Because of shifting notions of significance among different communities of reception, explorer and author Samuel Hearne (1745-92) occupies a curiously complex position in the Canadian cultural canon. Historians recognized the magnitude of his exploits by honouring him with designation as a National Historic Person in 1920; fifteen years later Fort Prince of Wales (near present-day Churchill, Manitoba), his primary locale in British North America, was named a National Historic Site and has since been restored. Official recognition continued when the Canadian government marked the bicentenary of Hearne's arrival at the mouth of the Coppermine River with a commemorative postage stamp in 1971. In the cultural realm, however, he is valued for his published narrative rather than for his physical accomplishments, "as if [he] went through that land for a book," in the words of poet John Newlove (429). While Hearne's overland journey across the tundra in 1770-72 was an epic achievement, it did more to enlighten the Hudson's Bay Company about northern resources than to contribute to the later formation of the Canadian nation. Hence, Hearne stands in contrast to other western Canadian explorers whose written narratives are secondary to the sites and outcomes of their travels, such as Simon Fraser, whose voyage down the river that bears his name demonstrated that it was not navigable for trade, and George Vancouver, whose friends' names dot the landscape that would become the major urban centre of Vancouver.[1] But Hearne produced a more readable account of his travels, lavishly published in 1795, with the result that his book has long been a consistent component of Canada's national heritage.

Although his name is not preserved on significant landmarks,[2] Hearne provides a reference point for subsequent Arctic travel narratives,[3] as does his association with the Coppermine River and the Bloody Falls massacre of a band of sleeping Inuit by his Dene-Chipewyan guides in 1771.[4] The ongoing power of this story has recently been addressed by historical geographer Emilie Cameron, who argues that "Bloody Falls has a remarkable capacity to gather and order Qablunaaq experiences and relations with the North and with Inuit" (10-11). Her decolonizing study Far Off Metal River: Inuit Lands, Settler Stories, and the Making of the Contemporary Arctic (2015) restores Kugluk, the Inuinnaqtam name for the rapids more commonly known as Bloody Falls (xiv), to its Indigenous inhabitants by documenting their knowledge of the history and reality of the region, along with their resistance to imposition of the Hearne narrative in its many manifestations, including historical plaques.[5] When the canon of Canadian literary texts expanded in the 1970s and 1980s to include documentary non-fiction, Hearne's narrative became a prominent representative of exploration writing and the subject of numerous studies involving postcolonial, textual, gender-based, and other critical approaches by scholars such as Ian MacLaren, Kathleen Venema, and Bruce Greenfield. Alongside the work of these critics, this essay approaches Hearne from yet another angle that involves patterns of reception and reconception, formulated in part through the lens of book history. By following three modes of representation — editions of his text, non-fictional retellings of his story, and his appearance in works by creative writers — we can see how Hearne has been constructed in Canada's print and literary histories over more than a century and how the complex afterlife of his narrative offers a window into Canadians' shifting notions of cultural value.

While historians have elucidated the factual aspects of Hearne's narrative, questions surrounding his authorship have intrigued textual scholars; as well, the complexity of his self-representation and the appeal of his storytelling have inspired creative writers. Issues that enmesh Hearne include his subject position as narrator, his representation of Indigenous people in one of the first detailed contact narratives about the northernmost reaches of British North America (including his description of cultures soon to be decimated by smallpox), and questions of authorial reliability stimulated by MacLaren's hypothesis that another hand polished the narrative's climactic description of the massacre of 17 July 1771 — in particular the compelling image of the dying Inuit girl, pinioned by her attackers' spears and twining herself around Hearne's legs as she begged to be spared. In her 2002 dissertation based upon careful examination of all surviving archival documents written by Hearne, historian Heather Driscoll countered that Hearne "was capable of writing the text, had the motivation and opportunity to do so, and therefore was, indeed, the author" (ii). The debate about Hearne's literary ability also colours Ken McGoogan's defensive biography, Ancient Mariner (2003). On the creative side, Hearne's story has inspired a number of literary efforts, the most recent being Pauline Holdstock's novel Into the Heart of the Country (2011). Aimed at different readerships, these various works develop different strategies to address Hearne's personality and experiences.

