The interior of Newfoundland is thinly settled. This has always been so. Newfoundland is extensive, perhaps half the land area of the United Kingdom; but it is, in the words of historian and archaeologist Ralph Pastore, “a rather impoverished piece of the boreal forest in the mouth of the St. Lawrence”—impoverished, chiefly, in terms of the richness of its ecosystem which, when European fishermen started to arrive at the beginning of the sixteenth century, was characterised by “a disproportionately small number of prey species [caribou, beaver, arctic hare] relative to the large number of predators [wolves, bears, lynx, marten, mink, weasel, otter, fox, and human being]. Marine resources were much more extensive [salmon, flounder, smelt, cod, whale, harp seal, harbour seal, grey seal, walrus, murre, great auk, soft-shelled clam, mussels, lobster] but seasonal and affected by sometimes dramatic fluctuations in numbers and distribution (especially of migrating harp seal and caribou)."
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When Europeans arrived in Newfoundland and set up seasonal fishing curing plants around the coast, they encountered the indigenous people of the island, known to us now as the Beothuk. The Beothuk moved seasonally between winter base camps in the interior of the island, and summer out-camps on the coast, where they harvested birds and their eggs, and salmon and mussels, seal and whale. They seem to have had amicable relations with the Micmac of Cape Breton Island who crossed to the south and south west of Newfoundland in the summer; and arms-length, occasionally fractious relations with the parties of Inuit who crossed the straits of Belle Isle in the north to catch seal and whale. It is not really know what sort of relations they had with the Norse colonisers of L’Anse aux Meadows, or if they ever met (Beothuk heartlands seem to have been around the Exploits river, and central lakes, and further east around Notre Dame, Bonavista, Trinity and Placentia bays), but the best guess, from Norse accounts and the short-lived nature of the colony is: not friendly.
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To the Europeans, the Beothuk were elusive, reticent, fleet, retiring. But this was a learnt behaviour. The Portuguese Gaspar de Corte Real, who sailed the straits of Belle Isle between Newfoundland and Labrador in 1501, seems to have met, captured, and returned to Portugal a number of Beothuk (distinguishable from the Inuit by their habit of wearing loosely draped, rather than fitted, furs, which they reversed, winter to summer), whom he found to be ‘gentle and given to laughter.’
Attempts were periodically made, especially by the English settlers, to set relations on a regular footing, akin to those which the French enjoyed with the Micmac in Cape Breton and Nova Scotia. The fur trade was seen as a valuable seasonal adjunct to the cod fishery, and the Beothuk were clearly expert fur trappers. Contact was sought. The tried and tested method for establishing amicable relations was to trade at a distance, a system of silent barte—finding a Beothuk camp, taking a little caribou or beaver meat, and leaving in exchange whatever it might be supposed the Beothuk needed or desired: amber beads, bracelets, or ‘bisket’.
The Beothuk did not seem very interested, and more elaborate schemes were deployed. In 1583, Sir Humphrey Gilbert had brought musicians, haberdashery and Morris dancers, hoping that this exhibition of English sophistication would entice out the aborigines of the islands; but without success. The musicians and Morris dancers, we must suppose, performed to the ancient forest on a deserted beach.
In 1612, the first English governor of Newfoundland, John Guy, led a small party in search of the Beothuk. After rifling a number of empty camps, the party encountered a group of men, and tentative approaches were made. Six Englishmen seem to have met eight Beothuk. Henry Crout, one of the party, later described the encounter. Gifts were exchanged, incomprehensible speeches were made, and the Beothuk waved a white wolf skin about. They then took to ‘prolonged dancing, leaping and singing, in which the colonists participated, all holding hands.’ This was followed by a shared meal, the English providing ‘bread, butter, raisins, acquavitae and beer’, and the Beothuk smoked meat of unknown origin, and a root. The Beothuk blew across the top of the acquavitae bottle, and it made a curious sound, ‘which they fell all into laughture at.’ The parties then exchanged the wolf skin and a white flag which the English had brought.
The encounter was, as far as could be understood, a success, but was never repeated. Occasional silent barter in furs with invisible Beothuk traders did not lead to more than a few furs changing hand. Instead, the Beothuk came to the deserted camps of the Europeans when the Europeans were absent, and pilfered bits of iron—nails and pins, whatever the Europeans had discarded. They would turn these to account as hooks or spearpoints. They were not very interested in either rum or guns—the last, a fatal oversight, as it turned out. Occasionally they would raid a salmon weir, or a rack of curing cod; some encounters turned violent, the Beothuk breaking weirs and killing settlers around Notre Dame bay, but more often coming off worse.
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There seem to have been two settlement patterns among bands of the historic Beothuk population: the interior and the coastal, where, in the former, the more permanent camps were located along the Exploits River and the larger inland lakes, with exploitation camps along the coast; and in the latter, the reverse. It may be that some bands favoured one, some another; but more likely, in pre-historic, so-called Little Passage cultures, all bands were coastal in orientation; it was the arrival of the fishing fleets, and then the settlers, around the coast, which tipped the orientation towards the interior-orientation. The Beothuk now dwelt in the forest, and made surreptitious forays to the coast in spring and summer.
This interior orientation went along with a removed, shadowy, forest-dwelling (and well-founded) xenophobia. By the middle of the 18th century, an implacable resentment and resistance to the English settlers had taken root among the Beothuk. A cultural distaste. The Beothuk would sit around their campfires at night, rehearsing the wrongs done to them by the English, by the Micmac, by everyone. To have converse with the outsiders, with the enemies, was taboo, a bar to entry to the Happy Isles, the Beothuk paradise. To spend time with the English was to be burnt alive on your return.
We know this, because towards the end of the eighteenth century a small handful of Beothuk did come to spend time with the English, partly in response to bungled and broadly well-meaning but in practice inhumane attempts on the part of successive English governors to make contact, the chief spars of which were repeated useless proclamations regarding the treatment of the aboriginal population, and bounties for capture of individuals who might subsequently act as mediators with their tribe, which, predictably enough, resulted in a sequence of children taken from the arms of their dead mothers and presented to governors in expectation of reward, Beothuk men murdered and their womenfolk kidnapped.
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Estimates of the size of the size of the Beothuk population before and during the European settlement vary, but there are unlikely to have been more than two thousand, probably more likely several hundred individuals at the point of first contact around the beginning of the sixteenth century; by the beginning of the nineteenth century, one captive Beothuk, Shanawdithit, could name all the individuals of her tribe, 72 in number.
In the interior, there was not much to eat. The scattered Beothuk bands seem to have come together annually during the caribou migration; they fashioned long fences to funnel the caribou into killing grounds. There was, most years, no shortage of caribou meat. But there was little else.
1829, the year of Shanawdithit's death, is usually given as the year of Beothuk extinction, from tuberculosis and malnutrition.
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The soil of Newfoundland is heavily acidic and not conducive to the preservation of organic matter. Camps and their associated lifeways dissolve rapidly into the forest. The Beothuk are, by and large, only identified in the archaeological record by the presence of modified European implements.
