Samuel Hearne's Accounts of the Massacre at Bloody Fall, 17 July 1771
[In the following essay, MacLaren points to differences in Hearne's field notes and the subsequently published A Journey to the Northern Ocean to show that the latter is not necessarily an accurate account of the events being depicted.]
In the twentieth century we are continually trying to alter and refine our descriptions of facts, while at the same time trying to stabilize literary texts in “definitive” editions. The description of a fact has no acknowledged literary value and becomes disposable at a moment's notice. The description of a fantasy, once canonized as literature, becomes immutable.
(Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World 140)
Formerly every Thing printed was believed, because it was in Print: Now Things seem to be disbelieved for just the very same Reason.
(“A Traveller” [Benjamin Franklin] 135)
The early literature of exploration and travel possesses a bibliographical character that may be described as peregrine. Words travelled by discrete routes through stages: field notes/log book, journal/report, draft manuscript, and finally the publishable commodity of a book-length narrative. Sometimes, many years lapsed between and among any of these stages, and by no means did all narratives go through all the stages, nor do they in today's travel literature. On occasion, in its latter stages, where the purpose of the words themselves altered in order to conform to expectations and forms other than the traveller's own, a narrative underwent so much change that its content and/or style significantly altered its previous stages, as when a publisher, necessarily having a keen eye for what would and what would not realize him a profit on a competitive market, encouraged the explorer or traveller—rarely a seasoned writer and often a one-time author—to have his field notes or journal “readied” for the press. (What author would hesitate to accede to such a suggestion, especially in the ages before Charles Dickens had won authors any power at all?1)
In 1582, with the appearance in English-language exploration and travel literature of Richard Hakluyt, the encyclopedist of travellers' reports who expedited the journey of words into published form, the involvement in the text by others, or at least the pressure exerted by others on the traveller/author to make his narrative conform to what a readership was prepared to consume, grew increasingly common. Hakluyt himself exerted his influence over publication by sedulously disqualifying from his collections any accounts the veracity of which he could not establish (he did print Mandeville's notoriously unreliable Travels but chose to leave it in Latin rather than use any of the available English versions). But with changes in taste, the Age of Enlightenment's encyclopedists, editors, and publishers of travel writing did not always associate veracity with fact in the strict way that Hakluyt had. Certainly, editorial involvement, not to say corruption, including the engagement of the Grub Street hack, had developed into a common practice in both scientific narratives and the less specific travels by the last decade of the eighteenth century, when Samuel Hearne was preparing to sign a contract with a publisher for the narrative of his 1769-72 explorations in boreal and arctic North America.2 In Hearne's day, publishers endeavoured to straddle the fence of fact and imagination; that they supplied both is no surprise given the lucrative market for the genre. Hearne, though he did not live to spend the money, received £200 for his writings. Johnson had procured Goldsmith only £60 for The Vicar of Wakefield in 1766, and poor Jane Austen realized but £10 for the first draft of Northanger Abbey in 1803 (Glover xliii).
In the twentieth century, history, anthropology, and literary studies have shown a tendency to accord the published stage of travel writing pre-eminent authority by assuming that a book not only provides the eyewitness's accounts of events, people, and matter, but also displays his own literary sensibility, his own capacity for understanding the significance of what he experienced, and his own ability for communicating it. Readers assume that a work of travel literature indicates a traveller's on-the-spot attitudes towards the lands of which he claimed possession and the peoples of whom he offered the European world its early glimpses. Typically, by referring to the books as “journals”—Paul Carter's Road to Botany Bay provides a recent example, among many—critics and scholars in several disciplines encourage such straightforward readings.3 Thus, despite our healthy scepticism about words and texts in other respects—one thinks of Mary Louise Pratt's neighbouring criticism of the positivist claims of ethnographies—this practice persists, resembling, however unintentionally, the straightforward equation between words and things that the Royal Society's Thomas Sprat offered in 1667 as the model which explorers' and travellers' relations were to employ.4 Today, it is an unwarranted connection between words and their putative authors' first perceptions that is more likely to occur. The necessary corrective is the examination of such matters as the involvement of a ghost writer (as it was with Captain Cook, Alexander Mackenzie, and Paul Kane5) or the substantive alteration of a text by the traveller himself sometime after his travels.6 All factors that may qualify straightforward readings of books of travel and exploration need to be established and considered. Moreover, such study needs, at least for now, to be conducted book by book, traveller by traveller, rather than synthetically across the genre. Only this individual analysis will establish whether a particular book can legitimately be straightforwardly consulted as an authoritative source or not.
