Notes
“Report of the Select Committee on the Expedition to the Arctic Seas”, House of Commons, April 28, 1834, in James Clark Ross, Narrative of the second voyage of Captain Ross to the Arctic regions […] 1829-33, London, 1834, BiblioBazaar, 2008, 138.
Andrew Lambert, The Gates of Hell : Sir John Franklin’s Tragic Quest for the Northwest Passage, New Haven & London : Yale University Press, 2009.
See Jen Hill, White horizon : the Arctic in the nineteenth-century British imagination, Albany : State University of New York Press, 2008. See also Francis Spufford, I may be some time : Ice and the English Imagination, London : Faber and Faber, 1996 ; Robert G. David, The Arctic in the British Imagination, 1818-1914, Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2000 ; Eric G. Wilson, The Spiritual History of Ice : romanticism, science, and the imagination, New York ; Houndmills, England : Palgrave Macmillan, 2003 ; Russell A. Potter, Arctic Spectacles : The Frozen North in Visual Culture, 1818-1875, Seattle & London : University of Washington Press, 2007.
Lorenzo Pasqualigo, letter dated August 23, 1497, in H. P. Biggar (ed.), The Precursors of Jacques Cartier 1497-1534 : A Collection of Documents Relating to the Early History of the Dominion of Canada, Ottawa : Government Printing Bureau, 1911, 14.
J. A. Williamson, The Cabot Voyages and Bristol Discovery under Henry VII, Cambridge : Hakluyt Society, 1962, 143.
Karen Kupperman, Roanoke, The Abandoned Colony (2nd ed.), Lanham, Md : Rowman & Littlefield, 2007, 172.
Mary C. Fuller, Remembering the Early Modern Voyage, New York : Palgrave, Macmillan, 2008, 15.
“De navigatione” (“An Embarkation Poem”), in David B. Quinn & Neil M. Cheshire (eds.), The New Found Land of Stephen Parmenius, Toronto : Toronto University Press, 1972, 75-105.
Letter to R. Hakluyt, 6. Aug 1583 (published in Principal Navigations, 1589), D. B. Quinn and N. M. Cheshire (eds.), The New Found Land of Stephen Parmenius, op. cit., 175.
Mary-Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes : Travel Writing and Transculturation, London & New York : Routledge, 1992, 6.
Several accounts relate Frobisher’s voyages: George Best’s A true discourse of the late voyages of discoverie […] under the conduct of Martin Frobisher, London : 1578 (edition used : Richard Collinson ed., London : Hakluyt Society, 1867, reprntd 1963), was published shortly after the return of the last expedition. Separate accounts were also published for each of the three voyages : Dionise Settle, A true reporte of the laste voyage into the west and northwest regions, &c. 1577. […] by Capteine Frobisher, London : 1577 ; Thomas Ellis, A true report of the third and last voyage into Meta incognita : […] Anno. 1578, London : 1578 ; Christopher Hall, The First Voyage of Master Martin Frobisher to the North-West, in R. Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, London : 1589. For Hall, Settle and Ellis, the edition used is Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, Glasgow : J. MacLehose &Sons, 1903, vol. VII, 204-242.
Pierre Bourdieu, Ce que parler veut dire : l’économie des échanges linguistiques, Paris : Fayard, 1982 ; Stuart Hall (ed.), Representation : cultural representations and signifying practices, London : the Open University, 1997; Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power : Theories in Subjection, Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1997.
John H. Elliott, “The Old World and the New Revisited”, in K. Kupperman (ed.), America in European consciousness, 1493-1750, Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1995, 394-395 ; see also John Parker, Books to Build an Empire : A Bibliographical History of English Overseas Interests to 1620, Amsterdam : N. Israel, 1965, 93 ; William C. Spengemann, A New World of Words, Redefining Early American Literature, New Haven : Yale University Press, 1994, 134.
Richard Hore, “Voyage to Newfoundland” (1536), in R. Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, op. cit., 517-519, reproduced in D. B. Quinn et al.(eds), New American World : A Documentary History of North America to 1612, New York : Arno Press, 1979, vol. 1, 207.
As reported by Michael Lok, Frobisher’s main financial backer, in a private letter (State paper, BM, Cotton collection, reproduced in G. Best, op. cit., 87).
Dyonise Settle, A true Report of the last Voyage into the West and Northwest regions in 1577 worthily achieved by Captain Frobisher […] With a description of the people there inhabiting, and other circumstances notable, London, 1577.
Gilbert’s Discourse was published 10 years later, in 1576.
Ibidem in Quinn, New American World, op. cit., vol. 3, 11.
Ibid., 9.
Parmenius’s Embarkation Poem, op. cit., 87.
Hall, The First Voyage of Master Martin Frobisher, op. cit., 209 ; Best, A true discourse of the late voyages of discoverie, op. cit., 281 ; Lok in 1576, in Collinson, op. cit., 87.
Hall, The First Voyage, op. cit., 209.
Settle, A true reporte of the laste voyage, op. cit., 220.
Best, A true discourse of the late voyages of discoverie, op. cit., 73.
Ibidem, 72.
David B. Quinn’s claim that the English only very rarely used the term “savage” when describing the Inuit, and only in context of violent conflict (“This New Prey : Eskimos in Europe in 1567, 1576, and 1577”, in Indians and Europe, Christian F. Feest, ed. Aachen : Herodot, 1987, 68), needs to be re-examined : not only does Best use the term a third as much as the phrase “country people” (9 occurrences of “savage”, 6 for “country people”), but even in the course of relatively peaceful interaction : when for instance, the English travelers search an Inuit camp with the help of a hostage taken a few days before, they refer to him as their “savage” (Best, A true discourse of the late voyages of discoverie, op. cit., 136).
