For much of July and August and through the month of September, Lieutenant David Buchan had been commanding a cutter from the HMS Adonis, searching the harbours and coves of Notre Dame Bay for the small bands of Red Indians reported to frequent the area during the summer months. He and his crew of marines had covered almost two hundred miles of coastline, steering up dozens of rivers and narrow gullies, marching for hours through bush and across marshes when a mooring stake was discovered near a trail. The blackflies and mosquitoes over the water were so thick that a used handkerchief came away blackened. The insects crawled into the mouths and ears of the marines and necklaced them with blood. When his men complained about the useless effort and the choking flies, Buchan ordered them to ship their oars and sat the boat still on the water so long they begged him to set to rowing for the relief that only the breeze of movement offered.
There was no lack of evidence of a Beothuk presence — abandoned mamateeks, recently used firepits, well-marked trails. Twice Buchan and his men approached camps in which fires were burning and birds on wooden skewers were angled over the coals, but the occupants had seen or heard them approach and disappeared into the woods. The marines spoke of it among themselves as otherworldly, the work of fairies or the Old Man himself, their enthusiasm for the search waning as their fear and distrust increased. To Buchan, it seemed almost a deliberate seduction, a teasing game that strengthened his determination to carry on.
It was Governor John Duckworth, newly appointed to the office in Newfoundland, who first offered the undertaking to Buchan. They had met on an April evening at the London Tavern in St. John’s. It was cold and miserable outside and heavy sleet tattooed the windows with each gust of wind. There was one double-burner Argand lamp to light the entire room and the near dark and foreboding weather gave a clandestine air to their discussion. They sat beside the flagstone fireplace over plates of mutton and peas. “Marie is well, I trust,” Duckworth said.
“Fine, yes.”
“And the girl?”
“Thank you, yes. By the latest news I have.”
“Good,” Duckworth said without enthusiasm. “Good.” He looked at his plate of food and sighed heavily. “In my experience,” he told the officer, “public service is submission to discomfort.” He ticked off his ailments on the fingers of his right hand. The dull pall of headaches, attacks of the night sweats, nausea or constipation or the trots. It was a physical expression of the sense of impotence that arose from one’s inability to please everyone. He was only a fortnight into his appointment to the position of governor and the Society of Merchants in St. John’s was agitating for the removal of the chief justice, Thomas Tremlett. Illegal building on the waterfront had, according to a long-established custom, gone on through the winter in the absence of the governor and would now have to be dealt with. And there was, closest to his heart, for no reason of consequence to his office or the Crown, the matter of the Red Indians.
In preparation for his posting to Newfoundland, Duckworth had done a meticulous review of the literature. He burrowed through letters, reports and ledgers, correspondence from previous governors to the Privy Council and the Board of Trade, the short and invariably disastrous histories of plantations established in the colony during the seventeenth century. As he read through the paperwork, he began taking note of the infrequent asides regarding the natives of the island, christened Red Indians for their practice of covering skin and clothing, shelters, canoes and tools in a pigment of red ochre. The Indians were a shadowy presence in the colonial literature as they were on the island itself. They surfaced as a minor category in descriptions of the landscape, weather, animals and fishing conditions of the country. They once occupied the entire coast of Newfoundland and there were infrequent but promising contacts with Europeans in the early 1600s, some symbolic acts of trade, ritual exchanges of gifts. Then several pivotal misunderstandings. There were incidents of pilfering from English establishments prompting acts of violence in retaliation. Bloodshed. The Beothuk began to withdraw from those areas overrun by strangers, surrendering the Avalon Peninsula, then Conception and Trinity bays to the rapidly expanding English shore fishery. The French Shore was abandoned to the itinerant presence of the French and their Mi’kmaq allies who migrated from Cape Breton Island. The Mi’kmaq also moved inland to hunt and trap around Grand Lake and the countryside as far north as White Bay.
Duckworth stared across at Buchan. He said, “I hope I’m not boring you, Lieutenant.”
According to the evidence of the literature Duckworth had read, the displacement of the Beothuk took place with a curious lack of concerted resistance. The Red Indians seemed almost to dissipate, like a dream that resists articulation, becoming increasingly elusive as the Europeans occupied and renamed the bays and points and islands that once belonged to them alone.