rinds of trees standing each of them on stones, boiling with fowls in each; they had also many such pots so sewed, and which were full of yolk of eggs that they had boiled hard and so dried, and which the savages do use in their broth.  They had great store of skins of deer, beaver, bears, otter, seal, and divers other fine skins, which were well dressed; they had also great store of several sorts of fish dried.  By shooting off a musquet towards them, they all ran away without any apparel but only their hats on, which were made of seal skins, in fashion like our hats, sewed handsomely with narrow bands and set round with fine white shels.  All the canoes, flesh, skins, yolks of eggs, bows, arrows, and much fine ochre and divers other things did the ship’s company take and share among them.”  And from Whitburne’s time up to 1818 have complaints been made of thefts committed by the Indians.  To the Northward the settlers, as they allege, had many effects stolen from them—­one individual alone made a deposition to the effect that he had lost through the depredations of the Indians, property to the amount of L200.

Now whether in such thefts (although they were only of a petty character) we are to trace the origin of that murderous warfare so relentlessly carried on by the Whites against the Red Indians, or whether the atrocities of the former, were the result of brutal ignorance and a wanton disregard of human life, cannot how be determined,—­we have only the lamentable fact before us, that to a set of men not only destitute of all religious principle, but also of the common feelings of humanity, the pursuit and slaughter of the Red Indian became a pastime—­an amusement—­eagerly sought after—­wantonly and barbarously pursued, and in the issue fatally, nd it may be added, awfully successful.

For the greater part of the seventeenth century the history of the Red Indians present a dreary waste—­no sympathy appears to have been felt for them, and no efforts were made to stay the hands of their merciless destroyers.  In their attempts to avoid the Micmac, their dire enemy, they fell in the path of the no less dreaded White, and thus year after year passed away, and the comparatively defenceless Boeothick found, only in the grave, a refuge and rest from his barbarous and powerful foes.  During the long period just adverted to, the Red Indian was regarded by furriers, whose path he sometimes crossed; and with whose gains his necessities compelled him sometimes to interfere, with as little compassion as they entertained for any wild or dangerous beast of the forest, and were shot or butchered with as little hesitation.  And barbarities of this nature became at length so common, that the attention of the Government was directed to it; and in 1786 a proclamation was issued by Governor Elliot, in which it is stated “that it having been represented to the King that his subjects residing in this Island do often treat the Indians with the greatest inhumanity,