indie’s Reviews > The Afterlife of George Cartwright > Status Update

"I would imagine myself, after a week, going back to the barracks and pretending I’d been in London on a spree. And so I did nothing. I continued to live in my Labrador journal. I returned there every night before sleep like a pigeon flying back to its cote."

"Yet there was still a side to me I never shared with anyone. Sometimes in the morning or at night when I looked in the mirror, I would see myself inside my costume, my eyes inside my mask of a face, and I would admit to myself that my life had been all selfishness and vanity.

I was a piece of human regalia, a mascot, a ceremonial mace."

"There was no question. So many unburied. No one had left the island alive. They had camped there for the seals, and the disease had taken them like the fulfillment of one of their terrible myths. It had lain coiled in her trunk like a vicious animal. Did she take it out and put it on like a wig? Did she dance with it on?"

"Some took up rocks and beat their faces until they were swollen and streaming with blood [...] Attuiock’s sister broke open her cheek and put out one of her eyes. Cartwright found himself sobbing, pleading with them to stop. He was shocked and astonished by this wild show of grief, this intense objection to loss on the part of people who seemed to possess so little, to whom death was such a common thing."

Surprised that Cartwright knows where the clitoris is.

"For a few seconds Cartwright toyed with the idea of making himself king of the independent nation of Labrador."

"You are Inuit,” Attuiock told him. “You are human.”

"'But it’s so godforsaken bloody cold.… When I’m done, could you put me in a barrel with salt, and see that I get back to England? To my sister. You could pour me out In a ditch or meadow, so long as it’s in Kent.… I’ll pay for it. There’s my watch and musket. And last year’s pay.'

Cartwright had the cooper make a barrel-shaped coffin for him and buried him in the snow under a north-facing cliff near the sea." AHHHH

“You’re a hypocrite. You came here to escape England and so did I. But you bring with you the very things you wanted to flee.”

“[...] Our only strength is in our appeal to law, in presenting ourselves as representatives of our country. If we were only individuals, this land would devour us like a trout leaping and swallowing a fly.”

“I say we’ve got nothing to fear but what we bring with us.”

"It wasn’t only his penis that Cartwright decked in odd attire."