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Abstract
George Best employs racial rhetoric in his exploration narrative to contemplate and order human difference. This essay examines the ways in which that racial rhetoric, informed by prior English understandings of sub-Saharan Africa, disrupts the narrative as Best grapples with cosmographical quandaries, not the least of which is how and where American indigenous groups fit into a larger world order. Close reading of the textual and rhetorical features of Best's narrative reveals the manner in which black Africans function as an essential but problematic mediating presence through which Best contemplates cultural differences, in particular the features of the Inuit, and attempts to reconcile moments of cognitive dissonance in which his expectations do not align with his experiences. Ultimately, the narrative suggests larger questions about how racial discourse and stereotypes about West Africa affected Englishmen's encounters with and representations of Native peoples in early Atlantic contact zones.
Notes
1. George Best, ‘A True Discourse of the Late Voyages of Discoverie for Finding of a Passage to Cathaya, by the North-West, under the Conduct of Martin Frobisher General’ [1578], in The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher, ed. Sir Richard Collinson (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1867), 54. There are several versions and reprints of Best's accounts of the voyages. Richard Hakluyt includes the accounts in his Principal Navigations (1589, 99). Please note that although Collinson's reprint confusingly attributes his text to ‘the first edition of Hakluyt's voyages (1578)’, it is in fact based on an edition first published in London in 1578 by Henry Bynnyman. Subsequent citations for Best's narrative refer to the Collinson reprint.
2. Best, A True Discourse, 55.
3. Best, A True Discourse, 55–6.
4. Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
5. Alden T. and Virginia Mason Vaughan, ‘Before Othello: Elizabethan Representation of Sub-Saharan Africans’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., 54 no. 1 (Jan. 1997): 19–44 (27).
6. Imtiaz H. Habib, Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677: Imprints of the Invisible (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 104.
7. My understanding of Best's text as manifesting moments of cognitive dissonance that he struggles to reconcile resonates with other studies of early modern European travel narratives. For some examples, see Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986); Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World from Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993); and more recently Michael Householder, Inventing Americans in the Age of Discovery: Narratives of Encounter (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011).
8. My approach shares similarities with Michael Householder's Inventing Americans. We both use Best's narrative to emphasise the problems of building empire. But his emphasis is on how Best imagines indigenous peoples; mine is on how he imagines black Africans and the ways in which that imagination drives his interpretations of the Inuit.
9. James McDermott, Martin Frobisher: Elizabethan Privateer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).
10. For a discussion of Frobisher's privateering (or pirating) activity, see McDermott, Martin Frobisher, 48–78.
11. Although he does not offer a detailed account of the people and land, the explorer and merchant William Hawkins stopped along the Sestos River on the Guinea coast in 1530, while en route to Brazil. While there, he ‘traffiqued with the Negros, and tooke of them Elephants teeth, and other commodities which that place yeeldeth’. See ‘A briefe relation of two sundry voyages made by the worshipful M. William Hawkins of Plimmouth . . . ’ in Hakluyt's The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation . . . (London, 1599), 700; Early English Books Online, http://eebo.chadwyck.com (accessed April 28, 2013).
12. Nearly a decade after his release, Frobisher testified before the Privy Council, offering details about his captivity and the political and cultural structures of the Portuguese and surrounding African communities. See ‘The Declaration of Martyne Frubishere’ in Calendar of State Papers . . . Public Record Office, Volume 5 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1867), 53; http://books.google.com (accessed April 24, 2013).
13. Frobisher's parents died when he was relatively young. As a result, he moved to London where his mother's relative York assumed responsibility for his upbringing and education. York, an investor and trader in those Guinea expeditions, orchestrated Frobisher's participation in the voyages. For more on Frobisher's experiences in Guinea see McDermott, Martin Frobisher, 28–47.
14. Richard Willes, The History of Travayle in the West and East Indies. . . . Gathered in Parte and Done into Englyshe by Richarde Eden. Newly Set in Order, Augmented, and Finished by Richarde Willes (London, 1577), 233.
15. Michael Lok was a travelling merchant who inherited the trade from his father. He spent most of the 1550s trading throughout southern Europe and the Mediterranean before returning to England. Between 1571 and 1576, he served as the London Agent for the Muscovy Company, whose originating mission was to find a northeast route to Asia. With Lok's help, Frobisher found the political and financial resources to support his expedition. For more detailed biographical information about Lok, see McDermott, Martin Frobisher, 103–19. See also McDermott's essay ‘Michael Lok, Mercer and Merchant Adventurer’ in Meta Incognita: A Discourse of Discovery. Vol. I, ed. Thomas H.B. Symons (Hull, Quebec: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1999), 119–46.
