If John Rodgers Jewitt had complied with his father's wishes that he become a surgeon's apprentice, his life might have been unexceptional. By convincing his father, a blacksmith in Boston, England, to accept him as an apprentice to his trade in 1797, Jewitt unknowingly embarked on a course that six years later would find him spared from a massacre but wounded and taken captive by the Nootka Indians on the west coast of North America. The necessarily terse journal that Jewitt secretly kept from March 1803 to July 1805 while he lived with the Nootkas--written with the ink he made from the juice of berries-became the starting point for A Narrative of the Adventures and Sufferings, of John R. Jewitt, written by Richard Alsop (one of the best-known of a group of writers called the "Connecticut Wits") after he became fascinated by Jewitt's journal and interviewed Jewitt extensively over the course...