secret; and spend three or four preparatory weeks in procuring daggers, and chetoolths or war-clubs,--and in scrubbing themselves daily with bushes and briars; exclaiming, all the time, 'Wocash Quahootze! teechamme ah welth, wik etish tau-ilthkar-sab-matemas-wik-sish to hauk matemas--i-ya-ish kahshittle--as-smootish wareih matemas'-Great God! let me live--not be sick-find the enemy-not fear him-find him asleep-kill a great many of him. The Aycharts, a tribe about fifty miles to the south, had given Maquina some cause of offence; and in July of the second year of the captivity, he told Jewitt that he was going to war, and wanted a supply of daggers. When all was ready, nearly the whole five hundred warriors embarked in about forty canoes, and at midnight came within view of the fated village. Jewitt and Thompson were in the expedition, and had armed themselves with pistols and cutlasses. The former wished, if possible, not to stain his hands with the blood of any fellow-creature;' while the latter would willingly have killed, not only all the Aycharts, but all the Nootkians besides. Maquina would not suffer his impatient warriors to land, till the day was breaking; for, said he, that is the time when sleep is the soundest. At dawn, accordingly, they disembarked; and while the savages skulked along to enter the village unperceived, our two captives were stationed at convenient places for the interception of such as should be making their escape. The work of death was begun by Maquina's driving his hatchet into the unconscious head of the phylarch, and was ended in the complete extermination of the Aychartan nation. Jewitt and Thompson conducted as their characters would lead us to expect. The latter killed 'seven stout fellows,'-the former made prisoners of four. And both had their appropriate reward; for while Thompson received the title of Chehielsumahar, who was the Nootkian Roustum, or Robinhood,-Jewitt enabled both himself and his comrade to live more comfortably than before, by acquiring, according to the laws of war, the absolute property of his four captives.

War is, indeed, a prolific source of slavery among the savages on the North West Coast. Prisoners are invariably reduced to the most abject servitude; and Jewitt and Thompson were only excepted from the common lot, because they were much more valuable than the ordinary sort of captives. Nearly half of the inhabitants of Maquina's house were slaves:-slaves do all the drudgery of the tribe; and although their masters and themselves both eat at the same time, and of the same food, the two orders are too effectually kept asunder in every other particuJar. When a slave dies, for example, his corpse is dragged out

of doors, and left to return to dust upon the surface of the earth; whereas the death of a freeman is a subject of general sorrow:--his body is inclosed in a decent coffin and sepulchred with appropriate ceremonials. The death of a chief or warrior makes still more noise. When Tootoosch died the whole village yelled and cried for three hours. His corpse was laid out upon a plank,--his head encircled with the red fillet; and, after lying in this situation a considerable time, his remains were deposited in a box, along with the most valuable articles of his property, and carried to the grave in the night, accompanied by his family with their hair cut short, and followed up by almost all the members of the tribe. The procession returned to Maquina's house; where the blankets and other parts of the chief's wardrobe were committed to the flames by a priest appointed for the purpose,--and the whole celebration was closed with a caper from Kinneclimmets and a dance from Sat-sat-so-kis.But it is during their lives that the slaves are distinguished from the freemen in the most ignominious manner. A dead body can receive very little injury from ill-treatment:-but, besides, being neglected after death, the female slaves are gratuitously prostituted, while living, to the brutal appetites of every individual in the tribe. In the higher walks of life, however, the virtue of chastity is nowhere more highly prized; and the reports of navigators respecting the prevalence of indiscri minate prostitution, have been entirely founded in the mistake of supposing, that the wretches brought on board and submitted to the crews of their ships, were the wives and daughters of the real Nootkians.

There is, also, another custom among these savages, which must invariably deceive a transient visitor. The Nootkian, as well as all the other tribes on the coast, have, like ourselves, a Sunday and an every day dress,-one dress which they wear among themselves, and another in which they see strangers. The ordinary garment is a cloke, or katsack, fabricated of bark; which, while it entirely covers the body, is contrived to leave both arms at full liberty,-that of the men by being tied under the one, and diagonally over the other, and that of the women by being secured under the chin, and perforated on each side. As thecloke and cincture' of the common people is manufactured of coarse materials, and rather loosely put together, they keep out the tempest' by daubing it over with red paint. But the fine texture of those which are worn by the chiefs renders such a precaution unnecessary; and they are, accordingly, left in their native yellowish colour,-except where the owners have attempted to ornament them with representations of human heads, of fish, and of various other objects. The cincture, or

girdle, is generally of the same cloth: and,--besides the service of securing the mantle about the body,--it is a convenient sheath for knives and daggers. In winter they wear an additional garment of the same materials, which very much resembles the cape of a modern over-coat, when separated from the body.--The extraordinary mantles are made either of seaotter skin, or of what the Nootkians call matmelth, the skin of an animal which Jewitt conjectures to be of the deer kind. It is prepared in very much the same way as that of the deer among ourselves; and the garment made out of it is never put on, except in going on board a foreign ship, or in visiting some neighbouring tribe.--Thompson,--out of sheer roguery, we suppose,--sewed together a number of very gay vest-patterns,bordered them with a deep stripe of sea-otter skin,-strung around the bottom five or six rows of metal buttons, and presented it to the king as a royal robe. Nothing could have pleased Maquina more. He put the thing on immediately; and went strutting about the room,-looking first down one side, and then down the other, and exclaiming in the pride of his heart,-Klew sish katsuck;-wik cum atack Nootka! Very fine garment;-Nootka can't make him!