Samuel Hearne's three attempts, only the last of which succeeded, to traverse the Barrens from Hudson Bay to the Arctic Ocean are known to most readers only from his book, A Journey from Prince of Wales's Fort in Hudson's Bay to the Northern Ocean 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, first published in 1795 in London. The present purpose is twofold: first, to place on view another stage—the initial one—of that narrative by printing for the first time the account from Hearne's field notes of the massacre of twenty-two Copper Inuit, probably Kogluktomiut (Jenness), or Nagyuktomiut (Franklin 352), at Bloody Fall, on the Coppermine River, by the Dene (Chipewyan and Copper [Yellowknife] Indians) with whom Hearne was travelling in 1771; and, second, to offer, less perhaps to the reader of history and anthropology than to the reader of exploration literature, some considerations of the divergences in content, structure, and style between that first account and two others, the second of which, from the published book, has been so often excerpted by editors, taught by instructors in many disciplines, and critically interpreted by academic and other readers of Canadian literature as to have become virtually a work of literature in its own right.
I
First, the bibliographical details deserve a recapitulation. In Hearne's case, three stages of the massacre narrative are extant. The best known of these, of course, is the fourth stage, the posthumously published book, most recently edited in 1958, by Richard Glover. Then there is a fragment of a second-stage narrative—a journal—which was created following Hearne's return to Fort Prince of Wales. This fragment survives, apparently, only in fellow fur trader Andrew Graham's transcription of it in his voluminous “Observations,” portions of which, including Hearne's journal fragment (Hudson's Bay Company Archives E.2/12, 336-45), were edited by Glyndwr Williams and published (Graham 196-200) in 1969. Owing to a bedeviling variety of conflicting evidence in Graham's manuscripts (201 n.6, 355, 359), this fragment cannot with utter assurance be dated more precisely than to the twenty-year span, 1773-92. Finally, or initially, there is the least known version, the first-stage set of field notes from the third journey. To the best of my knowledge, no third-stage narrative (that is, a draft manuscript of the published book) has survived.
Richard Glover, whose edition of A Journey has become the standard for scholars in all disciplines, states that any manuscript report of the first two journeys is now lost: “So too is the original journal [that is, field notes] of his third trip, which was sent home to London, but in 1791 it was copied for the Marquis of Buckingham. The Marquis bound his copy up … and then buried it in his library, whence it ultimately came safely to rest in the British Museum” (xxxii). Dated 1791 at its conclusion, this is the copy that has come to be known as the Stowe MS; it is catalogued with the Stowe collection as MS 307 in the British Museum. In addition to MS 307, there is a sixty-one-page transcription of it, dated 1916 (or 1918: the final digit is unclear), in the National Archives of Canada. So far as the massacre account is concerned, the nine discrepancies between the MS and the transcription—in capitalizations, the elision of dashes, and the rendering of two words, “miles” and “shots,” in the singular—are not substantive.7 Whether or not the Stowe MS was faithfully copied from Hearne's original cannot be known. For the present purposes it is assumed that no wording was changed but that the spelling was likely standardized.8 The same is assumed for Graham's transcription of the fragment of Hearne's journal. In this connection, it is important to keep in mind that because of the Hudson's Bay Record Society's policy of modernizing the spellings of common words in its editions (Graham xi), one must take care when drawing inferences based on the spelling of words in the quotations from the published edition of Hearne's journal fragment.
While it may seem from the subtitle of these field notes—“Beginning 7th Decr 1770 ending June 30th 1772”—that the MS is a second-stage narrative, written after Hearne's return to Fort Prince of Wales, all internal evidence suggests that it is a copy of field notes that were written, if not always daily, then certainly at regular intervals during the third expedition: not only are there no retrospective remarks (i.e., “When we passed this way again several months later …”)—there are in A Journey and in the fragment of the journal9—but there is also no foreshadowing. There are regular uses (although more in the first thirty pages than in the last) of the present tense and occasional uses of the future. For example, in a passage written on 1 July 1771 at Congecathawhachaga Lake) and for which there is, perhaps unsurprisingly no equivalent in A Journey (84), Hearne writes as follows (after recording his notoriously inaccurate observation of latitude):
After we go from here the Captain [Matonabbee, who is never identified in the field notes by his name and only once by the name of “Captain Mabanie Azus, L, aza” (1)] expects in less than 10 days to arrive at Coppermine River, if so, I reckon it does not exceed 200 Miles at most, but by the Captains & other Indians [sic] account the road is very difficult.
(19)
The last use of the present tense before the account of the massacre comes in the entry for the day before, 16 July 1771: “by the spies accounts the river further down is more confused with shoals than at this part” (26). Of course, the tense, together with “by the spies accounts,” suggests that Hearne had yet to see the lower reaches of the river for himself.
