The Strange Death of Mistress Coffin Read Online Free PDF Page A

needed something worthy to fascinate and represent him while awaiting the promises of spring.

V

    T HE E XAMINATION AND D EPOSITION OF D ARBY S HAW,
this twentieth day of June,
anno Domini 1648,
Being Sworn saith:
    My name is Darby Shaw, carpenter and trader, of Robinson’s Falls since 1641. I am thirty-five, widowed, previously of Nottinghamshire, England, Parish Gotham.
    Assistant Magistrates:
Are you not an acquaintance or associate of Jared Higgins?
    Shaw:
Known him most of my life, Your Honors. We were boyhood friends. After my second wife, Mary, died in childbirth he helped me settle at the plantation. It was our first child, and we but married two years.
    Mgts.:
Your association with Higgins extended to trade, did it not?
    Shaw:
It did. We’d hunt and explore together. We’ve claimed some intervals and upland meadow together, know the best hunting lands from our travels and from the savages. Yes, he has helped me in the fur trade now and again.
    Whenever one of us needs help in some labor we ask one another first, provided there is payment enough for two.
    Mgts.:
You have trusted each other completely?
    Shaw:
Aye to that, Your Honors. Better than any other.
    Mgts.:
Your trade is directly through the savages? And you, as well as Higgins, consort with them and are welcomed by them?
    Shaw:
You can find better quarter with most savages than with some English plantations, Your Honors. More than one have remarked on that.
    Mgts.:
So they may have, Shaw. But our question is the extent of your trafficking and living with the savages.
    Shaw:
Well, in my case, much. Fur is my trade, now, Sirs. When I first came to the plantation I built and enlarged fair houses and mills. Fishing shallops even, everything there was to be built. But the fur proved ready and sovereign. Beaver, otter, musquash, martin, fox, raccoon—anything that’ll bring the price.
    Higgins comes along when he can spare the time, for about a third of my return.
    Myself, I travel and live with the lords of the soil weeks at a time, mostly in these parts. But I’ve been known as far as the interior lakes and all up the coast of Maine.
    We run a trading wigwam too. Moved some thousands of skins through last year on the beaver trade alone. Most of our corn comes in that way—worth five or six shillings a bushel.
    Mgts.:
Was Higgins well known among the savages?
    Shaw:
Times he has lived with them as I have. With some there is deeper trust than with others. But we’ve always abided the law—no trade in strong waters nor firearms, if that’s your meaning. Where trust is sound by proved trade, there is no necessity to break English law. Higgins’ relations with savages are less than mine. But he knows their ways well.
    Mgts.:
Then it is true as has been said of you that you have lived as a White Indian?
    Shaw:
I don’t deny that. For a time. But I live at Robinson’sFalls. When I return to the savages it is for the sake of my trade, and theirs. All benefit. I do, the savages do. I need not tell Your Honors the gain to England, to all Europe, from the wealth of these forests.
    Mgts.:
And Higgins too has lived as a White Indian?
    Shaw:
That too is true, though not so much as I. No one calls him so, as some have called me.
    Mgts.:
Shaw, now think you hard upon your oath. Might there be some savage barbarity here in this violence to Mistress Coffin?
    Shaw:
For a pound or two? A few kernels? They live not by such need. Nor inclined to such doings as befell the good woman. To what purpose? Our trade and relations with the savages is good. Better here than in plantations to the south. Even where peaceable relations are maintained. There is less treachery because more sharing the return.
    Mgts.:
Higgins had no entanglements to bring on such barbarity? Had Higgins, to your knowledge, ever pursued this woman? Sought her favors?
    Shaw:
To my knowledge there were neither adulterous favors sought, denied, nor granted. These are