Ho’kwat, by David Hooper

Ho’kwat, by David Hooper

John Williams, an aging Englishman, recounts his adventures from the early 1800s, which include his service as a young Royal Navy officer at the Battle of Trafalgar and a traumatic shipwreck at sea. He becomes a British spy and embarks on a voyage to the Columbia River, which ends with the explosion of the ship and a subsequent sojourn at the Russian fort on Sitka Sound. Williams relives the ill-fated historical voyage of Russians to the Northwest Coast in search of new settlements, which ended with a shipwreck on what is now the Washington State coast. The stranded crew resisted capture by the resident Native Americans, escaping into the Hoh River wilderness, where they subsisted on hallucinogenic mushrooms and fell under the spell of a charismatic owl. After a long winter, exhausted and starved, they surrendered and were enslaved, but eventually ransomed and returned to their fort. Most of Ho’kwat’s characters were real people, including Anna Petrovna Bulyin, protrayed herein as a beautful, determined envoy from the Russian tsar, who dies a tragic, violent death after giving birth to a tribal leader’s daughter. Williams describes his encounters with whales, after which he experiences dramatic changes in his age. Although quite elderly, he thereby lives until the present day, when he writes Ho’kwat, his memoir.

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