Ghosts of James Bay (2 page)

The strangers were white-skinned—
kawaaposit.
They had arrived before the last cold and dark and had stayed in camp here since then. They were not good hunters, had not chosen a good campsite, and now they did not look well. One of them had died. But they did have many marvels that the warrior wanted to trade for.

The
kawaaposit
camp was in the clearing, less than the height of a tall tree in front of the warrior. It was an odd place with a wooden hut built from square trees that the strangers had brought ashore from the canoe. It was much larger, but also much heavier, than the conical teepees of the warrior's people. Obviously these creatures could not travel anywhere without their huge canoe to carry all their possessions.

Several figures, including the old hair-faced one whom the warrior assumed was the leader, were standing about in the open. This would be the obvious time to meet them, when they could see him approach and would not be startled, yet the warrior hesitated.

It was not that he was frightened; he was a
Kenistenoag
and afraid of nothing. These were his lands. His people had lived here since time immemorial when they had been placed in the world by the Great Spider. The warrior lived in complete harmony with all the land's elements. True, life was difficult sometimes when the Manitou was offended and made the game go away or the cold hard or the snow deep, but that was the way the world was. The spirits were everywhere, in the animals, the trees, even in the very earth beneath the warrior's feet. They were as real as the other people in his band, and how well or badly your life went depended on how you treated them. Permission must be asked of the spirits before a tree
was cut or an animal killed and thanks must be given for the bounty they provided. If it was not done, then the spirits would be offended and make life hard for the people.

No, the warrior was not frightened. What made him hesitate was the decision made by his band. Some of the elders felt these strangers were not of this world. Certainly observation of them did suggest they were very odd and seemed to have little or no contact with the spirits. To the warrior this was peculiar, but he felt that if they were not of this world, then they could have no impact upon it and contact with them would not anger the spirits. Others thought, however, that the spirits did not want the people to make contact, and their arguments had won. The pale strangers could be watched, but there was to be no contact.

The warrior felt uncomfortable with the decision. He saw no threat and felt sure that, if he could trade for some of the strangers' wonders, he could convince his people that trade with them would be to everyone's benefit. He had to do it. Taking a deep breath and murmuring a prayer to the spirits, the warrior stood and stepped out into the pale spring sunlight.

The first man to spot the warrior standing near the trees dropped the wood he was carrying and ran in terror as if he had glimpsed a Windigo monster. His shouting alerted the others, and soon they formed a semicircle in the clearing, watching the warrior carefully. Two of the men held hatchets and one carried the long stick the warrior had heard make a loud noise and seen kill game. The warrior spread his arms wide to show he held no weapon. The hairy-faced leader stepped forward and copied the gesture. Then he spoke in the strange, halting tongue these people used. The warrior remained silent. He made the gesture for trade. Hairy Face spoke again. Obviously they did not use even the same gestures as the
Kenistenoag
. Crouching, the warrior picked up three pebbles, two small and one large. He moved the
two small ones toward the stranger and the large one before himself. Then, slowly and deliberately, as if he were teaching a young child, he exchanged them.

Hairy Face turned and spoke with his companions. Three of them came forward and handed him knives. A fourth brought a leather sack from inside the hut. Turning back, Hairy Face placed one of the knives on the ground in front of him. He also took several items from the sack and added them to the pile.

The warrior stepped forward. The knife was good. The blade was long, the edge sharp, and the handle fitted comfortably into his fist. He could skin a caribou or fight equally easily with this weapon. He put it back on the ground and turned his attention to the other things. There were a number of small round disks with tiny holes punched through their centres. The warrior could not imagine what their use was, but they would be good ornaments for the women to decorate ceremonial clothing. The last item was round and had a short handle at the bottom. It was shiny and had patterns engraved on it. The warrior picked it up and examined it. The other side was startling. It was clear like water and, like a still pool on a sunny day, it reflected the sky, the trees, and the warrior's face. Yet, unlike water, it was hard to the touch. These strangers must have magic to be able to capture water this way. What other wonders did they have in the leather bag?

