Baffin Island, not to mention Baffin Bay, is named after a man named William Baffin who was named after his father, who was named after his father, who was named after his father, who was named after his mother, who unfortunately looked like a man.
It is perhaps no coincidence that Baffin Island is named after a man who was in many ways an island himself. Or was he rather, as John Donne would have said, “a piece of the continent, a part of the main if a clod be washed away by the sea”?
While the truth is we will never know, the question is will we ever care? All we know is that William Baffin was born in 1584, a small child of humble origin. He was born in a shoe on Brick Lane, his father was a cobbler, his mother was insane. You’d have to be to marry a cobbler, people used to say. Nowadays, there’s much less stigma attached to mending shoes, it’s just like being gay. His parents were impoverished, poor and broke, they had nothing to eat; nevertheless William was a fussy eater and his father used to beat him. He was a punctilious man, yes, he was most attentive to punctilios, or fine points of etiquette and would only ever beat his son with his right hand.
“Eat your peas, young William Baffin, or I will beat you soundly,” he would say.
“No, father, I do not like peas,” William Baffin would reply without missing a beat.
“You will eat your peas and you will eat them with a fork and a fork only. Woe betide you if you push them onto your fork with a knife. It’s a question of etiquette”.
“Why don’t you stick your fork up your arse and go take a poke?” replied William Baffin. “That is not so much a question of etiquette as rhetoric.”
Then his father would promptly beat him with a shoe, (the right one of course) an ordinary shoe without a buckle, as buckles had not yet been invented. They were an important innovation, no doubt but one, which did not appear until the middle of the 17th century. In his diary on January 22nd 1660 Samuel Pepys wrote:
“This day I began to put on buckles to my shoes.”
Sadly William Baffin would not live long enough to have this pleasure.
William Baffin grew tired of his father beating him and one day requested that he be beaten by his mother instead. His mother was much less punctilious than his father and simply gave him a slap round the face and told him to stop being such a cheeky so and so.
William Baffin hated his parents, in particular his mother and father, and longed to distance himself from them. He considered the best way of doing this would be to go away, preferably as far away as possible, and if this were not possible, then really quite far would have to suffice.
William Baffin left home early one morning and with him he took one of his father’s shoes. He felt sure this would vex him greatly and he chuckled to himself as he made his way to the docks and indeed the rest of his life. While literally waiting for his ship to come in, William Baffin meditated on one of the great metaphysical conundrums of all time; if you had a different father would you be the same person and more to the point would you have the same shoes?
William Baffin concluded that he would be half a different person and one of his shoes would be the same. From that moment onwards and for no good reason whatsoever William Baffin dreamed of having only one leg.
For many years William Baffin lived the life of a wandering soul. He was an itinerant spirit, a travelling vagabond, a nomad in no-man’s land. Whatever that means. He lived out of a suitcase, not in a suitcase but out of a suitcase. He might have been able to live in a suitcase when he was a small child but he was no longer a small child, he was a fully-grown man with a regular sized suitcase if you can imagine such a thing, in the spring of 1617.
Yes, he was a fully-grown man, with a fully-grown suitcase, which was essentially his home. He didn’t have many possessions: “if you are not careful, your possessions will possess you”, he would have said. But he didn’t, he didn’t say anything, you see he didn’t speak very much at all. He was eloquent, yes there was no doubt about that but hardly loquacious. If anything, he was more laconic than loquacious, he had the utmost respect for the sanctity of language, the precious nature of words and was anxious to do the right thing by them. Whatever that means.
William Baffin died on January 23 1622. As well as Baffin Bay and Baffin Island, there is also a flower named after him: a scentless rose, to commemorate the fact that the poor chap had no nose.
