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MIKLÓS VASSÁNYI
situation. This is also to say that my interest here goes first and foremost to
the anthropological rather than the historical facet of such incidents as I aim
to better understand why sheer violence so frequently erupted, often with
clear indications of a set-up, or preliminary planning on one side or the other.
We shall focus on the barter-and-massacre case reported by a survivor of
Captain Henry Hudson’s fourth voyage (1610-1611) and on the kidnapping¬
and-murder case partially witnessed by young man William Baffin, on his
first voyage to the West-Greenlandic coasts of Baffin Bay (1612), when he
served captain James Hall as a navigator. Putting ourselves into the shoes of
the Kalaallit and the Inuktitut, we shall attempt to find out what they may
have experienced upon the intrusion of European newcomers into Aboriginal
lands, and what may have triggered the aggressive behaviour of both parties
in these conflicts. Finally, we are going to analyze the happenings in order
to see what hidden agendas of habitat protection or, respectively, imperial
geopolitical strategies predestined the involved peoples to violence.
THE LOSS OF THE GREENLAND SAILING ROUTES FOR
THE DANES IN THE 15™ AND 16™ CENTURIES
The historical context of the events we are looking into has been extensively
reconstructed, especially by Finn Gad,* Samuel E. Morison,* and Wendell
H. Oswalt.* However, in order to see the religious, political and economic
commitments and motivations behind the voyages Baffin’s captain, James
Hall, undertook in Danish service to West Greenland towards the close of
the 16" and in the early 17" centuries, we must go back to the beginning
of the 15‘ century when regular communication by sea with the Greenland
Normann colony first stalled before — according to written evidence - it
ceased completely around 1406 or 1410 at the latest, with the consequence
that the memory of the sailing routes from Norway to Greenland gradually
sank into oblivion. As the distinguished historian of Greenland, F. Gad. put
it, “it is evident in the source material on the Greenland navigation towards
the end of the fourteenth century and well into the fifteenth century that
no single ship intentionally sailed for Greenland. We are only told of ships
that were blown off different courses before reaching Greenland." This
2 Finn Gad, The History of Greenland. Earliest Times to 1700, trans. Ernst Dupont, London, C.
Hurst and Co., 1970. Original Danish edition: Gronlands Historie I: Indtil 1700, Kobenhavn,
Nyt Nordisk Forlag, 1967.
3 Samuel Eliot Morison, The European Discovery of America. The Northern Voyages AD 500¬
1600, Vol. 1, New York, Oxford University, 1971.
4 Wendell H. Oswalt, Eskimos and Explorers, Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska,
1999, First edition: Novato (CA), Chandler and Sharp Publishers, 1979.
5 Gad, History of Greenland, 151.
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