JAMES HOFFMAN
In June, 1790, in the midst of politically charged debates in Britain over the tiny trading port of Nootka Sound, on the west coast of what is now called Vancouver Island, a play opened in London that performed events both in the colony and at home—as the country prepared for war with Spain. In this article, I trace the historical and theatrical context of the staging of Nootka Sound; Or, Britain Prepar'd at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. Creatively using the possible attendance of George Vancouver at the opening performance, I consider the ambivalent role this production played in the hegemonic operations of Empire in the late eighteenth century. Appearing centrally within the imperial dramatic apparatus, it nonetheless contained considerable doubt and dissent, even anti-colonial assertion. In its direct engagement with both the locale and the politics of the west coast, I make a case for calling Nootka Sound; Or, Britain Prepar'd British Columbia's first play.
En juin 1790 en Bretagne, en plein milieu des débats politiques à propos du commerce du petit port de Nootka Sound, sur la côte ouest de ce qu'on appelle aujourd'hui l'Ile de Vancouver, et pendant que le pays se préparait à la guerre contre l'Espagne, se jouait à Londres la première d'une pièce qui mettait en scène les événements coloniaux et domestiques. Dans cet article je souligne les aspects historiques et théâtraux de la mise en scène de Nootka Sound; Or, Britain Prepar'd au Théâtre Royal, Covent Garden. Imaginant l'assistance de Georges Vancouver à la première, j'ai pensé à l'ambivalence du rôle qu'a joué la mise en scène sur les opérations hégémoniques de l'empire à la fin du xviiiè siècle. Se plaçant au centre de la machine dramatique impériale, cette pièce fut, dans un certain sens, un véhicule du désaccord et même du sentiment anti-colonialiste. Dans son engagement directe avec la vie locale et la politique de la côte ouest, j'ai plaidé la cause pour reconnaître Nootka Sound; Or, Britain Prepar'd comme la première pièce de la Colombie Brittanique.
According to the present literature, British Columbia's first play is unknown. In Frontier Theatre, Chad Evans tells us that a "theatrical amusement" (14) took place on board a ship in Esquimalt Harbour in 1853. The title of that production is not yet discovered, although it was likely similar in spirit, if not in content, to The Irish Lion, a one-act farce presented on board Her Majesty's Ship President two years later. Evans compares these on-boards with the familiar at-homes, "the nineteenth-century house party, which often included private theatricals" (15). Already we can see the dynamic association of the theatre with the social and political life of the young colony: its first play was a comedy staged "to convey social favour to [select] colonists" (15) and its first theatre was an active warship.
But I would like to look further back, sixty-three years to be exact, to consider what I am calling British Columbia's first play. This is Nootka Sound; Or, Britain Prepar'd, a work that was performed in London in several runs during 1790, then occasionally almost every year until 1796.1 This production staged conflicting events at Nootka Sound, Britain's tiny new port on the remote shores of Canada's west coast, as well as events at home as Britain prepared to go to war with Spain in order to assert its authority in the Northwest Pacific. I will try to demonstrate how this play was a participant in the hegemonic operations of Empire-building on Canada's west coast and, as such, stands as British Columbia's "first play."
Nootka Sound on the west coast of what is now called Vancouver Island was the key port in early British Columbia history. Just inside the Sound was a village called Yuquot by the Nootka (today: Nuu-chah-nulth) natives—a summer camp of about 1,500 persons; Cook, who landed there in 1778, called it Ship Cove. The Spanish, however, under the Papal Bull of 1493, which granted them "all lands lying west of a line joining the North and South Poles, 100 leagues west of the Azores, including regions discovered and unknown [...]" (Green and Dickason 4), had assumed claim to the west coast of North America. In the 1770s, concerned about rumours of Russian expansion from Siberia into Alaska and southwards, and with concern about reports of preparations for a major exploratory journey into the northwest by Captain Cook, the Spanish began to send out expeditions along the northwest coast.
