ABSTRACT
George Best, who was among the several soldiers who accompanied Frobisher on his second voyage of 1577, was an educated gentleman who previously had traveled to Muscovy. Best's narratives summarized the entire Frobisher enterprise and situated it in the context of the ongoing debates about the nature of English colonization. The awareness of indigenous resistance, moreover, leads Best to revise ancient theories of racial classification to invent a more recognizably modern racial discourse predicated on biologically inherited cultural traits. Best's theory combines a revised version of the Noachid myth in which Ham's violation of domestic order not only leads to the negation of political status of his descendants. A true discourse narrates the conflicts and ambivalences that marked not only the Frobisher enterprise, but also the entire English attitude toward discovery and exploration. The English perception of the Inuits' nomadic movements, cannibalism, incommensurate trade valuations, and resistance to the Christian economy of mercy excluded the possibility of practical inter-cultural relations.
