Abstract
Abstract The north-west coast of North America,1 stretching from northern Washington to the south-eastern Alaska archipelago is home to seven Indian linguistic or ethnic groups2 whose cultures were heavily influenced by the temperate coastal ecology (map 1). A Spanish expedition of 1774 under Juan Perez made first contact in the Queen Charlotte Islands with Haida Indians (Pethick 1976: 41), but failed to produce a map as ordered. The honour of creating the first visual representation of the inhabitants of the central or British Columbia portion of the north-west coast fell to three artists on Captain James Cook's final voyage. Landfall at Nootka Sound in 1778 was recorded in sketches by William Ellis, Henry Roberts, and John Webber (Henry 1984: 63—79). Subsequent voyages by Spanish, Russian and English explorers produced a prodigious range of documentary art, both landscape and portraiture, as well as entire archives and libraries from which scholarly and popular works in textual and visual media about th...
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