The situation became more intense in the 1780s as the Spanish learned that the Russians expected to occupy Nootka Sound within a year; also there were reports that the English had been trading there. Accordingly, the Mexican viceroy Manuel Antonio Flórez ordered Esteban José Martínez to occupy Nootka Sound in the spring of 1789. His instructions regarding the British were to "firmly" (Archer 40) inform them of Spanish claims. In mid- June of that year, Martínez arrested the English frigate Argonaut, captained by James Colnett, along with the British vessel Princess Royal, under Thomas Hudson; their crews were taken to prison in Mexico and their cargoes were confiscated. The situation reached crisis proportions when the news reached London early the following year—especially as John Meares, one of the backers of the shipping company, made claims that the Nootka Chief Maquinna had granted him land and agreed to British sovereignty over the territory. Public opinion became inflamed; soon, Britain was preparing to go to war over the matter. Now, the little port at Nootka Sound became a serious topic of discussion—and representation.
I see Nootka Sound; Or, Britain Prepar'd as another form of the early mapping of British Columbia, a carto-theatrics, if you will, wherein knowledge of the territory was resituated within existing categories of British thought. During the 1780s, there were many British explorers and traders traveling to western Canada's shores, then writing and sketching their firsthand observations. These began the marking of the area for imperial expansion; they also opened the possibility of understanding the complexities of indigenous culture and intercultural relations. I wish to suggest that on the one hand, British theatre practices tended to shape the west coast of Canada into colonial space—many years in fact before formal colonization commenced by means of permanent settlement in the mid-1800s. At the same time, however, British theatre was far from monolithic: although the play Nootka Sound was intended to suppress indigenous truths and to presage future imperial tactics, I will illustrate that this was not the case.
To bring focus, I will be a little creative with my history. I want to imagine the experience of one member of the audience at the opening performance of the play at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, on June 4, 1790. This person is George Vancouver, a thirty-three year old officer of the Royal Navy. Already heavily implicated in the British colonizing venture, he had sailed as midshipman with Cook on his second and third voyages and, in April 1791, would sail in command of an expedition to explore the coast of the territory we now call British Columbia. Now, there is no hard evidence to support Vancouver's actual attendance at this play; there was, however, the possibility: he spent most of the first half of 1790 supervising the sloop of war Discovery at the Deptford dockyard, near London, as it was being equipped to make a survey of the Pacific Northwest Coast (Anderson 39). At the time of the play's opening, however, as Vancouver was later to report: "the ship's officers and men [were] engaged in more active service" (Godwin 25). Mobilization was underway: a month earlier, the treasury had allocated a million pounds for war preparation; the cabinet had ordered the outfitting of a squadron of ships, "to be prepared for such events as may arise" (Gough, Northwest Coast 140); and impressment had begun.
I want to use George Vancouver in this manner to illustrate how the theatre could function as a state apparatus to interpellate his subjectivity as a colonizer —although in somewhat contradictory ways. Certainly, over the next five years, as he explored and surveyed the Pacific Northwest, Vancouver experienced firsthand many of the same situations and issues presented in Nootka Sound; Or, Britain Prepar'd; this play, I am suggesting, must/could have had strong resonance with this important player in Britain's expanding political sphere. If he did not actually see the play, there were likely other key figures in the Pacific colonizing venture who did: perhaps Lord Grenville, the Secretary of State, or Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society. As for Vancouver, I will cite several incidents from his travels in support of my little conceit.
I imagine him sitting comfortably in a gallery seat waiting for the play to begin. He was most likely reading a newspaper with particular interest —the words "Nootka Sound" now appeared regularly in the headlines for, indeed, there was plenty of concern about this little outpost in the Pacific. Reading The Saint James Chronicle (June 3-5) that day he would have noticed, on page one, an advertisement for a book entitled Nootka Sound, which offered to comment on the "Nootka Sound establishment, commerce, etc.," while, on page four, another book, in two volumes, titled Fur Trade at Nootka Sound, promised to provide details of "all" the merchant shipping in and out of Nootka Sound during the late 1780s. Then, again on the front page, he must have keenly read the report of a violent public response to naval impressment: a "body of Coal-Heavers, to the number of 150," attacked a press gang, the officer in charge barely escaping with his life.
