Explorers visiting the Pacific Northwest in the 18th century expected to meet with native people, but for most First Nations, their initial contact with the European ships and crew would have been a notable event. The commercial potential of visitors in a large, copper-sheathed (to keep out worms) vessel was doubtless enticing, but there was still a need to fit the Europeans into an organized world where they were not strangers or enemies. The cosmology, or world view, and spirituality of the First Nations and the European arrivals was an important aspect of the early relationships between explorers and local peoples.
For First Nations peoples, humans, relatives, ancestors, helpers, and spirits inhabited the coastal environment, linking people and their natural surroundings. When the first European ships came, the pale skin of the crews and the ships’ great sails were assumed to be proof of the spirit world. Captain Cook was not necessarily welcomed as a “god”, as many histories like to suggest, but rather as a visitor from the parallel world of the sky, already known to them; some Nuu-chah-nulth histories associate the visitors with the moon. The Tlingit and Clatsop identified the first monstrous European ships with the Raven, a trickster figure.
The Europeans arrived in the Pacific with ideas about Christianity and how God would
guide their expedition. The British blessed their expeditions and the Spanish sailed with priests aboard. Even the Spanish act of possession involved religious blessings and the placing of a cross on shore to mark the territory. The intention to convert the local peoples to Christianity, and the ultimate view that the indigenous way of life and spiritual beliefs were inferior to those of Christian Europe, allowed them to claim land without worries that it was already inhabited.
