[26] The Nahwitti Indians. Compare the Tl[=a]-tl[=i]-s[=i]--Kwela and Nekum-ke-l[=i]sla septs of the Kwakiool people. They now inhabit a village named Meloopa, on the south-east side of Hope Island. But their original hamlet was situated on a small rocky peninsula on the east side of Cape Commerell, which forms the north point of Vancouver Island. Here remains of old houses are still to be seen, at a place known to the Indians as Nahwitti. It was close to this place that the _Tonquin_ was blown up.--_Science_, vol. ix. p. 341.
[28] There is a portrait of him, apparently authentic, in Meares's _Voyages_, vol. ii. (1791). That in the original edition of Jewitt's Narrative, like the plate of the capture of the _Boston_, appears to have been drawn from description, though there is a certain resemblance in it to Meares's sketch made fourteen or fifteen years earlier. But the scenery, the canoes, the people, and, above all, the palm trees in Nootka Sound, are purely imaginary.
BIRTH, PARENTAGE AND EARLY LIFE OF THE AUTHOR
I was born in Boston, a considerable borough town in Lincolnshire, in Great Britain, on the 21st of May, 1783. My father, Edward Jewitt, was by trade a blacksmith, and esteemed among the first in his line of business in that place. At the age of three years I had the misfortune to lose my mother, a most excellent woman, who died in childbed, leaving an infant daughter, who, with myself, and an elder brother by a former marriage of my father, constituted the whole of our family. My father, who considered a good education as the greatest blessing he could bestow on his children, was very particular in paying every attention to us in that respect, always exhorting us to behave well, and endeavouring to impress on our minds the principles of virtue and morality, and no expense in his power was spared to have us instructed in whatever might render us useful and respectable in society. My brother, who was four years older than myself and of a more hardy constitution, he destined for his own trade, but to me he had resolved to give an education superior to that which is to be obtained in a common school, it being his intention that I should adopt one of the learned professions. Accordingly, at the age of twelve he took me from the school in which I had been taught the first rudiments of learning, and placed me under the care of Mr. Moses, a celebrated teacher of an academy at Donnington, about eleven miles from Boston, in order to be instructed in the Latin language, and in some of the higher branches of the mathematics. I there made considerable proficiency in writing, reading, and arithmetic, and obtained a pretty good knowledge of navigation and of surveying; but my progress in Latin was slow, not only owing to the little inclination I felt for learning that language, but to a natural impediment in my speech, which rendered it extremely difficult for me to pronounce it, so that in a short time, with my father's consent, I wholly relinquished the study.