A Voyage to the Northwest Side of America: The Journey of James Colnett, 1786–89

Keith Thor Carlson is an assistant professor of history at the
University of Saskatchewan. He is the editor of the Stу:lo-Coast Salish
Historial Atlas.

The publication of James Colnett’s 1786–89 journals is a significant
contribution. Students of exploration and imperial Europe will
immediately recognize Colnett as the British mariner at the heart of the
famous “Nootka Crisis” of 1789, a relatively trivial incident on the
west coast of Vancouver Island that brought Britain and Spain to the
brink of war. Journals from that expedition have long been available,
but until the publication of this book, Colnett’s earlier fur-trading
and exploration sojourns were accessible only as original manuscripts at
the British National Archives or on microfilm. Galois situates
Colnett’s writings within a comparative context through the inclusion
of extracts from the journal of Third Mate Andrew Tylor, but what
genuinely sets Galois’s editing apart is the emphasis he places on
ethnography and on the Aboriginal perspective. This is perhaps best
illustrated in several of the book’s five appendixes, the most
engaging of which recounts Aboriginal oral traditions describing first
contact with Colnett from a Gitkxaala Tsimsian point of view.

From its 110-page introductory essay to its list of Northwest Coast
place names, this book has much to recommend it. Within the
introduction, for example, Galois provides a thoughtful discussion of
the role that violence played in the maritime fur trade. His findings
generally support the revisionist notion, now principally associated
with Cole Harris’s writings about the manifestation of a “culture of
terror,” over those of the older “enrichment thesis” associated
with Joyce Wike, Wilson Duff, and Robin Fisher. For Galois, though, the
violence was less imposed by outside forces than it was reflective of
the natures of both European and West Coast Aboriginal societies at the
time. Natives and newcomers each saw violence as an acceptable means of
asserting and projecting power, and neither side was shy about employing
it.

This book is a combination of original interpretive scholarship and
reference resource, all wrapped around the engaging and too-long-ignored
journals of James Colnett.