The Raw and the Cold: Five English Sailors in Sixteenth-Century Nunavut

Historians have long known that the English explorer Martin Frobisher left five men behind on his voyage to Baffin Island in 1576. Those men later vanished from the historical record. But the mystery of their disappearance is only the start of the story. Investigating the texts surrounding Frobisher...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The William and Mary quarterly 2013-01, Vol.70 (1), p.3-40
Main Author: Mancall, Peter C
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Arctic regions
Engraving
Expeditions
Folktales
Frobisher, Martin
Inuit
Kayaks
Linguistic anthropology
Missing persons
Narratives
Ocean navigation
Sailing ships
Sailors
Seas
Travel
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Summary:Historians have long known that the English explorer Martin Frobisher left five men behind on his voyage to Baffin Island in 1576. Those men later vanished from the historical record. But the mystery of their disappearance is only the start of the story. Investigating the texts surrounding Frobisher's three voyages to Nunavut along with other kinds of evidence, such as folklore and oral history, invests the saga of the five men with different meaning. First, microhistorical analysis can reveal the shifting place of the Arctic in English plans for the Western Hemisphere. Second, the differing stories about what happened to the men serve as a reminder that in this part of the world the fate of Europeans depended on maintaining good relations with local peoples. The Inuit knew how to survive the frigid climate of Nunavut, but the English did not. Lacking the kinds of advantages that the English possessed in other sites of encounter, the newcomers redefined their expectations: the North would be a place to harvest resources and perhaps traverse, but not territory that invited settlement. The Inuit remained the masters of the Arctic.
ISSN:0043-5597
1933-7698
DOI:10.5309/willmaryquar.70.1.0003