After receiving youthful training in the Royal Navy, which Samuel Hearne entered at the age of eleven, he joined the Hudson's Bay Company (hereafter HBC) in 1766, at the age of twenty-one, and was posted to Fort Prince of Wales, a principal site in the development of the northern fur trade. Assigned to pursue rumours of copper deposits somewhere to the northwest, he undertook three separate overland journeys into the northern barrens. After the first two efforts of 1769 were aborted, the third expedition accomplished its goal. Over the course of nineteen months in 1770-72, Hearne and his Dene-Chipewyan informants made a return journey of some 3,500 miles, travelling on foot to the mouth of the Coppermine River, where it drains into the Arctic Ocean. Without European companions and utterly dependent on his Indigenous guides, Hearne carefully recorded the region's geography, natural life, and ethnography in field notes and work logs that belonged to the HBC but no longer survive. In the eyes of the HBC, the results were mostly negative: Hearne found virtually no copper, and he established that there was no viable Northwest Passage below the latitude of sixty-eight degrees, thereby demolishing "a centuries-old will-o'-the wisp of the European imagination," in the words of Victor G. Hopwood (154).[6] Nonetheless, Hearne's intelligence and fortitude demonstrated his value to the HBC, and he rose to become governor of Fort Prince of Wales in 1776. During these years, he began to mine his memory and the details of his logbooks for a book-length narrative that received considerable recognition while still in manuscript form. In 1782, when Hearne surrendered Fort Prince of Wales to French forces led by Comte de Laprouse, the latter agreed to take care of the manuscript and duly returned it on the assurance that Hearne would seek publication. After ill health prompted his return to England in 1787, Hearne obtained access to his HBC records and devoted his final years to completing his account of his experiences with guidance from his old friend, scientist William Wales, "widely assumed to be Hearne's ghostwriter" (Craciun, "Writing the Disaster" 447). In 1792, when Hearne died of dropsy at the age of forty-seven, he left a manuscript for which he had been promised two hundred pounds upon publication (never paid because of his premature death). Three years later, his book was handsomely produced by Strahan and Cadell[7] as A Journey from Prince of Wales' Fort in Hudson's Bay, to the Northern Ocean . . . in the years 1769, 1770, 1771, and 1772, joining that publisher's list of significant exploration narratives by such canonical authors as James Cook and George Anson.

The story of Hearne's canonicity and afterlife in relation to the interventions of publishers, editors, scholars, and popular and creative writers begins with his book's publishing history. During the 1780s, Hearne was well aware that "several learned and curious gentlemen are in possession of manuscript copies of, or extracts from, my Journals" (xxx). Direct manifestations of their interest include Thomas Pennant's references to Hearne's experiences in his Arctic Zoology of 1784 (clxxv-clxxii), Andrew Graham's citation of an "extract from [Hearne's] Journal" in his 1791 manuscript later issued as Andrew Graham's Observations on Hudson's Bay 1767-91 (196-202), and Dr. James Douglas's description of Hearne's northern trek in his introduction to the 1784 edition of Cook's A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean . . . (xlvii-l). This advance circulation created such a strong appetite for the full volume that, according to one historian of European knowledge, "The subsequent posthumous publication of Hearne's journals in 1795 is arguably more historically significant than Hearne's journeys themselves" (Binnema 103). The first London edition of Hearne's narrative was quickly followed by a reprint in Dublin in 1796 and translation into German (Berlin 1797, Vienna 1803), Dutch (The Hague 1798), Swedish (Stockholm 1798), French (Paris 1799), Danish (Copenhagen 1802), and Russian (St. Petersburg 1808). An abridgement appeared in volume 17 of William Fordyce Mavor's series of selected exploration writings, issued in London in 1797 and reprinted in Philadelphia in 1802 (see Mavor), and another version was issued by Sir R. Phillips in London in 1809 (see Phillips). Hearne remained visible during the nineteenth century with extensive citations in popular volumes, such as John Barrow's Chronological History of Voyages into the Arctic (1818) (see Craciun, "Writing the Disaster"). John Franklin carried a copy of Hearne's hefty Journey on his first venture into the Arctic, the ill-fated Coppermine Expedition of 1819-22 (an omen of his later catastrophic voyage of 1845-47); his resulting Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea in the Years 1819, 20, 21, and 22(1823) frequently references people and sites described by Hearne as well as his own visit to Bloody Falls (350). In Writing Arctic Disaster: Authorship and Exploration, Adriana Craciun argues that in Victorian England the wide circulation of Hearne's narrative — especially his prefatory account of James Knight's doomed 1719 expedition in quest of the Northwest Passage — played a major role in "the popularization of Arctic disaster, and specifically in the Franklin disaster to come" (25). British attention returned to Hearne in 2009 at the hands of Ray Mears, whose book Northern Wilderness, alongside an episode in the BBC television series Ray Mears's Northern Wilderness, gave Hearne extended attention as one of the "explorers who should be household names in their native Britain, but who are now as little known as the land they encountered" (2).

