The Farfarers: Before the Norse

by Farley Mowat

  A goodly number of the names they bestowed are still in use, if in somewhat corrupt form. Thus Port au Choix (Portuchoa), Port au Port (Oporportu), and Cape Ray (Cadarrayco).

  The Basques also gave names to inhabitants of the coasts where whaling stations were established.

  One such name may have been Jakatar.

  Jakatar (spelled in a multitude of ways, including Jack-a-tar, Jakotar, Jackitar, Jockataw, and Jacqueetar) makes its first appearance in the historic record as an entry in a mid-nineteenth-century journal kept by the Anglican minister at Sandy Point, St. George’s Bay. On May 23, 1857, the Reverend Henry Lind wrote:

  Went to see a poor man. . . . He and all his family belong to a much despised and neglected race called Jack a Tars, they speak an impure dialect of French and Indian, [are] R.C.s and of almost lawless habits.

  Although Britain did not take formal possession of western Newfoundland until 1904, a few Jersey merchants had established themselves in St. George’s Bay as early as the 1840s. They noted that the indigenes consisted of nomadic Micmac Indians from Nova Scotia; some Acadian French; and dark-skinned, dark-eyed, dark-haired “natives” called Jakatars.

  Leonard Muise has this to say about Jakatars:

  “We have always adapted to the ways of the times. Inter-marriage was never a problem and we have a history of sharing as well as getting along with other people. We were always taught we were a mix of M’ikmaw, possibly Beothuk, French and other European peoples, but we look different and act different than others. Frank Speck in his book about early cultures tells of the old people here talking (c. 1922) about ‘the ancients’—not Beothuks—who lived in St. George’s Bay before the M’ikmaw came here. Maybe we Jakatars are descended from them too.”4

  Some philologists assert the name is derived from Jack-tar, a nickname given to Royal Navy seamen in the days of sail. However, west-coast Newfoundlanders had only the most peripheral and transient contact with the British navy prior to 1840 (and not much more thereafter). The similarity of names must surely be coincidental.

  Could Jakatar be of French derivation? There is no evidence that it is. How about M’ikmaw? The answer is the same. Could it be Beothuk? All that we know of the Beothuk language consists of a vocabulary derived from two of the last known survivors of this race; and it contains nothing which throws light on the origins of Jakatar.

  One prospect remains.

  During the Middle Ages a Basque name for God was Jakue, evidently a variant on Jainko.5 Tar was, and remains, a Basque suffix signifying (amongst other things) a connection with, or a relation to. Basque linguists tell me that in fifteenth-century usage Jakutar could have been an acceptable way to describe a follower or adherent of (the Christian) God.

  The first Basques arriving on Newfoundland’s west coast might have felt this to be an appropriate name for indigenes who showed an awareness of, perhaps even a recognizable allegiance to, their God. Such attributes would certainly have set them apart from any other aboriginal peoples the Basques might have encountered, and would have warranted a nominal distinction.

  Certainly, elements of religious belief and practice do remain deeply embedded in human cultures even after these have endured momentous changes and dislocations over long periods of time. In 1585, when the English navigator John Davis landed on the southwest coast of Greenland, he met no living people. He did, however, find a burial ground (probably of stone crypts) containing the bodies of several natives dressed in seal skins. Nothing about the dead indicated any previous European contact . . . except that crosses stood over the graves.

  Whatever their origins, and the origin of their name, Jakatars still consider themselves a people in their own right, and declare southwestern Newfoundland, especially St. George’s and Port au Port bays, to be their native and ancestral land.

  CHAPTER THIRTY - FOUR

  THE COUNTRY PATH

  The day was young; but he was old, and the climb up the mountain had wearied him. Gratefully, he sat himself down in the long shadow of one of the twin beacons. From this high vantage point he could look far out across the broad bay along whose green shores most of the people lived.