Press gang activities of course were often conducted with brutality and received with opposition; it is doubtful that Vancouver felt sorry for anyone on either side of the impressment. His strong reaction reflected his concern for the radically shifting nature of the Pacific enterprise, which, like the Coal- Heaver's response to the Pacific military preparation, threatened to end in a destructive manner or simply collapse altogether. Early in the year he was appointed second in command of a scientific expedition to the South Seas and the Northwest coast of America. In late March, however, as news of the Spanish "insult" increased, Lord Grenville released plans for a military expedition to Nootka; it was to be "an establishment prepared to meet with force any interference from natives or Spaniards" (Godwin 27). In late April, however, amid growing hostilities with Spain over Nootka, he was assigned to the man-of-war Couregeaux, now assembling for battle. Finally, with the Nootka Convention signed in late October, wherein Spain agreed to end its claim to sole sovereign rights over the northwest coast, Vancouver was informed that yet another expedition was being planned: now he was appointed as commander to proceed to Nootka to receive territory taken by the Spanish, to survey the coast, and, finally, "to obtain every possible information that could be collected respecting the natural and political state of that country" (qtd. in Godwin 28).
Now I see Vancouver glancing away from his paper, with exceptional interest, towards the highest symbol of the Imperium: the day the play opened was King George's birthday and, if His Majesty were not actually present, at least the royal box must have been colourfully and patriotically festooned. Finally, as the play began, Vancouver would have examined, on the stage, in splendid newly painted scenery, the colony of Nootka Sound, remote, exotic, but also, as Vancouver must have observed, jarringly staged. What, at this moment, as the sights and sounds of British Columbia in its early days of contact were staged in London, did Vancouver see?
He witnessed, in spectacular mise en scène, a panoply of British Imperial might: scenes of energetic activity at the Portsmouth naval yard; an inciting incident in a distant colony; the bullying activities of a press gang; and finally, giant warships, cannons ready, pennants aloft, assembling under the command of Captain Briton and dozens of his loyal, singing tars, and concluding with this tableau:
Scene the last: an Allegorical Frontpiece thro which is seen the British navy lying at Spithead- Enter in procession with marines, Society Boys, etc. Captain Briton, Eliza, and of all the rest of the persons of the drama. (Byrne 26)
Clearly this production was an active player in the ongoing crisis at a tiny British trading port of Nootka Sound, half way along the west coast of what is now called Vancouver Island. A year earlier, the Spanish, staking their claim to the west coast, had commandeered four English merchantmen, with their cargoes, taking the crews to Mexico, "in irons," as the Times (6 May 1790) reported it. As the officer charged with sailing to Nootka Sound to survey the area and, as he was soon to learn, to settle diplomatic accounts with the Spanish, George Vancouver, like many others in the audience that evening, must have burst into rousing patriotic song, along with the oakhearted tars on stage, with lines such as,
The throne of Britannia's the ocean
She sits there serene and majestic
Her huge floating castles in motion
Secure her each comfort domestic. (4)
Or, in another chorus,
The proud Don strokes his whiskers terrific
The poor simple Indian to frighten
We'll bang him though in the Pacific
His pockets of doubloons we'll lighten. (5)
But Vancouver also saw actions which must have troubled him. The production opened with a play-within-a play, in which a group of sailors, playing both British and Spanish characters, were rehearsing a scene based on the seizures at Nootka. In London this historical incident was now a cause célèbre, as the colony became the subject of serious debate in parliament and of intense reporting and discussion in the newspapers, especially in the spring and summer of 1790, when diplomatic efforts were going nowhere and there was the real possibility of war.
