OR RED INDIANS OF NEWFOUNDLAND. 165 



One positive fact, however, affords a decisive iudicatiou regarding their social con- 

 nectiou. It will be recollected that when they killed the two marines of Lieut. Buchau 

 they cut off their heads and carried them away. This shows that they had not adopted 

 the Iroquois practice of scalping, which for a long time was also customary among the 

 Algonkiu and other tribes around them. This shows the Beothiks to be a very ancient 

 race and connected with the Malayo Polynesian race, who decapitate their victims taken 

 in war.' 



Of their religious ideas scarcely any information has been preserved. Old Broughton 

 tells us that they supposed that they sprang from arrows stuck in the groiind by the 

 Good Spirit. This seems to be a modification of an idea prevalent among many Indian 

 tribes, of their having originally sprung from the earth, perhaps a distortion of the Scrip- 

 ture teaching that God created man of the dust of the ground. Subsequent writers have 

 generally supposed them to be without any idea of a supreme being. It is certainly 

 strange, that those who had intercoarso with those of the tribe who lived among the 

 whites, should have gained no more information for us on the subject. In the vocabularies 

 taken down they have given no name for God, but they have given two for the devil. 

 The one is Ashmmb/im, which conveys the idea of an ugly black man, and whom 

 Shanaudithit described as short and stout, having long whiskers, dressed in beaver skins 

 and sometimes seen at the east end of the lake. The other is Mandée, the equi- 

 valent of the Micmac Mandou and the Nashkapi Mantuie. But this was originally 

 their name for the Supreme Being, the same as the Manito of the western tribes, and it 

 was only when the Micmacs came under the instruction of Christian missionaiies that 

 they came to regard their old god as evil, so that finally his name became associated with 

 the devil. But the Beothiks never met the missionaries and did not associate with the 

 Micmacs, so that they must have used the name in its original sense as denoting their 

 god. And Mary March said distinctly that they did believe in a great spirit. 



Cartwright thought it remarkable- that in a journey of seventy miles, through the 

 heart of their winter resort, he had not met with a single object that appeared to be 

 devoted to any religious or superstitious jîurpose, unless it were the carved bones spoken 

 of, which we have seen to have been really ornaments. But we find among them objects 

 to which they seem to have attached a certain sacreduess. Lieut. Buchan saw in one of 

 their lodges a peculiar stafl". He described it as " nearly six feet two inches in length, at 

 the head tapering to the end, and terminating in not more than three quarters of an inch. 

 It represented four plain equal sides, except at the upper end, where it resembled three 

 rims one above the other, and the whole stained red." It was pointed out as belonging 

 to a man who was distinguished by a high cap, and whom he supposed to be a chief. 

 He concluded that it was a badge of office, but Shauandithit made drawings of some half 

 a dozen of objects resembling wands or sceptres, but one of them with a representation of 

 a vessel on the head of it. These were said to have been about six feet long. (Plate XI.) 

 Mr Cormack has marked them iis " symbols of their mythology." But from the repre- 

 sentation given of them, and what we know of the customs of other aboriginal tribes, we 

 have no doubt that it was the badge of the authority of the head of the family. Thus Dr. 

 Turner says of the Samoans : " A rod or staff, six feet long, such as is seen on the Egyptian 

 monuments, is one of the common budges of qlfire of the heads of families in Samoa, who are 



' I am indebted to Dr. John Campbell, of Montreal, for first calling my attention to this point. 



