The other pirate, the one holding Nancy, made a noise, a sort of grunt, but he did not seem to take the comment about killing her as an order. If she could bite his hand, struggle to get out into the water, would he kill her? It might be worth it. If she could not survive to escape, to get back to Ned and to Kathryn, then it would be better to be dead than to be captive aboard a pirate ship. Regardless of Sheila Pike’s tales, Nancy had no romantic ideas about pirates. She knew what kind of men they were and why they might want to keep a girl alive to take on board. She was no Irish chieftain’s daughter; they would not hold her for ransom.
The boat was full now, with her, and the sacks of flour, and the goats. One of the men began to row it back out to the ship. Petal, her little kid-goat, bleated piteously. The two men left on shore were rolling barrels down to the beach, collecting the chickens in crates. When Ned and Frank and Master Guy came back, they would find everything gone, and Daisy and Tom dead. And no one would be left to tell what had happened to Nancy.
They were nearly back to the ship. They would load her on board like cargo. The man holding her had loosed his grip on her mouth and taken the knife from her throat, though he still held her about the waist to keep her from jumping overboard. She was crying aloud, wailing open-mouthed like baby Jonathan did when he wanted the teat, but there was no one to hear.
He went up the ladder first and hauled her up behind him, the other man shoving her backside. She tried to kick his hands away, but the man above her was hauling her under the armpits, and before she could get in a good kick, she was dumped on the deck. For a moment she only lay there as the two pirates went on with the task of unloading the goods they had stolen. She heard Petal bleat again and again. Another man knelt nearby with a drawn knife.
“Well now, what prize have we here?”
“Is she worth a ransom?”
“Nah, just a serving wench by the looks of her.”
“Ah, well, she can serve me!”
Then a voice cutting sharp with command across the others, “Leave her be till the captain sees her. But watch she don’t try to jump.”
She would try to jump, if the pirate would move that knife and take his knee off her shoulder. She could not swim, of course; she would sink like a stone. Knowing that, why not make the attempt and die quickly, a pirate’s dagger to her neck? A quicker death than Tom would have, with that wound in his belly. Did she lie still on the deck in hopes that a miracle might still save her, that Ned would somehow appear on the beach and fight off an entire ship of pirates with the help of Frank and Master Guy? He would if he could, she thought, one last pleasant thought to hold to.
But it was a fancy only. A fancy, like the idea of surviving, finding her way to safety. Better the ocean’s dark depths, or failing that, the knife.
More shouts. A whoop and a cheer from the men on deck. “’Tis been that dry this past week, she’s going up like tinder!” cried one.
Fire.
She struggled, then, to rise, but the pirate pressed his knee into her shoulder. “I only want to see. Let me see!” she said. The first words she had spoken, here on this ship, to these men. The first words of her new life, which might be a very short and ugly one.
“Aye, lass, you can see. See what happens to those who build where they’ve no right to build, who think the king’s writ matters in this land.” He moved his knee, hauled her up to the rail where she crouched, his arm pinning her from behind, mindful of his orders not to let her throw herself into the sea.
The boat was rowing back towards the ship again. The pirates, a crate of chickens, some barrels and sacks of food. The boat was laden to the gunwales. On shore, tongues of flame licked at the grass. Smoke spiralled up above the treetops. The fire would spread, beyond the cleared land to the sawpit, then leap to the trees. Perhaps Ned, Frank, and Master Guy would never make it back to the site; perhaps they, too would be burned up. If they did come back to Master Guy’s ruined and ravaged piece of land, Tom’s and Daisy’s bodies would be charred in the ruins. Doubtless they would think Nancy, too, had died in the fire.
She thought she heard voices on shore. Perhaps they were coming back now, this very moment, in time to put out the fire, to see Daisy and Tom, give them at least a decent burial. But not in time to stop the ship that was even now pulling up its boat and anchor. Not in time to rescue Nancy. She looked at the swirling spirals of smoke, at the flames rushing across the grass, and saw no human figure moving there. It was too far away to tell; too far away to hear anything.