But this scene, replaying events so prominent now in imperial politics, curiously subverted its own intentions on the Covent Garden stage. One of the first performers to appear, a lieutenant claiming to be the author and the director, informed his audience that the piece was "intended only as a little diversion"; to his actors he declared his work "only a little temporary unconnected effusion" (1-2), terminology hardly in line with the play's jingoistic rhetoric or the reality of the British government's extraordinary action in assembling almost fifty ships of war off the south coast, a fleet that "formed the most powerful mustered by the Island Power up to that time" (Gough, Northwest Coast 142). In addition, for much of the remainder of the play, Vancouver witnessed a press gang cajoling various members of the British public into joining up, but, in these farcical scenes, the citizens were neither desirable nor willing defenders of empire—the first, a drunken taylor, needing a death threat before being marched off to the docks.
As Vancouver could well see, each of the people impressed—a drunken, unfit tailor, a lovesick woman disguised as a man, and a disreputable Irishman—were clearly those who would not benefit from the colonial project, nor, indeed, from whom the colonial navy itself would benefit. When the Irishman O'Shaughnossy is taken, he is literally an argument for the unworkability, even the resistance, of colonized peoples. According to the stage directions, he is "[dragged] in [...] out of the Barber's Shop half shav'd with a cloth about his neck" (15). His record as a sailor is abysmal: he had been punished for stealing, for refusing to obey orders, and for being insubordinate. But in dialogue with his captors, he displays his lineage, then his defiance:
O'Sh. (Feeling his chin): "Oh, thunder! I am but half shav'd. Here is
usage for an O'Shaughnossy! the lineal descendent of Brian Boro,
King of Munster and foster brother to Squire Casey of
Bulruddery.–I'll just step in, and get the other half of my countenance
mow'd into a state of decency.
PIP: No you don't.
O'Sh.: The devil keel haul the race of you! (16)
This dismantling of imperial authority was echoed elsewhere in the plot. The characters drawn from colonial affairs, such as the Spanish Captain Martínez, or the British Captain James Colnett (in the second version of the play: see note 1), although historically both failed colonizers, occupied the central, more realistic narrative, while the imperial figures, such as Captain Briton and his sailors, were assigned to the peripheries of allegory and tableau. Similarly, the colony on stage was depicted as severely struggling, in this case against Spanish domination; clearly, His Catholic Majesty had botched his strategy of impressment.
This demonstrates the working of Bhabha's notion of the disjunction between the imperial idea and its colonial implementation, of the "uncertainty that afflicts the discourse of power" (113) as the colonized "make ambivalent [...] colonial cultural texts" (119) by appropriation and repetition. The Covent Garden Theatre, by replaying and depicting events at Nootka Sound, entered into Bhabha's "third-space of enunciation" (37) wherein colonized/colonizer relations are interdependent, their subjectivities mutually constructed. In this space, for example, hierarchies and purities of race are untenable. In short, cultural identities in Nootka Sound were contradictory.
As Vancouver could well see, there was considerable disparity between his actual encounter of the colony and its theatrical representation—after all, he had been a witness, having spent one month at Nootka Sound with Captain Cook in 1778. The natives Vancouver had met at that time were the Mowachaht, a well established, confident people characterized by a modern historian as having "a recent and newly-acquired ascendancy that they were anxious to defend at all costs—a superiority that would make them, for the time being, lords of the coast. They claimed the English as their ‘exclusive property'" (Gough, Distant Dominion 48). On the stage, however, they appeared as mere non-speaking supernumeraries; their complex political relations with their internecine competitors, the Muchalaht and others, were suppressed, replaced by a contretemps between the British and Spanish. A people already identified by Cook, John Meares, and other observers as rich in culture and highly adept at trading, even to the point of punishing British merchant atrocities (vide James Hanna and The Sea Otter2), were restricted to visual decoration.
