In April 1823, a group of Newfoundland fur trappers encountered three women at Badger Bay who were in starving conditions.
They had journeyed from the island’s interior in search of mussels.
Two of the women died shortly after the men brought them to St. John’s and the one that remained was one of the last people left in her tribe.
She spent the rest of her life sharing her culture and history.
She translated English words into her own language, drew pictures of mythological figures, homes, and other artifacts, and illustrated various encounters between her people and European settlers.
On June 6, 1829, her death marked the end of her people.
I’m Craig Baird and this is Canadian History Ehx.
This month I’m diving deep into Newfoundland’s history and today I share the story of Shanawdithit and the Beothuk People.
To the Norse it was Vinland.
The English called it “New founde lande”.
The Portuguese gave it the name of Terra Nova.
The Beothuk just called it Onewayk.
“Our Land”.
It truly was theirs.
Anyone who visited the island would have seen a culture perfectly adapted to the island.
Conical birch bark dwellings, called mamateeks, dotted the entire coast.
These tiny mobile villages were home to extended families of 30 to 50 people.
To survive, the Beothuk made the most of the resources the land provided.
The long-indented coast of Newfoundland and its many inland waterways were the perfect for long-distance travel.
The Beothuk were skilled canoeists who not only navigated large lakes and rivers but also the ocean.
They used swift birchbark canoes, which could carry up to ten occupants and be easily transported overland to hunt sea mammals using arrows, harpoons and spears.
Inland, they built deer fences that stretched over 60 kilometres to drive caribou to awaiting hunters.
One of the most important parts of this vibrant culture was the use of red ochre. They painted their canoes with it, their cultural items and even their bodies.
Generation after generation thrived on the island.
But that was soon to change.
On May 29, 1453, the Ottoman Empire captured Constantinople, bringing an end to the Byzantine Empire after 1,000 years in power.
The city was renamed Istanbul, and Europe suddenly found itself cut off from the Black Sea and the overland access to Asia.
Four decades later in 1492, Christopher Columbus thought he could find a new route to Asia across the Atlantic Ocean.
Contrary to popular belief, he was not out to prove the Earth was round.
Humans had known that going back to the days of the Ancient Greeks.
In fact, Columbus ignored many experts of that era and made several errors in his calculations about the circumference of the Earth.
He thought Japan was 4,400 kilometres from Europe when it is in fact 19,600 kilometres away.
And there was a giant continent in the way.
Nonetheless, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain financed his voyage across the Atlantic and promised a lifetime pension to the first person to see land.
On Aug. 3, 1492, Columbus left with three ships, the Pinta, the Nina and the Santa Maria and after a brief stop in the Canary Islands in September, they spent five weeks sailing across the ocean.
On Oct. 12, 1492, at 2 a.m., Martin Alonso Pinzon, a lookout on the Pinta, saw land.
But he didn’t get that sweet lifetime pension because Columbus said that he had already seen a light on the land a few hours earlier and claimed the pension for himself.
Upon reaching land, Columbus met people he called Los Indios, or Indians in English.
They were the Lucayan people, Indigenous inhabitants of the island they called Guanahani, and they greeted Columbus and his men warmly.
Unfortunately, they had gold ear ornaments and Columbus immediately took them prisoner and demanded to know where he could get more.
Months later in March 1493, Columbus returned to a hero’s welcome in Spain, and he brought with him 10 kidnapped Indigenous people he used to validate his claims of gold in the land he claimed to have quote unquote “discovered”.
As news spread, other European rulers wanted to send their own ships in the hopes they would return packed with gold.
One man, John Cabot, believed that the true path to Asia was through the north and went to Bristol, England to find financial backers for his journey.
The city was the second-largest seaport in England, and along with enthusiastic investors he was also granted a commission by King Henry VII of England, who would receive one-fifth of the profit from the voyage.
In the spring of 1497 Cabot ventured out but hit bad weather and turned back.
A few weeks later, Cabot once again headed west and on June 24, 1497, John Cabot’s ship, the Matthew of Bristol, appeared on the horizon of a land that would become Newfoundland.
The ship anchored off the coast, and John Cabot along with a few men approached the beach in a boat.
The only signs of life were the remains of a fire, a trail, nets and a wooden tool.
After getting fresh water, Cabot and his men left, hoping to return the following year.
It didn’t happen.
