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SECOND CONTACT: PATTERNS OF “SECOND ENCOUNTERS”...
specifically vis-a-vis Hall. The murderer must have simply harboured revenge
on account of previous year’s kidnap, and when he spotted the only person
among the English he remembered, he struck “resolutely.” In all likelihood,
Baffin’s conjecture is right, since no other person was attacked than the one
and only returning visitor, despite the threatening eventuality of a sweeping
general onslaught. The explanation that a kidnap was retaliated by a murder
as a personal vendetta hence seems a satisfactory one.
CONCLUSION: THE HIDDEN STRATEGIES
OF HABITAT PROTECTION AND LAND ACQUISITION
On reading the sources, we may be inclined to think that the Inuit’s tendency
to protect their habitat and food resources, and the great European empires’
desire to acquire unknown lands are strivings standing very far apart from one
another. This is true but my point is that they are opposite sides of the same
coin. In a very general sense, in both cases, smaller or bigger groups of humans
try to secure means of survival. Humans are beings with past, present, and
future, and hence, with foresight and afterthought, providence and memory,
emotional motivations, morals and rational considerations. All of which yields
the possibility of planning, of having an agenda that is, in cases like the above,
more often than not hidden. Even though an encounter between Inuit and
Europeans frequently resulted in simple barter trade, a win-win situation,
historical reality demonstrates that perhaps just as often, hidden strategies
took over and shunted human behaviour. These agendas were mutually hidden
though ad intra well known, and as far as the competing European powers were
concerned, generally public among them. In the case of a political formation
like the Danish Kingdom or Great Britain, this agenda, completely hidden
from the Inuit, implied an imperial strategy of land acquisition, of territorial
expansion because of a horror vacui; a part played in a geopolitical game, with
lots of power, wealth, and human lives at stake. In this game, an Aboriginal
individual was seldom thought of as a human person but was considered an
unimportant factor or, at most, as an accessory to something material or
politically rewarding for an empire: as a potential subject, to be converted,
as manpower, a trade partner. Most of the time, Aboriginals in these early
phases of European expansion in the North were not even viewed as obstacles
in the way of reaching, for instance, the Northwest Passage or a particular
silver ore, let alone as the owners of their land. Land had to be taken not from
the Aboriginals but from rivalling political powers. But Baffin’s testimony of a
personal revenge case just proves the humanity of — an Aboriginal murderer
who retaliated a murder or kidnap committed by a European explorer.
A moral concept, revenge is irreducibly human. For on the other hand, even
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