Yet, as Gilbert and Tompkins, in Post-Colonial Drama, have noted, "silence can be more active than passive, especially on the stage where a silent character still speaks the languages of the body and of space" (190). I would argue that it was the Nootka people themselves, undifferentiated in the text, who, in many ways, haunted this production. As colonized subjects, they presented a silence that must have had its own communicative effects on a politically aware audience member such as Vancouver. These natives, only directly referred to in one of the songs as "the poor simple Indians" (5), countered their vocal muteness with their physical embodiment in costume and setting.
They existed, for example, in the scenery, which was most likely original, and probably referenced travel writings, as was a current practice on the London stage. Late in 1790, for example, Byrne was engaged in a new pantomime that figured the artist as a key observer, as the prologue states: "he comes not to consider but to see" (underlined in original). This work, The Picture of Paris Taken in the Year 1790, staged at Covent Garden in December 1790, depicted various contemporary scenes in Paris. In Nootka Sound, perhaps, there was use of the detailed sketches of Nootka Sound made by John Webber, the artist on Cook's ship. The playbill for Nootka Sound promised "New [...] Scenes and Decorations," while one reviewer praised the "beautiful and picturesque" scenery (London Chronicle 8): from this we can conclude there was considerable effort put into the visual staging—especially when exciting world events such as the fall of the Bastille or the taking of Quebec were scenically rendered on stage within a short time of their happening. Audiences, we can conclude, would expect a degree of truthful representation.
At the same time, however, the creator and director of this production was a well-known pantomimist, and therefore the topography of the region was likely compromised, as conventional "pantomime habitually mingled the mythic, the grotesque, and the magic" (Backscheider 173). Thus, rather than a unified vision of the colonial project, the play presented a dialectic in which the imperatives of the Nootka people co-mingled with British plans for domination as contained in the narratives and fantasies of current British spectacle that was often blatantly patriotic.
We don't know exactly how the Nootka natives were acted and costumed at Covent Garden in 1790, but I would argue that, as various Pacific natives had been brought to England at this time for display, including one that the trader John Meares returned to his home on the northwest coast in 1788,3 the representation of the natives in this play production was fairly authentic. That they were vocally silenced in the script confirms the power of their physical presence; their identity was situated in places outside imperial theatrics. Of course they were performed by British actors, but these actors most likely reminded their audience, by means of parodic and bracketed gestures, much as they did with their Spanish roles, that they were uncomfortable with their parts. The result was the "split subjectivity" that Gilbert and Tompkins refer to as "potentially enabling rather than disempowering," since it "removes both the coloniser and the colonised from their assigned positions of power and impotence" (231).
Now if spectacular pantomime was the major determinant of the production, as seems to have been the case, there was the expectation of the exotic Other, rendered through magic and transformation: Harlequin with his wand. The playwright was James Byrne, presently "official ballet-master" at Covent Garden (Highfill 456). Byrne excelled at pantomime: he had played principal Harlequin at both major theatres, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, and had produced a number of pantomimic works. He would be expected to produce stunning theatrical effects in his work.
But Nootka Sound did not meet expectations: the script offered neither Harlequin nor magic. Indeed, pantomime itself was in transition as its creators in the 1790s explored new sources of content, often from contemporary life, such as sermons and morality, travel and topography (Disher 274), and certainly from major crises in the world. As Nootka Sound was being rehearsed, several London theatres sought to exploit by means of spectacular extravaganzas the tumultuous events overtaking France. Thomas Harris, manager of Covent Garden, had plans to stage a play entitled The Bastille; it had been in rehearsal, huge scenic pieces had been built, when the Examiner of plays prohibited production because of its potential for stirring similar revolt in Britain. But he did permit the scenery to be used in Covent Garden's staging of a work called The Crusade. This "Historical Romance" played alongside Nootka Sound, thus pictorially manifesting a (silenced) context of republican counter-discourse.
