The Beothuk Expedition by Derek Yetman Read Free Book Online Page A

families or parishes were unable to support them at home. Here they are known as White Boys, though few of them have actual ties to that rebel cause. They may sympathize with it and why should they not? English landlords have been turning them off their tenant farms and crofts for years, evicting them with no compensation, few skills and even fewer prospects.
    Reverend Balfour at Trinity has informed the governor that his parish has been the scene of many outrages, where from want and necessity the Irish riot frequently. The English settlers have been forced to draw together for their own protection and no man will accept the duties of constable, for fear of his life. Many of these Irish routinely die of starvation and exposure in winter. I myself have arrested individuals for manslaughter that was brought on by desperation and fuelled by intoxicating spirits. Only last year, a young woman named Hannah Barrett was tormented by a mob of these fellows and run off a cliff to her death. The situation has not improved a year hence, for recently I’ve heard that a gang of scoundrels has been terrorizing Trinity once more. As surrogate magistrate, I have no time to deal with them now but I shall certainly clip their wings on my return.
    Even the Irish who have employment here are no better off, it seems. Their employers will cheat them and abuse them given half the chance, and they do not help themselves with their weakness for drink. Captain Palliser has had occasion to reprimand certain English merchants for paying their servants with rum instead of wages. Unable to buy their passage home at the season’s end, these servants are abandoned to debauchery and wickedness for six months of the year. They become perfect strangers to all government, religion and good order.
    One of the most notorious merchants for this is Andrew Pinson, an agent of John Noble at Toulinguet. The governor has reprimanded him repeatedly for landing his crews at St. John’s in the fall and paying them entirely in spirits. While he and his methods are condemned by us, his business fellows love him even less, owing to his attempts at monopolizing the fur and salmon trade on this coast. Pinson, I am bound to say, is the epitome of all that is wrong with this place, for the man is Greed itself.
    By contrast, it has been most gratifying to serve under an individual as enlightened as Captain Palliser. We are of the same mind in believing that the lower classes do not have to be kept poor in order to be kept industrious. We are part of the new order, he and I: compassionate, yet firm and consistent in administering justice to the lower ranks of society. I recall our very first conversation, on whether God had established our social system, and whether poverty, pain and death are part of the mystery of Creation. We are both inclined to think it is so, though we shall never shrink from appeasing human suffering where we find it.
    Suffering is a word that I have heard frequently of late. The Reverend Stow is most insistent that we catch up with the Guernsey to prevent our own suffering. Of course, I suspect that our ecclesiastical friend is more concerned with his personal comfort than with any true suffering on the part of the crew. The word has also been used by Mr. Squibb, in connection with a midshipman who was left here by the Liverpool . He seems to think the boy will suffer and die if he is left in the care of a former naval surgeon. These surgeons may be crude in their methods, I will admit, but it would be impossible to take a bedridden man on an expedition such as this. Still, our young Mr. Squibb can be most persistent, a distasteful quality that I have noted in him. But Mr. Palliser is not here to favour him now, and so he shall have to obey my orders on the subject. We are overcrowded as it is and our provisions were meant for eight men, not eleven and certainly not a dozen. I have therefore decided that the midshipman from the Liverpool will