Chapter 3

Hemmed in From Every Side

The Beothuk’s gradual withdrawal from the Avalon Peninsula, the area most subject to the overland forays of armed troops and the presence of hostile fleets, was a tribal decision. However, not long after, other factors outside their control forced them into a deeper retreat. Eventually, almost the entire coastline was affected by foreign activity. The Beothuk pulled back even more — cutting themselves off from the ocean’s rich resources — resources on which their lives depended.

Starvation was a constant threat. Their existence was an endless round of attempts to manage and balance the seasonal variations. If, during a one-year cycle, the weather pattern altered dramatically, or some unforeseen event changed caribou migration patterns, it could create a serious food crisis for the Beothuk. In order to gather enough to survive during both winter and summer, it was necessary to travel to where food was most plentiful at any given time. The tribe traditionally spent the spring and summer among the indented bays and the countless islands offshore. They foraged in small family bands concentrating on collecting wild bird eggs, and hunted animals such as hare, marten, fox, bear, and seal. The bands also fished, and they harpooned the seal at sea from open boats, which was often extremely dangerous.

The bulk of their food was dried or preserved so that it could be stocked for winter and easily carried on their travels. In the fall, when most of the bands left the coast to go deep inland to the Exploits complex of rivers and lakes, it was principally to hunt the huge caribou herds that annually migrated through this area. During this event the Beothuk collaborated to build fences to control the places where caribou crossed the rivers. There they could be slaughtered easily at chosen sites without needless waste. These fences extended over many miles, a dense breastplate of cut trees and twigs, towering well over a man’s head. They were vital to the gathering of food resources, and their repair and extension depended on an organized community effort.

After the mass kill, hundreds of carcasses were frozen then packaged and stored in pits at the main camp on Red Indian Lake. The meat was shared by all alike. The tribe also fished for salmon, which was bountiful in the Exploits and its tributaries and was an essential source of food for the Beothuk. Their three major winter camps at Red Indian Lake were extremely difficult for outsiders to access. But for the Beothuk, who had been raised in the difficult terrain, the three camps were within easy trekking distance of each other.

The dwellings at the Red Indian Lake winter camps were very different from the quickly erected mammateeks they used in their summer travels. The winter houses were large, semi-subterranean, multi-sided structures, sometimes up to 10 metres in diameter. They could hold up to 50 or 60 people. Each dwelling was warmly insulated with moss and clay, and had a central fireplace with an opening above for smoke to escape. There were lofts for storage, and personal belongings hung on the walls. There were additional fire pits outside, and hundreds of caribou leg bones were mounted on poles throughout the camp. Deep food storage pits contained frozen meat.

The five ceremonial staves with their shamanic emblems were always planted outside the chief’s mammateek. During the great annual feasts and spiritual celebrations, every infant who had been born within the year was anointed with grease and red ochre at an initiation ceremony. At these times, all the adults from every family also renewed their own ochre anointments, which affirmed their tribal identity. The entire nation had sung and danced at these central gatherings, safe from predators for hundreds of years ....

Then, in the 1700s, a number of changes took place almost simultaneously. First, the English began to settle permanently, and move inland to build large commercial salmon fisheries in the heart of Red Indian territory. Trappers also encroached farther and farther inland. Second, during the 1700s the Mi’kmaq began to infiltrate Newfoundland in ever increasing numbers. They had made the ocean crossing by canoe from Cape Breton for hundreds of years, but they were so few initially that they were no threat to the Beothuk. Mutual respect and friendship developed and the two peoples sometimes joined together for celebrations. This situation changed radically after the French forged a strong military alliance and trading relationship with the Mi’kmaq on the mainland. This opened the door for the French colony in Newfoundland at Plaisance to play the Mi’kmaq off against their local enemies, the Beothuk and the English. They supplied the Mi’kmaq with firearms, and since the Beothuk refused to adopt guns, the odds became desperately unequal.

There were significant battles between the two tribes. The Beothuk, lacking firepower, suffered major defeats and were forced to retreat inland from the St George’s Bay area. Within 30 years there was a violent confrontation at the northern end of Grand Lake. The Mi’kmaq won, and tradition says they put every man, woman, and child to death. Whatever the truth, this victory gave them control over the whole of the western region of Newfoundland. In the south of Newfoundland, the Mi’kmaq, largely because of their close ties with the French at Plaisance, now dominated the hunting and fishing around the harbours west of Placentia Bay. Although the official English position was that they were “foreign Indians” and must return to “their own side of the gulf” in Nova Scotia by October of each year, only a few obeyed. Instead, they moved determinedly inland, advancing from the south as far as Exploits River, into the heart of Beothuk territory. And the Mi’kmaq began to hunt in the same areas as the ever-encroaching English trappers.