16. For a detailed discussion of the Inuit Frobisher brought back to England, see Neil Cheshire, et al., ‘Frobisher's Eskimos in England’ Archivaria 10 (1980 Summer): 23–50. See also Alden T. Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500–1776 (London: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1–20.
17. The expedition's financial strain created tension between Frobisher and Lok, eventually ending their partnership. Each man accused the other of financial irregularities and poor management.
18. Best, A True Discourse, 17. Importantly, Best does not write the first account of Frobisher's expeditions, nor does he write the only first-hand account. Other written accounts include Dionyse Settle's 1577 A True Report of the Last Voyage into the West and Northwest Regions. Settle was a gentleman passenger aboard the second voyage's flagship, the Ayde. In his narrative, he details the events of only that second voyage. We are provided with a number of accounts of the third voyage – from Thomas Ellis, a sailor, Edward Selman, appointed the voyage's official recorder, and Thomas Wiars, a passenger on one of the ships. For annotated versions of accounts from the third voyage, including several journals and logs, see James McDermott, The Third Voyage of Martin Frobisher to Baffin Island 1578 (London: The Hakluyt Society, 2001).
19. Best, A True Discourse, 17.
20. ‘The Abuses of Captayn Furbusher Agaynst the Companye, 1578’, in Collinson, The Three Voyages, 361.
21. For a more detailed discussion of the accusations both men faced, in addition to ‘The Abuses of Captayn Furbusher Agaynst the Companye, 1578’, see ‘The Slanderous Clamors of Captaine Furbusher Against Michael Lok 1578’, both supplemental documents in Collinson, The Three Voyages, 359–63.
22. Best, A True Discourse, 20.
23. Best, A True Discourse, 18.
24. Best, A True Discourse, 15.
25. Best, A True Discourse, 41.
26. Best, A True Discourse, 38.
27. David Whitford, The Curse of Ham in the Early Modern Era: The Bible and the Justifications for Slavery (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2009), 115.
28. Best, A True Discourse, 54.
29. Whitford, Curse of Ham, 109.
30. Aristotle theorises that the sun's effect on the earth causes the earth to exhale in a sense, and that exhalation can be vaporous/moist in nature or smoky/dry. Gold and other minerals are created when a vaporous exhalation (containing moisture) gets trapped beneath the earth's surface and forms into malleable substances. Heat matters, Aristotle explains in Book IV of Meteorology, because it fuels the process of concoction, a kind of physical ripening in which an object's internal heat or heat from the earth interacts with the dry or moist qualities of the object and/or the earth to achieve its perfect state. ‘For when concoction has taken place’, according to Aristotle, ‘we say that a thing has been perfected and has come to be itself. It is the proper heat of a thing that sets up this perfecting’ (Book IV, Part 2). Aristotle, ‘Book IV’, Meteorology [350 bce] trans. E.W. Webster, http://classics.mit.edu (accessed May 14, 2012).
31. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville recounts the travels of a French gentleman through regions of Africa and India. The text was first translated into English in the fifteenth century and was a widely popular source of information (and myths) about equatorial regions prior to the 16th century. Mandeville regaled readers with fantastical stories of one-footed Africans, men with dog-like faces, and the rich Christian King Prester John.
32. As Frank T. Kryza notes, ‘Timbuktu was a powerful “idea” as much as a place, its texture and weave to be shaped by each man who heard the tale. . . . to merchants it was a great center of commerce with streets paved with precious metal and gemstones embedded in every wall; to politicians it was the capital of a great central African empire’. Kryza, The Race for Timbuktu: In Search of Africa's City of Gold (New York: Ecco, 2006), xvii. For more information about gold's centrality in early European voyages to Africa see John W. Blake, West Africa: Quest for God and Gold 1454–1578 (London: Curzon Press, 1977).
33. See Leo Africanus, A Geographical Historie of Africa, trans. John Pory (London, 1600), 288. Early English Books Online, http://eebo.chadwyck.com (accessed November 3, 2012).
