Gunboat Frontier: British Maritime Authority and Northwest Coast Indians, 1846-90

David Mattison is a librarian with the B.C. Provincial Archives and
Records Services Library.

Maritime historian Barry Gough’s new book completes his trilogy, which details the role of the British Royal Navy in policing the Northwest Coast of North America. While Gunboat Frontier overlaps in time with the first volume, The Royal Nary and the Northwest Coast of North America, 1810-1971 (1971), the present volume, as its sub-title indicates, is directed towards the exercise of naval power against the native peoples. This was a promise the author submitted in the first volume and one which has been admirably filled. Gough’s research and writing can serve as a model both for his students and for other historians.

An intimate sense of locale is afforded by the author’s having visited many of the sites at which the gunboats threw rockets and shells ashore to burn Indian villages. Colonial attitudes of the 1840s and 1850s toward the Indians engendered a prevailing atmosphere of mutual mistrust and suspicion. The Indians cried for their land while the fearful settlers, more often than not viewed as intruders, called for a gunboat. The gunboats also acted as a policing mechanism and deterrent against illegal liquor traffickers and pirating and slaving practices among the coast Indians, particularly the powerful Haida people. With the change from colony to self-government in 1871, when British Columbia joined Confederation, the British Admiralty became less and less inclined to listen blindly to pleas for military assistance where diplomacy or preventative measures should have sufficed. The cost to the colony and later province was minimal; “apart from paying for a few bunkers full of coal,” the financial burden was entirely shouldered by the British public.

The use of naval power had one drawback, which Gough occasionally highlights: “The influence of one of Her Majesty’s ships spread no farther inland from salt water or river fairway than the range of shot, shell or rocket; it penetrated no deeper than the endurance of foot-sore landing parties slogging through wet bush.” Despite the perceived threat of a mass uprising, Gough concludes that inter-tribal conflicts would prevent such an occurrence, as did the eventual debilitation of the coast Indians by disease and alcohol. Gunboat actions, as Gough notes, affected only a minority of native people and the few shellings that did result were normally the last recourse in a process of negotiation and less formal diplomatic action such as the hostage-taking of chiefs.

Gunboat Frontier is an outstanding book which no Canadian and few American libraries should be without. It accurately reflects a critical era in Canadian history and reexamines with an unerring eye many of the factors that contributed to the positive and negative aspects of Indian-White relations in coastal British Columbia.