White Slaves of Maquinna: John R Jewitt's Narrative of Capture and Confinement at Nootka

Kerry Abel is a professor of history at Carleton University. She is the author of Drum Songs: Glimpses of Dene History, co-editor of Aboriginal Resource Use in Canada: Historical and Legal Aspects, and co-editor of Northern Visions: New Perspectives on the North in Canadian History.

Stories of Europeans held captive by aboriginal peoples have proven so
popular that they are now recognized as a distinct literary genre: the
captivity narrative. Food for armchair adventurers in the 19th century
and now revived as sources of “insider” ethnographic information,
they provide escapism, titillation, and entertainment packaged in the
guise of morality tales or educational reading. John Jewitt’s account
of his life from 1803–05 with the Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka) of Vancouver
Island has been a perennial favorite. Originally published in 1815, it
has been reprinted in one form or another at least 20 times and thus
been available to every generation of readers since Jewitt’s day. This
new edition from Heritage House includes a brief introduction, a short
afterword, illustrations, and a bibliography.

The edition will be troubling to purists. It is not a reprint of
Jewitt’s narrative, but an edited version in which sentences and
paragraphs have been shortened for the contemporary reader, and some
wording and punctuation has been “modernized”; the flavor of the
original is thus significantly diluted. Few of the original
illustrations are reproduced here. While there is an alleged
reproduction of the 1815 title page, it contains two spelling errors not
in the original and the printer is incorrectly identified.

The editorial process is not made clear and the editor or author of the
introduction is not named. The afterword is a condensed version of a
1940 essay on Jewitt, although a good deal has been written more
recently that could have enriched the text. The bibliography is too
short to be very useful, with only five book titles and five Web site
addresses listed. Furthermore, only one of the Web sites was accessible
as listed in mid-January 2001 (one site had been shut down, two had
moved, and the address of another contained a typographical error).

Finally, the quality of the ethnographic detail in Jewitt’s narrative
is somewhat suspect because much of the original narrative was probably
written by editor and promoter Robert Alsop, who was primarily
interested in generating book sales. Readers might be better advised to
read the original edition.