Beothuk numbers began to dwindle with the relentless fighting and atrocities. They fought back with small raids and the random killings of individual Mi’kmaq and settlers. The Beothuk practice of decapitating captives, putting their heads on poles, and dancing around them terrified both the Mi’kmaq and the English. Their horrifying deeds became legendary and fear of the tribe was widespread.

The Beothuk faced another challenge when the Inuit (who were particularly hostile to the Beothuk) and the Montagnais moved into the Northern Peninsula. This occurred around the same time that the French sealing stations in the north began to restrict Beothuk access to that part of the coast. The result was that the Beothuk were caught in a multilateral squeeze that forced them farther into the interior. They were cut off from the vital resources of the coast that ensured a varied diet.

The English posed the most devastating of all these threats. They steadily advanced inland into Beothuk territory, taking over the salmon rivers and disturbing the caribou migration patterns through their random hunting. And they quickly became major competitors for all fur-bearing animals. At first, when the settlers took only what they needed for their own consumption, the Beothuk still had enough fish to meet their needs. Then, in 1708, an entrepreneur named George Skeffington constructed a very large commercial salmon fishery to cure and process salmon for export and took control over several of the major salmon rivers in the interior. The Beothuk depended on these for fish, especially the Gander, the Exploits, and the Indian Arm Rivers.

Skeffington not only built houses and fishing stages, but various settlers had miles of forest cleared along the banks in order to service and patrol the salmon posts. A mix of bullying and the threat of firearms scared off the Beothuk. Even worse, the English, greedy to harvest the fish in record time, dammed rivers and set up weirs to prevent salmon from reaching the spawning grounds. The fish were forced to congregate in the pools below, where waiting salmon catchers scooped them out in huge numbers. Fleets of nets were set along the Exploits for at least 44 kilometres.

For the first time, the Beothuk retaliated with organized violence. Around 1720, they broke down weirs, took away nets and provisions, and killed some of Skeffington’s men. In response, Skeffington raised a posse of 30 to 40 armed men, and the Beothuk retreated except for occasional lightning raids.

The operation of the fishery was then greatly extended into most areas of Notre Dame Bay. The Beothuk were left with access to only a few small rivers, including Charles Brook. Soon the salmon catchers had moved in there, too. In response, the Beothuk patrolled the river in several large canoes. The settlers were alarmed, knowing that they were being watched from the surrounding forest. Sometimes Beothuk appeared on the opposite bank, making threatening gestures and shouting. None of these settlers were harmed though, and the Beothuk again pulled back from Notre Dame Bay, this time almost entirely. Edward Burd noted in his journal in 1726, “The Indians are now pretty much worn out ... the English ... treat them with great severity.”

Now seriously threatened by the scarcity of a staple in their diet, the Beothuk reacted much more forcefully. They mounted determined raids, especially at night (which particularly frightened the settlers) and initiated a kind of guerrilla warfare of ambush and random killing. The settlers reacted by sending out equally random punitive raiding parties. Colonists were particularly vulnerable to attack while at work, likely because it served as a message to desist from these destructive activities. Two young men were ambushed on their way to take salmon out of a pond at Ragged Harbour. One was killed, and the other one escaped when he managed to reach his gun and wound one of the attackers.

Thomas Rowsell, who had the reputation of being a great “Indian killer” who never spared the lives of any Native people, was killed while he was dipping salmon at his weir in New Bay. His body was found stripped naked, pierced with arrows, and beheaded. In retaliation, eight of Rowsell’s friends ambushed a party of Beothuk in two canoes at Moore’s Cove and riddled them with buckshot. Several were killed.

In the early 1760s, shipmaster Scott and his fishing crew built a fortified house in the Bay of Exploits. One day the premises were surrounded by a large number of Beothuk, and Scott went out unarmed to investigate. Trying to put on a show of friendliness, he attempted to mix with them even though they were clearly a well-armed raiding party. An old Native man, pretending to respond in a friendly way, put his arms around Scott’s neck. As he did so, another warrior stabbed Scott in the back. The Beothuk launched into bloodcurdling war whoops, and let loose a storm of arrows. The other shipmaster and four crewmembers were killed before the rest escaped to the ships. On another occasion, five Englishmen who tried to settle in Hall’s Bay were attacked by a war party. This time their heads were cut off and stuck on poles.

As well as being known for their chilling ferocity in beheading captives, the Beothuk also had a reputation for being unexpectedly merciful. On one occasion, a fisherman in the Bay of Exploits was inspecting his traps along a riverbank when he heard a voice. Startled, he looked up and saw a Beothuk standing on the shore with an arrow notched into his bow, ready to shoot. He signalled to the fisherman to leave, and the man rowed away as fast as if the devil was after him. Boasting about his adventure later, he claimed to regret not having had his gun with him, as he would have shot the Beothuk “dead upon the spot.” This was quite consistent with the prevailing attitude of the settlers.