Because the next use of the present tense does not occur until Hearne had taken “a little sleep which is the first since the 15th [July] & now near 6 in the morning on the 18th” (30; cf. A Journey 106), it is clear that all events leading up to and ensuing from the massacre, including the fifteen-kilometre trip down to and back from the Arctic Ocean, were written after they occurred, and perhaps all at one sitting. The portion of that field note relating the twenty-eight hours of 16 and 17 July follows (with the original spelling and syntax intact):
About one in the morning of the 16th it proved fair weather so began again & surveyed about 10 miles further down, found it as above with one more capital fall & shoals as before, Then we met the three men who went as spies who informed the others of 5 tents of Esquimaux on the W. side of the river & by their account 10 or 12 miles further down. On the receiving this news no further attention or attendance could I get to the continuance of the Survey but their whole concern was turned to consult the best method of stealing on them the ensuing night & killing them while asleep; for which purpose they immediately put their guns spears & c into proper order & crossed the river to the W side, for by the spies accounts the river further down is more confused with shoals than at this part; accordingly when at the West side we walked down the river side about 11 or 12 mile so near that I frequently had an opportunity of assuring myself, as the spies had informed me of the river being at this part less navigable than what I had already surveyed. By this time we saw the clifts of rocks at the back of which were the Esquimaux tents distant about 1[frac12] mile; from this time the Indians were very careful not to cross any hills for fear of being seen by the Esquimaux, but walked in the low valleys which made the way much farther and more difficult, the whole way being thro' clay swamps each step near to the knees. The land was so situated that the Indians crept under some of the rocks within 100 yards of the tents where they lay some time to watch the motions of the Esquimaux but finding all asleep as they supposed by seeing nobody stir without they ran on the tent on a sudden & killed every soul before they had power to rise in the whole 21 persons. The Captn & some of the other Indians wanted me to stay behind the Cliff where they were lying in ambush watching the motions of the Esquimaux saying I could have a good sight of the fight and in no danger, but not thinking it would be so ended & for fear any of the Esquimaux should in running for their lives come past the place where I was lying & might probably kill me as one of their Enemies, I thought it most prudent to be as near as possible to the backs of them Indians, then in case of an attack they would be ready to assist me: At first my Captn was very unwilling to consent saying a random arrow or many things might wound or kill me, & if so he never expected forgiveness from the English; however finding me determined to accompany them, they also fixed a spear for me, & provided me with a broad bayonet likewise; but my Gun I had lent to the Captain, in lieu of which he offered me one of a brace of pocket pistols, but thinking I should not have occasion for so many weapons I did not accept thereof. Being thus equipped they would fain have persuaded me to do as they intended to do, to which I declared off, saying I was at peace with all nations, but in case of their first attacking me would endeavour to defend myself if possible & if my own safety depended thereon would not be afraid of Killing an Esquimaux more than them, at which the Indians seemed greatly pleased & when they ran to the Tents I accompanied them at least followed them close at their backs where I stood neuter & saw the cruel massacre which was soon accomplished, the inhabitants being all asleep. There were also 7 more tents of Esquimaux upon the East side of the river, directly opposite where the Natives had committed this cruel murder, the noise of the Guns had alarmed the inhabitants who immediately embarked in their little Canoes & flew to an Island in the river about 160 yards from their Tents. while they were embarking the Indians fired a great many shot at them & tho' not above 80 yards across at that part did no other damage than shooting one man thro' the calf of his leg which only served to freshen his way. when the Indians had plundered the tents of the deceased of all the Copper work & any other trifling things they thought worth while to take they then returned up the river a little way to where their Canoes were left in order to cross to the East side to plunder them likewise; but as crossing the river took some time with only 3 Canoes & entirely under cover of the rocks, the surviving Esquimaux who flew to an Island for shelter thought we were gone about our business & had part of them returned to the Tents for their things as I suppose, for on our coming in sight of their Tents we saw several people busy in tying up bundles who were not above 90 or 100 yards from them, on whom the Indians ran in again, but killed only one man before they embarked & gained the former island to which they first flew for shelter.
After the Indians had plundered those Tents of all Copper & c they were again ready to assist me in making an end to the survey the Sea being then in sight from N.W. by N. to the N.E. distant about 8 Miles. It was then about 5 in the morning of the 17th when I again proceeded. …
(26-29)
As one might expect, the field notes provide a briefer account of the so-called massacre at Bloody Fall than the journal's passage (Graham 196-200) does, and a much briefer account than the book's centrepiece and climax (A Journey 96-105) does. The differences may be traced through comparisons of content, style, and structure.