The warrior picked up the items and placed them in his sack. By gestures he indicated he would return to this spot with trade goods after only one sleep. Hairy Face nodded. Then he began making eating gestures with his fingers. Was he asking the warrior to stay and eat with them? The warrior shook his head, turned, and strode into the trees. He had enough to think about already now that he had made contact.

Dad and I were up on the shores of James Bay digging for buried treasure. Not gold or jewels, but arrowheads, bones, and fragments of pottery. My dad is an archaeologist and spends most of his summers camped beside ancient villages in remote corners of Quebec and Ontario digging into piles of garbage. That's what archaeologists mostly do—look through what people threw away hundreds of years ago. My feeling is that if it was garbage two thousand years ago, it's still garbage now. After all, there's a reason people throw stuff away. But Dad doesn't think like that.

“It's one of the few windows we have into the lives of people who lived before things were written down,” he often says. “At a campsite in Northern Quebec we can find copper from the Arctic, obsidian from Yellowstone Park, and shells from the New England coast. That's evidence of a continent-wide trading network in place long before Europeans ever set foot here.”

Okay, I accept that, but it's still a window onto a garbage tip.

The summer of my morning canoe trip was our second
dig on this particular garbage tip, or midden, as Dad called it. I had been there with him the year before, but so had a lot of other people, mostly graduate students, and they got to do all the interesting work. I had been a general dogsbody, carting loads of dirt away and keeping the tools clean. The second summer was different. I was all there was, so I had to do everything, and I had enjoyed it. Just the thought that the next trowel full of dirt might reveal some vital clue was a thrill. Not that we had found much. In fact, my moment of glory had come the year before.

Our camp had been in the same place both years. It was on the shore of James Bay, with the tents in a semicircle facing the water. There was a work tent, a cook tent, sleeping tents, and a large tarpaulin strung between the trees under which we stored tools and equipment. In the centre was a large fire pit where we sometimes cooked or roasted marshmallows on sticks. The northern edge of the camp was marked by a huge rock—a glacial erratic Dad called it. It had been dropped there when the ice sheets melted thousands of years ago, and it was great for climbing. It was almost a cube, about five metres high, and there was only one side I hadn't managed to climb. It was the side closest to the camp. It was nearly smooth and was dominated by a tricky overhang near the top. I had a lot of bruises from arguing with that overhang.

At the end of the first year's dig the crew had only come up with the usual collection of discarded arrowheads, spear points, and fire-blackened bones. It was interesting, but Dad wanted more. He believed Europeans had been into Hudson Bay before Henry Hudson in 1610. Dad said the English were looking for a Northwest Passage to Asia, or the Strait of Anian, as they called it. This would give them a shortcut to the valuable spices away from any competition with Spain. Since England and Spain were virtually at war, any discovery
an explorer made would be kept secret. My father believed there had been a discovery before 1610, but that it had never been written up in the history books.

Dad based his theory on an old document that dated from the late 1500s. It had turned up in an archive in Bristol and had probably been written by a fisherman, since it talked about the cod stocks off the Newfoundland coast. One piece of it caught Dad's attention. He had told me it so many times that I knew it by heart despite the odd wording and really original spelling:

Onn the daye following wee mett with a rotten Shippes Boatt. In itt laye a man much gonne in Starvation and neare too Death. The crewe were so afrighted by his Sicklye appearence that they but crossed themselvese and would not renedere him aid. I tooke myselfe into the Boatt and befor he perrished the man tolde mee that he was the mate from the Barcke
Jonathan
from Plymouthe whiche had comme to grief in some Ice that was swepte moste Furioslye out of a Greate Sea to the west. He talked off the wonderes of the Landes he hadde seen, Unicorns, Men with theire faces on theire chestes, and seas filled with Mermaids who had the heads and bodyes of women and the tailes of Greate Fish. Then for want of Succour he died. Truly, there are yet manye wonderes too be discovered in this Lande.