In the literary realm, Hearne is credited with having inspired Wordsworth's "Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman" (1798), which in turn lies behind Duncan Campbell Scott's well-known 1905 poem "The Forsaken" (Beckmann), and with having influenced Poe and Thoreau.[8] Canadian author Ken McGoogan titled his biography Ancient Mariner to enhance his argument that Hearne's travels and continuing sense of guilt about the massacre informed Coleridge's well-known poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1-3, 273-74, 290-94). Although John Livingstone Lowes confirms that Coleridge owned a copy of the Dublin edition of Hearne's Journey (449) and that Coleridge's poem "The Three Graves" indirectly drew on Hearne's accounts of Native witchcraft (117), there seems to be little reason to argue with his identification of Coleridge's source as George Shelvocke's A Voyage Round the World by Way of the Great South Sea (1726), a book that Wordsworth drew to Coleridge's attention and that includes a description of Captain Simon Hadley's senseless shooting of an albatross (485-86; also see Fowke).

Hearne's significance in the Canadian context was confirmed in 1911 when the first Canadian edition of his Journey was issued in Toronto by the Champlain Society as the sixth volume in its ongoing series of significant documents in Canadian history. Founded in 1905 and still active today, this organization aims "to increase public awareness of, and accessibility to, Canada's rich store of historical records"[9] by issuing a wide range of published and manuscript materials in limited scholarly editions with a usual print run of five hundred copies. Hearne's Journey was prepared by J.B. Tyrrell, a geologist and cartographer with the Geological Survey of Canada who described himself as "the only one since Hearne who has conducted explorations in the country lying between Fort Churchill and the eastern end of Great Slave Lake and south of latitude of 63 [degrees] N" (ix). His diplomatic edition records the pagination of the original edition of 1795, with Hearne's notes and illustrations supplemented by additional notes, maps, and illustrations, including fifteen documentary photographs from Tyrrell's own expeditions, along with a bibliography and index. The Champlain Society returned to Hearne in 1934 with the publication of his manuscript journals of inland travels in 1774-75, still held in the HBC archives, as part of its volume 21. Also edited by Tyrrell, this text provides a fine example of an HBC employee's logbook, reporting daily movements and activities in abbreviated notation with minimal narrative.

The 1950s proved to be a distinctive decade in the dissemination of Hearne's story with new book-length versions contributing to the fresh national consciousness of the postwar era signalled by such milestones as the 1951 report of the Massey Commission, the 1955 Canadian Writers' Conference at Queen's University, and the creation of the Canada Council in 1957. Two different representations of Hearne's journals, both published in 1958, established his narrative's ongoing appeal to different readerships. Drawing on new research in both the United Kingdom and the HBC archives in Winnipeg, historian Richard Glover issued a scholarly edition with Macmillan of Canada that remains the definitive text for academics even though it was last reprinted in 1972. Throughout this edition, Glover draws comparisons between Hearne's published volume and the Stowe manuscript in the British Library, which he characterizes as Hearne's "original report of 1772" (41).[10]

