#yuquot

[fadingphilologist]

The outside beach at Yuquot.

The village site is on an isthmus that narrows to a couple of hundred meters. On the opposite side from sheltered Friendly Cove, the ocean waves break against a steep pebble beach. The building was a Catholic church from 1956 to the 1990s and is now used to store cultural artifacts.

[fadingphilologist]

Friendly Cove.

This is the very spot where in 1778 Captain Cook was met by a warm welcome from the Mowachaht/Muchalaht inhabitants. The bushes in the foreground cover the sites of the many longhouses and successive homes, of which in 2017 only one remained. The Spanish built a fort in the vicinity of the present light station, which marks the entrance to Nootka Sound from the open ocean to the right.

[fadingphilologist]

Friendly Cove (Yuquot) on Nootka Island.

There’s lots of history in this spectacular setting, facing Nootka Sound on one side and the open Pacific on the other. Captain Cook, the first European visitor, found a large summer village here in 1778. The Spanish later established a fort, and Captains Vancouver and Bodega y Quadra spent some time here in futile negotiations about the northern boundary of Spanish influence. The sailor John Jewitt wrote an entertaining, if somewhat embellished, account of his 1803 capture and enslavement by Chief Maquinna, whose winter village was at Tahsis.

[poltrack]

Nootka Island and Friendly Cove

Nootka Island and Friendly Cove

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Battered by savage storms on their voyage from Hawaii and seeking a place to make repairs and to find fresh water, Captain James Cook with his ships Resolution and Discovery, limped into this bay on March 29,1778. While the British anchored their ‘floating islands,’ the First Nations people shouted from their canoes: “itchme nutka, itchme nutka,”…

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