“For a period of nearly two hundred years this barbarity had continued, and it was considered meritorious to shoot a Red Indian.  ‘To go to look for Indians’ came to be as much a phrase as to look for partridges (ptarmigan).  They were harassed from post to post, from island to island; their hunting and fishing stations were unscrupulously seized by the invading English.  They were shot down without the least provocation, or captured to be exposed as curiosities to the rabble at the fairs of the western towns of Christian England at twopence a piece."[16]

[Footnote 16:  These are the remarks of an English chaplain in the island, quoted by the Rev. George Patterson, who contributed a most interesting article on the vanished Beothiks of Newfoundland to the Royal Society of Canada in 1891.]

Too late—­when the worry and anxiety of the Napoleonic wars were over—­the British Government sent a commission of naval officers to enquire into the treatment of the Beothiks by the settlers.  One woman alone remained, as a frightened semi-captive, to be consoled and soothed.  There are Indians in the south of Newfoundland at the present day, but they are Mikmaks who come over from the adjoining regions of Cape Breton and Nova Scotia.  So tender, indeed, is the modern government of the island towards these (out of compunction for the past) that they are allowed to kill the reindeer and other wild animals without the licence which is exacted from white people, and so are actually injuring Newfoundland’s resources!

Since the great Dominion of Canada was brought into existence in 1871 as a unified, responsible government, the treatment of the remaining Amerindian natives of British North America has been admirable; and splendid work has been done in reclaiming them to a wholesome civilization by the Moravian, Roman Catholic, and Church of England missionaries.

CHAPTER VIII

The Hudson Bay Explorers and the British Conquest of all Canada

In a general way the discovery of the main features of the vast Canadian Dominion may be thus apportioned amongst the different European nations.  First came the British, led by an Italian pilot.  They discovered Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland.  Then came the Portuguese, who discovered the north-east of Newfoundland and the coast of Labrador, while a French expedition under an Italian captain reached to Nova Scotia and southern Newfoundland.  A Spanish expedition under a Portuguese leader shortly afterwards reached the coast of New Brunswick.  After that the French from Brittany, Normandy, and the west coast of France laid bare the west coast of Newfoundland, the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the River St. Lawrence, and the Great Lakes.