The Beothuk Expedition

by Derek Yetman

  “Wilkes and freedom!” was his reply, shouted to the court. The marines stepped closer and seized his arms. The three officers conferred for a moment, and Mr. Palliser stood up.

  “Nehemiah Grimes, petty officer of HMS Liverpool.” There was complete silence, even from Grimes. “The court finds you guilty of violating Articles eleven, twelve and fourteen of the code that governs His Majesty’s naval service. To whit, you have failed to obey the orders of a superior officer for joining battle with a ship, and have presumed to submit a vessel of His Majesty’s service to peril. Further to this, you are found guilty of harbouring and acting upon a traitorous and mutinous design.”

  The governor grimaced and shifted his weight to his good leg. “To answer for these crimes,” he concluded, “you will be hanged by the neck until dead. The sentence will be carried out at sunrise tomorrow.”

  Grimes seemed too shocked to move for a moment. But then he was struggling against the grip of his guards and crying, “No justice, no king!” He called upon the marines to overthrow their common oppressor, a plea that earned him a sharp elbow to the ribs. I felt a brief stab of pity that a sailor should have to die for falling under the spell of a politician’s empty rhetoric. But then I thought of my old friend Frost and the Indian woman, and the boy whose fate we would probably never know. The real pity, I thought, was that Grimes could only be hanged once.

  With the prisoner subdued, the governor asked if he had anything to say to the court. Grimes lifted his head and looked around the cabin. I have no doubt that the man was deranged, possibly from the knowledge that he was soon to die, but his bitter laughter filled the room and unsettled me. His eyes scanned the faces that surrounded him and came to rest on the man standing next to me.

  “You must be Tench,” he said. All eyes turned to see a look of alarm spreading across the second lieutenant’s face. “It’s you, ain’t it?” Grimes persisted.

  “Mister Palliser!” Tench croaked as he found his voice. “I must protest, sir! The prisoner has no right to—”

  “Cooper and Rowsell,” Grimes said in a louder voice, “they was Pinson’s men. And you’re one, too.”

  The shocked silence of the room lasted until Tench, his face glowing scarlet, cried, “Sir! This is an outrage!”

  Grimes turned a challenging glare to Mr. Cartwright, who was standing at my other side. “How else did the furriers know where to find you, eh? They was told you’d be at Fogo and that’s where they was sent! Pinson knew you’d need to hire guides, and sure enough, there was Tom Rowsell. Only Sam Cooper got there late and had to follow you to Indian Point, now didn’t he?”

  I heard his words clear enough, but my mind was spinning as I tried to grasp their meaning. Captain Palliser’s expression was frightening and Mr. Cartwright had lost his colour.

  “I must insist, sir!” Tench shouted. “This man is condemned to death and will say anything to—”

  The governor’s even louder voice overrode his words. “What are you alleging, Grimes?”

  “Pinson knew all about this plan to make peace with the Indians and to give ’em protection. Someone was passin’ that on to ’im.” The seaman smirked at Tench, whose face had taken on a purple hue. “And Pinson wasn’t too happy with that news, now was he? It was goin’ to interfere with him trappin’ where he liked, and gettin’ rid of them nuisance Indians. So he sent Cooper and Rowsell to scupper it all. If they killed an Indian or two then there’d never be a treaty, ’cause they’d never trust Cartwright, nor anyone else, again.”

  “What proof do you have of this?” Mr. Palliser demanded.

  Grimes shook his head and gave a scornful laugh. “My proof is far away from here. In them woods. And only Pinson knows where for certain, or maybe his man here.” He nodded towards Tench.

  The second lieutenant made a strangled noise. His eyes were bulging with outrage or panic and I saw them dart to the cutlass rack on the wall. He began to sputter but the captain cut him short: “Enough, sir!” The anger in his voice was barely restrained. “I will deal with this anon, but for the moment it changes nothing in regard to this court martial. The charges against the prisoner have been proved, and he remains guilty. Take him below. He will be hanged on the morrow.”

  The court was dismissed, and each of us was left to ponder what we had heard. I did not sleep that night, nor, I am certain, did Mr. Cartwright. The possibility that we had been manipulated from the very beginning of our expedition was too much to accept, or even to comprehend. It was no secret that many were opposed to peace with the Red Indians, but never had I imagined the extent of that feeling or the effort to prevent it. The possibility that powerful merchants and navy officers were colluding for that purpose came as a great shock to me. Was it an isolated incident or was it pervasive? If it were true, how long had it been going on? Years, or decades? Or even, God help us, from the very beginning of our presence on the island? It was a long and troublesome night, not least because it seemed that we would never know the truth.

