Frobisher's Eskimos in England
Frobisher's Eskimos in England by NEIL CHESHIRE, TONYWALDRON, ALISONQUINN and DAVIDQUINN Eschatology is, no doubt, a melancholy subject at the best oftimes. And yet, both for the historian and for the medical man, a study of 'the last things' can prove a unique source of illumination. So it is in the case of Frobisher's Eskimos: espe- cially in the case of the trio he brought back from his 1577 expedition, and to some extent also in that of the isolated man who was captured on the previous voyage of 1576. It had always been known, in a general way, that these Eskimos did not survive long on English soil. Yet, the story may now be amplified by presenting a detailed account of their last days, the attention they received and their final resting- places. This might be thought mere morbid obsessionality were it not for the fact that a principal source of these funebria, as we may call them, is a lengthy post mortem report on the Eskimo man, as to the course of his fatal illness and the cause of his death, which has not been closely studied hitherto; it was written in Latin by the medical doctor who had attended him. The translation provided here is a revision of an earlier version (also by Neil Cheshire), which was the first complete translation to be producedr,and to this an historico-medical commen- tary has been added. Two other much shorter 'funeral' records, one of them a previously unnoticed manuscript, are also discussed. Since, however, these documents can be fully understood only in the light of the Eskimos' previous histories and the circumstances of Frobisher's voyage (so far as they are known), and since some of this information is dispersed among relatively obscure and inaccessible contemporary sources (though some other is oft-reprinted), there is virtue in bringing together as much of it as is practicable and relevant.
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