Objects of Distant Exchange: The Northwest Coast, Early America, and the Global Imagination

Anya Zilberstein

TWO seemingly unremarkable iron daggers have been in the Peabody Essex Museum (formerly the East India Marine Society Museum) in Salem, Massachusetts, since the early nineteenth century (Figure I). At a glance the daggers could be mistaken for weapons forged in eastern North America or Europe except for some unusual modifications. One of the daggers resembles an oversized kitchen knife. It is a single, hefty sheet of metal with crudely gouged channels on one side of the blade and a bolt welded at the hilt. Now tarnished and dull, its eye-catching feature is the accession number museum curators branded on it in the nineteenth century: "147" stenciled boldly in white on the flat side of the blade. The other dagger is double edged and its construction is more complex. Two bayonets were welded together end-to-end to form a two-foot-long rod wrapped at the joint with tooled brown Moroccan leather. Accompanying it is a holster with sheaths fitted to each blade made from a rougher leather that curators ambiguously identified as "native rawhide."1	1
Figure I Two daggers donated to the East India Marine Society in Salem, Massachusetts, in the early nineteenth century, attributed to blacksmith John Rodgers Jewitt, a captive of the Nootka people on Vancouver Island from 1803 to 1805. Courtesy, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, acc. nos. E3559, E3561.
Anyone engaged in maritime travel in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries may have encountered thousands of such daggers, salvaged or customized from scrap, which were typical of the merchandise circulating in exchange networks among Euro-American and indigenous traders throughout the world. But these particular daggers were uniquely associated with a story. Members and curators of the East India Marine Society supposed the daggers originated along the Pacific Northwest Coast and were the handiwork of John Rodgers Jewitt, a young English blacksmith held captive among the Nootka people of Vancouver Island from March 1803 to February 1805. In 1803 the Nootka had attacked a Massachusetts merchant ship, the Boston, which had come to trade goods such as the daggers for local furs, especially the luxurious fur of the northern sea otter. Jewitt was one of only two surviving members of the crew and during much of his captivity crafted daggers, fishhooks, ornaments, and other metal pieces for Maquinna, the Nootka chief who led the attack. After settling in New England, Jewitt published a journal and a narrative of his Northwest Coast experience, publicizing on both sides of the Atlantic the massacre of his crewmates and his two-year forced apprenticeship to Maquinna.2	. . .