River Thieves (3 page)

“Never been a navy man on the shore this late in the season,” John Senior said. “Not in all my years.”

Peyton couldn’t discern the drift of those words, whether they were wistful or angry or fearful. All that summer they had heard stories of the commander of the
Adonis
, a Lieutenant Buchan, travelling across the northeast shore in a cutter. Mapping the coastline was the explanation that had come to them, a notion John Senior was suspicious of almost out of habit. When word reached the Peytons that the vessel was going to winter-over, it was like a confirmation of the worst, though nothing said between them acknowledged any specific concern.

“What is it this Buchan is after?” Peyton asked.

John Senior shook his head. He was squinting into the light of the sun as it fell into the forest. “Leave me worry about the navy man. You worry about keeping your powder dry. And minding the ice.”

Peyton nodded and they pushed on towards Ship Cove as the darkness seemed to rise out of the countryside around them, the sky turning black overhead by imperceptible degrees. They didn’t speak of the
Adonis
or Lieutenant Buchan again, although in his head Peyton was already running through the possibilities. He had another full day’s travel to face in the morning. And he could see, exhausted as he was, he had little chance of sleeping through the night again.

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.

The scattered references to them fascinated, then obsessed Duckworth, like an unfamiliar word that begins to recur in a way that seems loaded with import. He had written letters and attended informal meetings with members of the Privy Council in London before beginning his appointment. He wanted some
action taken to protect the Indians, to establish a formal relationship. He argued, quoted statistics (manufactured out of the air to lend weight to his opinions), bullied and harangued to the point that people began avoiding him, coming down with sudden illnesses that made it impossible to keep their appointments. He was gaining a reputation, he was told by friends, as a quack. Each month his appetite decreased. The crick in his neck tightened like a body on the rack.

Duckworth sat back from his meal. The Privy Council, he told Buchan, had been made aware of the dire situation of the local natives by most of the colony’s governors in recent memory. A series of ineffectual proclamations had been issued in response to reports that attacks of inhuman barbarity were being perpetrated against the Indians by settlers. The decrees placed the natives under the protection of the Crown and exhorted settlers to “live in amity and brotherly kindness” with the Red Indians. There was a report from an officer of the navy in 1792, the state of the tribe was discussed at a commission of inquiry, there were official recommendations. There was talk of a reservation in Notre Dame Bay, of making an example of some of the worst offenders in the Bay of Exploits. All of these suggestions the Privy Council took under advisement and proceeded to ignore, unwilling to risk alienating the growing population of settlers by appearing to side with local natives. The English cod fishery on the Grand Banks was the richest in the world, Duckworth reminded Buchan, and the revolt in America had not been without its lessons.

They washed their food down with tankards of a dark molasses beer brewed on the premises and Duckworth lifted a hand to signal for more. Despite the chill in the air, the effort of
eating raised beads of perspiration on the governor’s forehead. As far as he could determine from his own inquiries, he continued, no one had ever succeeded in building a sustained relationship of trust with the Red Indians. The remnants of the tribe had retreated to the northeast shore, wintering seventy miles inland on the Red Indian’s lake. During the warmer months they scavenged a living among the sparsely populated maze of islands in the Bay of Exploits. From May to September they hunted for eggs on the bird islands and harvested seals and took salmon from the rivers not yet occupied and dammed by English settlers. They dug for clams and mussels on the shoreline and pilfered ironwork and nets from the settlers’ tilts and they sometimes cut the English boats from their moorings in the dark of night in a useless display of bravado or protest.

The settlers responded to their constant stealing and vandalism by shooting at them on sight or raiding and looting their camps in retaliation. An old man named Rogers living on Twillingate Great Island had boasted of killing upwards of sixty of them. Several people Duckworth knew personally — he leaned dangerously low over his plate of food — had seen Red Indian hands displayed as trophies by furriers in the Bay of Exploits.

Buchan was vaguely familiar with much of the information Duckworth was relating, but he saw the governor’s need for a naive audience, his desire to find a convert. He shook his head in disbelief. He nodded, he made small disgusted noises in his throat, he offered pained expressions where appropriate.

Duckworth had tucked a linen napkin into his waistcoat to protect the white silk. He leaned his bulk back from the table and methodically wiped his hands clean with the napkin before
removing a folded sheaf of letters from the waist pocket of his frock coat.

“One of my predecessors,” he said, wiping at the corners of his mouth with his thumb, “consulted a magistrate by the name of Bland for advice on this issue.” He flipped through the pages for a particular passage and turned a letter up to the poor light of the lamp when he found it. “‘Before the lapse of another century,’” he read, “‘the English nation, like the Spanish, may have affixed to its character the indelible reproach of having extirpated a whole race of people.’” There was a noticeable tick in the pale jowls of his face. He folded the papers and laid them on the table at the officer’s elbow. “My dear Buchan,” he said.

Duckworth rested his chin on the starched muslin folds of his cravat as the lieutenant leafed slowly through the letters. Buchan was a Scotsman who had signed on as a cabin boy in the Royal Navy at the age of ten. By the time of the most recent war with the French he was master of the HMS
Nettby
and was instrumental in sinking and capturing several French ships in the conflict. He’d served intermittently on the Newfoundland station for several years and had mapped much of the island’s south coast. The two men had crossed paths in official capacities for nearly a decade and they recognized in one another an instinctual devotion to duty and Empire. They both felt the same confirmation of their natural inclinations in service to the ways and laws of Britannia.

“I’m speaking to you now,” Duckworth said with a conspiratorial air, “as a gentleman and a friend.”

Duckworth wrote Buchan a letter of orders to spend the late summer months navigating and mapping the coastal waters of
the northeast shore to justify the expense of assigning the
Adonis.
He sent the officer away with a proclamation issued on the first day of August, 1810, which promised a reward of one hundred pounds to any person who could bring about and establish on a firm and settled footing a friendly intercourse with the native Indians. “Of course, I have no authorization to propose a reward,” Duckworth admitted, “but the brutes will simply laugh at you if you come without one.”

By the end of September, Buchan had conceded the failure of his summer mission and wrote to the governor to inform him the
Adonis
would winter over in Notre Dame Bay and undertake a trek to the Red Indian’s lake after the freeze-up. The Indians’ winter camps were reputed to be much larger and less mobile and Buchan was certain a dialogue could be forced if he was able to reach them. Duckworth offered his consent with the understanding that Buchan would act as a floating surrogate while he was stationed there, hearing civil cases across the district. The
Adonis
was anchored in Ship Cove by chaining the schooner to trees on the shoreline and the chain links were studded with brass nails to keep them from chafing through the trunks.

Buchan consulted with local fishermen and made a list of the most prominent settlers on the shore, then set about visiting those he had yet to meet. He presented the governor’s proclamation, outlined his plans for the winter, and, where it seemed likely he might receive some, he requested advice and assistance. About the middle of October, shortly after John Peyton had left the coast for the traplines in the interior, Buchan and a small party of marines from the
Adonis
arrived at John Senior’s winter house.

“I was just now across in Ship Cove,” John Senior said. “Not a week past. Your man Bouthland offered me a little tour of the
Adonis.”

“He told me.” Buchan pushed his empty plate towards the centre of the table. “I’m sorry to have been away,” he said. “Though I would have lost the excuse to impose on your hospitality.” He smiled across at his host, but John Senior made no effort to return it and Buchan looked quickly around at the kitchen. The house was well appointed for this part of the world. It was the first two-storey building Buchan had encountered outside the village of Twillingate. He said, “This is quite a property, Mr. Peyton.”