In the same year, Canada's other major press of the era, McClelland and Stewart, published a volume under the name of popular naturalist author Farley Mowat titled Coppermine Journey: An Account of a Great Adventure — Selected from the Journals of Samuel Hearne. Drawing on his own experience in the Arctic and retaining some flavour of Hearne's style, Mowat streamlined the text and modernized its punctuation and syntax in order to return Hearne to what Mowat characterized as Hearne's intended "Everyman" readership ([xi]). Then at the beginning of his career, Mowat demonstrated his gift for narrative organization (much superior to Hearne's) by consolidating information that is dispersed in the original version, transferring information about Indigenous life from Hearne's copious footnotes and final encyclopedic chapters into the primary narrative, and explaining the enmity between Dene and Inuit before the occurance of the massacre. He also restructured Hearne's chapters so that several conclude with strategic highlights, such as placing Hearne's comments about cannibalism at the end of the second chapter and his reflections on the negative impact of European contact on the Native population at the end of the fifth chapter. Mowat's interventions enliven the narrative by reducing its scientific and cartographic content and highlighting the human element to create a drama of three major characters: Moses Norton, the nasty governor of Fort Prince of Wales; Matonabbee, Hearne's outstanding Dene-Chipewyan guide; and Samuel Hearne himself, the determined, long-suffering hero. However, in removing material outside the timeline of Hearne's three ventures of 1769-72, Mowat deleted two significant sections concerning 1782-83, when Fort Prince of Wales was temporarily in French hands. Missing are Hearne's dispassionate account of Matonabbee's suicide when the latter believed that the British had forever abandoned Fort Prince of Wales[11] and his touching description of his beloved Mary Norton, the mixed-race daughter of Governor Moses Norton, who starved to death during Hearne's absence in the winter of 1782-83. (As discussed later in this essay, Mary's story would be taken up by novelist Pauline Holdstock in 2011.)

The work of eminent book designer Frank Newfeld, the first edition of Mowat's book featured endpapers with a map of Hearne's journeys and a repeated internal image based upon an Inuit harpoon. Using the orange of copper, the blue of water, and the white space of arctic snow, the dust jacket artistically references the book's climactic massacre with a stylized illustration of Aboriginals killing Inuit (here fully clothed, though Hearne specified that they were nude), along with images of travelling by canoe and dogsled — the latter a means of transportation that Hearne and his companions never used and whose presence demonstrates the tendency of illustrators to rely on conventional notions of northern Indigenous cultures. Notwithstanding Mowat's scornful description of the "Eskimo harpoon" motif as "a delightful scholastic joke" (Letter) because of its inappropriateness to Hearne's story, this edition represents the best of Canadian commercial book production in the 1950s and 1960s. When the text was reissued in 1990 as a small mass-market paperback, its front cover, dominated by the name of Farley Mowat, proclaimed his celebrity status over that of Hearne, whose name is almost invisible. Insouciance rather than accuracy governed the selection of this version's cover image, taken not from one of the engravings in Hearne's original volume but from a sixteenth-century woodcut of Inuit kayakers that originally illustrated Martin Frobisher's voyage of 1577 (see Frobisher).[12]

Contrasting with Mowat's popular account is the handsome 1971 edition of Hearne's Journey produced by Mel Hurtig in his Canadiana Reprint Series of more than two dozen "facsimile reproductions" of "classics of Canadian history and literature," to cite the publisher's blurb on the back of the dust jacket.[13] In line with the centennial nationalism of the late 1960s through the 1970s, this series demonstrated Hurtig's commitment to celebrating Canadian accomplishments by building resources such as the Canadian Encyclopedia. Introduced by historian Leslie Neatby, Hurtig's edition of Hearne's Journey, priced at twenty dollars, includes nearly full-size reproductions of the engravings and multicolour fold-out maps of the first edition of 1795. Hurtig retained the font size of Hearne's original text but reduced the volume's stately quarto dimensions by trimming the margins and deleting some bottom-of-the-page information such as printers' signatures and production dates of plates.[14] Although the text appears to be an exact photographic replica of the 1795 original, MacLaren has drawn attention to Hurtig's silent corrections of printing errors listed in the "errata" sheet of the first edition and cautions us about the assumed reliability of a "facsimile reprint" ("Notes" 29).[15]

In 2007, Hearne's journal returned to print in a handy paperback from TouchWood Editions, a press in Victoria specializing in works about the Pacific Northwest. Characterized on the front cover as "The Adventures of Samuel Hearne," this version features modernized spelling; as well, the original footnotes have been changed to endnotes so that Hearne's often extensive commentary is no longer set up in conversation with the primary text. Despite its many typographical errors and muddy reproductions of the original maps and illustrations, this book is helpfully indexed and useful as a basic text for general readers and undergraduate classes.