The Farfarers

by Farley Mowat

  Their heartland was the Exploits watershed. Exploits River rises in the headwaters of a remote body of water grandiloquently named King George IV Lake, in the southwestern corner of the island. Lloyds River carries the flow northeastward into Red Indian Lake. The waters leave this lake as the Exploits River and eventually debouch into the sea in Notre Dame Bay, almost two hundred miles from their source.

  Michael John, who was chief of the Conne River M’ikmaw band in Bay d’Espoir in my time, told me his people believed King George Lake had been the last refuge of the Beothuks. Unable to find anyone who could tell me about the place first-hand, I decided to visit it myself. No roads led to it, but a pilot friend volunteered to take me in by float plane.

  We flew first to Red Indian Lake, landing at several coves where large winter settlements of Beothuks had once stood. Not a trace of them now remained. Reaching the southwest end of the forty-mile-long lake, we flew up Lloyds River over white-water rapids bordered by tall spruce forests. To either side grey hills rose higher and higher until we found ourselves shoulder to shoulder with the Annieopsquotch Mountains.

  Abruptly the valley released us into a vast amphitheatre cradling King George Lake, whose several long arms were flung wide across a plateau guarded by encircling mountains of barren and forbidding countenance. However, the land around the lake rippled with luxuriant forests veined by countless streams and ponds fringed with grassy swales. Nowhere was there any sign of man.

  The plane banked gently in a circuit of the plateau, then swept in low over a broad delta at the lake’s southwestern edge. The waters below us seemed to explode as thousands and tens of thousands of ducks and geese rose in protest against our intrusion. We swung hastily away, but not before I had glimpsed a herd of perhaps fifty caribou stampeding across one of many grassy islands.

  We flew another circuit, staying high enough to avoid avian collisions, and saw that the southern portion of the lake, its islands, and the shores of several streams running into it, were embroidered by hundreds of acres of pasture so vividly green as to seem cultivated.

  I was looking for words to express my astonishment when my pilot friend forestalled me.

  “What a hell of a hideout! Nobody’d ever believe this place! It’s like some kind of Indian Shangri-La!”

  By now it was late afternoon and because of the risks involved in making a night landing at the seaplane base, we reluctantly turned back. I had seen enough to understand why the last Beothuks might well have sought refuge in this extraordinary place.

  Thirty years later, while pondering the problem of where west-coast Alban crofters might likewise have found sanctuary from a plague of European marauders, I recalled my all-too-brief glimpse of King George Lake. Could it have served the Albans as it had reputedly served the Beothuks? It seemed unlikely, for how could west-coast pastoralists have moved themselves, their chattels, and animals across the intervening barrier of the Long Range Mountains? And how, if they had somehow managed what appeared to me to be a most difficult trek, could pastoralists have survived in the heart of what was effectively an island of virgin forest embedded in a sub-alpine wilderness?

  I posed these questions to Len Muise.

  “Nothing to that. They could have easy walked in and out of there whenever they wanted, along the Country Path.”

  “You mean there’s a road in from St. George’s Bay?” I asked, incredulously.

  “Not a road, old son. The Country Path. You start at Flat Bay Brook near Cairn Mountain, climb a ridge alongside Three Brooks till you get up on top of the country. After that it’s just a saunter across the high barrens till you come down again to King George Lake—Chris’s Pond, our old people used to call it. It’s no more’n thirty-forty miles; two days’ walk, and easy going. Melvin White, he’s a Jacko like me, been into King George a dozen times.”

  We left it at that until one November evening Len telephoned me.

  “Old man, I got news for you. Melvin White says you can easy take cattle, ponies, sheep to Chris’s Pond along the Country Path, so long as you takes your time. Mel says there’s a big stone cairn, taller’n a man, on top of a high hill about halfway in. You head for that, he says. The hill’s called Dolly’s Lookout, after an old M’ikmaw lady used to trap back there.