II
Most striking to readers is likely to be the fact that the field note makes no mention whatsoever of the most memorable figure of the book's drama, the “young girl, seemingly about eighteen years of age” (A Journey 99), whose nightmarish twining round Hearne's legs in a paragraph that seems, like her death, interminable, will have remained uppermost in their minds. Her torturous death in the book is complemented (exacerbated?) by the deaths of the old man on the east side of the river—“not less than twenty had a hand in his death, as his whole body was like a cullender” (A Journey 102)—and of the deaf and nearly blind old woman who is tortured upriver after the initial massacre—“they not only poked out her eyes, but stabbed her in many parts very remote from those which are vital” (A Journey 103). Only the man even appears in the field note (“but killed only one man”) where he is unattended by the piercing simile of the cullender.10 Thus, none of the book's descriptions of the cruellest acts of the Chipewyan and Copper Indians appears in the field note. Matonabbee's “gang” killed and plundered twenty-two Copper Inuit, twenty-one in their tents on the west bank of the Coppermine River, and one on the east bank. These appear to be the bald facts, although Hearne, by using the terms “cruel massacre” and “cruel murder” in his field note, leaves no doubt of his own view of the incident. But even in the second stage of the narrative, the facts begin to change. The fragment of the journal (probably written by Hearne, although, because it too survives only in a transcription, Andrew Graham or another's involvement cannot be ruled out as a certainty) does introduce “one young girl, about eighteen years old” (Graham 198), and describes her “twining and twisting round the spears like an eel” (Graham 199), although it stops short of the book's exclamation mark. If this is Hearne's work, his retrospection certainly adds a gothic dimension to the narrative at the second stage. More change was to come, however. The journal's account of the girl is doubled in length by the book's, which includes for the first time the expressive focus on Hearne:
though I summed up all the fortitude I was master of on the occasion, it was with difficulty that I could refrain from tears; and I am confident that my features must have feelingly expressed how sincerely I was affected at the barbarous scene I then witnessed; even at this hour I cannot reflect on the transactions of that horrid day without shedding tears.
(A Journey 100)
In the journal as well, the old woman makes a first appearance, if a brief one compared to the description of her and her death in A Journey: “We found a very old woman a small distance up the river spearing salmon, whom they butchered, every man having a thrust at her with his spear” (Graham 200).
It could be that, in the first instance, Hearne was simply recording the fact of casualties. Only occasionally in his field notes does he amplify or even muse on what he succinctly describes, so it is hardly surprising that this field note does not contain the details supplied when the report of the massacre was expanded into a journal and then into a book. Supporting this view is the likelihood that Hearne had only his superiors in mind as the audience of his field notes, and wrote knowingly that they would want to know only about the prospects of mining copper in the region, and of the navigability of the river and of the sea at its mouth.11 No doubt, the Hudson's Bay Company's London governor, Samuel Wegg and his Committee would be interested to know that racial enmity might render difficult the establishment of a mine or of trading relations in the district (and might jeopardize the relations already well established on Hudson Bay, depending on the Chipewyans' response to the initiative). With this in mind, they might also wish to know that Hearne had wisely and adamantly remained “neuter,” that is, as the OED defines it, had “not declar[ed himself] on, or render[ed] assistance to, either side,” but would not care to know Hearne's emotional responses to the events: the fur trader's report was not the sort of genre that normally included such material. These are the good reasons for assuming that Hearne simply left out of his field note scenes of torture, confining himself, first, to an explanation of why he remained in the Chipewyan and Copper Indians' company when they had departed from the river survey, and, second, to a report both of the massacre (as simply “cruel”) and of the fact that the Indians had plundered the Inuit, some of whom had survived. To the extent that he did these things, Hearne submitted a report in the factual and plain style that Hakluyt in the sixteenth and Sprat in the seventeenth centuries would have approved.
It stands to reason that when the purpose of Hearne's narrative altered from reporting to his superior to presenting his remarkable adventures to the public (both in and of themselves, and for the vindication of him that they achieved12), the narrative altered as well. In the case of the publication stage, the narrative could amplify, dramatize, and ponder events and observations; as well, the figure of the explorer could be more prominently asserted in the text. The genre of the travel book even permitted the author some licence: the aesthetically justified “lie” had been commonly practised in medieval travel literature, and was regarded as permissible, within limits, in all but the most strictly scientific travel reports through the eighteenth century. For Hearne, the truth of the massacre, as distinct from the facts, was perhaps incarnated before him by his imagination retrospectively. The figure of the girl, the “poor,” the “fellow-creature” (A Journey 100), whom perhaps Hearne saw as only one of many at the time, becomes his doppelgänger, in whom he realizes and articulates his own paralysis in the face of such barbarity. In the light of such a likelihood, Hearne may be approximated to the figure of Christopher Columbus that William C. Spengemann has romantically drawn:
[Columbus] reviews the data again and again in a vain attempt to discover exactly where his travels have brought him and what they have made of him. What the voyage was to have revealed is given to the narrative to decipher, and the narrative itself becomes an imaginative voyage toward the truth, an effort to attain artistically the authoritative knowledge that travel alone has denied him.
(25)
Writers often speak of the facts, the data holding but the germ of the truth. At the Writers Festival held in conjunction with the Olympic Games at Calgary in 1988, the members of the travel literature panel—Dennison Berwick, Jan Morris, and Ronald Wright—agreed that the experience of events provides only the raw material for a travel book; the traveller must still find the essence of the travels and shape it in words. Publishing only one's field notes, therefore, struck them as pointless; perhaps it struck Hearne similarly.
