Editor’s Note: This is the fifth post in Part IV of the Visual Cultures of the Circumpolar North series edited by Isabelle Gapp and guest edited by Jonathan Peyton.
Kinngait artist Jamasee Pitseolak’s carving Martin Frobisher, made of a locally quarried steatite or soapstone, depicts the Elizabethan privateer and explorer as a mechanical excavator. Between 1576 and 1578 Frobisher led three expeditions to Qikiqtaaluk (Baffin Island), initially in search for a Northwest Passage. On the first of these three expeditions, however, Frobisher found an ‘ore’ that hinted – wrongly, as it turned out – at the presence of gold. His second and third voyages became primarily mining expeditions, transporting over a thousand tons of worthless rock back to England and ultimately bankrupting his chief investor, Michael Lok.
©The Polar Museum, Scott Polar Research Institute
Pitseolak’s playful portrait serves as a twofold reminder: first, that European engagement with the high north has always been exploitative, in which capacity Frobisher exemplifies an extractive model that has informed European and settler-led activity in the Arctic for four-and-a-half centuries. And second, that Frobisher’s ultimate inability to turn a profit should not distract from the rapacity of his ambition. Ashis Nandy did not have the Arctic in mind when he wrote that ‘colonialism could be characterized by the search for economic and political advantage without concomitant real economic or political gains, and sometimes even with economic or political losses’.1 One consequence of taking this assertion seriously, however, is to centre failure in accounts of the development and formation of extractive imperial political economies. Doing so enables European voyages to the Arctic, in all their hubristic folly, to be considered as a constitutive part of wider colonial and imperial projects.
While Pitseolak’s carving foregrounds the quest for gold underpinning Frobisher’s second and third voyages, mining was not the only extractive practice in which he and his men engaged. On both his first and second expeditions, Frobisher captured Inuit – four in total, comprising two men, a woman and a young child – and transported them back to England. In this essay, I aim to read Frobisher’s hostage-taking through the extractive lens emphasised by Pitseolak. How might the extraction of fools’ gold and the extraction of Inuit bodies form part of the same imperial or proto-imperial project?
My starting point is a remark by George Best, an officer on Frobisher’s second and third expeditions, who notes that Frobisher was ‘desirous to bring some token from thence, of his being there, [and] was greatly discontented, that he had not before apprehended some of them [i.e., Inuit]’.2 This reduction of the Inuit to ‘some token… of… being there’ opens up questions about their materiality and visuality: given that the evidentiary or demonstrative properties of a ‘token’ are meaningful only when presented to an audience in need of persuasion, to whom and to what end did Frobisher wish to present these ‘tokens’, and what visual and political economies governed their display?
A clue can be found in the nineteen portraits commissioned by Frobisher’s sponsors from the London-based Dutch painter Cornelius Ketel in 1577, shortly after the second voyage’s return. Ketel was tasked with painting the expedition’s key figures (including the life-size portrait of Frobisher himself that hangs in the Bodleian Library in Oxford), as well as chief funder Michael Lok and captain Christopher Hall. In addition, however, Ketel painted nine pictures depicting the Inuit man, woman and child captured by Frobisher and his men that year, named by the English ‘Calichough’, ‘Arnaaq’ and ‘Nutaaq’ respectively.3
The fact that almost half of the portraits commissioned from Ketel were of Frobisher’s three captives suggests a lively market for these pictures’ dissemination, viewing and exchange. Although the sole, nameless Inuk man abducted the previous year had died shortly after arrival in England, Frobisher’s funder Michael Lok noted that he projected ‘a wonder onto the whole city [of London] and to the rest of the realm’.4 The glut of portraits commissioned the following year suggest an attempt first to recreate and commodify this ‘wonder’, and second to insure against the possibility of the Inuit’s premature deaths by producing icons that could stand in for the captives’ bodies if they succumbed to disease – as indeed they did, within months of landing in England.
Two of Ketel’s portraits were sent to Queen Elizabeth, who displayed them at Hampton Court until at least the 1590s.5 According to James McDermott, Lok was petitioning Elizabeth at this time to permit him and his associates to incorporate a ‘Cathay Company’ that would have exclusive resource and trading rights in the areas charted by Frobisher.6 In this context, the portraits can be read as a means of persuading Elizabeth both of Frobisher’s immediate accomplishments, and of his wider contribution to her nation’s emerging sense of itself as an imperial actor. In the words of George Best, ‘we may truly infer, that the Englishman in these our days, in his notable discoveries, to the Spaniard and Portingale is nothing inferior… For what hath the Spaniarde or Portingale done by the southeast and southweast, that the Englishman by the northeast and northweast hath not countervailed the same?’.7
Although none of Ketel’s Inuit portraits have survived, he was not the only artist to create a visual record of Frobisher’s four captives. A significant number of ‘unofficial’ images by John White (among others) were circulated widely in the 1570s.8 White’s drawings show Calichough and Arnaaq in their own dress, but abstracted from any sort of identifiable landscape, dislocating them both from Qikiqtaaluk and from England. It is here, in contextless abstraction, that Calichough, Arnaaq, Nutaaq and their unnamed compatriot are most ‘token’-like, in the sense in which Michel Serres uses the term: they represent ‘a fuzzy multiplicity of values and possibilities’; a vehicle for their viewers’ hopes, prejudices, ambitions, desires and whimsy.9 As Stephen Greenblatt has noted, the worthless ore that Frobisher brought back with him functioned as ‘another kind of token’ precisely insofar as it ‘proved similarly open to competing interpretations’, dependent for its meaning and value on the rival assessments of various assayers instructed to find gold in its folds and seams.10
With this, Ketel’s and White’s portraits of Frobisher’s captives can be brought back into conversation with Pitseolak’s portrait of Frobisher himself. If Frobisher embodies an extractive model of engagement with what is now the American north, it is not just because of whom or what he physically took back to England with him, but also because of the extent to which these ‘tokens’ informed, promoted and shape England’s emerging imperial project, with consequences for the Arctic and beyond.
Notes
[1] Ashis Nandy (2009): The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 1
[2] George Best (1904 [1578]), True Discourse…, in The Principall Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation, ed.Richard Hakluyt. Glasgow: James Maclehose & Sons, pp. 281-282
[3] The captives’ names are known only through English sources; given that ‘Arnaaq’ is a homonym for the Inuktitut word for ‘woman’, their accuracy is to be doubted.
[4] Quoted in Richard Collinson (2010 [1869]; ed.): The Three Voyages of Martin Frobisher: In Search of a Passage to Cathaia and India by the North-West, A.D. 1576–8. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 87
[5] Neil Cheshire, Tony Waldron et al (1980). “Frobisher’s Eskimos in England”. Archivaria 10, p. 34
[6] James McDermott (2001): Michael Frobisher: Elizabethan Privateer. New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 160
[7] Quoted in Collinson op cit., p.19
[8] The Dutch ichthyologist Adriaen Coenenzn was even able in 1578 to make accurate copies of White’s pictures that had been shown to him by a sailor at The Hague, within at most a year of their creation. See Cheshire, Waldron et al op cit., p. 31.
[9] Michel Serres (1982): The Parasite. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, p. 161
[10] Stephen Greenblatt (1991). Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 112.
Feature image: Jamasee Pitseolak, Martin Frobisher, 2009. carving, serpentine. ©The Polar Museum, Scott Polar Research Institute