  “And I almost forgot. Looking east from Cairn Mountain you can see the cairn on Dolly’s Lookout. And from Dolly’s you look straight ahead to Blue Hill on Lloyds River, right near where it runs into King George Lake. Some says there’s the ruins of a cairn on top of Blue Hill too.”

  Len explained that he and Melvin White intended to drive their Skidoos in to Dolly’s Lookout as soon as there was enough snow. “Bring you a picture of it. So’s you won’t think we’re story telling.”

  Early in 1997 he sent me a letter, together with a number of photographs.

  “I am happy to inform you, myself and Melvin travelled on Skidoos to the cairn. The first try the weather turned so stormy when we got on top of the country we had to retreat.

  “Sunday we tried again. It was bitter cold, -25°C plus the wind chill. The cairn stands at 1,800 feet and is a very unusual sight, approximately seven feet high and more than three wide. It was too cold to do any real measuring. If we took off our gloves for long our hands would start to freeze. This cairn is at the half-way mark along the country path that leads to and from all parts of the Newfoundland interior.”

  This tower beacon marks the midway point on the Country Path connecting St. George’s Bay and King George IV Lake, in western Newfoundland.

  Melvin White and his wife rode back to Dolly’s Lookout during the winter of 1997–98, on a day when there was no risk of being turned into ice statues. This time they also photographed a pile of large, sharpangled stones twenty feet south of the standing pillar.

  “There was plenty stones enough,” Melvin reported, “to make another cairn. I’m sure there was two there once. One must have been tore down. Couldn’t have fallen down by itself. They were too well built. The crest of Dolly’s Lookout is smooth as a bald man’s head. No loose stones on it. All swept off by the old glaciers. The stones for the cairns had to come from the bottom of a gully half a mile away and three or four hundred feet below the crest.”

  Len Muise summed it up.

  “Somebody went to a devil of a lot of work putting the towers on Cairn Mountain and Dolly’s Lookout. In pairs, too, like a kind of code pointing the way to King George Lake. I don’t believe old Captain Cook ever did that. M’ikmaw nor Beothuks didn’t do things like that either. I’ve asked woodsmen and countrymen from all around and they tell me there’s nothing like those cairns anywhere else in the interior of Newfoundland.”

  The Country Path answered the question of how coastal crofters could have travelled between the sea and King George Lake. But could they and their livestock have survived deep in the interior?

  During the 1980s King George Lake was discovered by the outer world when a highway was built across the mountains to link a number of isolated outports on the south coast with the provincial highway system. The Annieopsquotch country, which had previously been almost inaccessible, now came under assault from four-wheel-drive trucks, all-terrain vehicles, and snowmobiles. Almost overnight King George Lake became a mecca for hunters, fishermen, even tourists. Scientists came too. And they were so impressed that they recommended the lake be protected. In 1996 the provincial government proclaimed the southern arm and adjacent shores an ecological reserve.1

  This was belated recognition of what had long been known as a unique place to Beothuks, M’ikmaws, Jakatars, and, as I believe, the people of Alba-in-the-West.

  Natural meadows, or “grasses,” on the deltas and lower reaches of the two streams (Second Exploits and Lloyds rivers) flowing into the southern arm amount to more than 1,600 acres. Melvin White, who has extensively explored the area, estimates that the King George Lake grasses could currently meet the forage and hay requirements of forty to fifty smallholders, such as his own people h
ad been in the past and, to some extent, still are. Furthermore, there is plenty of good alluvial soil upon which to grow cereals, vegetables, and possibly even fruits.

  “There’s no a better place to farm in Newfoundland,” Melvin told me. Recent studies would seem to bear him out. Not only does the King George Lake enclave possess the richest ecosystem in Newfoundland, it is blessed with the longest growing season. It has always supported a plethora of wildlife ranging from arctic hares to caribou, from ptarmigan to Canada geese, from trout to land-locked salmon, from pine martens to black bears. There is no doubt but that it could have supported a sizeable crofter settlement.

  But was it a sanctuary for the people of Alba-in-the-West?

