A Journey to the Northern Ocean

A Journey to the Northern Ocean

The Adventures of Samuel Hearne

FOREWORD BY KEN MCGOOGAN

Samuel Hearne

To

SAMUEL WEGG, Esq. - Governor.

Sir JAMES WINTER LAKE, Deputy Governor,

And

THE REST OF THE COMMITTEE

of the Honourable

HUDSON’S BAY COMPANY.

HONOURABLE SIRS,

As the following Journey was undertaken at your Request and Expence, I feel it no less my Duty than my Inclination to address it to you; hoping that my humble Endeavours to relate, in a plain and unadorned Style, the various Circumstances and Remarks which occurred during that Journey, will meet with your Approbation.

I am, with much Esteem and Gratitude,

HONOURABLE SIRS,

Your most obedient, and

most obliged humble Servant,

SAMUEL HEARNE.

CONTENTS

Foreword to the 2007 edition by Ken McGoogan

Map of Hearne’s Journey

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: November 6th, 1769 to December 11th, 1769

Chapter 2: February 23rd, 1770 to August 11th, 1770

Chapter 3: August 13th , 1770 to November 25th, 1770

Chapter 4: November 28th, 1770 to May 3rd, 1771

Chapter 5: May 3rd, 1771 to July 13th, 1771

Chapter 6: July 14th, 1771 to August 5th, 1771

Chapter 7: August 1771 to December 24th, 1771

Chapter 8: January 9th, 1772 to June 29th, 1772

Chapter 9: The Landscape and its People

Chapter 10: An Account of Flora and Fauna

Endnotes

Index

FOREWORD

by Ken McGoogan

On August 8, 1782, at three o’clock on a cold, grey, blustery afternoon, and in response to the excited shouts of young Hudson’s Bay Company men, Samuel Hearne hurried to the ramparts of Prince of Wales Fort. Putting a looking glass to one eye, he peered across the choppy waters of Hudson Bay. Directly off Eskimo Point, on which the Fort stood, he saw three battleships approaching, all flying the Union Jack—one powerful vessel carrying seventy-four guns, and two speedy frigates with thirty-six guns each.

Not for nothing had Hearne, now governor of the Fort, spent six years in the Royal Navy. Even before he lowered his looking glass, he knew the truth. Despite the British flags and pennons, these were not His Majesty’s Ships that had chanced into Hudson Bay and were coming now to pay a social call. These vessels were French men-of-war, and they were coming, incredibly but certainly, to sack Prince of Wales Fort. You may cease rejoicing, Hearne told his excited men. These are French warships come to wreak havoc.

The governor knew he faced impossible odds. On the ramparts, he had forty-two cannons, each of which, to fire even sporadically, required a crew of ten or twelve men. Given two or three hundred defenders, he would be able to hold the Fort for a few hours, perhaps one whole day. As it stood, in addition to a handful of visiting Dene and two or three Homeguard Cree, Hearne had thirty-nine men, many of whom were out hunting ducks. Their return would give him six crews of untrained blacksmiths, masons and labourers. The warships that lay just beyond cannon range would carry between four and five hundred trained fighting men. A competent commander would mount a two-pronged attack, landing ground troops on one side of the Fort, and then, on the other, sailing into the river. As the ships commenced firing, blazing away with more than one hundred powerful guns, the trained fighters would advance and overrun the Fort.

Hearne knew that if he offered resistance the invaders would feel justified in commencing a murderous rampage. He had witnessed atrocities. As an admirer of the humanist Voltaire, who condemned warfare and ridiculed patriotism, he concluded that the only rational course would be to surrender the Fort.

The following morning, when a French contingent approached, Hearne ordered the front gates thrown open. Alone and unarmed, holding aloft a makeshift white flag, he marched out to meet the invaders. Taken prisoner, Hearne sought to salvage a single possession—a draft of the book you hold in your hands, first published as A Journey from Prince of Wales’s Fort in Hudson’s Bay to the Northern Ocean in the years 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and best known as A Journey to the Northern Ocean.

The foregoing account, and also the thrust of what follows, will be vaguely familiar to readers of my book Ancient Mariner: The Amazing Adventures of Samuel Hearne, the Sailor Who Walked to the Arctic Ocean. That work owes its existence to this one, which is widely recognized as the first classic of northern exploration literature. In this volume, Hearne tells the story of his three-year odyssey in the subarctic Barrens, and of how he became the first European to travel overland to the Arctic coast of North America. With that accomplishment, he demonstrated that no Northwest Passage dissected the continent, and fixed a first point along the southern channel of what would prove to be the only way across the top of the world for ships of that century or the next.