  He had poled his canoe up Flat Bay Brook to the mountain path, and had then begun his climb, impelled to do so by a dream. No European vessel had entered the Bay for almost a generation, but last night he had dreamed one was coming—was almost here.

  Only the middle-aged and elderly remembered the last merchantman to visit the Bay. She had brought a wealth of goods, but also a burden of ill news. Her supercargo, who spoke the local tongue, described seaborne freebooters swarming so thickly in European waters that only men-of-war had any security, and even they were at risk. Merchant ships were being pillaged, burned and sunk, or driven from the seas. The supercargo, a burly Bristol man, had made his decision: “If our old hulk lives to feel Severn water under her keel again, I’ll swallow the anchor and go ashore for good.”

  The merchantman’s departure had been a gloomy event; those who watched her grow small on the horizon being all too well aware that they might not see her like for a long time.

  Now, as the old man shaded his eyes against the glare of sun on sea he thought he saw the flicker of a distant sail. Aged he might be, but his sight was still keen. He watched, transfixed, as his dream of the night became a reality in the morning—a kind of reality—for he had never imagined a vessel the like of the one bearing towards him now.

  She sat cliff-high in the water, her size exaggerated by bulky fore- and aftercastles. Instead of the traditional single mast and square sail, she carried three masts, a large one stepped amidships and smaller ones at bow and stern. And on these she bore so many sails they made her look more like a fleet than a single vessel.

  Astounded by her appearance, the old man watched until it was clear her course would bring her to Flat Island Haven, whereupon he hurried down from the lookout to spread the amazing news.

  As the stranger rounded-to under the head of Flat Island, she unfurled from her stern a great flag of a design unknown to the people hurriedly gathering along the beach. Then a smaller pennant was streamed from her mainmast top. This one had a more familiar look: a white cross set against a crimson background. Whoever she might be, and wherever she came from, the alien vessel was flying a Christian flag.

  She was in fact a Basque carrack, one of the first to sail deep into the Gulf. Her lookouts had spotted the twin towers on Cairn Mountain while still well to seaward and her master had determined to see what they portended.

  More than idle curiosity impelled him. His big vessel (she displaced more than two hundred tons) was a whaler. Since entering Belle Isle Strait she had been sailing through an abundance of whales. Now her people were impatient to find a suitable haven where trypots could be set up on shore and from which boats could sally out to harpoon the giants whose rendered oil was almost as good as gold.

  The bold coast to the north had rebuffed them, but they found what they were seeking in St. George’s Bay. They also found a welcome here from a people who, so it seemed, were not altogether different from their own kind.

  WHAT FOLLOWS CONTAINS MUCH SUPPOSITION, BUT I am sufficiently confident of its validity to dispense with the usual continuous barrage of qualifications.

  Alba-in-the-West welcomed the fifteenth-century arrival of the Basques. For many decades thereafter natives and newcomers maintained friendly and mutually useful relationships. Arriving in early summer and usually departing late in autumn or, occasionally, wintering over, the whalers brought European goods that they traded for furs, food, and labour. Local men assisted Basques on the cutting ramps and at the trypots, and some became adept at pulling oars and at wielding harpoons from the slim, swift whale boats.

  Crofters supplied the whalers with farm produce and with relaxation from the gory, greasy butchery that filled long days of labour. Valuta men, who had all but abandoned their age-old trade for want of markets, now found reason to return to it. They revisited the fabulou
s walrus haul-outs on the Gulf islands and were soon doing a brisk business with the whalers in hides and ivory.

  From year to year more and more Basques arrived until their tryworks were belching black, oily smoke along Newfoundland’s west coast from Cabot Strait to the Strait of Belle Isle, and along much of the south coast of Labrador. By the end of the fifteenth century scores, if not hundreds, of Basque whaling ships were working the waters of the Gulf.

  The crews were a rough-and-ready lot, but they seem to have adhered to a code governing not only how they treated one another but how they treated indigenes. Scanty as it is, the record indicates that they consistently behaved more humanely towards the natives than did other Europeans of their time.

