Basques? Beothuk? Innu? Inuit? or St. Lawrence Iroquoians? The Whalers on the 1546 Desceliers Map, Seen through the Eyes of Different Beholders
Bibliographic record
Abstract
THE PIERRE DESCELIERS mappemonde of 1546 is a large, beautifully coloured world map, decorated with many drawings of Native people as well as Europeans, in different parts of the world. One of these scenes depicts whale hunting between northern Newfoundland and southern Labrador, near the eastern entrance to the Strait of Belle Isle (Plate 1). This decorative sketch shows five persons in a small boat harpooning a large cetacean. These whalers have been taken by some scholars to be Basques, by others Beothuk, or Inuit or even St. Lawrence Iroquoians. The fact that various authorities arrive at four different ethnic identifications is intriguing. This paper provides a detailed description of Desceliers’ whaling scene, reviews the context in which hypotheses about it were formulated, and re-evaluates these interpretations. Although the original Desceliers mappemonde is brightly coloured, reproductions of it have been most commonly printed in black and white. The resulting image effectively obscures a variety of details, and thereby reduces the reliability of such photographs for specialized studies. A redrawn and hand-painted copy, in the
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".