During his unprecedented trek, Hearne travelled more than thirty-five hundred miles through uncharted territory, mostly on foot, occasionally by canoe. He did so not as a native, for whom such journeys were commonplace if difficult, but as a visitor from another world, an alien creature who managed to adapt and survive and eventually to communicate what he learned to those at home. Hearne demonstrated that to thrive in the north, Europeans had to apprentice themselves to the native peoples who had lived there for centuries—a lesson lost on many who followed.

With his Journey to the Northern Ocean, Hearne not only left a cracking good tale but made other contributions. As an anthropologist before anthropology was born, he painted a vivid word-portrait of a people, the Chipewyan Dene, and a way of life—including customs, spiritual beliefs, hunting practices, and male-female relations—that because of a smallpox epidemic disappeared soon after he wrote about it. As an untrained yet gifted artist, Hearne created the earliest good sketches of Prince of Wales Fort,York Factory and Great Slave Lake, and also of many aboriginal artifacts—images that, because they are unique and irreplaceable, continue to turn up in new books on northern history.

Hearne did pioneering work as a naturalist, devoting more than fifty pages of his book to describing the animals of the subarctic. He not only maintained an ever-changing menagerie of curious pets, from minks to foxes and beavers, but accomplished experiments and dissections to determine fine differences among specimens. Twentieth century historian Richard Glover summed this up best when he asserted that Samuel Hearne showed himself head and shoulders superior to every other North American naturalist who preceded [John James] Audubon.

As an author, Hearne produced the only written record of one of the most controversial moments in Canadian history—the massacre of innocents at a place he named Bloody Fall. Also, by living for a long period in a foreign subculture, Hearne practiced what would later be called immersion reporting. His Journey constitutes one of the earliest contributions to a tradition that would evolve through works by Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Piers Paul Read and Bill Buford—the tradition of creative non-fiction.

Samuel Hearne was born in London in 1745. His father, manager and chief engineer of the London Bridge Water Works, died of a fever when Samuel was four, leaving the boy to grow up in Beaminster, Dorset, in southwest England, where his mother had been raised. In 1757, as a strapping, irrepressible youth, Hearne joined the Royal Navy under the protection of Samuel Hood, a famous fighting captain who later became First Lord of the Admiralty.

As a so-called young gentleman who walked the quarterdeck, Hearne served with Captain Hood through the Seven Years War, learning all he would ever need to know about chasing down and seizing enemy vessels—and about firing cannons. In 1763, when the end of the war closed off any prospect of advancement, the ambitious Hearne went to London, a city of five thousand coffee houses. This was Dr. Johnson’s London, where men wearing periwigs and breeches and square-buckled shoes debated the merits of Voltaire and Rousseau into the wee hours.

Early in 1766, seeking adventure and a chance to make his name, the young merchant mariner joined the fur-trading Hudson’s Bay Company to work as first mate on a whaling ship. During the next three years, while based at the company’s northernmost outpost, Prince of Wales Fort, the scientifically minded Hearne became friends with William Wales, a visiting mathematician, and Andrew Graham, a committed naturalist, while applying himself to learning the languages of the native peoples with whom he came into contact—the Cree, the Chipewyan Dene and the Inuit.

In 1769, when he was twenty-four, Hearne set out on the quest that provides the backbone of this book. Striking off into uncharted territory, he hoped to find the Northwest Passage, or else to disprove its existence, and also to discover certain fabulous copper deposits rumoured to exist at the mouth of the Far-Off Metal River. After failing once, and then again, the determined Hearne set out a third time, joining forces with the remarkable native leader Matonabbee, and travelling ultimately as the sole European among a group of Chipewyan Dene, whose language he was still learning.

It would take three years, and require all his courage and fortitude, but Samuel Hearne would pursue his quest to the end, making notes and maps as he went. Back at Prince of Wales Fort, Hearne turned his field notes into an official report and sent that document to London, prompting the committee to award him a considerable bonus.