It sounded like a sailor's story to me, and the poor man was obviously delirious. The information in it was vague and ambiguous. Dad could find no record of a ship called the
Jonathan
around that time. However, he was convinced the “Greate Sea” was Hudson Bay and the strait where the ship came to grief in the ice, Hudson Strait. Dad got some support
from a map that was published in 1595, fifteen years before Hudson sailed. It showed a large bay at the end of a strait that cut into North America. To Dad, this meant Hudson Bay was known before Henry sailed into it, but his ideas were scoffed at. The most his colleagues would admit was that
possibly,
a few fishermen
might
have visited the Grand Banks before John Cabot, but saying that someone had gotten into Hudson Bay that far back was laughed at. Then, in the first summer, I fell off the big rock.

It was lunch break on the final day, and I was having one last try to defeat the overhang. I failed and landed painfully back at the bottom. As I was spitting a mouthful of dirt out, I noticed something in the ground. The rock was quite far from the midden where the main work was going on, so no one was interested in digging there. I didn't think anything of it at first—all I could see was a tiny curve of something dirty—but I had been trained by years of helping my father to look for anything unusual. I called Dad over and he dug it out. His excitement grew as he uncovered something that was obviously not just another trade trinket.

“It's a coin,” he said, lifting the object and turning it in the sunlight. “Very old. Looks like it might even be gold.”

That sent a thrill through me—gold—but it really didn't look like much. It was round, but so covered with dirt that I couldn't make anything out.

We dug around, down almost thirty centimetres, but found nothing else. However it got there, the coin was on its own.

One of the few things Dad knew nothing about was coins so, when we returned to town, we went to see a collector. Dad knew better than to try to clean the coin without knowing what he was doing, so it was pretty grubby and still didn't look like much.

The collector was a short, dumpy man. He was old and wore half-glasses on his nose. He talked about as much as Dad, so there were a lot of silences while he worked on the coin.

I was looking at the display cases filled with odd things like groats and farthings, Dad was lost in thought, and the collector was talking to the coin under his breath. He never managed to complete a sentence: “It must be... Where is that...? Now if only I can...” At last he let out a louder than usual exclamation: “Aha!”

Dad and I turned. The collector lifted his head and seemed startled that we were still there. He looked at us silently for a while. “Yes,” he said eventually, “this is very nice.” Then he lapsed back into silence.

“Good,” Dad said encouragingly. “But what is it and how old is it?”

“Yes, yes,” the collector continued, “it's an angel, and a very nice one, too.”

He seemed about to stop talking again, so I asked, “What's an angel?”

“Oh!” He seemed surprised that I didn't know. “An angel is an old English gold coin originally worth six shillings and eight pence—one-third of a pound—but later revalued up to ten shillings. They were introduced by Edward IV in 1465 and were made until old Charles I got his head chopped off after he lost the English Civil War in the 1640s.” The man said “old Charles I” as if he had been a personal friend.

“But why angel?” I asked before he got too far into the list of English kings.

“Well,” he continued, holding up the coin, “look here.” We both moved closer and peered where he pointed with a chubby finger. “See the picture on the obverse?” We looked closer.

“St. George and the dragon?” I ventured. The collector made a noise like the one my math teacher made when someone
gave a really dumb answer.

“No, no. See the halo around the head? It's the archangel Michael spearing a dragon. Hence the name.” He turned the coin over. The other side had a picture of a ship carrying a coat of arms covered in fleur-de-lys and lions. There was writing around the rim on both sides, but I couldn't make out what it said. “This is unique. I've never seen one of these before.” The collector quivered with excitement. “It must be worth a fortune.”

“How old?” I could hear the tension in Dad's voice. He didn't care how much the coin was worth. It would end up in a museum, anyway. He wanted to know when it dated from. If it was much before 1610, then it would be strong evidence for contact with Europe before that time.