34. Raymond E. Dumett, El Dorado in West Africa: The Gold-mining Frontier, African Labor, and Colonial Capitalism in the Gold Coast, 1875–1900 (Athens, GA: Ohio UP, 1998), 1. For more on the pre-colonial trade relationship between Africa and Europe see Blake, West Africa; Philip D. Morgan, ‘Africa and the Atlantic, 1450–1820’, in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, ed. Jack D. Greene and Philip D. Morgan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 223–48 and A. Teixeira da Mota and P.E.H. Hair, East of Mina: Afro-European Relations on the Gold Coast in the 1550s and 1560s (Madison: University of Wisconsin-Madison Press), 1988.
35. Eden, The Decades of the Newe Worlde or West India [1555] from The First Three English Books on America, ed. Edward Arber (Westminster: A. Constable and co., 1895), 383. http://books.google.com (accessed August 13, 2012).
36. Best's strategy of comparing black Africans and Americans in his discussion about climate and somatic features actually mimics Eden. After describing the strange beasts, people and cultural practices of Guinea, Eden describes vividly a hellish heat that blankets the landscape. He marvels that the same kind of climate and people do not exist on the other side of the world at the same distance from the equator. Eden muses, ‘This is also to bee consydered as a secreate woorke of nature, that throughout all Afryke under the Equinoctiall line and neare abowt the same on bothe sydes, the regions are extreme hotte and the people very blacke. Whereas contrarily such regions of the West Indies as are under the same line, are very temperate and the people neyther blacke nor with curlde and short woole on theyr heads as have they of Afryke but of the coloure of an olive with longe and blacke heare on theyr heads’. Eden, Decades, 387–8. For both Eden and Best, Black Africans are a constant by which they attempt to understand American populations in the West Indies and the Arctic. Both men's observations imply the same conclusion: the Americas prove zone theory invalid.
37. Eden, Decades, 373.
38. Best, A True Discourse, 41.
39. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that Frobisher would have shared information with Best about his Guinea experiences. His debriefing before the Privy Council in 1562 illustrates that he came away from the region with specific information that England could exploit – information about Portugal defences at Mina, about interactions between those Portuguese stationed at Mina and surrounding African communities, about the amount of ship traffic along the coast, and about failed alliances between the Portuguese and African kings who refused to swear allegiance. Apparently, Frobisher recognised the value of his experiences and shared the knowledge.
40. For a more detailed discussion of how European cultures understood the Hamitic Curse in its early stages, see Whitford, Curse of Ham and David Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
41. Braude, ‘Michelangelo and the Curse of Ham’, 88.
42. Best, A True Discourse, 56.
43. William H. Sherman, ‘Stirrings and Searchings (1500–1720)’, in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 17–36, 31.
44. In 1595, Ralegh describes Amazons, Ewaipanoma (headless people) and cannibals in his travels through Guiana on the northeast corner of South America. Similarly, Eden, drawing on John Lok's reports from that second Guinea voyage, describes Africa as a land populated with ‘wylde and wanderynge’ people, some headless, some cannibalistic. See Sir Walter Ralegh, Discoverie of Guiana, ed. Joyce Lorimer (London: The Hakluyt Society, 2006) and Eden, Decades, 384.
45. Settle, A True Reporte of the Laste Voyage into the West and Northwest Regions, &c. 1577 (London: Henrie Middleton, 1577), 18. Early English Books Online, http://eebo.chadwyck.com (accessed April 30, 2013).
46. Best, A True Discourse, 142–3.
47. Best, A True Discourse, 124.
48. Best, A True Discourse, 126.
49. Best, A True Discourse, 134.
50. Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 14.
51. Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 22.
52. This act of possession becomes literal when Frobisher's men actually detach the animal's horn and transport it back to England as a present for Queen Elizabeth. Ironically, Lok points to that exotic relic as evidence of Frobisher's arrogance and misdeeds during the expeditions. In his own written testimony, primarily defending himself against charges of financial impropriety, Lok complains of the ‘Jewell’, intended as a gift for the Queen, that Frobisher ‘did present it in his owne name and not in the Companyes name to whome it did belonge’ (McDermott, The Third Voyage, 82).