Furriers, in contrast with fishermen, tended to trap alone. If they could, trappers might open fire on Native people, but just as often they snuck away if they came upon a group. On the other hand, there is not one report of a Beothuk killing a trapper on his trapline or in his tilt, although there was plenty of opportunity. They did, however, enjoy sleuthing trappers and scaring them by hiding around their tilts, and they did take their traps. When one trapper, Richard Richmond, found fresh tracks around his tilt and all his traps missing, he was frightened enough to leave permanently.

William Cull did not give up so easily. He saw tracks near his tilt at Peters Brook, but he only had his hatchet with him, so he rushed back to get his gun. He then loaded it with drop shot, hurriedly put on his snowshoes, and set off in pursuit, ready to kill. Cull tracked the offenders for two full days before giving up the chase. Not willing to give them the slightest satisfaction, he collected whatever traps he could carry, and then destroyed all the rest before he returned home.

The Beothuk were never given credit for their considerable restraint. But some of the settlers, outraged at their losses, planned elaborate revenge. They made indiscriminate raids on Beothuk camps, stole furs (in one raid over 100 skins were looted), destroyed essentials like mammateeks and canoes, and killed or injured for the sport of it.

John Peyton Sr. and his partner Harry Miller, together with their headman Thomas Taylor, deliberately planned one particularly disturbing raid. In 1781, after walking along the bank of the Exploits for three days, they spied some Beothuk processing caribou skins beside a small camp. The trappers burst in and immediately fired without warning. Men, women, and children, in utter confusion, fled screaming with terror into the shelter of the nearby trees. The men pursued them ruthlessly, and caught a number of the wounded, as well as a young girl and an older woman. There is no record of what they did with those they caught (settlers who were later questioned were very evasive), but it was known that Peyton had 36 pistol balls in his gun. He personally bragged about it as “a glorious expedition,” and related that he had discovered an old man in a mammateek who had in his hand one of Peyton’s traps, which had been stolen on a previous occasion. He was working it against a rock, fashioning arrowheads from the iron. Peyton wrested what remained of the trap from him and savagely beat his brains out. The trappers then pilfered the camp, and loaded up as many furs as they could carry. They left without any concern for the distress and injury they left behind them.

Nine years later, in 1790, the same Harry Miller sent out eight men on a raid of winter settlements, ostensibly to retrieve stolen traps and salmon nets. The real purpose was additional revenge for Thomas Rowsell’s death and beheading. The men travelled for four days until they came across four mammateeks and three canoes in a small cove. The Beothuk, who saw them coming, snatched up the small children and fled into the forest. The men set their dogs on them, and routed out two women and an infant. At first they intended to force the women to go back with them, but later reconsidered and let them go, thinking they would be a burden and not worth the trouble. Meanwhile, they had a hearty meal, bundled up as many skins and possessions as they could carry away, and spent the night in the camp. Before they left in the morning they set fire to three of the four mammateeks and burned all the canoes. In addition, they destroyed or threw into the river any useful articles, as well as those that had previously been stolen from settlers.

Women who were caught alone were often brutalized. One of the most gruesome murders was of a pregnant woman who was shot when she begged on her knees for mercy. Her hands were chopped off and later displayed as a hunting trophy. Another Beothuk woman pleaded for mercy for herself and her two children, exposing her breasts to her captors, John Moore and his friend. (This may have been her way of letting him know that she was a mother or that she was a female.) They killed her and attempted to make off with her children. One child died while it was being hauled to the boat, and the other escaped into the woods.

Settlers constantly challenged the Beothuk, even at sea. Initially, both the Beothuk and the settlers hunted seal from open boats. However, when the English started to use decked schooners for sealing and built large settlements at the mouths of bays, they gained every advantage, eventually destroying the Beothuk’s capacity to hunt seal in those areas.

Settlers also harassed the Beothuk when they paddled to the many islands around the coast to collect eggs from the colonies of seabirds that nested there. They went as far afield as Funk Island, which was a considerable distance offshore. When armed colonists also began to collect eggs on a large scale, they enjoyed the sport of holing Beothuk canoes they encountered at sea with mole shot. To avoid their tormentors, the Beothuk waited to put to sea until the water was shrouded by thick fog, a dangerous practice. Not content just to collect the eggs, the English began to decimate the bird population. Feathers were sought after for European clothing and they produced a good price. The Funk Island great auk, in particular, was slaughtered both for its feathers and its thick layer of fat, which was rendered for fuel. These birds could not fly, and they were driven into corrals where they could be easily killed, scalded, and plucked. So many were destroyed that by 1800 the species became extinct.