Hearne resumed sailing as a first mate, and then at Cumberland House established the HBC’s first inland trading post, opening a new chapter in the history of the northern part of the continent. In 1776, Hearne became governor of Prince of Wales Fort, and so gained the freedom not only to conduct his scientific experiments but to take as his country wife the mixed race daughter of the previous governor. His marriage to Mary Norton—revealed, as so much of significance in Journey, in long footnotes that Hearne never did integrate into the text—emerges as easily the most tragic story of star-crossed love in fur trade history.

While serving as governor, Hearne began fleshing out his original, bare-bones report about his northern odyssey, with a view to publishing it as a book. In 1782, when the French took him prisoner and razed Prince of Wales Fort, Hearne strove to minimize the impact on the native peoples who remained behind—and especially on the love of his life, Mary Norton. Of confiscated property, he sought the return of a single item—the manuscript on which he had been sporadically working for a dozen years.

By a stroke of luck, the leader of the three-ship expedition proved to be the cultivated Compte de la Perouse, who would become famous as the foremost French navigator of the age. Hearne drew on his own naval background and appreciation of Voltaire to establish a rapport with this officer, who read his manuscript and returned it on one condition—that Hearne get it published as soon as possible.

With winter looming, and the French lacking experience in northern waters, Hearne struck a deal: he would instruct an experienced man to guide these ships through Hudson Strait if La Perouse would then release him and his men to cross the Atlantic in a small sloop that the French vessels were towing. Having passed through the strait, and against the cautionary advice of La Perouse, Hearne debarked into the sloop and, with thirty-two men, sailed to Orkney and then to Portsmouth.

Arriving back in London, Hearne found himself lionized as a result of his misadventure with La Perouse. And now, again, his draft manuscript impressed influential people—not just his old friend William Wales, the mathematician and astronomer, but Dr. John Douglas, the canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral and later Bishop of Salisbury, who was editing the journal of the third voyage of Captain James Cook. In his introduction to that work, Douglas not only summarized Hearne’s odyssey, but quoted two long passages and suggested that the journal should be published.

While yearning for that publication, Hearne had one greater priority. The following spring, he departed London on the first ship to Hudson Bay, bent on returning to Churchill and rebuilding his life with Mary Norton. Soon after he arrived, however, he learned that, during his absence, his wife had starved to death.

From this devastating news—and the further discovery that his friend and business partner Matonabbee had despaired and hanged himself—Hearne did not soon recover. He went through a rough patch—depression and drinking, probably to the extent of damaging his liver and kidneys—during which he made little progress on the book. In 1787, Hearne resigned his post and returned to England, carrying his manuscript with him.

In London, Hearne took rooms in Red Lyon Square. Drawing on his long experience in the northwest, he began serving as a consultant to the London committee of the Hudson’s Bay Company. This work gave him access to the Company’s extensive archives. Endlessly curious, Hearne turned his attention to the enduring mystery of the lost expedition of James Knight—and not for the first time.

In 1719, acting on behalf of the HBC, the aging but irrepressible Knight had sailed from London with forty men and two ships, bent on discovering the entrance to the Northwest Passage and, more concretely, those vast quantities of gold and copper said to exist near the mouth of the Far-Off-Metal River. Knight and his men sailed into Hudson Bay and were never heard from again. Early in the 1720s, an HBC captain named Scroggs had found some wreckage on Marble Island, a few miles off the coast near Chesterfield Inlet, and concluded that both ships had sunk and every man was killed by the Eskimos.

In July 1767, Hearne himself had sailed north as first mate of the sloop Success. At Marble Island, one of the sloop’s small boats, while searching for whales, chanced upon wreckage from the Knight expedition. Hearne arrived soon afterwards. Despite a threatening storm, he went ashore and found guns, anchors, cables, bricks, a smith’s anvil, and the foundations of a house. Logbooks of the two HBC sloop captains mention that in his quest for information, and despite a fierce lightning storm, the first mate also dug up graves.

Talking later with two Inuit interpreters, Hearne concluded that Scroggs had been wrong. Knight and his men would have presented no threat to the Inuit. Besides, the voyagers were far better armed. The following summer, Hearne again visited the site of the wreckage. This time he collected relics and sent them to London as evidence that the expedition had been lost on that inhospitable island, where neither stick nor stump was to be seen.

