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With art and maps by Shanawdithit
The pencil drawings are intricate: slender dark lines marching carefully across the pages, glimpses into a people long believed extinguished. Shanawdithit, a Beothuk woman in her 20s, drew them nearly two centuries ago in the months before she died. Only a dozen of her drawings are known to exist today.
Five are maps of the lake in central Newfoundland, today known as Red Indian Lake, where Shanawdithit’s people made camp. But they are not mainly cartographic. Instead, they are accounts of what Shanawdithit saw: where heavily armed British settlers captured Shanawdithit’s aunt, Demasduit, in March 1819; where Demasduit’s husband, Nonosabasut, the last known Beothuk chief, was shot and killed, along with his brother, trying to convince the English to give her back; and, drawn in the red that symbolized both her people’s ochre decorations and their blood, the routes that the Beothuk took as they fled the muskets and bayonets that day.
There are pioneering moments which have such an impact on humankind that they become immortalized in our collective memory. The moment Thomas Edison patented the lightbulb, or Marie Curie became the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize, or Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. Then there are other, quirkier, lesser-known world firsts from the Cotswolds which could be just likely to stick in people’s minds if only they heard about them.
World Woolsack champion In 2007, Pete Roberts set the world’s fastest men’s time in the World Woolsack Championships in Tetbury with 45.94 seconds. Competitors raced up and down Gumstool Hill with 27kg of wool on their shoulders, starting near the Royal Oak pub and finishing at The Crown – around 240 yards.