In 1498, Cabot disappeared at sea on his second voyage to North America.
However, The Beothuk had been watching from the trees when Cabot first made landfall.
They may have thought that these people were going to be like the last strangers who had arrived from the water.
Their oral histories spoke of visitors with beards, long hair and large boats.
They built homes and lived on the island for years before they disappeared.
Sometimes they attacked them in bloody skirmishes.
But that had been 500 years earlier.
The Norse had made the Beothuk wary of anyone who came across the waters.
Perhaps they hoped that these new visitors wouldn’t come back either.
Sadly, they weren’t that lucky and before long many more would arrive on their shores.
That’s because during his voyage in 1497, John Cabot and his crew dipped baskets into the cold waters of the Grand Banks and pulled them up teeming with fish.
Within a decade, sailors from the Basque region of Northern Spain followed Cabot’s route to the southern coast of Newfoundland.
That’s where a series of underwater plateaus create a continental shelf as each plateau is relatively shallow, extending down 15 to 91 metres.
From the north, the cold Labrador Current hits the warm Gulf Stream from the south mixing at the Grand Banks which lifts nutrients to the surface from the ocean bottom and then settles on the shelf.
Everything from lobster and cod to whales and dolphins’ feeds in this region’s nutrient rich waters.
And every spring fisherman caught fish, salted and dried them on the shore, then returned home to Europe by the end of summer.
There were no permanent European settlements yet, but their work still disrupted the lives of the Beothuk.
Each time sailors arrived, the Beothuk were pushed away from their coastal grounds and into the interior of the island.
With each year, it seemed more Europeans were arriving to fish the Grand Banks
Soon they set up temporary settlements on the coast.
In 1578, after four years of observations, Anthony Parkhurst, a promoter of English colonization in North America, published his report on the Newfoundland fisheries.
He counted 50 English ships, 100 Spanish vessels, 50 Portuguese ships and 150 boats from France.
In addition, the Basques had 30 vessels just for hunting whales.
Five years later, Sir Humphrey Gilbert sailed into what would one day be St. John’s Harbour.
On 5 August 1583, he went ashore and assembled merchants and fishermen before his tent, where a rod and turf were cut and delivered to him to symbolize the transfer of land which was common law in England.
By doing so he proclaimed the land to be the queens in perpetuity.
He then levied a tax on the fishermen and took over authority of the fishing stations.
It never even occurred to him that the land he claimed for England had been Beothuk territory for centuries.
Nearly four decades later, in 1612, John Guy formed the London and Bristol Company for the Plantation of Newfoundland and established a settlement at Cuper’s Cove on the southwest shore of Conception Bay.
Most of the settlers left in less than ten years, but this early English settlement was just the start of what was to come.
Before long, more settlements popped up at Bristol’s Hope, Renews, South Falkland and Avalon to support the 10,000 sailors who fished the fertile waters.
However, as the European population grew, the Beothuk were pushed farther off their land, and their numbers began to decline.
Their only respite from European invasion came each autumn, when European fishermen left the Grand Banks and their temporary settlements to return home.
Once they left, the Beothuk came out of the woods to find what they carelessly left behind.
Nails, fishhooks, scraps of iron and much more were taken by the Beothuk and turned into arrowheads, blades and other useful tools.
Each spring, the fishermen returned to find their camps empty, and their structures taken apart.
What the Beothuk viewed as items to be scavenged, the Europeans saw as outright theft, which caused the relationship to strain.
John Guy had established the settlement of Cuper’s Cove, and he knew that his new venture could not survive without trade, so he sent men to find the Beothuk in the interior of the island.
They returned with no success.
Each time they thought they had found a Beothuk settlement, it had been abandoned shortly before.
Guy eventually went on his own trading mission.
He came across Beothuk dwellings, took some items, and left item to communicate a trade.
What he didn’t understand is that the Beothuk wanted nothing to do with Europeans.
But John Guy wouldn’t give up easily.
On one of his trading expeditions, he came across a deserted Beothuk camp.
Believing the Beothuk were watching from the trees, he hoisted a white flag and waved it.
Separated by a river, eight men came out of the trees and lit a signal fire.
In response, John Guy encouraged them to cross and join his party.
After a short while of hand gestures to communicate his desire to trade, some of the Beothuk waded across.
Guy said their entire bodies were covered with red ochre and their hair was entwined with feathers.
