Ghosts of James Bay

by John Wilson

  At the end of the first year’s dig the crew had only come up with the usual collection of discarded arrowheads, spear points, and fire-blackened bones. It was interesting, but Dad wanted more. He believed Europeans had been into Hudson Bay before Henry Hudson in 1610. Dad said the English were looking for a Northwest Passage to Asia, or the Strait of Anian, as they called it. This would give them a shortcut to the valuable spices away from any competition with Spain. Since England and Spain were virtually at war, any discovery an explorer made would be kept secret. My father believed there had been a discovery before 1610, but that it had never been written up in the history books.

  Dad based his theory on an old document that dated from the late 1500s. It had turned up in an archive in Bristol and had probably been written by a fisherman, since it talked about the cod stocks off the Newfoundland coast. One piece of it caught Dad’s attention. He had told me it so many times that I knew it by heart despite the odd wording and really original spelling:

  Onn the daye following wee mett with a rotten Shippes Boatt. In itt laye a man much gonne in Starvation and neare too Death. The crewe were so afrighted by his Sicklye appearence that they but crossed themselvese and would not renedere him aid. I tooke myselfe into the Boatt and befor he perrished the man tolde mee that he was the mate from the Barcke Jonathan from Plymouthe whiche had comme to grief in some Ice that was swepte moste Furioslye out of a Greate Sea to the west. He talked off the wonderes of the Landes he hadde seen, Unicorns, Men with theire faces on theire chestes, and seas filled with Mermaids who had the heads and bodyes of women and the tailes of Greate Fish. Then for want of Succour he died. Truly, there are yet manye wonderes too be discovered in this Lande.

  It sounded like a sailor’s story to me, and the poor man was obviously delirious. The information in it was vague and ambiguous. Dad could find no record of a ship called the Jonathan around that time. However, he was convinced the “Greate Sea” was Hudson Bay and the strait where the ship came to grief in the ice, Hudson Strait. Dad got some support from a map that was published in 1595, fifteen years before Hudson sailed. It showed a large bay at the end of a strait that cut into North America. To Dad, this meant Hudson Bay was known before Henry sailed into it, but his ideas were scoffed at. The most his colleagues would admit was that possibly, a few fishermen might have visited the Grand Banks before John Cabot, but saying that someone had gotten into Hudson Bay that far back was laughed at. Then, in the first summer, I fell off the big rock.

  It was lunch break on the final day, and I was having one last try to defeat the overhang. I failed and landed painfully back at the bottom. As I was spitting a mouthful of dirt out, I noticed something in the ground. The rock was quite far from the midden where the main work was going on, so no one was interested in digging there. I didn’t think anything of it at first—all I could see was a tiny curve of something dirty—but I had been trained by years of helping my father to look for anything unusual. I called Dad over and he dug it out. His excitement grew as he uncovered something that was obviously not just another trade trinket.

  “It’s a coin,” he said, lifting the object and turning it in the sunlight. “Very old. Looks like it might even be gold.”

  That sent a thrill through me—gold—but it really didn’t look like much. It was round, but so covered with dirt that I couldn’t make anything out.

  We dug around, down almost thirty centimetres, but found nothing else. However it got there, the coin was on its own.

  One of the few things Dad knew nothing about was coins so, when we returned to town, we went to see a collector. Dad knew better than to try to clean the coin without knowing what he was doing, so it was pretty grubby and still didn’t look like much.

  The collector was a short, dumpy man. He was old and wore half-glasses on his nose. He talked about as much as Dad, so there were a lot of silences while he worked on the coin.

  I was looking at the display cases filled with odd things like groats and farthings, Dad was lost in thought, and the collector was talking to the coin under his breath. He never managed to complete a sentence: “It must be... Where is that...? Now if only I can...” At last he let out a louder than usual exclamation: “Aha!”

  Dad and I turned. The collector lifted his head and seemed startled that we were still there. He looked at us silently for a while. “Yes,” he said eventually, “this is very nice.” Then he lapsed back into silence.

  “Good,” Dad said encouragingly. “But what is it and how old is it?”

