Gatschet.j 414 [June 19, 



State of New Tork, and has in his long-sustained correspondence with rae 

 evinced the greatest interest for all ethnologic problems and questions con- 

 nected with his "Terra Nova." With accuracy he compared the faulty 

 vocabulary published by Lloyd, and corrected about twenty-five of its 

 misspellings from the original, which is written in a sloven hand ; he 

 also gathered many words hitherto unknown from Cormack's manuscript 

 "Notes," and transmitted them all to me. 



The information we possess of the Beothuk tongue was chiefly derived 

 from two women, and is almost exclusively of a lexical, not of a grammatic 

 nature. The points deducible from the vocabularies concerning the struc- 

 ture of the verb, noun, and sentence, the formation of compound terms, 

 the prefixes and suffixes of the language are very fragmentary and one- 

 sided. The mode of transcription is so defective that no vocabularies ever 

 have caused me so much trouble and uncertainty as these in obtaining 

 from them results available for science. 



The two female informants had lived but a short time among the En- 

 glish-speaking population, and were not sufficiently acquainted with En- 

 glish to inspire much confidence in their accuracy. They were : 



1. Demasduit, also called Waunathoake, and by the white people Mary 

 March, because captured on the fifih day of March, 1819. John Peyton, 

 who carried on considerable salmon fisheries in the north of the island^ 

 had suffered much by the depredations of the Beothuk. He and his party 

 met her, her husband and another man of the tribe on the frozen Red 

 Indian Pond, on the principal tributary of Exploits River, engaged them 

 in a fight, killed her husband, and brought herself to St. John's, where she 

 stayed during the rest of the year, and died at sea of a pulmonary disease, 

 on her return home, January 8, 1820, about twenty-three years old. She 

 furnished a vocabulary of her language (about 180 words) to the Rev. John 

 Leigh, who presented it to Mr. John Peyton ; it is printed in Lloyd's 

 article, iv, pp. 37-39. A miniature of her will be found in Tocque's Wan- 

 dering Thoughts, p. 373, and Bonnycastle i, 276, describes her as follows : 

 "Hair like that of an European, black eyes, skin copper color, docile, 

 very active, agreeable in demeanor ; in this respect she differed much from 

 the Mieniacs and other Indians." Thomas Taylor, a man present at her 

 capture, was still alive in 1884. 



2. Shanandithii or Shawnadithit, afterwards called Nancj', was, with 

 two daughters, brought to St. John's in 1823 by William Call, starvation 

 being the cause of their surrender. Shanandithit lived in W. E. Cor- 

 mack's house* until he left the colony, and the daughters returned to 

 their tribe ; then stopped at the house of the attorney-general, Mr. Simms, 

 and subsequently at John Peyton's house. About 50 years old, she fell 

 sick and died of consumption in 1829, at the hospital of St. John's. When 

 in 1825 she procured a Beothuk skull for Cormack, she asserted that only 

 fourteen individuals remained of her tribe. Mrs. Peyton, who still lives at 



*Mr. Cormack was a man of intellectual acquirements, having followed a 

 course of studies at Edinburgh University. 