They stood bold and upright wearing animal furs, including beaver skin collars as the leader kissed the tip of his fingers and gestured towards them.
The Beothuk gave long speeches which John Guy and his men did not understand and then began to dance.
Once they had exhausted themselves, they sat down for a meal.
Guy made sure to serve them a lavish feast of bread, butter, raisins and beer.
In return, the Beothuk provided caribou meat and root vegetables.
The feast was described as lively and filled with laughter.
The Beothuk gave Guy and his men furs and received a linen cap, two towels, three knives, a piece of brass, a shirt, two napkins, gloves, 12 spices, a hatchet, a knife, four threaded needles and a pair of scissors in return. John Guy really wanted to make a good impression and that night, the Beothuk communicated to them that they would be safe for the night.
Then the two groups agreed to return to that spot in one year to negotiate some more.
However, what could’ve been a prosperous trading relationship was thwarted by a tragic misunderstanding.
A year went by and as promised. The Beothuk returned to the designated spot to wait for the Englishman, but John Guy’s delegation never arrived.
The snow had been especially heavy that winter and The Englishmen had been forced to turn back after only two days.
Meanwhile the Beothuk waited, and when they saw a fishing boat approaching them the group went out to greet them thinking it was John Guy’s party.
It wasn’t.
Those aboard the boat believed the Beothuk were hostile.
They fired their guns and killed several Beothuk as they fled.
Those who survived viewed the entire incident as treachery.
They never forgave and they never forgot.
From then on, they refused to trade with Europeans whose numbers… just…kept… growing.
European expansion, mostly by the English, grew throughout the 1700s.
That meant they cut down forests to build their settlements, and dammed rivers to fish salmon and by 1708, George Skeffington had built a commercial fishery that would cure and process salmon from the Gander, Exploits and Indian Arm Rivers.
They did this before the salmon reached spawning grounds in Beothuk territory, limiting their access to the much-needed fish, leading them to retaliate for the first time.
In 1720, the Beothuk smashed weirs, destroyed nets and killed several men who worked for Skeffington.
In response, the company sent 30 armed men into Beothuk territory.
When they were unable to find anyone, they returned but this was the first of many attacks.
And over the next few years, the Beothuk continued to raid English settlements mostly at night, or while settlers were away working.
But it was a dangerous endeavour for both parties.
One day Thomas Rowsell was drying salmon at his weir when the Beothuk showed up.
He had a reputation for killing Beothuk and his body was later found naked, covered in arrow wounds.
He had also been beheaded.
In retaliation, Rowsell’s friends gave chase and ambushed two parties of Beothuk in canoes and killed several of them.
The tit for tat escalation continued and in the mid-1760s, the fortified house of a shipmaster was attacked by the Beothuk.
The shipmaster and four crewmembers were killed.
They wouldn’t be the last.
When five Englishmen attempted to start a settlement in Hall’s Bay, they were later found decapitated with their heads on poles.
The Beothuk showed no mercy to those who fished their rivers, but the same could not be said for trappers who typically worked alone and lived off the land.
The Beothuk didn’t harm them but instead took their traps and overall, their attacks were nothing compared to the brutality they faced from colonizers.
Settlers made no secret of their hatred for the Beothuk.
They routinely made trips into the interior to steal their furs, destroy canoes and pillage their homes.
They showed no hesitation to kill either.
In 1775 near Trinity Bay, an armed group of white settlers came upon a group of Beothuk people sleeping.
They murdered seven of them.
One man, said to stand well over six feet, was shot several times before he died.
His body was towed behind the settler’s boat before it was cut loose.
The man’s body eventually washed up at Lance Cove where people gawked at him like he was a macabre tourist attraction until he rotted away and was swept out to sea.
As the years went by the persecution of the Beothuk people continued.
John Peyton Sr ran a salmon and fur post at Sandy Point near the mouth of the Exploits River.
Over the years equipment, including salmon nets and a boat had been stolen several times by the Beothuks. Peyton Sr., along with two other men, Harry Miller and Thomas Taylor, were given permission to find the Beothuk responsible.
They walked along the coast for three days and when they found a group processing caribou skins, they fired their guns.
The Beothuk fled but Peyton Sr., Miller and Taylor managed to kill many Beothuk that day.
It is unknown how many, but it is believed to be at least 24 people died that day.
