After hollowing out their canoes, which they do very neatly, they fashion the outside, and slightly burn it, for the purpose of removing any splinters or small points that might obstruct its passage through the water, after which they rub it over thoroughly with rushes or coarse mats, in order to smooth it, which not only renders it almost as smooth as glass, but forms a better security for it from the weather; this operation of burning and rubbing down the bottoms of their canoes is practised as often as they acquire any considerable degree of roughness from use. The outside by this means becomes quite black, and to complete their work they paint the inside of a bright red, with ochre or some other similar substance; the prows and sterns are almost always ornamented with figures of ducks or some other kind of bird, the former being so fashioned as to represent the head, and the latter the tail; these are separate pieces from the canoe, and are fastened to it with small flexible twigs or bark cord.
Some of these canoes, particularly those employed in whaling, which will hold about ten men, are ornamented within about two inches below the gunwale with two parallel lines on each side of very small white shells, running fore and aft, which has a very pretty effect. Their war canoes have no ornament of this kind, but are painted on the outside with figures in white chalk, representing eagles, whales, human heads, etc. They are very dexterous in the use of their paddles, which are very neatly wrought, and are five feet long, with a short handle and a blade seven inches broad in the middle, tapering to a sharp point. With these they will make a canoe skim very swiftly on the water, with scarcely any noise, while they keep time to the stroke of the paddle with their songs.
FOOTNOTES:
[74] Yet they are by no means weak in the legs, a coast Indian being capable of long travel in the bush without tiring. The Hydahs of Queen Charlotte Island, and the Tlinkets and Kaloshes of the neighbouring mainland, are splendid specimens of men, tall, comparatively fair, large-headed, regularly-featured, and endowed with courage and intelligence, though their morals leave much to be desired. All the canoe Indians are very strong-handed, owing to the constant use of the paddle. In a scuffle with one of them, it does not do to let him get a grip; better prevent him from coming to close quarters, for in this case the white man has little chance. The Klahoquahts are the finest-looking of the Vancouver west coast tribes.
[75] I have rarely seen a corpulent Indian, and not one idiot, or a cripple so deformed that he was incapable of earning his livelihood. It is seldom that they are deformed from birth, and when they are, they generally disappear, so as not to be a burden on the tribe. As a facetious old savage remarked to me, when discussing that curious immunity from helplessness in his tribe, "The climate doesn't agree with them." The brother of Quisto, chief of the Pachenahts in 1865 (San Juan Harbour), was much deformed in the legs, but he was an excellent canoeman.
[76] Commonly the flattish nacreous portion of the Abelone, or Ear-shell (Haliotis Kamschatkiana), known as Apats-em, which is pawned or sold in times of scarcity. By constant removal and insertion, the septum of the nose, through which it is fastened, becomes in time so large that it will admit almost any kind of moderately-sized ornament. Feathers are frequently inserted, and more than once I have seen an Indian, clad in a blanket alone, denude himself of his single garment to hold biscuits or other goods, and dispose of his pipe by sticking it in the hole through his nasal septum, which, had times been better, would have been occupied with a piece of shell, either square, oblong, or of a horseshoe shape.
[77] This is the well-known Dentalium pretiosum, or Tooth-shell, generally known as the Hioqua. It is procured chiefly from Cape Flattery, on the southern side of Juan de Fuca Strait, and from Koskeemo Sound on the north. The "Aitizzarts" (Ayhuttisahts) probably obtained it by barter with the tribes on that part of the coast. It is not much used nowadays.—The Peoples of the World, vol. i. p. 60.
[78] This is powdered mica of the black variety. It is obtained in various places, from veins exposed, for the most part in the beds of streams.
[79] These seem to be the Nimpkish, from the Nimpkish River, south of Fort Rupert, on the eastern shore of Vancouver Island, who still frequently cross the island by a chain of rivers and lakes to Nootka Sound. This is confirmed by Jewitt writing in another place that they lived somewhat in the interior. It is doubtful whether he knew that the country in which he lived was an island. At all events, he never mentions it by that name. This route I have described in "Das Innere der Vancouver Insel" (Petermann, Geographische Mittheilungen, 1869).
[80] Enhydra lutris, or "Quiaotluck," now so rapidly decreasing in numbers that it can scarcely escape the fate of Steller's Rhytina.