The last of the tribe: a single woman from the island of San Nicolas
The children's writer Scott O'Dell had a novel called "The Island of Blue Dolphins", in which the main character lives on an island in the Pacific Ocean all alone. Her tribe left the island, and she stayed.
Few people know that O'Dell's novel is based on real events, and the prototype of his heroine was Juana Maria-the last survivor of the Nicolenos tribe living on the island of San Cocolas. What happened to the rest of her tribe — read in our material.
San Nicolas is an island in the Pacific Ocean in front of the coast of California, whose population numbered about 300 people. These people lived there for 10 thousand years. But in 1814, when Juana Maria was still a child, a group of Aleutian otter hunters from the Russian-American company landed on the island. The newcomers accused one of the nikolenos of killing a hunter and staged a massacre, leaving twenty out of three hundred people by 1835.
After learning about the tragedy, the Catholic mission Santa Barbara equipped an expedition to the island to take out the surviving members of the tribe. And Juana-Maria stayed. No one knows why. According to one version, when the group sailed, she was looking for her missing two-year-old child. According to another — Juana-Maria jumped out of a boat that had already left when she did not find her younger brother in it. The ship sailed in a hurry, and Juana-Maria was not in it.
The schooner Peor es Nada under the command of Charles Hubbard docked in the Bay of San Pedro. But the rescue failed: the Indians had no immunity to the diseases of the Old World, and they began to die one by one. The last to die was a man named Black Hawk: he became blind and drowned after falling from a steep bank.
They tried to find Juana Maria several times, but without success. The girl hid on the island, and was discovered only in 1853 by a fur hunter George Nidever. In his memoirs, he describes her as an "elderly woman":
"Instead of running away, she smiled and nodded, starting to chatter in an unintelligible language." Nidever said that she was of average height, about 50 years old, but still " strong and active, she had a nice face, and she smiled all the time."
The woman lived in a hut made of whale bones, and wore clothes made of seal skin and cormorant feathers. She hunted seals and ducks, sewed her own clothes, repaired housing… Nidever must have taken the woman with him to help her.
He brought her to the Santa Barbara Mission. But her loneliness did not end there: Juana-Maria wanted to communicate, but she spoke only in the local language, which no one understood. Historians are still not sure what language Juana Maria could have spoken.
Perhaps she was hoping to find her loved ones, but by that time they were dead. So Juana-Maria remained the last surviving nicolaenos.
She was called a savage, and the newspapers told about every little thing that concerned their new neighbor: that she had never seen horses, or that she liked coffee and liquor. She also loved to sing and dance.
Remaining in history as the "lonely woman of San Nicolas", Juana-Maria was never able to tell anything about her life.
Statue of a single woman of the island of San Nicolas
Keywords: Woman | Isolation | Loneliness | Tribe