"A friend warned me at the time that regret would find me eventually. I didn't believe him."
The author has gone on record as saying that if his novel is about any one thing more than it is about any other thing, it is a novel about regret. The quote above distills the essence of the problem with doing things that one may come to regret. It is so difficult to appreciate beforehand the consequences that will come about of an action that instills the sense of remorse. Think how the times you may have been warned about doing something you would come to regret that you went ahead and did anyway. How would things have turned out differently if you could have actually felt—tangibly and viscerally—the pain that would come with wishing you could go back in time and change the past. This is what is being expressed here, but it will take more than three-hundred pages for Buchan to reach this point. Of course, had those actions and events which caused the regret of the future not taken place in the place, there would be no novel. So, creatively speaking, regret is a strong foundation upon which to build a story.
It was the sound of his father's voice that woke John Peyton, a half-strangled shouting across the narrow hall that separated the upstairs bedrooms in the winter house…He lay listening to the silence that always followed his father's nightmares, neither of the men shifting in their beds or making any other sound, both pretending they weren't awake.
The nightmares of John Senior—father of the John Peyton mentioned above—is the image that the novel really commences upon, though a few pages of prefatory material exist prior to this excerpt from the opening paragraph of chapter one. Indeed, even before this image of John, Jr. lying in bed listening to the terrible soundtrack of his father’s inner demons playing out in his sleeping head, there is an entry from the Dictionary of Newfoundland English providing a synonym for nightmares as the “Old Hag.” What is especially of interest is that John Senior is not the only person haunted by nightmarish visitations and memories.
Above Badger Bay Brook the landmarks and features they passed were mostly nameless, and whenever the party came upon a river feeding into the Exploits or crossed a significant point of land, Buchan called the men into a huddle and they shouted suggestions over the wind. They dropped names behind themselves like stones set to mark the path out of wilderness—Cull’s Knoll; Buchan's Island, Deep Woody Point; Surprise Brook for a stream that Peyton had fallen into through the ice. Richmond made it known he wanted something named for himself and each time was disappointed to be overlooked.
The book ends with A Note on the Beothuk. The Beothuk is the name of the indigenous aboriginal inhabitants of Newfoundland and history remembers them as the only such group in North America to be entirely wiped from existence. Or, at least, as the author generously puts it: "Some individuals may have continued to lead a sequestered existence [afterwards], but as a cultural group the Beothuk had vanished." All that is really left of an entire culture is, therefore, its name. This quote of European invaders taking the land for their own and renaming landmarks and features after themselves could not be more self-explanatory relative to the story of the Beothuk. It is also, of course, an aspect of its history that some in Newfoundland look upon with a great deal of regret.
