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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 kidnappingand-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 5001600, 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. * 210