So the Nootka people did not need to speak to demonstrate that not only was their land actively under reclamation, but they were acting as allies of the British in what was essentially an anti-colonial action against the Spanish. Furthermore, they were present in their sympathetic linkages with First- World peoples similarly disaffected by colonization: Nootka Sound featured a lineage of people, in both First and Third Worlds, all of whom countered both the rhetorical and the operational formulae of imperialism.
In addition, the script Vancouver heard was configured in a very ambiguous manner. Titled "A Pantomimic, Operatic Farce," the work defied categorization. The Lieutenant-director, immediately after promising his audience the scene at Nootka Sound would be "a miniature of the present moment," described what was to follow as "a slight specimen of Pantomime, Tragedy, Comedy, Tragedy, Opera and Farce, all together, egad!" (2). These assertions of denial and multiplicity opened the way for different voices, for counterdiscourses, in which, quoting Said, "texts from the metropolitan centre and from the peripheries [are read] contrapuntally" (259). The Nootka natives may have been verbally silenced, but I believe their political presence allowed a space for a multiplicity of voices to speak—and I would maintain Vancouver was well positioned to hear them.
Then the metatheatrical aspects added to the air of colonial revisioning. Nootka Sound; Or, Britain Prepared was presented as an afterpiece, in this way inverting its status as a mainstream document of nationhood; perhaps the afterpiece genre itself can be understood as a sign of the colonial, existing on the margins but chosen, interestingly, to close the evening. Finally, this royal, imperial play, performed at the Theatre Royal on the King's birthday, clearly intended, as the Public Advertiser (June 5) expressed it, to "[animate] the people vigorously to support their claims in the present dispute with Spain" (2), was not received well.
If, in the next day or so, Vancouver had read the newspaper reviews of Nootka Sound, his ambivalent feelings would have been confirmed. Reviewers in two newspapers agreed the work was overblown, even for an afterpiece. The London Chronicle (June 3-4) only excused the play's excess on the grounds of the present need to "repel the insult, and maintain the dignity of the British flag" (8). It found the production effective as patriotic spectacle but weak on dramatic quality, especially in its naive depiction of complex events. The Public Advertiser (June 5) dismissed the piece outright, declaring it "not of such a nature as to do credit to the Theatre Royal" (2).
In this way Vancouver saw the colony rendered impurely in terms of the dominant rhetoric of the colonizer. The result was a theatrical imaginary that displayed to Vancouver, with his inside information from both shores, the deep ambivalence of the colonizing project. Catherine Hall has characterized this ambivalence as "the colonizer simultaneously projecting and disavowing difference in an essentially contradictory way, asserting mastery but constantly finding it slipping away" (70). David Spurr, in The Rhetoric of Empire, has noted the "internal resistance" of imperial discourse itself, "as it struggles with its own displacement and distortion through the highly differentiated scenes of colonial presence" (185). Surely Vancouver, squarely positioned between metropolitan rhetorical excess on one side and colonial silence on the other, must have questioned the nature of this project of empire-building. What could he have thought of this jingoistic play that so minimized the imperatives of the colonials, and was already so inscribed with resistance?
Nootka Sound must have forced a serious re-thinking of the colonial plans, at least with this important member of the audience, as the fabric of the imperial narrative began to unravel even this early in its First-World formation. We know that colonial discourses fluctuated over time and according to political changes at home: surely, for example, Vancouver revised his preconceptions of the natives as well as his future interactions with them. We know that this was the case with the natives of the Sandwich Islands. When he visited them several years after Cook he observed:
The alteration which has taken place in the several governments of these islands since their discovery by Captain Cook, has arisen from incessant war, instigated both at home and abroad by ambitious and enterprising chieftans; which the commerce of European arms and communication cannot fail of encouraging to the most deplorable extent.
