But the most famous of all the piracies of the Western Indians is that of which an account is contained in John Jewitt's Narrative. The ostensible author of this work was a Hull blacksmith, the armourer of the _Boston_, an American ship which was seized while lying in Nootka Sound, and the entire crew massacred, with the exception of Jewitt, who was spared owing to his skill as a mechanic being valuable to the Indians, and John Thompson, the sail-maker, who, though left for dead, recovered, and was saved by the tact of Jewitt in representing him to be his father. This happened in March 1803, and from that date until the 20th of July 1805, these two men were kept in slavery to the chief Maquenna or Moqulla, when they were freed by the arrival of the brig _Lydia_ of Boston, Samuel Hill master. During this servitude, Jewitt, who seems to have been a man of some education, kept a journal and acquired the Aht language, though the style in which his book is written shows that in preparing it for the press he had obtained the assistance of a more practised writer than himself. Still, his work is a valuable contribution to ethnology. For, omitting the brief but excellent accounts by Cook and Meares, it is the earliest, and, with the exception of Mr. Sproat's lecture, the fullest description of these Indians. It is indeed the only one treating specially on the Nootka people, with whom alone he had any minute acquaintance. Some of the habits he pictures are now obsolete, or greatly modified, but others--it may be said the greater number--are exactly as he notes them to have been eighty-six years ago. Besides the internal evidences of its authenticity, the truth of the adventures described was vouched for at the time by Jewitt's companion in slavery; and though there is no absolute proof of its credibility, it may not be uninteresting to state that, thirty years ago, I conversed with an American sea captain, who, as a boy, distinctly remembered Jewitt working as a blacksmith in the town of Middleton in Connecticut. When the book was first published, in the year 1815, several editions appeared in America, and at least two reprints were called for in England, so that the Narrative enjoyed considerable popularity in the first two decades of the century. Writing in 1840, Robert Green Low, Librarian to the Department of State at Washington, characterises it as "a simple and unpretending narrative, which will, no doubt, in after centuries, be read with interest by the enlightened people of North-West America." Again, in 1845, the same industrious, though not always impartial, historian remarks that "this little book has been frequently reprinted, and, though seldom found in libraries, is much read by boys and seamen in the United States." As copies are now seldom met with, this is no longer the case, though on our cruise in 1863 it was one of the well-thumbed little library of the traders, one of whom had inherited it from William Edy Banfield, whose name has