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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 +225 +