Ibid., 227, 242, 249, 269, 271, 281.
Ibid., 73.
Christopher Hall was captain of the Gabriell ; his account was written in 1576 but published for the first time in 1589 only, in Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1903, vol. VII, 204-211).
During the third expedition, Best was captain of the Anne Francis, one of the 15 boats that the fleet comprised.
Best, A true discourse of the late voyages of discoverie, op. cit., 73.
Ibid., 288.
See Peter C. Mancall who analyses the disappearance of the five men as a cautionary tale both for the Inuit and the Europeans (“The Raw and the Cold : Five abandoned Sailors in the Sixteenth Century Northwest Atlantic”, to be published in the forthcoming American Origins, vol. I of The Oxford History of the United States, New York : Oxford University Press).
Ibid., 147.
Charles Francis Hall, Life with the Esquimaux, London : Samson Low, Son, & Marston, 1864, vol. 2, 78, 151.
Lok in Best, A true discourse of the late voyages of discoverie, op. cit., 83.
Ibidem, 74.
Ibid., 85 ; our emphasis.
J. Parker, Books to build an Empire, op. cit., 69.
Lok’s letter to the Queen, 22 April 1577, in Best, A true discourse of the late voyages of discoverie, op. cit., 93.
N. Cheshire, D. B. Quinn, et al., “Frobisher’s Eskimos in England”, Archivaria, n.10 (Summer 1980), 24.
European travellers did not realize until much later that their germs had such a devastating effect on indigenous peoples. As Best notes with characteristic self-assurance, the first Inuit man captured by Frobisher did not die of his injuries, but “lived until he came in Englande, and then he died of colde which he had taken at sea” (Best, A true discourse of the late voyages of discoverie, op. cit., 74).
Lok in Best, A true discourse of the late voyages of discoverie, op. cit., 83. The second ship of the expedition, the Michaell, returned to England after encountering ice off Greenland.
Best, A true discourse of the late voyages of discoverie, op. cit., 74.
Ibidem, 74.
Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society, Glencoe, Ill : Free Press, 1958, 51.
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, from More to Shakespeare, Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1980, 227.
A reproduction of the drawings of the three captives (Prints and Drawings of the British Museum), attributed to John White, can be seen on the website of the Canadian Museum of Civilization at : <http://www.civilization.ca/cmc/exhibitions/hist/frobisher/freng01e.shtml> (last accessed October 19 2014).
Best, A true discourse of the late voyages of discoverie, op. cit., 149.
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, op. cit., 233.
Mary-Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes, op. cit., 7.
Settle, A true reporte of the laste voyage, op. cit., 223.
Best, A true discourse of the late voyages of discoverie, op. cit., 23, 19.
Ibidem, 220.
Ibid., 151.
Settle, A true reporte of the laste voyage, op. cit., 223 (our emphasis).
Best, A true discourse of the late voyages of discoverie, op. cit., 249.
Immolation as opposed to drowning is another cultural marker which reinforces the divide between the two groups: fire implicitly connects the English to the Prometheus myth, which would seem to exclude the Inuit and their raw-food diet from mankind.
Settle, A true reporte of the laste voyage, op. cit., 224 ; Best, A true discourse, op. cit., 140, 283.
Settle, A true reporte of the laste voyage, op. cit., 224.
Best, A true discourse of the late voyages of discoverie, op. cit., 286; see also Settle, A true reporte of the laste voyage, op. cit., 224.
Best, A true discourse of the late voyages of discoverie, op. cit., 269.
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London ; New York : Routledge, 2004, 85.
The inunnguaq, a human-shaped type of inukshut, was chosen as the Vancouver Winter Olympics logo in 2010. The inunnguaq may actually be a very concrete example of colonial hybridity : archaeologist Robert McGhee convincingly argues that the human-like – or cross-like – inukshuk, of a recent origin and found in Southern Baffin Island and Northern Hudson Bay, may have been directly inspired by the stone crosses first erected by Frobisher’s men (The Arctic voyages of Martin Frobisher an Elizabethan Adventure, Montreal : McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001, 127).
Best, A true discourse of the late voyages of discoverie, op. cit., 281-287.
Ibidem, 283.
George Steiner, Language and Silence, New York : Atheneum, 1967, 15.
Best, A true discourse of the late voyages of discoverie, op. cit., 73.
See note 29 above.
Hall, op. cit., 211.
All references to Shakespeare are taken from the Norton Shakespeare, St. Greenblatt et al. (ed.), New York, London : Norton, 1997.
For the use of “felicitous” ambiguity in Othello, see Greenblatt, Norton Shakespeare, op. cit., 332.
Settle, A true reporte of the laste voyage, op. cit., 224.
Best, A true discourse of the late voyages of discoverie, op. cit., 288; see also 265, “They found such plenty of black ore of the same sort which was brought into England this last year, that if the goodness might answer […]” (our emphasis).
Settle, A true reporte of the laste voyage, op. cit., 219.
McGhee, The Arctic voyages of Martin Frobisher an Elizabethan Adventure, op. cit., 173.
Ill-equipped teams dug the hard Baffin Island rock for a month in severe weather conditions – with temperatures in August just barely above freezing and almost daily rain and sleet (McGhee, The Arctic voyages of Martin Frobisher, op. cit.,123-124).
Best, A true discourse of the late voyages of discoverie, op. cit., 280.
Ibidem, 258. For similar accounts of social harmony, see also 137.
P. Bourdieu, Propos sur le champ politique, Lyon : Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2000, 51-61.
Best, A true discourse of the late voyages of discoverie, op. cit., 265.
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