  By the beginning of the sixteenth century, west-faring Basques were bringing great riches in oil, baleen, ivory, and fur into Biscayan ports. Basques were secretive; nevertheless, it was inevitable that Frenchmen to the north, and Portuguese and Spaniards to the south, would catch the smell of money on the west wind. Even before the new century got under way adventurers from all three nations were following the Basques into the Gulf.

  Some of the newcomers were fishermen chiefly concerned with catching massive quantities of cod. But many were, in effect, the Vikings of their age. If they adhered to any code of conduct, it was one based on the prescript: every man for himself and devil take the hindmost.

  These adventurers were of the same breed as the marauders who had been wreaking havoc in European waters for more than a century. And just as their peers had visited chaos and destruction on the coastal inhabitants of many European countries, so these men ravaged the coastal regions of the western Atlantic.

  They had never shown much compunction towards their European countrymen. They showed little or none towards the natives of the New World, treating them with a degree of savagery that only civilized man seems fully capable of mastering.

  Indigenes and their belongings were regarded as objects to be turned to account. For as long as natives proved to be of use helping the newcomers siphon off gold, furs, and other valuables, they might be suffered to survive—preferably as slaves. However, if they resisted or were uncooperative, they were all too often given over to slaughter and rapine. Some of the “adventurers” arriving on the New World coasts seem to have taken as much pleasure from discharging culverins loaded with grape-shot into crowds of natives as Norse berserkers had once taken from tossing babies on spear points.

  Freebooters on the south and western coasts of Newfoundland were at first few in number and so constrained to be somewhat circumspect. Initially they may even have paid the crofters for meat and grain, and traded with them for furs and ivory. But that way of doing business did not last. As the newcomers grew more numerous, many abandoned the pretence of being traders and turned to outright robbery.

  The natives of the southwest coast of Newfoundland, whose Tunit, Beothuk, and Alban ancestors had been able to see off Karlsefni’s Norsemen, could not withstand these new marauders who came armed with crossbows and canon. Crofts or encampments within a day’s march of the coasts were subject to sudden descents bringing death to those who resisted the seizure of goods, cattle—or of people. Valuta men hardly dared raise a sail offshore for fear they might draw a corsair down upon them. The islands and beaches where they had long been used to gathering walrus ivory and hides were now possessed by rapacious newcomers who shed the blood of competitors and walrus with almost equal profligacy.

  Beothuks were early victims. Traditionally they had been used to wintering deep in the interior where caribou were most abundant and accessible. In spring they had gone out to the coasts to take advantage of fish, seabirds, and sea mammals. They remained safe in the interior, but disastrous meetings with Europeans forced them to largely abandon the coasts and the natural resources which had once sustained them there.

  Alba-in-the-West would have offered almost irresistible targets to transatlantic mariners recently arrived in New World waters and desperate for fresh food after barely surviving weeks at sea on a diet of saltjunk and weevily biscuits.

  Crofters would have found themselves under mounting pressure to abandon their coastal holdings during the raiding season, which extended from early summer to late autumn—the very time when crops had to be grown and harvested. Many were already in the habit of wintering some distance inland, where they could shelter from the worst of the weather in what Newfoundland outporters to this day call “winter houses.” But now the people of Alba-in-the-West found themselves becoming summer exiles, forced to seek places in the interior where crops could be grown and natural hay harvested.

  Few such existed. One of the few was the upper reaches of the Codroy Valley, which extended far enough inland to offer reasonable security and was broad and fertile enough to provide sustenance for a considerable number of homesteaders and their animals.

  There is no way of knowing when the people of the Codroy coast (between Cape Anguille and Port aux Basques) withdrew inland, but history has preserved one record that may bear upon the matter.

  In 1497 a Venetian adventurer with the Anglicized name of John Cabot set sail from Bristol for certain lands in the west which Bristol seamen had already visited. Cabot commanded an English ship and crew, and was almost certainly piloted by a man with knowledge of the New World.

