A Journey to the Northern Ocean

by Samuel Hearne

  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.