Readers' sympathetic responses to any of these views will depend upon the degree to which travel literature serves a factual purpose for them. To be enchanted stands at one end of the spectrum; to be informed at the other. It has always been a beguiling genre,13 and, because beguiling, intriguing. When the stage of the field notes is also available, one can afford not to suspend one's disbelief, or at least to seek to understand how the writer wove the experiences of travel into a book. George Back, one of the four British naval officers on John Franklin's first overland expedition (1819-22), which reached Bloody Fall in July 1821, fifty years after the massacre, must have been one of the first to express his disbelief over Hearne's book. He did so after having seen a copy of Hearne's field notes or journal, or so I infer from his fellow officer's—surgeon-naturalist John Richardson—remark in Back's Narrative (1836), to the effect that “His [Hearne's] printed work does not, however, quote his courses and distances so fully as his original journal (a copy of which we saw at Hudson's Bay)” (147). Certainly all the British officers, the first white men on the Coppermine River after Hearne, were reading his book as fact, evaluating it for its accuracy as fact, and decrying its factual errors. In his own journal from the first expedition, Back wrote: “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.”14 Very likely, “the most interesting part” includes the paragraph recounting the young woman's tortured murder.15 Back does not deny the fact of the massacre; indeed, his painting of Bloody Fall is the first illustration to document the scene of it. It is complete with skulls and bones in the left foreground and pointedly dated “July 17” in the title that accompanies the engraving made in 1823 (Franklin opp. 350). What Back does dispute is the embellishment of it.16
Back's doubt helps one to see that the young woman, who happens to be eighteen years of age and, therefore, suitable as a parallel for the Gothic novel's sexually mature, innocent victim of male assault, cannot be interjected into the narrative in a discrete paragraph without compromising the entire account. No one—man or woman, even Gothic heroine—could entwine around the legs of Hearne the bystander, unless the Inuit were either defending themselves or fleeing their assailants. If the field note is fact, they did neither. There was no battle, no skirmish. First, the Chipewyan and Copper Indians consulted on “the best method of stealing on them the ensuing night & killing them while asleep.” Then they “ran on the tent on a sudden & killed every soul before they had power to rise” (emphasis added). Hearne is explicit; he is clear; he is factual about this. And he emphasizes it by repetition: “I stood neuter & saw the cruel massacre which was soon accomplished, the inhabitants being all asleep.” Perhaps George Back had heard as much from his old guide.17 On the west bank of the river, there had been no contact except the killings. The Inuit on the east bank of the Coppermine fled “immediately” rather than attempt to avenge the loss of their families, and the river provided both an effective barrier and a means of escape for them. But apart from their terror-stricken (one presumes) departure, there is no other action in the field note; the stealth of the Indians is the only movement on the west bank; even the deaf, nearly blind old woman makes no appearance.
III
That the field notes nowhere identify the site of the massacre as Bloody Fall (cf. A Journey 108) opens the possibility that, in conjunction with the alteration of the plot, all the sublime Gothicism of the book's account has been added, from the name of the site, the gang torture of the young woman, old woman, and old man, the gore, and the misogyny,18 to the sadism, the horror experienced by the awakened victims, and the pathos.19 With these additions come the Gothic style and structure of the incident. Lurid and pathetic adjectives and epithets, which begin to make their appearance in the journal, abound in the published account: “completely frightful,” “poor unsuspecting creatures,” “poor unhappy victims,” “poor expiring wretches,” “truly dreadful” (A Journey 99), “shrieks and agony of the poor wretch,” “the terror of my mind at beholding this butchery,” “poor creature,” “horrid day” (100), “poor surviving Esquimaux” (101), “poor creatures” (104), as well as the infamous simile of the young woman as eel (100). Then, with the deaths of the Inuit, the journal to some and the book to a great degree introduce another powerful Gothic effect—that of suggestion, rather than identification. It is pointless to venture a clearer understanding of what “[t]he brutish manner” was “in which the savages used the bodies they had so cruelly bereaved of life,” and which both the journal's and the book's personas of Hearne find “so shocking, that it would be indecent to describe” (Graham 199; A Journey 100). The physical Gothic and the historical Gothic, especially in works written after the French Revolution, had outstripped the imagination, thereby making suggestion (of algolagnia or something else) more powerful than description. Thus, both the horror of such Gothicized histories as Anna Maria MacKenzie's The Danish Massacre: An Historical Fact (1791), in which the violence does occur, and the terror of Ann Radcliffe's novels, in which the suggestion of the violence is all, are brought into play in the massacre scene.20 But, as with the excessiveness of Gothic fiction, there is yet more. The journal and the book also add the derisive component in which the Indians call out to the Inuit on the east bank, “tima! tima!,” although the book goes on: tima being “in the Esquimaux language … a friendly word similar to what cheer?” (A Journey 101). Further, they render the Inuit relentlessly as pathetic innocents. Not only are all of them “poor creatures,” but they do not know enough to protect themselves. In the field note, “the noise of the Guns had alarmed” those of them on the east side of the river; they “immediately embarked in their little Canoes & flew to an Island in the river about 160 yards from their Tents” (28). In the book, on the other hand,
[t]he poor Esquimaux on the opposite shore, though all up in arms, did not attempt to abandon their tents; and they were so unacquainted with the nature of fire-arms, that when the bullets struck the ground, they ran in crowds to see what was sent them, and seemed anxious to examine all the pieces of lead which they found flattened against the rocks. At length one of the Esquimaux men was shot in the calf of his leg, which put them in great confusion.