There is still another particular of dress which would lead strangers into error respecting the common appearance of the Nootkians. Upon any extraordinary occasion, and the arrival of a foreign ship is considered as such,-they bind their hair with a green bow on the top of their heads, and then shake over it the white down of a kind of eagle which abounds on the coast. The bow itself is daubed with turpentine and beset with a variety of feathers:-And they are so particular in this selftarring and feathering, that after a good hour's labour, they, will frequently demolish the whole, and begin the operation anew. They are equally scrupulous in painting themselves:-and if the squares with which they chequer their faces are too large or too small, or are not precisely equilateral, they erase them altogether, and lay on a new set. The men generally finish one side of their faces with black paint, and the other with red; but the women go no farther than to draw two black half moons over the eyes, and two red stripes from the corners of the mouth to the roots of their ears. The women dress their hair, too, in quite a different manner from that of the men; inasmuch, as instead of collecting it into one bunch on the top, they let it fall in two plats on each side of the head. They are tied at the bottoms, and are kept smooth by a suffusion of whaleoil. In all these things, however, the Nootkians, like ourselves, consult each his own fancy. They sometimes have on their faces a sort of raised-work; which is made by first spreading

over its surface a pretty thick stratum of bears' grease, and then ploughing with a stick the requisite number of horizontal furrows.

Their other personal decorations consist of necklaces, bracelets, and pendulums for the nose and the ears. They have a species of shell called Ifwaw, which is procured with great trouble from the reefs and sunken rocks along the coast, and which constitutes their only circulating medium, as well as their most costly ornaments. It is of a dazzling whiteness, hollow, tapering, very smooth,--three inches in length, and about three-eights of an inch in cirumference. The chiefs wear necklaces of ifwaw; and hang single shells upon the periphery of the ear, or in the gristle of the nose. But the common nosejewel is a slip of copper, or of some other convenient material, which is suspended from the cartilage by means of a wire or string, and sometimes projects eight or nine inches on each side of the face. As the commonality generally have them of wood, they can, without much expense, make their own jewels, as long as they please.-- These sprit-sail-yard fellows, as my mess-mate used to call them, when rigged out in this manner, made quite a strange show, and it was his delight whenever he saw one of them coming towards us with an air of consequence proportioned to the length of his stick, to put up his hand suddenly as he was passing him, so as to strike the stick, in order, as he said, to brace him up sharp to the wind; this used to make them very angry, but nothing was more remote from Thompson's ideas than the wish to cultivate their favour.'

Nootkian architecture is extremely simple. Six crotches are first erected,—one at each corner, and two at the gable ends of the contemplated edifice; next a very heavy pole is laid upon those in the middle and two lighter ones upon each pair on the sides: and the whole is then covered with planks split out of some fissile wood: τότε γίνεται πολλὰ ἄξιον κλίμα οικία. But it can hardly be said to be as άior to the Nootkians; for, with a notable regard to the real utility of houses and clothes, whenever there is any thing of a violent storm,-instead of taking shelter under the roof,--they strip, to a man, and get on the top, in order to keep the planks from being blown off. As a recompense for this inconvenience, however, their houses serve all the purposes of a bass-drum,-when any extraordinary occasion calls for a louder noise than can be made upon the smaller boxes, which constitute their common musical instruments. The inside is as plain as the exterior,--except that the posts and ridge-poles are carved into bas-relievos, which were intended to represent the heads of human beings. There is but a single aperture, which is most commonly at one of the ends;

and the smoke must accordingly go out at the same door with the inhabitants. Through the centre of the floor, which is nothing but earth, there runs a longitudinal hall; on each side of which are arranged the apartments of the several inhabitant families,-beginning with that of the chief (every house has one,) and proceeding alternately with those of the patriarchs, according to their respective ranks. Each family has its fire; but their only furniture consists of a tub to cook in, and a tray to eat out of. When a meal is prepared, they take their places around the common dish, in a squat, taylor-like posture; and, as they eat but once in a day, each gormandizes as much as he can; though we read of none in Maquina's sty who ever became so greedy as to get into the trough. The king here, as in some other countries is considered as the fountain of honour;' and it is deemed a great mark of favour (about as good as a pension) to receive a morsel from the royal tray.--The great excellence of a Nootkian house, consists in its portability. About the first of September the whole tribe break up their settlement, and depart for Tashees, a village about thirty miles up the Sound, where they catch their yearly supply of salmon. Here they remain nearly four months; and then remove to Cooptee, another station about half the way betwixt Nootka and Tashees,--where they take their annual supply of herring. In each of these three places they have the crotches and ridge poles of a village; so that when they arrive at either they have nothing to do but to cover them with their portable planks.

Our readers will have already perceived that the chief portion of their food consists of fish. Through the valley of Tashees there runs a river twenty rods wide by about twelve feet deep, which is so abundant in salmon that Jewitt has seen no less than seven hundred taken in fifteen minutes. They are driven into a conical basket about twenty feet in length, four in diameter at one end, and about as many inches at the other. Their curation is consigned to the women; who cut of the heads and tails, extract the spine, and hang them in their houses to dry. Cooptee, where the herring are caught, is situated at the mouth of the same river which runs past Tashees. The fishers are provided with a slip of some hard wood about seven feet long, two inches broad, by a half of an inch thick, and beset on one side with sharp whalebone teeth,-take their stations in the prow, and when they encounter a shoal of herring, bring down their instrument with both hands,--invert it dexterously,-and turn the captives into the canoe. With a little economy these Nootkians might live around the whole year upon the salmon and herring which they catch at Tashees and Cooptee: but