In 1769, Hearne visited Marble Island once more, as first mate on the brigantine Charlotte. During this visit, he would later write, he was rowing around looking for whales when he spotted some Inuit walking on the island. Perceiving that a couple of them were greatly advanced in years, he went ashore and interviewed them. By this time, Hearne could speak some Inuktitut. Also, he drew on the help of an Inuit youth with whom he had sailed annually, and who enabled him to elicit a narrative that was full, clear, and unreserved.

According to these old Inuit, sickness and famine decimated the shipwrecked English. By the second winter, only twenty remained. The Inuit now erected their own camp on Marble Island, building snow huts on the opposite side of the harbour and providing the visitors with whale blubber, seal flesh and oil. In the spring of 1721, the natives paddled to the mainland to hunt. That summer, when they returned, Hearne wrote later:

they only found five of the English alive, and those were in such distress for provisions that they eagerly ate the seal’s flesh and whale’s blubber quite raw, as they purchased it from the natives. This disordered them so much, that three of them died in a few days, and the other two, though very weak, made a shift to bury them. Those two survived many days after the rest, and frequently went to the top of an adjacent rock, and earnestly looked to the South and the East, as if in expectation of some vessels coming to their relief. After continuing there a considerable time together, and nothing appearing in sight, they sat down close together, and wept bitterly. At length one of the two died, and the other’s strength was so far exhausted, that he fell down and died also, in attempting to dig a grave for his companion. The skulls and other large bones of those two men are now lying above-ground close to the house. The longest liver was, according to the Esquimaux account, always employed in working of iron into implements for them; probably he was the armourer, or smith.

For decades, and indeed centuries, Hearne’s reconstruction of the expedition’s fate stood as definitive. Who could argue with eyewitnesses? And who could forget the image of those pathetic, final survivors, scanning the horizon for salvation? The only problem with this evocative reconstruction is that Hearne made it up. The logbooks of the HBC vessels on location in 1769 make no mention of his encounter with eyewitnesses. This looks more than suspicious, given the detailed reports of his previous visits to Marble Island, and also the continuing interest in the Knight expedition. What really happened is that, two decades after he visited, while sitting at his writing desk in London, Hearne conjured both eyewitnesses and survivors out of his imagination. He created a fiction.

In Dead Silence: The Greatest Mystery in Arctic Discovery, authors John Geiger and Owen Beattie make this case at length. And they put it beyond doubt. That said, I believe they misjudge Hearne’s motivations.They suggest that Hearne fictionalized his narrative for monetary reasons—to make his book more salable. But for this they provide no evidence. And considering Hearne’s passion for scientific experiment, and the joy he took in solving natural mysteries for their own sake, another scenario emerges as at least equally plausible.

After perusing the relevant journals for the first time, and adding their supply of facts to his own hard-earned knowledge, Hearne honestly believed he had solved the riddle of Knight’s fate. To communicate his understanding, and to tell as much of the truth as he knew as convincingly as possible, Hearne invented eyewitnesses. The end result, as Geiger and Beattie rightly observe, was the most haunting vision of failed discovery in the pageant of Arctic exploration.

From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, we can see that, while repudiating the racism of Scroggs’s analysis, Hearne oversimplified the expedition’s fate. Almost certainly, Knight and some of his men reached the mainland, then started overland for the Far-Off-Metal River and perished in the Barrens. Hearne’s version ends with the dramatic observation that the last survivor was probably the armourer or the smith—an intuitive master stroke that increases the illusion of authenticity. Whatever else might be said, this evocative interpretation—which endured unchallenged for two centuries—reveals Hearne to be a gifted storyteller.

In London, Hearne became a regular visitor to Christ’s Hospital, a Blue Coat School for Boys in the heart of the city, where his best friend, William Wales, continued to serve as mathematics master. One of that school’s leading students, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, would later make copious notes in his personal copy of Hearne’s Journey, and would also cite the influence of the explorer’s deeply interesting anecdotes about the workings of the supernatural among the native peoples.

During this period, Hearne lent an English-Chipewyan dictionary he had compiled to Thomas Hutchins, another old friend from his days at Churchill. Hutchins died suddenly and, as Hearne explains in his introduction, the vocabulary disappeared forever—an irreplaceable loss not only to his own book, but to the history of northern exploration.