(A Journey 101)
Only then do the book's “poor Esquimaux” immediately “embark … in their little canoes.” Until then, outnumbered and ill-equipped in both arms and savvy, they stand about like sacrificial lambs. No such portrayal of them occurs in the field note.
Similarly pronounced in the book as not in either the field note or the journal is the presence of Hearne himself. He is very much the onlooker in the field note, but takes up a narrative prominence in the book, not only in the paragraph which he closes by shedding tears, but also in the subsequent one about the treatment of the corpses. Moreover, the “ridicule” (A Journey 100) that he suffers from the book's Indians, who taunt him when he distinguishes himself from them as the humane, civilized gentleman (“solicited very hard for” the young woman's life), is nowhere evident in the field note.21 In the journal, the Indians “upbraid” rather than ridicule him, and they alarm him: “I solicited for her life, but so far from being granted that [,] I was not fully assured of my own being entirely in safety for offering to speak in her behalf” (Graham 199). In the field note, he makes no effort to appear a brave, heroic, even gallant man; he explicitly states what the book cannot quite utter—that it is “for fear” that he does not remain behind on his own. He even points out Matonabbee's disinclination to have him tag along, a disinclination that arises not out of any solicitude for his esteemed white friend's security, but out of interest for himself and his people: if Hearne happens to be killed in the attack, only the Matonabbee of the field note shrewdly realizes that he will pay the price back at Fort Prince of Wales.22 The emphasis in the note is placed on Matonabbee, for whom Hearne becomes a liability. Standing “neuter” might have been Hearne's decision alone, but it must have met with Matonabbee's full approval.
The Hearne of the book not only scruples at the torture, but also draws attention to his own sentiments about it. This persona obviously suits both the Gothic convention (because it permits the outpouring of emotion), and late eighteenth-century travel literature (because it focuses attention as much on the traveller as on the world in which he travels).23 In the book, his syntax matches him: “my thoughts at the time were too much agitated to admit of any such remarks”; “I am confident that my features must have feelingly expressed how sincerely I was affected at the barbarous scene” (A Journey 100); and so forth. At times he is fastidious beyond measure—“but stabbed her in many parts very remote from those which are vital” (A Journey 103)—while at others he is most literary: “entered the lists,” and “transfixed her to the ground” (A Journey 99); “whole body like a cullender” (A Journey 102). And there is the gentlemanly litotes of the “Indians were not displeased at this proposal” (A Journey 98; compare the field note's “at which the Indians seemed greatly pleased [28], and the journal's “[t]hey seemed highly pleased” [Graham 198]). In this scene, one readily senses the incongruity of this veteran seaman and trader presenting himself in the manner of a Grand Tourist. In the light of it, one must contradict Glover's view, that “the most important and easily the most surprising achievement of such a semi-literate man as Hearne was the writing of his book” (xxviii). At least with respect to the massacre scene, this remark is both ungenerous (“semi-literate”) and too quick to credit where it is perhaps undeserved.24
IV
The structure of the book's massacre scene consummately creates a dramatic suspense that the field note lacks and that the journal only initiates. To create this suspense, A Journey conveys the Indians to the west side of the river and then halts the action while their targets and shields are bedecked with symbols, and the significance of those symbols is learned by a disparaging Hearne who paraphrases Revelation to dismiss “this piece of superstition.” (No such quotation occurs in the journal.) Then there is another advance of the party followed by a paragraph of delay concerning the unanimity of the Indians, for which the journal also has no parallel. The next paragraph inches them forward “to within two hundred yards of the tents” (A Journey 98), again suspends the action, and adumbrates the wait of the ambush by both interjecting the details of the negotiation over where Hearne ought to place himself and why, and, another addition to the field note and journal, describing, in the manner of preparation scenes in epics like The Iliad, the arming of the warriors. By contrast, the field note minimizes the wait, and emphasizes the action in one uninterrupted sentence: “The land was so situated that the Indians crept under some of the rocks within 100 [not 200] yards of the tents where they lay some time to watch the motions of the Esquimaux but finding all asleep as they supposed by seeing nobody stir without they ran on the tent on a sudden & killed every soul before they had power to rise in the whole 21 persons” (27). Only after that report does the field note mention the negotiation over Hearne's placement in the attack, and it spends only the briefest time describing the Indians' preparations.25
The tone of the field note is reportorial, almost flat but certainly not tedious. Hearne's description of the argument, like his remark about his fear, follows the news of the attack; by doing so it seems to make excuses for him. (Perhaps it shows him trying to come to terms with the atrocity, as well.) The field note leaves little doubt that the outcome of the attack took Hearne by surprise; by contrast, the book's dramatic suspense makes the massacre a foregone conclusion.
