Anglo-American Relations Before 1580 73
repressed the diseases that grew Uke hydras; for no one was
more practised in this art and none was more sure in that
superstitious practice.”
But perhaps the most interesting passage in the report is
that which displays the heroic stoicism of the woman in
what may have been to her a horrible situation. “I showed
the body to the woman . . . and, at my persuasion, she was
led along (although unwillingly) to the burial, which I
wished to be carried out with no religious rites, so that there
might be no possibility of alarm being caused to her on the
ground that we go in for human sacrifice, . . . [and] that I
might remove from her mind every suspicion about the eat-
ing of human flesh (which suspicion had struck deep roots
among these people). . . .” But the woman showed no signs
of being moved by the man’s death (“quantum ex vultu
intelleximus”), and Dodding and the others concluded that
she had felt nothing but scorn for him. One may suspect
that the explanation was more complicated than this. Dod-
ding goes so far as to report that “although they used to
sleep in the same bed, yet relations between them were con-
fined to talk, and she shrank from his embraces [amplexus
ejus abhorruisse].” Both the young woman and her child
also died within a short time, but so far as is known, no ex-
amination was made of their bodies. It may not exceed the
bounds of possibility that the cause of her death was in fact
simply captivity, and the cause of her stoicism at the death
of her companion simply that she had a husband at home.17
Altogether, the capture and transportation to England of
the Eskimos left more lasting marks than any other such
exploit in my survey. A nineteenth century annalist of Bris-
tol found a record of their arrival as follows: “In the year
1578 [sic] a great ship of our Queen’s called the Aid . . .