So abundant was this bird, and so fat, that its body was sometimes used as fuel, or as a lamp.

In the summertime their fish and flesh diet could be varied by the innumerable berries growing wild--strawberries, raspberries, currants, cranberries, and whortleberries.

The _capillaire_ plant yielded a lusciously sweet, sugary substance.[15] [Footnote 15: This was the Moxie plum or creeping snowberry (_Chiogenes hispidula_).] [Illustration: GREAT AUKS, GANNETS, PUFFINS, AND GUILLEMOTS] The Beothiks were a tall, good-looking people, with large black eyes and a light-coloured skin.

The early French and Biscayan seamen, who resorted to the coasts of Newfoundland for the whale fisheries, reported these "Red Indians" to be "an ingenious and tractable people, if well used, who were ready to help the white men with great labour and patience in the killing, cutting-up, and boiling of whales, and the making of train oil, without other expectation of reward than a little bread or some such small hire".
Yet from the beginning of the seventeenth century the Beothiks--then about four thousand in number--were ill-treated by the European fishermen who frequented the Newfoundland coasts.

They soon greatly decreased in numbers, and became very shy of white men.