Meanwhile, Hearne had been diagnosed with dropsy—a condition then regarded as a distinct disease, but now recognized as symptomatic of a damaged liver or kidneys, and characterized by the retention of bodily fluids and swelling in the feet and legs. In 1792, five years after he returned to London, Hearne realized that his physical condition was deteroriating. He grew anxious to ensure the publication of his life’s work and, with the help of William Wales, he signed a contract with a well-respected publisher named Andrew Strahan. Not long afterwards, in November 1792, Hearne passed away.

The history of A Journey to the Northern Ocean constitutes a kind of life after death for Samuel Hearne. The book did not appear immediately, partly because producing a volume complete with engravings required more time in the 1790s even than it does today. But a draft of the work had existed since the 1780s, and clearly the Hudson’s Bay Company felt no sense of urgency. The translator of the Compte de la Perouse’s Voyage Round the World appended a note to that work seconding the opinion of the French editor: There is little doubt . . . but that Mr. Hearne would readily have fulfilled his engagement to la Perouse, as the publication could not have failed to have been profitable to himself, had he not been prevented by the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Laws of copyright remained undeveloped. But the HBC, as Hearne’s original sponsor, certainly had the power to veto publication. Judging from internal evidence, Hearne did not revise or amend the work after 1791. Why delay beyond that? For years the HBC could offer a ready excuse: the geographer Alexander Dalrymple had attacked details of Hearne’s maps, and so the Company required geographical confirmation.

When the surveyor Philip Turnor vindicated Hearne in 1792, still the Company procrastinated. The Montreal-based fur traders represented a continuing threat, and the HBC feared that Hearne’s Journal contained information that these pedlars would find useful. So, while willing to circulate draft manuscripts within trusted circles—including those of Dalrymple—it resisted making the work more widely available.

Finally, in 1795—more than two decades after Hearne completed his trek, by which time his opus revealed no secrets—the HBC allowed the book to appear. Strahan and Cadell published A Journey From Prince of Wales’s Fort in Hudson’s Bay to the Northern Ocean in the years 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772 as a large quarto volume of 502 pages, complete with five maps and four full-page illustrations.

Early response proved enthusiastic. Foreign editions appeared quickly—Irish in 1796, Dutch in 1798, French in 1799. In England, reviews surfaced in Gentleman’s Magazine, Analytical Review, Monthly Review and Critical Review. While offering more summary than analysis, and revealing the racism of the times, these responses did identify the themes and motifs that would dominate later discourse.

The Gentleman’s Magazine highlighted the dreadful massacre of the unoffending Esquimaux by the Indians; a particular account of the Indians, their conjuring doctors, and the servile laborious offices performed by the women. It noted that the moose deer and the beaver are treated of at large, and the errors concerning them corrected.

The Monthly Review article ran five pages, three of those quoting Hearne’s description of the massacre. The anonymous reviewer said the book painted in a plain unadorned style, such a striking picture of the miseries of savage life, accompanied with so many minute incidents copied faithfully from nature, that it is impossible to read it without feeling a deep interest, and without reflecting on, and cherishing, the inestimable blessings of civilized society. He praises Hearne for showing the proper mix of indignation at the brutalities and compassion for the miseries of those wretched savages.

Early in the twentieth century, the geologist and fur trade scholar Joseph B. Tyrrell would introduce a new edition of Journey to the Northern Ocean, noting that he considered the work invaluable not so much because of its geographical information, but because it is an accurate, sympathetic, and patently truthful record of life among the Chipewyan Indians at that time. Their habits, customs, and general mode of life, however disagreeable or repulsive, are recorded in detail, and the book will consequently always remain a classic in American ethnology.

Among specialists, meanwhile, A Journey to the Northern Ocean had begun to spark argument. Following the lead of armchair geographer Alexander Dalrymple, some critics denigrated Hearne’s navigational skills. But most recognized that, given the inadequacy of his equipment, the explorer worked miracles in achieving what he did. Discussion continues even today over what precise route Hearne followed, and also over whether, at the climax of his journey, he dipped his fingers in the Arctic Ocean or viewed it from a hilltop. Yet nobody disputes that Hearne was the first European to travel overland to the Arctic coast of North America.

Geographical argument aside, Hearne and his Journey have survived three concerted assaults. The first began with David Thompson, a notable early map-maker. Late in 1784, at fourteen years of age, Thompson spent several months at Fort Churchill working under Hearne’s supervision. Decades later, with only a cursory nod in the direction of truth, he would write: Mr. Hearne was a handsome man of six feet in height, of a ruddy complexion and remarkably well-made, enjoying good health; as soon as the Hudson’s Bay Company could do without his services they dismissed him for cowardice.