Peyton Sr. said that the entire event was quote,
“a glorious expedition”.
But the three men’s thirst for Beothuk blood had not been quenched.
Later that year, Peyton discovered a Beothuk man who had stolen one of his traps and was fashioning it into arrowheads.
Peyton beat the man to death with the trap and then took everything from his camp.
In 1790, Harry Miller led eight men to raid Beothuk winter settlements.
Four days later, they found one and let their dogs chase down two women and an infant.
None of the settlers ever faced punishment, instead killing a Beothuk was a matter of pride.
Men would tally their kills on gun butts, and brag about murdering women and children.
But one man opposed this behaviour.
He abhorred the killing and persecution of the Beothuk.
Lt. John Cartwright was sent by the British government to fin Beothuk in the late-1700s, but he didn’t find any; instead, he discovered the settler’s brutality.
His report led to a change in Newfoundland law, making it illegal to kill a Beothuk.
By then, the Beothuk avoided white men at all costs.
In 1807, Governor John Holloway offered a reward for anyone who could establish friendly relations with them.
This meant that if someone could convince a Beothuk to go to St. John’s so the new policy could be explained, they would receive fifty pounds.
The reward was eventually doubled.
However, the policy had an adverse effect.
Instead of encouraging friendly relations, it led to white settlers going into the interior to forcefully kidnap people for a reward.
The British government had essentially put a bounty on Beothuk’s lives and that was on top of their brutal expansion into their lands that left them with no access to fishing grounds.
The Beothuk had been pushed to territories that could not support them, and many starved to death over many winters.
Those who survived were often killed by diseases because they had no immunity to illnesses like tuberculosis and smallpox.
By 1801, the once thriving Beothuk population had dwindled down to a handful of people.
They had survived for millennia on this land and now they were going extinct.
And that year a baby was born that would be known as the last one of her people.
Shanawdithit’s early life is unknown to us other than that she was born around 1801 near a large lake in the Newfoundland interior.
Almost from the start, she was surrounded by death and pain.
She and her family tried to live a traditional life in the interior of the island, away from white settlers but even then, as a child, while washing venison in the river, a white man shot her.
Her recovery took months.
The settlers, though, would not leave them alone.
In 1819, John Peyton Jr., the son of the man who massacred Beothuk decades earlier, was looking for the Beothuk he believed had looted his boat.
His party found a camp belonging to Shanawdithit’s family.
They immediately fled their camp but in the process a woman fell and Peyton and his men grabbed her.
At that moment, the Shanawdithit’s people turned around and advanced on the settlers as Peyton and his men backed up and stopped.
In this standoff, Chief Nonosabasut stepped out holding a spruce branch.
He gave a passionate speech for 10 minutes, then shook hands with everyone.
He believed the matter had been resolved and went to retrieve his wife Demasduit, the woman who had been captured.
Chief Nonosabasut and Demasduit were Shanawdithit’s aunt and uncle, although she was not with them at the time.
Peyton’s men refused to release her, and a Beothuk man took out an axe.
The white men threatened them with their guns as they dragged Demasduit away and stabbed Nonosabasut in the back.
Nonosabasut, however, managed to turn around and kill the man who attacked him.
Then he stabbed another white man with a dagger as he approached him then he went after a third before Peyton shot him.
Nonosabasut fell to the ground but before he could be defeated.
He stood up, gave a deathly stare, lifted his dagger and screamed, then he rushed at the closest white man before he was finally shot dead in a hail of gunfire.
As the other Beothuk fled, the white men dragged Demasduit away with her infant son.
Her son died two days later.
A few months later, the government attempted to return her to her people, sadly by then she was sick with tuberculosis and died on Jan. 8, 1820.
Her body was put on a lakeshore for her people to find.
She was buried beside her husband.
Meanwhile as Shanawdithit fought to survive, she saw her family slowly die around her.
With each winter, the size of her family decreased.
In 1823 her father fell through the ice and died.
Soon after, Shanawdithit was walking along Notre Dame Bay with her mother Doodebewshet and an unnamed sister, and a father and daughter.
They were seen by trapper and fisherman William Cull.
When the father and daughter approached him asking for food, he shot them.
Cull took the remaining women to St. John’s, where Shanawdithit’s mother and sister died soon after of tuberculosis.
William Cull was put on trial for killing two Beothuk but was acquitted due to a lack of evidence.