  “Yes, yes,” the collector continued, “it’s an angel, and a very nice one, too.”

  He seemed about to stop talking again, so I asked, “What’s an angel?”

  “Oh!” He seemed surprised that I didn’t know. “An angel is an old English gold coin originally worth six shillings and eight pence—one-third of a pound—but later revalued up to ten shillings. They were introduced by Edward IV in 1465 and were made until old Charles I got his head chopped off after he lost the English Civil War in the 1640s.” The man said “old Charles I” as if he had been a personal friend.

  “But why angel?” I asked before he got too far into the list of English kings.

  “Well,” he continued, holding up the coin, “look here.” We both moved closer and peered where he pointed with a chubby finger. “See the picture on the obverse?” We looked closer.

  “St. George and the dragon?” I ventured. The collector made a noise like the one my math teacher made when someone gave a really dumb answer.

  “No, no. See the halo around the head? It’s the archangel Michael spearing a dragon. Hence the name.” He turned the coin over. The other side had a picture of a ship carrying a coat of arms covered in fleur-de-lys and lions. There was writing around the rim on both sides, but I couldn’t make out what it said. “This is unique. I’ve never seen one of these before.” The collector quivered with excitement. “It must be worth a fortune.”

  “How old?” I could hear the tension in Dad’s voice. He didn’t care how much the coin was worth. It would end up in a museum, anyway. He wanted to know when it dated from. If it was much before 1610, then it would be strong evidence for contact with Europe before that time.

  The collector missed the tense note in Dad’s voice. In fact, I think he missed Dad’s voice altogether. He kept on talking as if we weren’t there. “Very fine condition. Only the graining and the lettering are worn. This is beautiful.”

  “How old?” Dad leaned over the counter, talking slowly and loudly. I thought he was about to grab the old man by the lapels and shake him into answering.

  The collector looked up. “Old? Oh, yes, yes. How old? Let’s see now. The lettering is worn. Definitely Elizabeth— see the ER?” He pointed at a couple of letters on either side of the ship’s mast. “Trouble is, they didn’t put dates on many coins in those days. Makes it more difficult to narrow down.” He removed his glasses, reached over, and picked up a magnifying eyepiece that he slowly screwed into his right eye socket. Next he pulled over a desk lamp, adjusted its angle, and brought the coin up to his eye. Automatically Dad and I leaned forward until all three heads were clustered around the coin. I thought Dad was going to explode with the tension.

  “What we need is the mint mark,” the collector said to himself. “That would tell us what we need to know. Now, where is it? Aha!” He jerked up, and Dad and I jumped back in surprise. “Here it is! Just as I thought. A sword. Remarkable. I doubt if very many of these were ever minted. It really is a very fine specimen. If you ever consider selling it, I—”

  “What date?” Dad almost shouted.

  “Oh!” The collector looked flustered. “The sword mint mark wasn’t used for very long. Definitely pre-Armada.”

  Dad let out a long sigh. I wished I’d paid more attention to history lessons.

  “When was that?” I asked.

  I was rewarded with another of those looks that suggested not knowing when the Armada took place merely confirmed the old man�
�s opinion that I and my entire generation were a total waste of time.

  “Don’t you know your history, young man?” he asked witheringly. “The Spanish Armada of 1588. Philip II of Spain’s attempt to wrest the throne from Elizabeth and make the country Catholic again. Francis Drake playing bowls on the cliffs. Don’t they teach you anything these days?”

  I didn’t feel the question required an answer. In any case, the collector rose from his seat and plucked a book off the shelf behind him.

  “For an exact date we’ll need to look at this. Ah, yes, the sword mint mark was only used for a short period of time. A few months, in fact, in the spring of 1582.”

  “Twenty-eight years before Henry Hudson sailed into the bay.” Dad looked almost triumphant. Then a frown crossed his face. “How long would something like this have remained in circulation?”