Nancy licked her dry lips, tasted her own blood there. She had prayed for rescue when she was tried as a witch, and rescue had come. But what would prayer avail her now? There was no one to come to her rescue.
She would have to save herself.
Afterword
THIS NOVEL, LIKE ANY WORK OF HISTORICAL FICTION, IS A BLEND of what we know from the historical record and what I’ve imagined to fill in the gaps. Its inspiration began with a single, striking fact that captured my attention back in 2010 during the Cupids 400 celebrations: midway through the process of writing this book, I discovered that even that fact may not be totally accurate. Such is the process of making fiction out of history.
In 1612, John Guy returned to his colony at Cupids, Newfoundland, where he had settled thirty-nine men two years earlier. One frequently quoted source says that on this return voyage from England, Guy brought with him ten heifers, two bulls, sixty goats, and sixteen women.
That’s it. No names: nothing to indicate who these sixteen women were. Sixteen women without names or history, planted on what was, to English people, the edge of the known world. As a novelist whose work has centred largely on unearthing the untold stories of women, I was of course fascinated.
We know exactly one fact about one of these women: she was the wife of a settler called Nicholas Guy, and she must have gotten pregnant very shortly after her arrival in Newfoundland in the summer of 1612, for on March 27, 1613, settler Henry Crout records that the wife of Nicholas Guy gave birth to a son. We do not know her name (there are records in a Bristol church of a Nicholas and Anne Guy being married, but their age makes it by no means certain this is the same couple who went to the New World; we also do not know what relation, if any, Nicholas Guy was to Governor John Guy).
About the rest of these women, nothing is known—whether they were the wives of men already settled there or, as happened in some other colonies including Jamestown, Virginia a few years later, young women brought out with the intent to marry them off to single men in the colony.
In fact, we don’t even know that there were sixteen of them. That account, in which their number is tabulated along with the livestock, comes from an eighteenth century source in the Bristol Records Office. In his A History of Newfoundland, published in 1895, Prowse says that six women spent the winter of 1612-1613 in Cupids but, despite his claim that he got this information from Purchas His Pilgrims (1625), Purchas actually makes no mention of this. The figure may just have been speculation on Prowse’s part.
By the time I discovered this discrepancy I was quite invested in those original sixteen women, many of whom already had names, faces and personalities in my mind, so for the purpose of my story I have stuck with the number sixteen. There may have been fewer: what is striking to me is that none of the men who recorded the events at Cupids while they were there felt it necessary to keep an accurate record of the number of women in the colony, much less to record their names or tell us anything about their backgrounds.
There is ample room for imagination in this story, because so much is unknown and there is space to weave a lot of fiction in between the accounts left behind by John Guy, Henry Crout, and others. While for the most part I have tried to keep my inventions firmly rooted in the soil of Cupids and the things we know happened there, I have made minor changes to details such as the dates of death for the men we know died during the first winter, and the dates on which various people came to or left Cupids, when the plot of
my story required those changes.
There are, however, a few areas I have taken more significant poetic license to imagine events that, while they conceivably could have happened, almost certainly did not.
The first of these is Nancy’s trial for witchcraft. There is no record of any woman ever being tried as a witch in colonial Newfoundland (although, to be fair, there’s no record from Cupids of a woman doing anything other than arriving and, in one case, giving birth). The early 1600s, the reign of known witch hater King James I of England, was a period rife with these accusations. In the process of researching this book I learned about the Pendle witches of Lancashire, who were hanged in the summer of 1612, just as my sixteen women were arriving at Cupids. While no evidence of any witch-hunting in Newfoundland remains, it seemed well within the scope of possibility to imagine frayed tempers and personal resentments within the small settlement turning in such a direction.