  “If the old people had to go somewhere away from the coast to live that’s where a good many would likely have gone,” Len says. “Somebody surely did go in there a long time ago, and took the trouble to build up those big old cairns along the Country Path so others would know how to find them.

  “One of these times something will turn up around Chris’s Pond. Maybe a cow’s skull. Maybe a hole in the ground where there was a house. Melvin and me will be going in next summer for a look around. It’s Jakatar country, you know; and whoever was in there was our people too.”

  POSTSCRIPT

  MOST OF THE NATIVE COMMUNITIES ALONG THE Atlantic seaboard of the New World withdrew from the coasts during the sixteenth century in order to avoid frequently fatal assaults by European fishermen, oilers, slavers, and other rapacious seekers after wealth.

  Because pastoralists were particularly vulnerable, they would have been amongst the first to retreat. I believe something of a pastoral tradition was maintained at The Grass and around King George IV Lake, but Albans most likely turned increasingly to the Beothuk way of life in order to maintain themselves.

  During the seventeenth century the unbridled lawlessness of European marauders declined somewhat as France and England established de facto control over more and more of the New World’s coastal regions. Indigenes who had taken refuge “in the country” began to emerge, if cautiously, to trade, to fish and hunt on salt water, and perhaps to re-establish themselves as crofters.

  Return to the coasts was not everywhere possible. On Newfoundland’s eastern and northeastern seaboards, English “planters” and seasonal fishermen alike continued to treat Beothuks with a hostility amounting to genocide—a persecution that would eventually lead to the extermination of the Red Indians in the eastern and central parts of the Island.

  French fishermen frequenting Newfoundland’s southwestern and western shores dealt with the natives more humanely, possibly because the French lacked the means with which to overwhelm les sauvages.

  So it happened that the ancient peoples in the southwest corner of the Island were able to endure and even to prosper. During the early decades of the eighteenth century, they were joined by parties of M’ikmaw from Cape Breton Island. These came initially as itinerant trappers, but some stayed to become an integral part of the southwest coast community.

  The latter part of the eighteenth century brought a few score Acadians, farmers of French descent fleeing English seizure of their Nova Scotian lands. Having long since established blood relationships with mainland M’ikmaw, the Acadians found no difficulty in melding with the existing cultures of southwestern Newfoundland. They brought with them a new impetus towards pastoralism, so that human life in the region became even more of a mix of small-scale crofting and native country pursuits.

  While nineteenth-century M’ikmaw trappers established a transient presence in much of southern and northern Newfoundland, the native Beothuks ceased to exist, or so the Europeans, who by then dominated the entire Island, maintained. But they were wrong. Men and women still lived around St. George’s Bay and in the Codroy Valley who thought of themselves as, and called themselves, Beothuks. Not until the turn of the next century did they nominally disappear.

  Which brings us to our own times—and to the apparent end of our story.

  However, according to Leonard Muise, the end is not yet.

  “All those early people—Dorsets, Red Indians, the ones you call Albans, Farley—they didn’t just dry up and blow away, you know.

  “Don’t you believe it! Truth is they’re all of them still round about. In St. George’s, Port au Port, and Codroy too. One of these times, scientists will likely show up here looking to test our DNA to see whereabouts we come from. I don’t doubt they’ll be some surprised by what they find.

  “But us Jakos, now . . . we won’t be the smallest little bit surprised because, you see, we know just who we are.”

  NOTES

  FOREWORD

  WHY AND WHEREFORE

  1 Farley Mowat, Westviking: The Ancient Norse in Greenland and North America (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1965; and Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1965).

  CHAPTER ONE

  BEGINNINGS

  1 Farley Mowat, Canada North, published in the Canadian Illustrated Library series (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1967).

  2 Payne River, Payne Lake, and many other topographical features in Ungava have arbitrarily been given new, French names by the provincial government of Quebec. I have generally retained the time-honoured originals.

  CHAPTER TWO

  FARFARER

  1 Her remains must long since have perished, but vessels belonging to Farfarer’s lineage remained in service in Ireland at least as late as the 1970s, although tarred canvas and even sheet plastic had by then replaced animal skin as the sheathing material.