That last assertion is ludicrous—but more belligerence was to come. The deeply religious Thompson noted that a Sunday sermon would customarily be read to the HBC men in the governor’s quarters, the only comfortable room at Fort Churchill: "one Sunday after the service, Mr. Jefferson, the reader, and myself staid (sic) a few minutes on orders; he [Hearne] then took Voltaire’s Dictionary and said to us, here is my belief and I have no other. Thompson concludes his word portrait by airily observing: In the autumn of 1785 [Hearne] returned to England, became a member of the Bucks Club and in two years was buried."

Hearne returned to England in 1787, never joined the Bucks, and lived until November 1792. The careless hostility of Thompson’s word-portrait, not published until 1916, undermined his own reputation. In the mid-twentieth century, historian Richard Glover produced a scorching essay entitled The Witness of David Thompson, in which he observed: It is quite astonishing to find how much falsehood and prejudice Thompson was able to pack into the page and a half or less that he devotes to Hearne.

Glover showed that Thompson was wrong to charge Hearne with cowardice for avoiding a meaningless battle that could only have cost innocent lives, and attributed the geographer’s dislike to the fact that Hearne was a disbeliever with no use for the rather narrow evangelicalism that served Thompson for religion. Probably Thompson bore a grudge because in 1784 the grief-stricken Hearne, devastated by the death of Mary Norton, paid him little attention. Later, impoverished and resenting the posthumous recognition accorded Hearne following the publication of his book, Thompson proved unable to transcend his boyhood misconceptions.

The second assault on Hearne’s reputation arose out of a book by George Back describing a journey down the Coppermine River with John Franklin in 1819-22. John Richardson, the expedition’s second-in-command, contributed a chapter-length Digression Concerning Hearne’s Route in which he mistakenly asserted that Bishop John Douglas had heavily edited A Journey to the Northern Ocean. In 1951, more than a century later, Richard Glover complained that Richardson’s allegations had thrown a large doubt over both the authenticity of Hearne’s text and the accuracy and motives of his statements.

Glover repudiated the claim that anyone but Hearne revised the book, citing the author’s constant, and rather untidy, habit of using footnotes to append corrections and afterthoughts to a text he was, perhaps, too indolent to rewrite. The internal evidence, including inconsistencies, inaccuracies and omissions, demonstrates clearly, Glover insisted, that the book’s blemishes and qualities both are Hearne’s.

Certainly, no decent editor would have allowed Thelewey-aza-yeth to appear four times in four different spellings, or failed to integrate numerous crucial footnotes into the text. And even a cursory comparison of Cook’s Third Voyage with Hearne’s Journey reveals the obvious: the former is polished, coherent, well-integrated, and obviously the work of a professional; the latter, drawn from personal experience, is awkward, uneven, littered with footnotes howling for integration, and clearly the product of a single, idiosyncratic mind.

Glover rightly concluded that Journey to the Northern Ocean was published almost exactly as Hearne wrote it, and pronounced it one of the classics of Western Canada’s past, a mine of information for the anthropologist, naturalist, and historian of the fur trade, let alone any value it may have for the geographer or as one of the great adventure stories of the world.

The third assault on Hearne’s reputation began late in the twentieth century and evolved out of the second. In his journal about the Coppermine expedition, eventually published as Arctic Artist, George Back described his own arrival at Bloody Falls and attempted to rename that historic site:

We were now at Massacre Rapid—celebrated in Hearne’s voyage for the shocking scene that occurred there—the most interesting part of which I imagine to be unfounded—as one of our guides had accompanied him—said that he [Hearne] was two days march from them at the time of their (the Indians) attacking the Esquimaux. The havoc that was there made was but too clearly verified—from the fractured skulls—and whitened bones of those poor sufferers—which yet remained visible.

In fact, George Back’s own imaginings were ill-founded. A close reading of his journal reveals that, initially, only one of nine accompanying natives claimed to have travelled with Hearne fifty years before. This was a man called Humpy, identified as the older brother of the Dene leader Akaitcho. The paragraph above, however, refers to a younger brother, White Capot, who apparently advanced a similar claim.