V
It would be a gross exaggeration to consider Hearne's Journey as the North American equivalent of the Travels of John Mandeville. Nevertheless, the contemplation of such a distorted comparison serves two purposes: it reminds one of how great the claims were on readers of travel writing in different ages, and it helps one to come to terms with the power that the book's purple patch has on its readers, both those who read it as literature and those who consult it as a dependable source of facts. The eyewitness who stands helplessly aside as the nightmare plays itself out before him wields a narrative power unmatched perhaps even by Mandeville, who, probably without even having travelled, forcefully generated his readers' “‘awareness of the narrator's presence’” (qtd. in Adams 168). Readers want, they desire to believe that the account is real. The first-person testimony, coupled with emotional responses, beguiles them (us) into that belief. The putative first-person explorer, returning from the lands beyond knowledge, empowers himself with tropes—“like an eel!” “like a cullender—and creates an irresistible narrative.
In terms of the book generally and not just the massacre scene, it is known that Hearne had help. Indeed, the book bears the marks of having been rather more assembled than written, taking the shape of a fascinating “omnibus” (Greenfield, “Rhetoric” 56) of northern North America. In A Journey, there is geography, zoology, botany, ichthyology, and ethnography, besides the narrative of a fur trader seconded to a hastily ordered expedition of exploration. The book suspends narratives while it momentarily takes up others.26 But, like George Back, and like the first reviewers of the book,27 nearly all readers return to the account of the massacre, so that it takes on a symbolic role, holding the various dimensions and voices of Hearne together, or at least transfixing them to the same point, which happens to coincide with the destination and the purpose of the explorer's odyssey.28
Coincidentally or otherwise, the Gothic taste of the age could be accommodated to the plot of the explorations, the explosion of violence serving as the climax of the published narrative in the very decade when the Gothic novel reached its “first peak … [as] the dominant genre” (Punter 61). It is worth noting as well that the Gothic taste could be accommodated at the same time as another. In the journal as well as A Journey, the “savages” not only stand in for the banditti waiting to ambush Grand Tourists in alpine passes; they also dramatically evoke a theory of man which, as Ronald L. Meek has shown, enjoyed great popularity in the last half of the eighteenth century.29 Holding sway during that period in the social sciences, certainly in ethnography, the theory held that civilizations develop by four stages. The lowest and primary stage is the Savage, followed by Pastoral, Agricultural, and Commercial. The Savage stage is characterized by the hunter and by his barbarous treatment of others, his “brutish manner” (A Journey 100). Not only was such behaviour expected of Native peoples in North America and elsewhere, but it was logical according to this theory because characteristically they neither herded nor farmed. Therefore, they had to remain like animals: aggressive, predatory, nomadic, and violent (especially towards women, who only find increasing security in the refinements that civilization acquires as it advances to the higher stages [Meek 167]). All Savages could thus be seen similarly; thus too could they be related: “the greater part of the peoples of America sprang originally from those barbarians who occupied the continent of Greece and its islands … before those peoples were subsequently known by the name of Greeks” (qtd. in Meek 62). Readers thereby had a model by which to read from the imperial centre outward to all the peoples of the world, from fourth stage to first.
Hearne's book, it has been frequently noted, provides a fascinating ethnography of Chipewyans because it is disinterested. Is it? Surely disinterestedness is a quality that can be attributed much more justly to the field notes than to the book. In the Journey, “Hearne,” rather than maintaining an even attitude towards Matonabbee's gang, swings on a pendulum of extremes between bemused tolerance and denunciation. One of his readers' great fears—that of his literally (rather than, as later with Cooper's Leatherstocking, affectedly) “going native”—plays its role in the drama of the book by virtue of this oscillation. The plunge into savagery is all the more horrifying a prospect in an age possessing both a taste for the Gothic and an ethnographical understanding of the hierarchical and progressive development of civilizations. As with the rungs of Plato's ladder, the stages, once passed, disappear in a progressivist theory of civilization. To regress, then, is not to falter; it is to plummet. When, at the second and fourth stages, Hearne's narrative prepares to make out of his journeys a traveller's tale, first for his civilized colleagues and then for the reading public, the massacre scenes, at first only partially but, later, consummately, bring together the rage for the Gothic and the European understanding of Man, transferring onto the Chipewyans at the climax all the darkness that European travel literature had habitually directed at the “Other” since the horrible wonders of the Tartars, the Turks, the Saracens, the Hottentots, and the Iroquois had been introduced to the genre. Much more than the field notes, the later versions increasingly reflect the tastes of his age.