He then demanded that the government pay him a reward for bringing three Beothuk to St. John’s.
Meanwhile Shanawdithit was alone in a sea of settlers who renamed her Nancy April.
She wasn’t allowed to return to her people… if there were any left in the interion… instead, she was taken to the home of John Peyton Jr, the man who had killed her uncle and kidnapped her aunt where she became a servant.
In the five years she was in his service she learned English and was then taken to the home of William Cormack a prominent family in Newfoundland.
He had been educated in Scotland and eventually returned to the island to take over the family business.
As a young man, he had been fascinated by the Beothuk and led several expeditions into the interior to establish friendly relations.
Despite his best efforts, he never found a single Beothuk on these trips.
Deeply concerned about their plight, he wrote to Lord Bathurst, the British Colonial Secretary, and expressed his desire to help them.
On Oct. 2, 1827, he founded the Beothuk Institute with the hopes of establishing open communication with the original inhabitants of the island and learn about their history.
While his intentions were fueled by a desire to help, he also wanted them to assimilate into British society without regard for their traditions or culture.
But let me be clear, his intentions weren’t pure.
The same year he founded the institute, he stole the skulls of Demasduit and her husband from their graves.
He sent them to Robert Jameson, the professor of natural history at the University of Edinburgh to be studied.
When Shanawdithit moved into his home, he began to talk with her about her people and their culture.
Through their discussions, she drew sketches of Beothuk settlements, their tools and mapped their territory.
In early 1829, William Cormack went to England to share his findings, while he was gone, she was moved to the home of Attorney General James Simms.
By then Shanawdithit was in frail health.
She only lived for nine more months and on June 6, 1829, Shanawdithit died of tuberculosis.
After her death, Dr. William Carson performed a postmortem.
Her skull was sent to the Royal College of Physicians in London where it remained until it was moved to the Royal College of Surgeons in 1938 but was eventually destroyed in the German Blitz bombing of London during the Second World War.
The rest of her remains were buried in a graveyard in St. John’s which was covered over to build a railroad line in 1903.
The church next to it was torn down in 1963 and now, only a plaque remains to identify Shanawdithit’s final resting place.
In 2000, the federal government recognized her as a National Historic Person. That same year, a statue titled The Spirit of the Beothuk was unveiled at Boyd’s Cove to honour her.
That’s because she left behind an incredible legacy.
Her drawings and writings have helped preserve the stores and culture of her people for future generations.
She ensured that the Beothuk would not be erased from history.
In 2015, Chief Mi’sel Joe of the Miawpukek First Nation at Conne River began the process to repatriate the remains of Shanawdithit’s aunt and uncle. He travelled to Scotland where he performed a sweetgrass ceremony for Demasduit and Nonosabasut.
Often called smudging, the traditional Indigenous practice uses the smoke from dried, braided sweetgrass to purify people, places, and objects, by attracting positive energy, healing, and good thoughts.
A year later, Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Dwight Ball requested that the remains be returned to Canada.
Melanie Joly, federal Canadian Heritage Minister, made the same request.
In 2019, four years after Chief Mi’sel Joe began the process, Gordon Rintoul, the Director of National Museums Scotland, announced an agreement had been reached and soon they will be returned.
A bit of good news amid a long history of tragedy.
When Shanawdithit died, many, including William Cormack believed she was the last of her people, and for decades historians accepted it as fact.
However, that may not be true.
Neighbouring First Nations never believed the Beothuk had disappeared.
They say that as Europeans expanded further into their territory, the Beothuk moved north to the Innu and south to the Mi’kmaq and joined their nations.
In 1910, Santu Toney, a 75-year-old woman who claimed she was the daughter of a Mi’kmaq mother and Beothuk father, recorded a song in the Beothuk language.
She said she had learned the song from her father.
In 2007, DNA testing from Demasduit and Nonosabasut’s teeth assigned them to Haplogroup X and Haplogroup C which are DNA markers found in some Mi’kmaq populations, lending further evidence to the theory the Beothuk joined other nations.
Most interestingly, a tiny portion of the Icelandic population belongs to the haplogroup C. The prevailing theory is that these Icelanders have First Nations ancestry, possibly arising from when the Norse arrived in North America around 1000 CE.
But that is a story for next week’s episode when we go back to the era of the Vikings and their explorations of Newfoundland and Labrador.
