Gallery Tells Story of the Last of the Beothuks

Shanawdithit, or Nancy April to the western settlers who destroyed her world, is said by contemporaries never to have smiled, which is not surprising.

A birch bark model canoe which she made, soon to go on display for the first time at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, south-east London, is a memorial to a woman who lost her family, her people, and even her own name before she died in Newfoundland more than 170 years ago, the last of the Beothuk Indians. When Newfoundland was first colonized there were around 2,000 Beothuks, but their numbers were soon in free fall, from killings, loss of hunting grounds, and disease.

The date of Shanawdithit's surrender to the inevitable is unusually precise: her father drowned, and in 1823 she was brought by trappers, with her mother and sister near starvation, to the settlers. She was rechristened and given the month of her capture as a surname, and became Nancy April. Her mother and sister soon died.Her last home was with William Cormack and she made small, beautiful pieces like the canoe for him. It will be on display in the Atlantic Worlds gallery, which opens next month. "What is unusual about our canoe is that we know it was properly and ethically acquired," said curator Claire Warrior, above. "Many other Beothuk pieces in museum collections were looted from graves, and are not displayable." Shanawdithit died in hospital, of the tuberculosis which killed so many of her people, in 1829, and in death partly regained her name, though spelled wrongly. The register of burials for St John's in Newfoundland records: "Interred Nancy, Shanawdithe ... (very probably the last of the aborigines)".