How old were these travellers in 1821? The warriors with whom Hearne trekked north fifty years before had left behind all women and children. By the time Back made the journey, White Capot would have had to be at least sixty-five, while Humpy would be closer to seventy—and this in a world so challenging and filled with hardship that the strongest men rarely survived beyond forty-five or fifty.

According to the published narrative of John Franklin, a man named Rabbit’s Head, yet another Dene, claimed to have travelled with Hearne, bringing the total to three. Obviously, making this claim increased a guide’s status with the credulous Englishmen. The cleverest of the Dene deduced also that challenging Hearne’s account—alleging, for example, that the explorer had not even witnessed the massacre—would enhance his own status still more. Yet even Hearne’s earliest surviving field notes put him at Bloody Falls. And Back’s claim that he saw fractured skulls and whitened bones has itself been challenged as fictional by those who want the massacre never to have happened—even though he gained nothing by making this claim.

In recent decades, as postmodernist literary theory transformed critical approaches, English professor Ian S. MacLaren has analyzed the development, through several drafts, of Hearne’s narrative of what happened at Bloody Falls. Taking his cue from George Back, he has observed that Hearne’s rough field notes make no mention of the memorable young girl, about eighteen years of age, who dies at the traveller’s feet, twining and twisting round the spears like an eel, nor of the subsequent death of a half-blind old woman. He concludes that such details are fabricated, entirely fictional, and that the young woman, in particular, owes much to the conventions of the Gothic novel.

In later essays, MacLaren goes further: he suggests that Samuel Hearne did not write the massacre scene. If, up to this point, the professor’s case remains plausible, here he goes off track. Certainly, the explorer’s rough field notes, written shortly after the event, lacked the detail of the finished narrative published in Journey. But non-fiction writers habitually elaborate from sparse original notes, and individuals who are shocked or traumatized often remain silent for years. Hearne witnessed events at Bloody Falls that he could not bring himself immediately to record—events that would haunt him for the rest of his days.

MacLaren contends that another writer, some more literate soul, created the massacre scene that has helped inscribe Journey as a literary classic: if not John Douglas, everybody’s original first choice, then William Wales; if not Wales, then some anonymous third party—anybody but Samuel Hearne. This contention arises out of a misunderstanding of the explorer’s social background; in my book Ancient Mariner, drawing on naval records, I demonstrate that Hearne was never an ordinary seaman, as previously believed, but walked the quarterdeck as a young gentleman, an officer-in-training, and that he, like George Back and John Franklin after him, gained secondary education while serving in the Royal Navy.

Nobody has ever argued that Hearne was a stylist. Still, while making final revisions, he did have his moments. Those who would question Hearne’s abilities as a writer might look again at his entertaining ruminations on the beavers he had kept as pets, who showed themselves remarkably fond of rice and plum pudding. After repudiating the assertion that beavers build two doors to their houses, and correcting the mistakes of those who had written of non-existent beaver apartments and slave-beavers, Hearne addresses the ludicrous notion that beavers can drive stakes as thick as a man’s leg into the ground three or four feet deep.

I cannot refrain from smiling, when I read the accounts of different authors who have written on the economy of those animals, as there seems to be a contest between them, who shall most exceed in fiction. But the compiler of the Wonders of Nature and Art seems, in my opinion, to have succeeded best in this respect; as he has not only collected all the fictions into which other writers on the subject have run, but has so greatly improved on them that little remains to be added to his account of the beaver, beside a vocabulary of their language, a code of their laws, and a sketch of their religion, to make it the most complete natural history of that animal which can possibly be offered to the public.

If that voice, worldly and amused, does not suggest sufficient authorial range, then consider how, in resolving the mystery of the James Knight expedition, Hearne created what has rightly been called the most haunting vision of failed discovery in the pageant of Arctic exploration. If, while sifting records in London, the retired explorer fabricated eyewitnesses to communicate the truth of his vision, as now seems certain, still the salient passage hinges on such detailed knowledge of when and how he visted Marble Island, to cite but one example, that his authorship of that incident is beyond dispute. If this born storyteller could create one unforgettable scene, why could he not conjure a second?

When, back in London, drawing on distant memory, Hearne rewrote the story of the massacre—which he had honed, by then, through numerous retellings—he may have exaggerated the truth beyond what would today be regarded as acceptable limits. But he was writing more than two centuries ago, before the prevailing conventions had even been established.