  “Curraghs,” as the Irish Celts called them, evolved from the boats used by the indigenes of northern Britain long before the Celtic invasions and were part of the circumpolar tradition of skin-clad vessels. Irish records tell us that, by the sixth century, curraghs were being sheathed with ox hides. Presumably this was because walrus hides were no longer available.

  In 1976 a thirty-six-foot curragh replica sheathed in leather carried a crew of five and nearly a ton of supplies from Ireland to Newfoundland via Iceland. Siberian and Alaskan umiaks, sheathed in walrus or bearded seal hides, are known to have reached lengths of sixty feet and more, and to have been capable of carrying as many as forty passengers and their gear in voyages across the Bering Sea. We can assume that the skin-clad craft of aboriginal north Europeans would have been at least as effective.

  Ireland’s National Museum has a tiny model of a curragh equipped with rowing and steering oars, a mast, and a spar, all hammered out of gold. Found in County Derry, the model is thought to date from the first century A.D. It represents a beamy, undecked, bluff-bowed, double-ended, soft-chinned vessel primarily intended to be wind-driven, but fitted with auxiliary power in the form of eighteen oarsman, whose presence still left half of the vessel’s capacity free for carrying passengers or cargo. Such a vessel would necessarily have had to been close to fifty feet in length.

  No model of a Northern Islands (Alban) boat has come to light, but thirty-foot sealskin fishing boats persisted in northern Shetland until the twentieth century. In 1810 the isolated island of St. Kilda was maintaining contact with the mainland by means of a churaich, a lightly framed vessel sheathed with the hides of grey seals, capable of carrying twenty passengers, several cattle, or a considerable quantity of freight.

  The foundations of North American boat-roofed houses provide us with a series of deck outlines of their covering vessels. These fall into two groups. Twenty-five that are sufficiently well preserved to permit an accurate measuring give an overall vessel length of from forty to fifty-five feet. Six others fall into the seventy- to eighty-foot range. The former seem to represent the general run of sea-going vessels. The latter were perhaps especially constructed as transatlantic traders.

  Ships of both classes have a length-to-beam ratio from 3.1:1 to 3.5:1. All were beamy vessels, well rounded fore and aft, presumably of relatively shoal draft, with only slight to moderate sheer. Although tenth- or eleventh-century Norse knorrin were shea
thed in wood instead of skins, their lines and scantlings were probably derived from Alban models and may not have differed materially in outward appearance from those Northern Islands vessels.

  CHAPTER THREE

  TUSKERS

  1 Siberians use the word valuta to designate goods of small bulk but great value, including precious metals, gems, furs, and ivory. This is the sense in which I use the term in this book.

  2 I have dealt in detail with the catastrophic destruction of the walrus in Sea of Slaughter (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1984), Part V, Finfeet.

  3 See Chapter 4, endnote 2.

  4 Most early maritime records, including Egyptian, Greek, and Carthaginian, traditionally noted marine distances in multiples of the “sailing day”—the distance a vessel could be expected to cover in one day under optimum conditions. Sailing days as marine units of distance remained in use in northern Europe until after the fourteenth century A.D. Although the unit varied in value according to the kind of vessels involved, it was roughly equivalent to one hundred of our statute miles.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  PYTHEAS

  1 One classical source refers to a great promontory northwest of Gaul called Calbion. This is almost certainly a corruption of Cape Albion (C. Albion) and most probably refers to Land’s End, the southwestern extremity of Cornwall.

  2 The entrance of orca into Greek, and later Latin, may have been one of Pytheas’s achievements. I suggest that the natives of Britain’s Northern Islands called the walrus orc, which was why Pytheas called the archipelago the Orc Islands—later, Orcadies. Eventually orca acquired the more generalized meaning of “sea monster,” which is how it was used in the Middle Ages. In the nineteenth century, it was again particularized by its inclusion in the Linnaean system of animal classification as Orcaella, a generic name for grampuses and killer whales. So, with regard to word usage, the walrus has now become the killer whale.