  The collector shook his head. “Hard to say. Not long. That’s certain in this case. Very few must have been made. From a numismatic point of view, this was a very interesting time. Henry VIII—Elizabeth’s father,” he added, looking pointedly at me, “had debased the silver standard and Elizabeth restored it. She also introduced the three-halfpence and three-farthing coins. All in all, I would have to say—”

  “But how long?” Dad cut in. “Could they have been in circulation for thirty years?”

  “Very unlikely,” The old man seemed completely unfazed at being thrown off his explanation. “As I said, there were very few of them. I suspect you’d have been hard-pressed to find one even ten years after they were minted.”

  Dad focused hard on the collector. “So, it would be unlikely that a sailor in 1610 would have a 1582 angel in his purse?”

  “Impossible, I’d say. Even if it had remained in circulation for a long time, the high-value Elizabethan coinage would have been withdrawn when James I assumed the throne in 1603. Monarchs in those days didn’t like to have the coins of their predecessors rattling around. Much preferred their own pictures.” The collector made a funny dry noise in his throat, which I assumed was a chuckle.

  Dad’s shoulders relaxed and a faint smile crossed his lips. “Thank you. Thank you very much.”

  On the way home Dad was talkative. I think he was trying out his theory on me. “This is a pre-Hudson coin. It’s unlikely in the extreme that it could have arrived in James Bay through trade. The only English presence was on the Newfoundland coast, and the trade routes didn’t run from there to the bay. They ran from the St. Lawrence River north to James Bay. The French were at Quebec by then, but I doubt they would have English coins with them. And even if they did, they wouldn’t trade gold with the First Nations. So this coin must have been brought to the area by an English explorer before Henry Hudson.”

  “I guess so.” It seemed reasonable, but then I wasn’t an expert. Unfortunately the experts weren’t so easily convinced. Dad presented his find to his colleagues at the university as soon as he could. They shouted him down. The idea was too radical, and they were upset that he had gone to a commercial collector instead of the much slower academic route. Dad recognized his mistake.

  “I should have taken more time, amassed more evidence to back up my claims. I rushed it too much. Now they’re even more fixed in their thinking and I’ll never budge them regardless of how much evidence I find.”

  It always amazed me how difficult it was to convince scientists of something new. I thought they were supposed to have open minds. Anyway, Dad got very depressed. It was just about this time that Mom announced she and I were moving out, so that didn’t help. I think Dad had a pretty miserable winter, although he always made an effort to be happy when I was around. The situation wasn’t helped when he learned that the archaeology department was cutting back on his fieldwork budget for the summer. Studying pre-Hudson trade routes suddenly wasn’t a hot topic.

  Dad wasn’t one to give up, though, and that was why I was his only assistant back at the James Bay site the second summer. He had financed a lot of the trip himself and had been given some help from the local Cree, who were interested in his work as long as he didn’t remove anything sacred or disturb any burials. This time we ignored the midden and spread our search more widely over the camp. Unfortunately we still didn’t find much—some trade goods, but nothing as datable as the angel. The only European artifact was a bone button, but that could have come from anywhere at any time.

  “It’s just a question of collecting as much evidence as possible to build as strong a case as I can,” Dad said the night before my canoe trip. “After all, it took Charles Darwin decades to collect enough information to convince people of evolution and, even today, there are those who don’t believe him. All I can do is keep searching.”

  Dad had seemed depressed. I think he had been hoping for something as spectacular as the angel, but that sort of thing only happened once in a lifetime.

  His mood had rubbed off on me and contributed to my sleepless night. In any case, I had felt I needed the morning canoe jaunt to blow away all my cobwebs.

  I was thinking about all of this as I sat drifting that morning and watching the fog roll toward me. Little did I know that the answer Dad was searching for was in the fog.

  The warrior sat by his small fire deep in thought. He was alone and less than a half day’s travel from the strangers. His people were camped another day’s travel to the south, but he would not go there yet. He had enough with him to trade with the strangers. In his hands he held the frozen water. It reflected the flickering flames of his campfire over which sizzled a small bird on a stick.