By pushing his material to its limits, Hearne raises questions, for twenty-first century readers, about the relationship between truth, memory and language—questions whose answers lie beyond the scope of this introduction. This much is certain: when the vast majority of contemporary novels have been relegated to the dustbin of literary history, readers will still be arguing about Samuel Hearne and the classic work you hold in your hands.

PREFACE

by Samuel Hearne, 1795

Mr. Dalrymple, in one of his Pamphlets relating to Hudson’s Bay, has been so very particular in his observations on my Journey, as to remark, that I have not explained the construction of the Quadrant, with a bubble attached to it for an horizon, and made by Daniel Scatlif of Wapping. But as no instrument on the same principle could be procured when I was setting out on my last Journey, an old Elton’s Quadrant, which had been upwards of thirty years at the Fort, was the only instrument I could then be provided with, in any respect proper for making observations with on the land.

Mr. Dalrymple also observes, that I only inserted in my last Journal to the Company, one observation for the latitude, which may be true; but I had, nevertheless, several others during that Journey, particularly at Snow-bird Lake, Thelwey-aza-yeth, and Clowey, exclusive of that mentioned in the Journal taken at Conge-cathawha-chaga. But when I was on that Journey, and several years after, I little thought that any remarks made in it would ever have attracted the notice of the Public: if I had, greater pains might and would have been taken to render it more worthy of their attention than it now is. At that time my ideas and ambition extended no farther than to give my employers such an account of my proceedings as might be satisfactory to them, and answer the purpose which they had in view; little thinking it would ever come under the inspection of so ingenious and indefatigable a geographer as Mr. Dalrymple must be allowed to be. But as the case has turned out otherwise, I have at my leisure hours recopied all my Journals into one book, and in some instances added to the remarks I had before made; not so much for the information of those who are critics in geography, as for the amusement of candid and indulgent readers, who may perhaps feel themselves in some measure gratified, by having the face of a country brought to their view, which has hitherto been entirely unknown to every European except myself. Nor will, I flatter myself, a description of the modes of living, manners, and customs of the natives, (which, though long known, have never been described,) be less acceptable to the curious.

I cannot help observing, that I feel myself rather hurt at Mr. Dalrymple’s rejecting my latitude in so peremptory a manner, and in so great a proportion, as he has done; because, before I arrived at Conge-cathawhachaga, the Sun did not set during the whole night: a proof that I was then to the Northward of the Arctic Circle. I may be allowed to add, that when I was at the Copper River, on the eighteenth of July, the Sun’s declination was but 21°, and yet it was certainly some height above the horizon at midnight; how much, as I did not then remark, I will not now take upon me to say; but it proves that the latitude was considerably more than Mr. Dalrymple will admit of. His assertion, that not grass is to be found on the (rocky) coast of Greenland farther North than the latitude of 65° , is no proof there should not be any in a much higher latitude in the interior parts of North America. For, in the first place, I think it is more than probable that the Copper River empties itself into a sort of inland Sea, or extensive Bay, somewhat like that of Hudson’s: and it is well known that no part of the coast of Hudson’s Straits, nor those of Labradore, at least for some degrees South of them, any more than the East coast of Hudson’s Bay, till we arrive near Whale river, have any trees on them; while the West coast of the Bay in the same latitudes, is well clothed with timber. Where then is the ground for such an assertion? Had Mr. Dalrymple considered this circumstance only, I flatter myself he would not so hastily have objected to woods and grass being seen in similar situations, though in a much higher latitude. Neither can the reasoning which Mr. Dalrymple derives from the error I committed in estimating the distance to Cumberland House, any way affect the question under consideration; because that distance being chiefly in longitude, I had no means of correcting it by an observation, which was not the case here.

I do not by any means wish to enter into a dispute with, or incur the displeasure of Mr. Dalrymple; but thinking, as I do, that I have not been treated in so liberal a manner as I ought to have been, he will excuse me for endeavouring to convince the Public that his objections are in a great measure without foundation. And having done so, I shall quit the disagreeable subject with declaring, that if any part of the following sheets should afford amusement to Mr. Dalrymple, or any other of my readers, it will be the highest gratification I can receive, and the only recompence I desire to obtain for the hardships and fatigue which I underwent in procuring the information contained in them.

Being well assured that several learned and curious gentlemen are in possession of manuscript copies of, or extracts from, my Journals, as well as copies of the Charts, I have been induced to make this copy as correct as possible, and to publish it; especially as I observe that