My second major invention is the pirate attack on Nicholas Guy’s property in the summer of 1613, the event which closes the novel and lays the foundation for its sequel. We know that Nicholas Guy eventually left Cupids and settled elsewhere along the coast of Conception Bay, though this likely did not happen as early as 1613. Many of the original settlers followed this same path: records show that by 1617 the Bristol men had left Cupids and established a second colony at Harbour Grace. By 1625 there were also English colonies at Carbonear, Ferryland, St. John’s, and Renews.
Pirates were a clear and present danger for these early English settlers. Peter Easton has gained an outsized reputation as a folk hero (or folk villain) in Newfoundland, although he was probably only active in the waters around Newfoundland during the summer of 1612 (but it was certainly a busy summer, and included threats to John Guy’s planned second colony at Renews). A pirate attack in the summer of 1613 in which an English plantation house is burned, two servants attacked, and a third taken captive, is entirely the product of my imagination—though, I hope, closely enough tied to the real history of pirates in Newfoundland waters that it does not strain credibility too much.
Speaking of outsized folk heroes who strain credibility, a word about the couple my characters encounter at the end of the novel—Sheila and Gilbert Pike. Many Newfoundlanders know the poetic legend of Irish princess Sheila NaGeira, her capture by pirates and eventual settlement on these shores. With my apologies to the town of Carbonear, I have to accept that scholars have concluded there is not a shred of contemporary evidence that Princess Sheila ever existed. In fact, references to her in oral tradition do not even seem to go back very far—although, of course, some weight must be given to those who claim that a tradition has been handed down in their family for 400 years, even though nobody thought to write it down before the early 20th century.
So why include this probably fictional character (and her equally mythical pirate husband) in my novel? Simply because Sheila NaGeira has taken on such a mythic life in Newfoundland that it was hard to exclude her. Like the witch trial and the pirate attack, it could have happened, even if we know almost for certain that it didn’t. Sheila insists on a larger role in the sequel to this novel, so, historical or not, I will be exploring her character further.
For any writer who is the descendent of English settlers to write about early English colonization in this land is to grapple with the fact that my ancestors came to a land they had no right to, and blatantly stole it from the people who lived there. Attitudes among English colonizers in this period towards the native population of North America varied wildly, from those who saw the natives as sovereign people with whom treaties and alliances must be made, to those who saw them as little better than animals. Some wanted to convert the natives to Christianity, some to trade with them, some to enslave them. Very few Europeans seem to have seriously considered the possibility of just going away and leaving the native people to their own land, but this, of course, was true all over the world, not just in Newfoundland.
I have tried, in this novel, to replicate the attitudes of John Guy’s colonists towards the native population of Newfoundland in a way that accurately reflects what they would have thought and said at the time (this includes their widespread use of the term “savage”) while also challenging these views. The story of English relations with the native people of Newfoundland, the Beothuk, is especially poignant because it started, from the English perspective, with such promise. The account of Beothuk and settlers singing and dancing together on the beach at what Guy and his men called Truce Sound (today called Bull Arm) in Trinity Bay is described by both Henry Crout and John Guy in separate journal entries. It ended just over two centuries later in the most tragic way imaginable, with the extinction of the Beothuk as a distinct nation upon the death of Shanawdithit in 1829. The tale of contact between settlers and the native population, and the ways in which my fictional characters confront their own assumptions about First Nations people, will be a recurring theme throughout this trilogy.
Finally, a few technical points:
In the early documents, John Guy’s settlement in Conception Bay is variously called Cupers Cove, Coopers Cove, Cuperts Cove, Cupits Cove and Cupids Cove. That the original colony and present day Cupids are one and the same has been known since the late 19th century. While there was some confusion earlier in the nineteenth century, the rediscovery by Newfoundland historians of two key documents in the 1880s put the debate to rest: one was a letter written from the colony by John Guy on May 16, 1611; the other Sir William Alexander’s An Encouragement to Colonies, published in London in 1624. In the latter Alexander states that, “The first houses for habitation were built in Cupids Coue within the Bay of Conception where people did dwell for sundry yeeres together, and some, well satisified both for pleasure and profit, are dwelling there still.” The earliest unpublished document that refers to the colony by its current name is a letter written from the colony by Bartholomew Pearson on April 2, 1613. Bartholomew, who had arrived in Renews with Henry Crout in the summer of 1612 and then moved on to the Cupids colony, wrote to Sir Percival Willoughby that, “I brought all the fowl which you sent over unto Renews, which was our first landing place, and from thence to cupids kove.”