  Obviously these newcomers needed his help. Their land must indeed be a wondrous place and very different from his land. They knew so little of here, not having small canoes to travel the rivers and lakes in summer or shoes for walking on top of the snow in winter. Many of the visitors looked sick, and even had the black lips that came sometimes after a particularly long and hard winter. He had seen for himself they could not hunt well, and most had the sunken eyes that showed they were near starvation. All these factors would give his people advantages in trade. He thrilled at what magic he might get in exchange for a complete canoe or an entire caribou carcass. But he must be patient. He must make a good trade for the things they had given him and return to show his people. Then he could persuade them to trade for more.

  Slowly he put down the frozen water and picked up the knife. He was certain his people could get more of these and probably some of the hatchets he had seen. Maybe, and the warrior in him thrilled at the thought, they could even get one of the long sticks that made noise and brought down game from far away. Then they need never fear attack from their enemies again. It was a good thought: safety for his people and fear spread far among his enemies. Quietly the warrior began to sing a battle song.

  It told of a fight long ago when his people had defeated a raiding party of the hated Iri-akhoiw. It had happened far to the south at the limits of his people’s travels. The Iri-akhoiw rarely moved this far north, being partly farmers, but occasionally they followed the great trading circle north in search of prisoners and plunder.

  The lot of a prisoner of the Iri-akhoiw was not an enviable one. With luck, and if you stood up to the beatings to test your character, you might be selected to be adopted by a family who had recently lost a member. If so, and if you worked hard, you would be accepted. If not, you would be burned with hot coals and sticks, slowly and painfully, from the feet up. Then you would be scalped and hot sand rubbed in the wound. If you fainted, you would be revived with water and food and the process continued because the point was that you should endure as much pain as humanly possible before you died. When at last you did die, your flesh would be ritually eaten so that all the Iri-akhoiw could partake of your bravery.

  On the occasion that the warrior sang about, this had not happened. The Kenistenoag had seen the enemy first, watched carefully, and caught them in the open before they could build one of their stockades. The slaughter had been great and the Iri-akhoiw had not r
eturned for many seasons.

  Of course, there were many occasions when the outcome had been the other way, and the invaders had fallen upon an unsuspecting village, but it was better to sing of the victories. When the song was done, the warrior crawled into his rough lean-to and huddled beneath his caribou-skin blanket. Tomorrow he would load up his sled, return to the strangers, and make a good trade. Things were turning out well. Content, the warrior slept.

  THREE

  I felt the chill in the air before the fog actually enveloped me. I was wearing a sweatshirt, but the morning was warm so I just had shorts on. The first thing I noticed was a rash of goose bumps on my legs. I shivered and looked up. The fog was almost on me. It hung like a rolling, heavy curtain over the water a few feet away. Oddly it appeared to be moving toward me unusually fast. In seconds I wouldn’t be able to see a thing. Quickly I glanced at the shore to try to get my bearings. I caught a glimpse of a dark line of trees before the shore, the water, the sky, everything, disappeared. It was even hard to make out the bow of the canoe through the smothering fog.

  Digging the paddle in hard, I turned the nose of the canoe toward where I had last seen the shore. If I concentrated on keeping even paddle strokes on each side, and was lucky, I should hit the shore and be able to work my way back to camp. If I didn’t, I would end up going around in large circles until the fog cleared—not a prospect I relished. Already I was feeling chilled in the damp air.

  It was a common misconception that people only got hypothermia in really cold weather. In fact, more people got it in the summer than the winter. It took them by surprise. They went out on the water in T-shirts and shorts and were surprised by how much colder it was on the water than on the shore. Then the weather changed: it clouded over, the wind rose, it began to rain. Next their outboard motors broke down, and they were in real trouble. They were a long way from shore. They hadn’t brought any food because they weren’t going out for long. Perhaps it was evening and they’d had a couple of beers. They started rowing and built up a sweat. After a few hours of that, they began shivering uncontrollably and got confused, and their hands wouldn’t obey them properly. Their core body temperatures dropped below the level of control. They needed external sources of heat in order to warm up. But they didn’t have any. They were in the early stages of hypothermia—and it was only August.