  The next morning, shortly after Nehemiah Grimes had been raised to the yardarm by his neck, Lieutenant Tench climbed over the Guernsey’s side and into a waiting cutter, preceded by his sea chest and dunnage. He was rowed to the Tweed, where he would serve out the remainder of the voyage as a supernumerary officer with no responsibilities. This, I gathered, had been the result of a thunderous session in the captain’s cabin, and I answered Mr. Palliser’s summons with some trepidation a short time later.

  As it was, I had no reason for anxiety. Mr. Cartwright was with the captain, and I saw that his dejection was now complete. The failure of his mission, the treachery of our own party, and now the possible deceit of a fellow officer had broken his will entirely. The governor was more angry than morose, and he wanted to know when I would be ready to part company in the Dove. I told him that I would be ready to sail at noon, and to this he nodded and stared at the papers on his desk.

  I stood there for some moments before he took notice of me again, and looking up, he said, “Do not think badly of me, Mister Squibb.” I was astonished to hear such a thing and stammered that I had never entertained the thought, nor saw any reason to do so. The governor shook his head and sighed.

  “All the same, there are those who will say that I should have known better. There is the matter of the reward, for one. And for another, I had heard rumours of Tench’s connections and interests some time ago. I cannot say that these were disreputable, but they were by no means transparent. I had little doubt that he was lining his own pockets, though by what means, I could only speculate. Even today, I have no proof of anything that Grimes has alleged.”

  The governor sat in quiet reflection for a moment before passing a hand over his face and clearing his throat. “I can say no more, gentlemen. Our attempt has come to nothing, and it may have made a grave situation worse. So there you have it.”

  The Guernsey’s midshipmen were shooting the noonday sun when Froggat came down the ladder and onto the stern of the Dove. Greening was standing beside me, polishing the glass of a new binnacle while I surveyed the rigging aloft.

  “Captain Squibb?” I heard Froggat say, not for the first time that day. I had not been elevated in rank, but having command of the sloop, I was technically her captain and therefore, as a courtesy, could be addressed as such. Greening turned his back to hide a grin and I wondered how long they would keep this up.

  “I make it noon, captain,” Froggat said.

  “Do you indeed?” I replied dryly.

  “Everything squared and awaiting your orders, sir.”

  “We shall cast off in ten minutes, Mister Froggat.”

  “Aye, aye, captain.”

  I gave him a withering look before turning away to the towering bulk of the Guernsey. There was a small commotion at the rail and I looked up to see Reverend Stow perilously descending the rope ladder, assisted by the gunner. I had been expecting them to come aboard at my invitation, to drink a parting glass to our friendship. They descende
d onto the deck without injury, joking that they feared being abducted again. I assured them that it was more than my skin was worth even to contemplate such a thing.

  Reverend Stow offered me the warmest congratulations and good wishes and Bolger expressed his disappointment at not being allowed to join us. I did not say it aloud but I regretted the captain’s order equally as much. We drank a toast to one another and then a second glass to the memory of our friend, Hard Frost. After this we exchanged our goodbyes and the chaplain was about to ascend the ladder when he suddenly turned and declared, “May God bless the Dove and all who sail in her!”

  The crew cheered and rushed to help him as he awkwardly mounted the ropes. The gunner went behind him to offer advice and I watched until they were safely aboard. Froggat, ever ready and efficient, ordered our lines cast off.

  “What course, sir?” he asked as the crew rattled up the canvas.

  I squinted into the pale sun that hovered above the mast while the little sloop began to gather way. “Shape a southeasterly course, Mister Froggat.”

  His gaze lingered a moment, as though he expected me to say something more.

  author’s

  NOTE

  On the 24th day of August, 1768, Lieutenant John Cartwright and thirteen others began the first European exploration of the Exploits River. Cartwright had been instructed by Governor Hugh Palliser to establish friendly relations with the Beothuk, or Red Indians, who were locked in a cycle of theft and retribution with trappers and fishermen. Palliser was the first naval governor to express concern over the fate of the island’s indigenous people, and in John Cartwright he found an officer of similar views.

  Under the guidance of planter John Cousens from Indian Point (now Cull’s Point), Cartwright sailed a boat belonging to HMS Liverpool to Peter’s Arm in the Bay of Exploits. Proceeding from there to Start Rattle, he began his historic journey on foot. Six days of arduous travel later, only five of the original party arrived at the source of the river. Cartwright named the body of water Lieutenant’s Lake (now Red Indian Lake) but he found no evidence that the Beothuk had been there since the previous winter. This led him to conclude that the tribe was migratory and spent its summers on the coast.