  After some thirty-five days at sea, a lookout raised the highlands of northwestern Cape Breton Island. Cabot then bore away towards a second and adjacent land, which would have been southwestern Newfoundland. Here in the final days of June he made his one reported landing.

  Only fragmentary accounts of his voyage have been preserved, mostly in letters written by Cabot’s contemporaries. The best of these is an account by John Day (who may have been a Spanish agent), addressed to the Lord Grand Admiral of Spain.

  . . . they disembarked with a crucifix and raised banners with the arms of the Holy Father and those of the King of England . . . and they found tall trees of the kind masts are made of . . . and the country [hereabouts] is very rich in pasture. . . . They found a trail that went inland, they saw a fireplace, they saw the manure of animals which they thought to be farm animals. . . . He [Cabot] did not dare advance inland beyond the shooting distance of a crossbow, and after taking in fresh water he returned to his ship, . . . [They then sailed east] following the shore [and] . . . it seemed to them that there were fields where they thought might also be settlements.

  Cabot sailed east along the south coast until he reached Cape Race where he took his departure for England without ever meeting a native. He and the Newfoundland indigenes evidently avoided one another. Doubtless they had their reasons.

  Short as it is, Day’s account contains matters of signal interest.

  Pastures, for instance. The Spanish word used by Day specifically identifies land used for grazing domestic animals.

  Mention of a trail (which can be translated as lane) suggests something more than the often-almost-invisible paths used by Indians.

  Manure meant the dung of domesticated animals. I think it safe to assume that Cabot’s west-of-England crew would have recognized the dung of farm animals when they saw it, and would have called it by its proper name. They would scarcely have been deceived by the dung of bears or caribou, then the only large wild animals to be found in the region.

  A fourth point has to do with Cabot’s obvious nervousness about encountering indigenes. Why would he have been so apprehensive unless he knew full well that the hive had already been thoroughly stirred up and the bees could be expected to be angry and dangerous?

  A final point to consider is the reference to possible fields and settlements . The Spanish word used by Day for settlement translates equally well as habitations. Why would Cabot’s people have thought they might be seeing fields and habitations in what was otherwise a wilderness? Perhaps because they had found convincing evidence that a pastoral people lived along this coast.

  Although we may never know precisely where Cabot landed or
what he found, Day’s account provides a convincing, if second-hand, description of what could have been a crofting site on the Codroy coast.

  The people of Port au Port Bay and St. George’s Bay had no such convenient retreat available to them. Although many small rivers empty into those two bays, most are so hemmed in by mountains as to be useless to homesteaders.

  There is one notable exception—Robinson’s River, emptying into St. George’s Bay some twenty miles southwest of Flat Island. Cutting west through the Long Range Mountains, Robinson’s turbulent waters are still some nine hundred feet above sea level at a point only twenty-five miles east of its mouth. Here, for a distance of two miles, the river inexplicably runs straight, slow, and level between steeply wooded walls towering six hundred feet above it. The result is a small but marvellously protected hidden valley with a microclimate all its own nourishing an extraordinary assemblage of grassy meadows.

  This remarkable oasis amongst the mountains has recently come to the attention of scientists and, because of its uniqueness, has been designated an ecological reserve. But it has long been familiar to local people, who call it The Grass.

  During the early part of this century, several families still lived on The Grass and took a livelihood in sheep and cattle from it. Ruins remain of their occupancy, including those of a small grist mill. It used to take these people as much as two days to journey between the coast and The Grass across terrain so difficult it is today barely navigable by four-wheel-drive vehicles. Here was a sanctuary whose nearly five hundred acres of pasture and arable land could have supported a dozen or more crofting families in almost unassailable security.

  The Grass could not, however, have sufficed for all the people of Alba-in-the-West.

  While living in Newfoundland during the 1960s, I spent a good deal of my time investigating the disappearance of the Beothuks.