I’ll warn you that this article includes an image that’s more than a tad racist. I’ve put it at the bottom. I’m hoping that your journey through this article will put its inclusion in context.

I didn’t plan to write this one. I was looking for information on the old loading dock for a walking trail sign in the journals of James Howley. Howley, as you may know, was the man who mapped Newfoundland. In 1878 he was in the area of Little Bay mine working toward that map. I was looking for an old wharf in his journal but like everyone else in Newfoundland lately I ended up looking for a doctor. I found a whole lot more. I don’t know what I’m going to find when I start digging. That said, I never expect unicorns. This one has unicorns.

To tell this story right I’ll need to give you a refresh on Little Bay’s earliest history. The town of Little Bay was founded by Baron Franz Ellershausen and ran by his partner Adolph Guzman. It was built to support a copper mine. The copper deposit that started it all was first discovered by a hunter named Robert Colbourne. Colbourne uncovered the ore accidentally but he couldn’t claim it right away. This was because the lease for the land was held by Guzman and a man named Dr. William Stirling. As luck would have it their lease was about to run out. Colbourne’s plan was to wait until that happened before claiming the lease and announcing his big find. He was going to be rich. There was one problem. Colbourne had a big mouth. The Baron found out and sent someone to sort Colbourne out. The person he sent was Dr. Henry Eales.

This next part is documented by Howley who found Eales at his camp in Wild Bight (modern day Beachside). Dr. Eales was freaking out because he didn’t know how he was going to complete this important mission that the Baron had sent him on. He asks Howley for advice. Howley concocts the plan to tell Colbourne that they already know about his ruse and that they can find the ore on their own without him. Colbourne takes the bait and shows Eales the find in a last ditch attempt to get anything for his discovery. What he received was a bag of flour and a pat on the back. The location he gave up would be sold for 2.2 million dollars just a couple of years later. In rereading Howley what stood out to me was the vital role Dr. Eales played in the venture. He was pivotal to Little Bay’s history but I didn’t know anything about him.

So, like I do, I decided to get to know him. He proved to be more than a little elusive. Getting his details was a challenge but I’m stubborn. I didn’t have much to go on. Just his name really – Dr. Eales. A quick search of the newspaper databases gave me little else, just a few mentions when he boarded a steamer.  Genealogical work hadn’t been done on him either so even finding his dates of birth and death proved an undertaking and once found they provided me with little else. This one wasn’t going to be easy but the harder they are to figure out, the more I want to know them. Like I said – stubborn.

Dr. Eales had me transfixed. The part he played was important but brief. He must have held an esteemed position but there was little mention of him. Checking the mining histories told me he had shipped ore from a mine called Burton’s Pond. I combed over Howley’s journals for more details. Two stood out. The first was that Eales was responsible for designing the tramway at Betts Cove. This was an insight. Betts Cove was the first Newfoundland town created by the Baron and his posse. So maybe Eales had been called to do that. This could explain why he seemed  tight with the Germans. The second was that he was friends with Governor Glover. John Hawley Glover had only taken the position of Governor of Newfoundland in 1876. 1876 was also the earliest reference I’d found placing Eales on the island. This could be something…

In Glover’s biography I found a brief mention of Eales. It had him serving on the HMS Prometheus. This was good. This put Dr. Eales in the British Navy. Things started to unlock from there. I quickly found that Dr. Eales became an assistant surgeon in 1849 and staff surgeon in 1859. That flushed him out a little but the bigger clue was the name of his ship – HMS Prometheus. I could track a ship. I found that during Eales tenure onboard it was in Africa on an anti-slavery mission. In fact it was stationed in a harbour at Lagos under the command of Norman Bedingfield.

Lagos is in modern day Nigeria so I started looking for first hand accounts from that time and place. And guess whose writings I found? None other than Sir Richard Francis Burton. Burton’s exploration of Africa is heaped in controversy and the stuff of legend but more importantly for this story is the fact that he documented everything he did. The account of his trek into inland Africa made mention of his two accompanying companions by name. They were Commander Bedingfield and his staff surgeon Dr. Henry Eales. Now to give you some temporal context this is 1861. American slavery would end in 1865 and the European scramble for Africa wouldn’t officially start until 1885. The interior of the African continent was largely unmapped and unexplored by Europeans. It was referred to as ‘The White Man’s Grave’ because most sent in failed to come back out. This was largely due to disease. Dr. Eales was brought along because he had come up with some treatments. So this was why Burton wanted him along but if you’re like me you’re probably wondering why Eales willingly joined such a perilous jaunt. I’m glad you asked. The answer is unicorns. You read that right. According to Burton, Dr. Eales was a romantic who believed unicorns were real and that they roamed there. He wanted to be the man to discover them for all that fancy scientific prestige and whatnot. This was wild. Now I don’t want to sidetrack too far into Burton’s story but he also mentioned a sketch that he drew during the journey. Commander Bedingfield was meeting with the Akuna. Eales sat on Bedingfield’s right. Burton, from behind them, sketched the scene. This is why I’ve included the picture at the bottom. The sketch by none other than Sir Richard Francis Burton shows the back of our Dr. Eales’ head. What an unusual find!