It would have been difficult for Vancouver to follow the play's progress through its two major revisions and title changes over the next few years, as he was now directly engaged in the exploration of Canada's west coast. One of his tasks to be carried out at the port of Nootka Sound was diplomatic: to negotiate details of Spain's restitution of seized property, as well as to confirm British trading rights in the region. One thing he most certainly would have discovered was the fate of James Colnett, a captain of one of the seized ships, who had endured a miserable year of confinement in Mexico. But it was a different story in the second version of the play, now renamed The Provocation! This version opened with the British at Nootka happily preparing to launch a ship, while the surrounding natives cheer and rejoice. Suddenly they are overtaken, "in a most deceitful manner" (Woodfall's Register, October 5, 1790), by the Spanish who put them in prison. But the now heroic Captain Colnett, aided by friendly natives and his swashbuckling wife dressed in male attire, performed a thrilling rescue. The Provocation! was now in the realm of pure fiction, of imperial mythmaking: the British were triumphant in defeating the Spanish; the Nootka natives were their unquestioning allies; and there was no reference to First- or Third-World resistance of any sort.
Perhaps it is time to leave George Vancouver in peace; let him sit there, watching and thinking. After all, within a year he will be sailing to the Northwest coast to complete his own mapping of its shores, and we wonder how strongly the imperial ambiguities of this production led him toward certain actions and restrained him from others. This is really the topic of another paper but, briefly, we can wonder about the relation between this play and the revised notions of colonial subjugation and dispossesion that might have taken place, if not in Vancouver's mind then at least in that of the British Admiralty. Having seen this play, could he have linked the stresses of the internally colonized, such as the Irish, women, the working man, with the native situation at Nootka? Was he aware, at least, of the so-called "Colonial reformers" (Thornton 12), his own contemporaries who questioned the social, political basis of Britain's relations with its colonies? Robin Blackburn, for example, has described how abolition of the slave-trade "suddenly moved to the centre of British political life" in the late 1780s and early nineties (138).
As for us, we now have a "first play," Nootka Sound; Or, Britain Prepar'd, which inhabits a particular political, discursive terrain in relation to western Canada's colonization. Operating centrally in the metropolis and deeply within imperial dramatic apparatus, it nonetheless participated questionably in the production of British hegemony. Containing considerable doubt and dissent, this officially validated text, duly signed by the Examiner of plays, unsettled the monolithic construction of the imperial project at its centre/source. We can see important anti-colonial gestures occurring within the ambit of First-World dramatic production.
NOTES
1. Nootka Sound; Or, Britain Prepar'd, created and directed by James Byrne, ballet-
master at Covent Garden, played June 4, 5, 7, 9 ,10, 14, in 1790. Revised
and renamed The Provocation! it played October 4, 5, 6, 8, 11, 12, 18, 20, 22,
25, 26, 26 and November 1 and 3 of the same year, and on June 6 in 1791.
Revised again and now renamed The Shipwreck; Or, French Ingratitude, it
played May 27 and 28, and June 10, 1793; June 3, 11, 1794; October 23, 26, 31,
1795; and February 2 and June 2, 1796. Although there is no script of The
Provocation! extant, it is described in The London Stage 1660-1800 as a "ballet-pantomime",
an "afterpiece"; also that it is based on Byrne's Nootka Sound and
that it was again altered then presented in May 1793 as The Shipwreck; Or
French Ingratitude (not extant). The Provocation! was reviewed and described
fairly thoroughly in The Diary; Or, Woodfall's Register, Oct 5, 1790.
Return to article
2. According to Gough (Distant Dominion 54), Hanna invited the great
Nootka Chief Maquinna aboard his 60-ton brig The Sea Otter then,
apparently to demonstrate his power, sat him on a chair rigged with
a small charge of gunpowder. This was ignited and while only
slightly injuring the Chief caused a severe revenge attack which the
Europeans only barely repulsed.
Return to article
3. John Meares, in his Voyages, reports that in 1788 he returned a Nootka native,
Comekela, who earlier had been taken and exhibited in London (109-111).
George Vancouver, on his voyage to the northwest coast in 1791, returned a
Sandwich Island native, Toweroo, to his home at Owhyee.
Return to article
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Thornton, A.P. The Imperial Idea and Its Enemies. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1966.