River Lords
by Amy Louise Peyton

The Beothuk were an aboriginal tribe of Indians, native only to the island of Newfoundland. They were also called the Red Indians, from the manner in which these natives smeared their faces and bodies and sometimes even their clothing with red ochre. This red ochre was found in areas covering a certain type of slate rock. Dispersed throughout this type of slate was an oxide of iron that formed a peroxide when exposed to the surface; it was red in colour and powdery in form. The purpose of its use by the Indians has not been fully understood—whether to ward off mosquitoes (gallinippers), evil spirits, or just used as a tribal ritual.

There is no mention of these natives by John Cabot when he discovered the island of Newfoundland in 1497, but the following year when he returned to the island he captured three of them and transported them to England, where they were presented to King Henry VII as public spectacles. According to Kerr’s Travels of 1498, of this event:

This year were also brought unto the King, three men taken in the Newfound-land...clothed with beast’s skins and ate raw flesh and spoke a language that no man could understand, in their demeanour like to brute beasts...

Another chronicler of world events wrote in his annals four years later:

It is granted natives of North America in their wild attire were exhibited to the public wonder of England in 1502.

Many French vessels that frequented the island of Newfoundland were also known to have captured several of these natives and transported them to France. A chronicler of the times named Charlevoix wrote of savages from the northeast coast having been brought to France in 1508. “There is no profit at all to be obtained from these natives, who are the most intractable of men, and one despairs of taming them.”

In 1509, the next year, six natives, referred to as savages, were taken by the French ship Bonaventure and transported to Rouen, France, along with their canoes, bow and arrows and deerskin clothing.

Two hundred and fifty-seven years later Sir Hugh Palliser, a naval governor of Newfoundland, gave an account of these native Indians to the British Admiralty in October 1766. He described them as “a number of wild, ungovernable people from the interior of Newfoundland, who are in every respect as savage and barbarous as the most savage tribes of the American continent.”

John August, a Beothuk, lived twenty years in captivity, knowing no way of life other than the white man’s. As an infant he was rescued from his slain mother’s papoose pouch in August 1768. He was taken to England and exposed to the curiosity of the rabble at Poole for a two-penny piece. When he was returned to Newfoundland he lived as a servant of Jeffrey G. Street at Trinity. When he died there he was interred by Street in a churchyard at Trinity; the burial was properly registered by the church.

It is difficult to imagine how many similar such events may have taken place in the ensuing decades, building up a distrust and fear amongst the natives. For approximately two hundred and fifty years after the island’s discovery it experienced an era of chaotic times. It was a no man’s land, with neither law nor order. The surrounding waters were frequented by English West Country fishermen and European fishing boats, mostly French, and even some bona fide pirates. These fearless and daring men fished, traded and plundered, recklessly ignoring the rights of the native aborigines whose territory they had invaded. It is not surprising that the natives became hostile to the visitors from across the sea.

The hostility worked both ways; the natives were portrayed as savage, brutal and revengeful people, a people to be greatly feared. The Beothuk revenge took violent form in the beheading of their enemies; when news of these acts spread, the white man’s fear grew. The Beothuk sometimes killed white men and cut off their heads to be placed on poles. If they came across the grave of a white man, their practice was to drive a stake down through it.

For almost two and a half centuries these natives were ill-treated and considered a great inconvenience to the weak attempts at colonization. The early settlers, first on the Avalon Peninsula and then along the northeast coast, caused the few remaining members of the tribe to retreat farther into the interior of Newfoundland.

Then came the Mi’kmaq, the tribes of Indians crossing to the island from Cape Breton and Labrador. There were two Mi’kmaq tribes, the Shaunamuncs (Montagnais from Labrador), a friendly tribe, and the Shannocs (from Cape Breton), a tribe hated and feared by the Beothuk. The Mi’kmaq were offered bounties by the French for Beothuk heads, and many of them were equipped and experienced in the use of firearms. The Beothuk’s defensive weapon was the bow and arrow, effective in an ambush, but no match for the power of a musket.

By the late 1700s the Beothuk tribe, now dwindling greatly, was hemmed between the two, the settlers along the northeast coast and the Mi’kmaq toward the west. This caused the, remnants of the Beothuk tribe to make the area of the mighty Exploits River headwaters a final retreat. The shores of the “great lake,” Red Indian Lake, became the site of their winter encampments, in close proximity to caribou herds, a vital source of meat and furs.

During the summer months the Beothuk migrated to the northeast seacoast via the great Exploits waterway to Notre Dame Bay. This river and bay abounded with their favourite foods of salmon, trout, wild aquatic fowl and their eggs, and mussels and clams.

The English and French migratory fishing crews were also attracted to this same bay by the abundance of salmon and cod. These two nationalities were continually in confrontation with each other and with the Red Indians. The French considered the Beothuk and the English their mortal enemies.

After years of spasmodic rule and untold atrocities to the Beothuk, something had to be done, and quickly, if the few remaining members of the tribe were to be reconciled and saved from extinction.

Cartwright, Buchan, Peyton Jr., Glascock, Cull and Cormack were unsuccessful in attempts to establish friendly relations with the tribe, but Peyton Jr. came closest to success. Had he been helped with further expeditions and more men, as he requested, he might have been spared the sorrow of seeing a native people wiped off the face of the earth.

After years of interference disrupting the tribe’s living patterns through struggles, confrontations and finally starvation, the Beothuk tribe dwindled in numbers. The white man’s aggressive colonialism drove them farther into the interior. Eventually the Beothuk race became extinct.