Next we’ll fast forward to 1862 when Commander Bedingfield gets the Prometheus stuck on a rock. Burton pens a letter back to England mocking him and Britain decides Lagos needs more oversight. They send down a Governor named Freeman. Accompanying him is an assistant with some sailing experience by the name of Glover. Yes, it’s the same Glover but don’t jump ahead of me now. Allow me to take you there. Glover manages to unstick the boat which impresses everyone and Burton documents the event while pointing out that this Glover guy is going places. When Freeman died in 1865 Glover was the obvious choice for replacement and so got the governor job. Glover used his new power to make Eales the town doctor and the two became chums but not long after that Eales comes down with a case of extreme dysentery and shits himself all the way back to England. He doesn’t have enough time served for a pension so his new buddy Glover goes to bat for him.

Obviously, not everyone in Africa was happy with the increasing European power on display and Glover’s administration winds up in an armed conflict with the Egbas at Ikorodu. Glover leads his enemy into a trap and a bunch of people die. Now the British mission in Lagos was anti-slavery and it’s reported that this was a conflict with slavers. You can make of that as you will but I will point out that this trap was set in a quarry. Eales was back home in Britain at this time but one of his many talents was surveying and we’re not quite sure why Glover moved him to the shore in the first place. About now you’re no doubt remembering that this whole narrative voyage started with historical mining in Newfoundland. The relevant piece of this Glover fiasco for our story is that back in Britain Dr. Eales got called in for a cross examination. This provides us with three pages worth of minutes transcribed in which Eales goes to bat for his buddy Glover just like Glover had done for him when he caught that bad case of the super poops. In the end Mr. Glover got a reward for his efforts. What was his big prize you might ask. It was Newfoundland. He gets to be the Governor of Newfoundland. Do you think they’re even now? Kinda sounds like Glover owes Eales one. He wouldn’t be the last.

This brings us back to 1876. You’ll remember that this is the same year we can first place Dr. Henry Eales on the rock. So now that we’ve come full circle lets reexamine the few references we have to Dr. Eales in Newfoundland while I propose a reinterpretation of events. But before that lets do a quick recap on the situation in Newfoundland with a few more details added for good measure.

In 1865 a surveyor named Robert Knight discovered the Betts Cove and Burton’s Pond deposits but for reasons unknown, the government interfered with his attempts to get them developed. Knight sells it to our Germans to pay off some owed debts and dies broke in 1873 without seeing the claims worked. Adolf Guzman shows up and starts developing Betts Cove and his boss, the Baron Franz von Ellershausen, followed him there  in 1874. The Betts Cove mine opened in 1875. Glover became Governor of Newfoundland  in 1876 and that same year Dr. Eales leased Burton’s Pond. We first find Eales travelling north on a steamship in November that year. Eales sends off a bunch of ore from Burton’s Pond but he also designs the tramway for Betts Cove.

I think this explains what Eales was doing in Newfoundland. The Baron was bloody selective about appointments in his towns and the surgeon he had called for was Dr. Stafford in Montreal. Eales wasn’t here for no doctoring. It was his surveying and engineering talents they wanted and Burton’s Pond was probably his payment. It wasn’t enough though and Howley has documented the doctor’s disappointment with that operation. Nevertheless, we can now see how he got in so tight with the Germans. But for how he knew to come to Newfoundland so impossibly immediately we have to turn to his relationship with Governor Glover.

I’ll point you to the writings of Reverend Harvey first. Harvey gets a bad wrap for exaggerating and misremembering stuff but I see no reason to doubt his account here as it’s backed up by Glover’s own record. Harvey travelled across Newfoundland with the Governor in 1878 to see the new mine being worked at Little Bay. One of the men in their party was our man Dr. Henry Eales. Howley, on the other hand, recorded this event in 1880. The popular opinion is that Howley got the date wrong. I don’t think that’s what’s going on. The journal of the house of assembly mentions that Governor Glover took an annual trip to visit various parts of Newfoundland and I know for certain that he went to Betts Cove on the HMS Gulnare in 1877. I would suggest that he made this summer trip multiple times and visited Henry Eales. Rev. Harvey points out that the two men had a lot to talk about as they’d both been to Africa and Howley mentions what a grand time the party enjoyed together. They were old friends.  I think we can safely say Eales came to Newfoundland because of Glover and placing his talents in the mining region was an obvious choice.