I have referred to the colony as “Cupids Cove” throughout the novel for the sake of consistency. I recommend to anyone able to do so a visit to the Cupids site. If you’re lucky, you may even encounter archaeologist William Gilbert, the man who knows more about Cupids than anyone living. If you’re unable to visit in person, please visit virtually at www.baccalieudigs.ca.
All the male characters at Cupids Cove in the novel are based (sometimes quite loosely) on men who actually settled there between 1610-1613. We know a lot about those colonists who wrote letters and journals and whose writings have survived, but almost nothing other than a name, an occupation, or the cause of death for many others. I have invented freely to fill in the gaps. For example, I gave George Whittington humbler origins than he likely had in real life, the better to illustrate how an ambitious man might rise in the colony. I also provided a more detailed story for the first man to die in Cupids, Thomas Percy, whom John Guy records as having died “of thought of having slaine a man in Rochester.” Percy’s suicide is my own interpretation of that cryptic cause of death. The women characters, as well as almost everyone in the Bristol chapters, are entirely products of my imagination.
To simplify things for the modern reader, I have used modern style dating, so that Chapter Fourteen, for example, is dated “January – February 1613” even though English people at that time would have referred to those months as January and February of 1612—their New Year began in March.
The quotes from Robert Hayman’s Quodlibets used in the epigraph and chapter headings are from the first work of English poetry written in Newfoundland—in fact, the first in all of what he would have called the New World. Hayman was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a great poet. He wasn’t even a very good poet. But he had strong feelings about a lot of things, incl
uding Newfoundland, where he served as governor of the Bristol’s Hope colony at Harbour Grace for about ten years, arriving there about four years after this novel ends. It’s worth noting that despite his heartfelt tribute to the beauty of Newfoundland’s winters (excerpted at the beginning of Chapter 15), Hayman spent only one winter in Newfoundland, and thereafter came over to govern in the summer months only. Nice work if you can get it.
For those who would like to know more about the historical background of the Cupids colony, I recommend the work of the late Gillian Cell, and the biography of John Guy written by the late Alan Williams. The best source for anything about Cupids today is the aforementioned William Gilbert, archaeologist and historian, who was endlessly patient in answering my questions and in reading through this manuscript to catch my mistakes and anachronisms. The errors that doubtless remain are entirely my own.
Among the many other people who helped with various aspects of the historicity and accuracy of the story, special thanks are due to Dru Brooke-Taylor, Michelle Porter, and Chris Dreidzic for answering some of my many questions. On a personal level, I remain, as always, grateful to my family—my husband Jason, my kids Emma and Chris, and my dad, Don Morgan, who always reads my early drafts—as well as to a wonderful network of friends. Special thanks to Jennifer Morgan, Christine Hennebury, Tina Chaulk, Lori Savory and Natalie Hallett (my Strident Women), as well as to Michelle Butler Hallett and Angela Antle, all of whom gave helpful feedback on an earlier draft of the novel.
I am grateful to the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council for a Professional Project Grant that helped support my research and writing on this project, as well as to my employers at The Murphy Centre for allowing me time away from my day job to focus on writing, and to the staff at various local coffee shops who made that writing time so enjoyable with their great service. Thanks to the excellent team at Breakwater Books and my editor Marnie Parsons for all they’ve done to make this book a reality—and a special thanks to a publisher who believes in me enough to commit to three books, so you all get to find out what happens after the last page of this one.
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