53. Not incidentally, Best's description of the fish parallels Eden's description of beasts Lok's crew encountered in that 1554 Guinea voyage. Amid the descriptions of monsters and anthropomorphic beings said to inhabit West Africa, Eden describes abnormally large elephants. To articulate the magnitude of their size, he writes of their teeth, ‘I sawe and measured sum of ix [nine] spannes in length as they were croked. Sum of them were as bigge as a mans thigh above the knee: and weyed abowte foure score and ten pound weyght a piece’ (383). Lok and his men manage to secure the head of one of those elephants and transport it back to London. After declaring that the head ‘coulde wey little lesse then five hundredth weyght’, Eden marvels ‘This heade dyvers have sene in the house of the worthy marchaunt Sir Andrewe Judde, where also I sawe it, and beheld it not only with my bodily eyes, but much more with the eyes of my mynde and spirite considered by the woorke, the cunnynge and wysdome of the woorke master: withowt which consideration, the sight of such straungne and woonderfull thynges may rather seeme curiosities then profitable contemplations’ (Eden, Decades, 383). The elephant assumes a divine quality not unlike Best's fish with the tapered horn. Both Eden and Best imbue the monstrous with elements of wonder.
54. Best, A True Discourse, 73.
55. Best, A True Discourse, 74.
56. Robert A. Williams, Jr, The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
57. Williams, The American Indian, 59.
58. Williams, The American Indian, 130.
59. Best, A True Discourse, 144.
60. Best, A True Discourse, 144.
61. Best, A True Discourse, 145.
62. Best, A True Discourse, 145.
63. Best, A True Discourse, 282.
64. Best, A True Discourse, 282.
65. Best, A True Discourse, 280–1.
66. Best, A True Discourse, 283.
67. Best, A True Discourse, 284. Here, Best participates in a form of ‘othering’ that reduces the captive man and woman to what Mary Louise Pratt would term as a portrait of manners and customs, which is a kind of normalising discourse that homogenises ‘the people to be subjected, that is, produced as subjects, into a collective they’. Importantly, the actions of the subject/they become reflections not of a unique individual but representations of a culture's ‘pregiven custom or trait’. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 64.
68. Best, A True Discourse, 281–2.
69. This is not the first time Best implies the Inuit are cannibals. For example, after the five Englishmen are taken hostage on the 1576 voyage, Best believes it is possible that the men were ‘slaine and eaten’ by the Inuit. On another occasion, Frobisher's men discover a tomb with human remains inside. According to Best, they ask an Inuk man they had just captured ‘whether his countreymen had not slain this man and eat his flesh so from the bones’. Best, A True Discourse, 139, 136.
70. Best, A True Discourse, 282.
71. Best, A True Discourse, 55.
72. This idea would resonate more in the seventeenth century among New England Puritans. For example, Puritan minister John Eliot, known as ‘apostle to the Indians’ because of his missionary work in colonial Massachusetts, argued that Indians in America were descendants of Jews, part of the lost tribes that God ‘dispersed and scattered into other nations’, including America (Thorowgood 19). Thomas Thorowgood included Eliot's theory in his larger work Jews in America, or Probabilities that Those Indians are Judaical (London: 1660). Early English Books Online, http://eebo.chadwyck.com (accessed January 9, 2013).
73. Gordon M. Sayre, ‘Prehistoric Diasporas: Colonial Theories of the Origins of Native American Peoples’, Writing Race Across the Atlantic World, ed. Phillip Beidler and Gary Taylor (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 51–76, 63.
74. Las Casas claims that ‘At a conservative estimate, the despotic and diabolical behaviour of the Christians has, over the last forty years, led to the unjust and totally unwarranted deaths of more than twelve million souls, women and children among them, and there are grounds for believing my own estimate of more than fifteen million to be nearer the mark’. A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, trans. Nigel Griffin (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 12. Some scholars, like Anthony Pagden, characterise Las Casas's text as hyperbole and argue that his numbers are exaggerated for rhetorical effect. See Pagden's introduction to A Short Account, xiii–xliii.
75. For more on English uses of the Black Legend, see E. Shaskan Bumas, ‘The Cannibal Butcher Shop: Protestant Uses of las Casas's Brevísima relación in Europe and the American Colonies’, Early American Literature 35, no. 2 (2000): 107–36.
76. For a more specific discussion and survey of such literature, see William Maltby, The Black Legend in England (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1971).
77. For examples, see Sir Francis Drake, Sir Francis Drake revived (London 1626). Early English Books Online, http://eebo.chadwyck.com (accessed March 10, 2007); Sir John Hawkins, A True Declaration of the Troublesome Voyage (London, 1569). Early English Books Online, http://eebo.chadwyck.com (accessed February 13, 2007); and Sir Walter Ralegh, Discoverie of Guiana.
78. ‘Instructions Given to Martyne Furbisher, Gent., for Orders to be Observed in the Viage Nowe Recommended to Him for the North West Parts and Cathay’, in Collinson, The Three Voyages, 117–20, 120.