With all of this in mind let’s reconsider the role Dr. Eales played in the starting of Little Bay. Robert Colbourne discovers the deposit. The Baron dispatches Eales to get it from him. Eales manages to pull off the impossible and now they have a find worth millions that they’ve paid for with a bag of flour. They have Dr. Eales to thank for that. What does Eales get out of it? I think I know. Now I’ve tossed a lot of names at you so far so I’ll forgive you if you’ve forgotten one from the beginning – a certain Twillingate doctor by the name of William Stirling. The lease that Colbourne was waiting to run out wasn’t just in Guzman’s name. It also had Dr. Stirling’s name on it but consider if Stirling wasn’t privy to the plot. So the situation is such that the Germans owed Eales an awfully big favour. I propose that it was in order to pay that back that they changed the name on the claim from Stirling to Eales. They pulled off such a feat because they had an ace up their sleeve. Baron Ellershausen’s lawyer was William Whiteway and Whiteway was Newfoundland’s premier. So it was all easy peasy, right? Nope, not so easy. Maybe it would have been but William Stirling wasn’t going down without a fight.

In Howley’s journal we find a scene in which Eales shows up in a panic. Ellershausen had sent him to find Howley to help settle a dispute on the claim. Dr. Eales heads off to find the maps. Howley thinks this settles it. I suspect Stirling didn’t agree. But now we know there was a dispute regarding the Little Bay claim. This is still only 1878 – year one for Little Bay. The government sends two men (Donnelly and Murry) to visit Little Bay the following year. The newspaper coverage paints it a friendly visit but the journal of the house of assembly recorded things differently. They were sent out to settle an ownership dispute. How much do you want to bet this is all the same thing? The Whiteway papers record that Dr. Stirling regained partial control of the lease in 1881. In 1882 the lease got split between the bunch. Included on the lease now are; Baron Ellershausen, his son in-law William Colchester, his business partner Adolph Guzman, the character of our focus Dr. Henry Eales, and their rival in this whole operation the good Dr. William Stirling. Whiteway concocted this everybody-wins solution and Dr. Stirling was most upset with the arrangement. I’m going to suggest that William Stirling wasn’t the only one it managed to piss off. Things are finalized in 1882 but this feud started back in 1878. I don’t think it took time off for good behaviour. So with that in mind consider the context of the departure of the Germans and our Dr. Henry Eales.

I have to critique some of Wendy Martin’s work. Before I do, I’ll say that her work is exceptional. That said, something has long sat weird with me. It’s how suddenly the Germans abandoned the Little Bay property. Martin suggests that following some financial losses, the unexpected death of the Baron’s friend William Dickson in 1880 was the catalyst. I’d like to reconsider  this conclusion. I don’t see the Baron as someone who gives up on a project because he’s sad.  I know from the Baron’s first attempt to sell the Betts Cove property that it required the approval of a board of directors. He had to buy them out first before he could include it with the sale of Little Bay. I therefore wonder if the upcoming addition of Dr. Stirling’s name to the Little Bay lease risked offsetting the German’s control going forward and the loss of a supporter made it painfully clear that Stirling’s inclusion could do them all a lot more damage later.

Let’s consider some other things that happen around this time that have largely gone unexplained. Guzman suddenly ordered his men to fill Peyton shaft with rocks. That never made sense… but wait a minute isn’t Stirling’s name on that claim? The Germans next moved over to work on the Hall’s Bay shaft. Martin points out that Whiteway took a shot at getting Stirling’s name off that one too. It didn’t work. That shaft was later renamed to Stirling shaft after Dr. Stirling’s daughter, Georgina Stirling, the famous opera singer, added her voice. So I propose that the sudden sale of Little Bay mine by the Baron can be better explained with reference to the rest of these events. It was the choice to put Henry Eales on the Little Bay lease that set in motion a feud with William Stirling. That feud made the future of the whole operation untenable. This is what I ended up at. I was just trying to find a doctor!

I’ll mention a few extra facts to support my interpretation. I’ve never found Dr. Stirling in Little Bay during any of this mess but he makes appearances there after it’s all over as an honoured guest. The next mine manager following Guzman was E.C. Wallace and one of the first things he does is head to Twillingate to stand in William Stirling’s daughter’s wedding. And finally, when Wallace is later injured in Africa it’s a doctor he knew from Betts Cove that informs the media as the two were pen pals. I’ll let you guess who that was. It wasn’t Dr. Eales. 

Henry Eales hightailed it out of Newfoundland. I believe it’s for the same reason the Germans did. They’d pissed off the wrong Twillingate doctor.  I can find no reference to Dr. Eales in Newfoundland after 1880 and in 1881 he’s back in Britain as recorded on the census there. In 1880 there was a return on Eales’ application for lease issued and from 1881 onward his royalty on the lease went unpaid. He was done with Newfoundland. He made an appearance at the unveiling of Glover’s bust in England after his death though so it looks like their friendship survived the ordeal.

Maybe the doctor left Newfoundland in a huff but I’d guess he did so with a cut of that 2.2 million dollars. If he cried about it at all he probably did so into piles and piles of cash. Dr. Henry Eales doesn’t appear to work again after this. The British census records him as a retired surgeon. In 1886 he married a single mother twenty years his junior and lived the rest of his life with her in England. It’s a solid guess that he spent those years regaling her with tales of mining and medicine… and maybe, just maybe he told her about that time he went looking for unicorns.

Henry Eales died in 1912. He was 89.