  It is surprising that Cartwright was unaware of this migratory pattern. He had stopped at Fogo en route to the Bay of Exploits and had talked with Tom June, referred to as “Cousens’ Indian” in his diary. Some ten years earlier, in the month of June, the boy had been abducted by Irish hunters during an attack on his family’s encampment. June later came into the employ of Cousens and worked as a fisherman out of Fogo. He provided Cartwright with a description of the lake but apparently neglected to tell him that his people would not be there in late August. Why he withheld that vital piece of information remains a mystery.

  Tom June was the first Beothuk to live among Europeans. He is said to have been an expert in all branches of the fishery, even serving as master of a fishing vessel. Some time after his meeting with John Cartwright, he was drowned while negotiating the difficult entrance to Fogo Harbour.

  At roughly the same time that Cartwright was on the river, a Beothuk woman was fatally shot by furriers and her male child abducted. Little more is known of the event, though Cartwright described the atrocity in passionate terms, illustrating the depth of his feeling for the natives’ plight:

  How the infant’s cries, as they bore it off, must have pierced her faint heart! How the terrors of its approaching fate must have wrung a mother’s breast … what feeling, what mode of disgust has nature implanted in the human heart, to express its abhorrence of the wretch who can be so hardened to vice as to conceive that he is entitled to a reward for the commission of such bloody deeds!

  One of the very villains concerned in this capture of the child, supposing it a circumstance that would be acceptable to the Governor, actually came to the writer of these remarks at Toulinguet [now Twillingate], to ask a gratuity for the share he had borne in the transaction. Had he been describing the death of a beast of chase, and the taking of its young, he could not have shown greater insensibility than he did at the relation above mentioned.

  The woman was shot in August 1768, and to complete the mockery of human misery, her child was the winter following exposed as a curiosity to the rabble of Poole at two pence apiece.

  Whether the child’s abductors were ever caught or punished is unclear, and unlikely. John August, as the four-year old Beothuk became known, was brought back to Newfoundland and, like Tom June, put to work in the fishery. He was first employed by Mr. Child at Catalina and later by the firm of Jeffrey and Street at Trinity. He died in 1788, was thought to have been twenty-four, and was interred in the Trinity churchyard. He was said to have returned to the river and to his people in the fall of each year.

  Predictably, such murders and abductions intensified the cycle of violence between Beothuk and European. The capture of Tom June ten years earlier was followed by the killing of a shipmaster named Scott and five of his crew in the Bay of Exploits, and by the murder of Captain Hall in Hall’s Bay. The abduction of John August, the death of his mother and other atrocities may have been avenged in 1789, when a furrier named Thomas Rowsell was killed in New Bay. A few years later, another furrier named Cooper was killed in Notre Dame Bay. Both had been known for their hatred of the native people. According to a contemporary account, friends of the two men avenged their deaths with “a war of extermination.” The war lasted another forty years, until Shanawdithit, the last known member of her tribe, died of tuberculosis in 1829.

  John Cartwright’s thirteen companions on the river included Reverend Neville Stow, chaplain of the Guernsey, and George Cartwright, who later became a failed merchant on the coast of Labrador. On leave from the army, George had accompanied his brother for adventure, though he would later become an advocate for peaceful (and commercial) relations with the Red Indians.

  Hugh Palliser was in the final year of his governorship in 1768, and his successor at last issued the proclamation of native protection that he had drafted. It had little effect, though Palliser’s attempts to improve the welfare of both the Beothuk and the indentured fishermen of the island were remarkable for the period. History also records his opposition to permanent settlement in Newfoundland and his energetic dealings with the French over the terms of the Treaty of Paris.

  John Cartwright returned to the island in 1769 and several years later resigned the Royal Navy rather than fight the Americans in their War of Independence. He was distinguished throughout his life for his humanitarian principles and keen sense of justice, and is remembered for having protected the poor Irish of Newfoundland from their often abusive employers (Andrew Pinson being recorded as one of the worst). Cartwright also wrote widely against slavery and in favour of American independence. Elected to the English Parliament in 1818, he was arrested and tried for sedition in 1820. He was convicted of attempting to persuade others to criticize the government and constitution and was fined one hundred pounds. He died in 1824 and a statue was erected to his memory in Cartwright Gardens, London, north of Russell Square.

  Much of the detail for this novel has been drawn from the journal of John Cartwright and from the records of George Cartwright, Hugh Palliser, Joseph Banks and others. In many cases, the words of the characters have been taken directly from those documents.

  Derek Yetman

  St. John’s, Newfoundland

  October 2011

  Derek Yetman has been a writer, editor and journalist for more than thirty years. His interest in Newfoundland military and naval history began when he was a naval reservist and an officer of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment. His attachment to the nautical world continues as secretary of the Crow’s Nest Officers’ Club and as skipper of the sailboat Second Wind. He lives in St. John’s. The Beothuk Expedition is his fourth novel.

 

 
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