Viewed from a wider perspective, nearly all the stresses suffered by the Beothuk on their small remote island were inseparable from the shifting European economic and political climate. European power struggles were played out in colonial policies that seldom considered the New World as anything more than an extension of their own interests at home.

After the mid-1700s, another alarming kind of harassment began to take root, the kidnapping of Beothuk children. The ultimate purpose (although this never actually happened) was to place them back with their tribe once they began to conform to the settlers’ way of thinking. It was hoped that the tribe might be introduced to Christianity by these means. There was also the chance that once the Beothuk were tamed, the entire island could then be surveyed for its natural resources without undue danger and interference.

At least three children were deliberately abducted and brought up in English households during the 1700s. In 1758, a group of Irish hunters from Fogo opened fire upon a lone mammateek. They killed a woman and child, but a young boy of about nine survived. The English named him Tom June (after the month he was taken). He was initially taken to England, and then later raised in Newfoundland. Subsequently, Tom June was employed in the fishery at Fogo where he became a well-known businessman.

The second child, John August, was kidnapped 10 years after the snatching of Tom June. Some fishermen chanced upon a woman with a child on her back. They shot and killed the woman, but carried off the boy, who was believed to be about four years old. He was presented to Governor Palliser for “a gratuity” (which was probably never paid). The boy was too young to be questioned about his culture, and of course did not understand a word of English. The next year he was taken to England and displayed in a public market for the price of roughly two pence per viewer. John August, also, was later returned to Newfoundland, where he eventually held the responsible position of master of a boat under the employ of a Trinity merchant.

The third and last child intentionally kidnapped was a girl, Oubee, who was taken in July 1791. Three Englishmen came upon what they were sure must have been a case of murder, after they noticed an empty punt (a shallow flat- bottomed boat with square ends) near a mammateek at Charles Brook. In fact, a family of Beothuk had taken the punt after two fishermen stole their canoe. They were forced to walk at least 100 kilometres through the forest to Indian Arm, where they stole the empty punt so that they could get back to their people. The family consisted of two women, two boys, and a young girl. The Englishmen allowed the women to escape, killed the man (who was holding a boy in his arms,) wounded the other boy, and carried off the girl, whose age was estimated as less than 10 years old.

Oubee was raised among the family of Thomas Stone of Trinity. Although they were said to have treated her with considerable care and humanity, she still tried to escape. They caught her anyway. The young girl was old enough to help compile a vocabulary of about 100 important Beothuk words. She did this by giving the name of objects as they were pointed out. These words were the first of the Beothuk language ever recorded. Dr. Clinch, who worked with her on the project, confirmed that “Oubee” was her Beothuk name. Around 1795, the Stones made a permanent move back to England, taking her with them. Oubee died a very short time after they arrived in England.

The same year that John August was kidnapped, Governor Palliser commissioned Lieutenant John Cartwright to lead an expedition into the interior to try to contact the Beothuk and to render them “useful subjects to his Majesty.” Cartwright was genuinely concerned about the plight of the Beothuk, and set off up the Exploits River on August 24, 1768. The heavily armed party went as far as Start Rattle, where they left the boats in the woods and divided into two groups in order to search both banks simultaneously. At the end of four days the conditions were unbearable. Many of the men had worn through their shoes, they had eaten almost all their supplies, and the rain was constant. The majority turned back for the shallop. Five of the original 14 persisted through the rain until sunset, when they erected a shelter for the night. The next morning found them at the edge of Red Indian Lake, where they discovered a large settlement that was almost covered by tall weeds and young trees. It had obviously been deserted for some time. On the way back they passed another more recently occupied camp, but still did not encounter any Beothuk. Cartwright had to be content with the opportunity to map areas that had never been recorded before by a European. He took extensive notes on the flora, fauna, and mineral resources. And, most importantly, he wrote a detailed description of the cultural artifacts the Beothuk had left behind. In this respect, Cartwright’s mission was far from a failure, although it had fallen short of its prime objective, which was to befriend the Native peoples. When he failed to encounter even one Beothuk, he began to suspect that they travelled to different areas with the seasons (a fact that was not yet known).

In any case, there was considerable alarm raised when it was reported that the group had found the major camps of the Beothuk deserted. Subsequently, a year later (in 1760), Governor Byron published a proclamation that condemned the persecution of the Beothuk. The proclamation made killing or wounding a Native person punishable by hanging.

Sadly, the proclamation was totally ineffective because the settlers most involved and affected by it did not support it. The atrocities continued.