When Hearne sold his manuscript shortly before dying, he requested that “anything in reason shall be allowed to the person that prepares the Work for the Press. With respect to the agreement you mentioned I wish for nothing more than it shall specify that the Book shall be sent into the World in a style that will do credit both to you, and myself” (qtd. in Glover, xlii-xliii). Andrew Strahan did not fail Hearne, publishing a discourse that the Old World could value on its own terms. As far as the massacre scene is concerned, the preparing and the stylistic shaping made yet another account. Which is preferable depends upon the reader's taste. As to reliability of travel writing, it is necessary to keep in mind that first contacts between Native North Americans and Europeans involved explorers but also their retrospective imaginations and their publishers.
Notes
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See N. N. Feltes for a discussion of the production of other literary genres in nineteenth-century Britain.
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Notwithstanding Hakluyt's example, the Royal Society's demand for the plain reporting of the facts, and Elizabethan England's voracious appetite for information, from the time of John Mandeville's Travels (c. 1356) the relations between matter and literary shaping and enhancement of the reports of it had also intrigued and baffled readers of published travels. Hakluyt represented those who sought to cut the Gordian knot in order to keep the facts straight, but a countervailing taste, one which predominated in eighteenth-century England, predated Hakluyt by many centuries in Europe. It demanded, not fact alone, but fact blended with imagination; instruction but also delight; news but also entertainment; certainty but also fantasy. The great problem with Marco Polo's narrative, for example, was that it had reported only what he had looked at, and not either what he had imagined or what the European reader might have expected him to imagine about the East as the haunt of Wonders. So Polo's account was made over, corrupted, contaminated, shaped; thus are there extant 120 different Polo manuscripts. As has been remarked, the narrative now adduced as Polo's “is in a sense the collaborative effort of a whole culture, enacting by its means its discovery of the Orient” (Campbell 92; emphasis added).
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A pertinent example of such straightforward readings of travel literature, without the benefit of prelusive bibliographical study is my “Samuel Hearne and the Landscapes of Discovery.” That essay offers some considerations of the book's structure and style, but their complexities are considered only in terms of the book stage of the narrative.
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Sprat's very influential proclamation about plain writing, in his History of the Royal-Society, is quoted and discussed by Mary B. Campbell (260).
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See Glover, “A Note,” 254-55; and MacLaren, “Alexander Mackenzie,” “Creating Travel Literature,” 80-85, and “‘I came to rite thare portraits.’”
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Even the first-time recording of experiences some time after their occurrence can, it has been argued, misrepresent them significantly. Cf. Samuel Johnson: “There is yet another cause of errour not always easily surmounted, though more dangerous to the veracity of itinerary narratives, than imperfect mensuration. An observer deeply impressed by any remarkable spectacle, does not suppose that the traces will soon vanish from his mind, and having commonly no great convenience for writing, defers the description to a time of more leisure, and better accommodation. He who has not made the experiment, or who is not accustomed to require rigorous accuracy from himself, will scarcely believe how much a few hours take from certainty of knowledge, and distinctness of imagery; how the succession of objects will be broken, how separate parts will be confused, and how many particular features and discriminations will be compressed and conglobated into one gross and general idea. To this dilatory notation must be imputed the false relations of travellers, where there is no imaginable motive to deceive. They trusted to memory, what cannot be trusted safely but to the eye, and told by guess what a few hours before they had known with certainty” (133).
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I acknowledge with gratitude the assistance in verification provided by R. G. Moyles and B. Belyea. For ease of access by Canadian readers of Hearne's field notes, all quotations of them (and the page numbers that appear in parentheses after each of them) refer to the transcript at the National Archives of Canada. The field notes are quoted by permission both of the Department of Manuscripts, British Library (Stowe MS 307, ff. 67-89), and of the Manuscript Division, State and Military Archives, National Archives of Canada (MG 21, transcripts of Samuel Hearne's narrative). Permissions are hereby gratefully acknowledged.
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Mary E. Hamilton's valuable sketch, “Samuel Hearne,” disagrees that no wording was changed but confirms my assumption that the spelling was standardized later. Hamilton is the first to draw attention to the relations between travel accounts and literature as they bear on Hearne. By noting how Hearne spelled in his letters written in years subsequent to his explorations, she shows that the standardized spelling to be found in the copy of the field notes probably lay beyond Hearne's knowledge (or concern) (12). The disagreement comes with Hamilton's inference, based on the date of 1791 that appears on the Stowe MS, that it “is probably not a replica of his original working journal but of an intermediate one” (13). The discussion that follows here, in arguing that the Stowe MS is a copy of Hearne's original field notes, emphasizes, not the date when the copy was made, but, rather, the appearance throughout it of all three principal tenses, a feature that rarely occurs except in field notes. The fragment of the journal transcribed by Graham is not mentioned by Hamilton.
It is because I agree with Hamilton about the spelling that I disagree with Richard Glover's argument (“A Note” 256), based on his notation of the solecisms in A Journey, that Hearne was fully its author. While grammar and spelling certainly had grown more standardized after the appearance of Johnson's Dictionary (1755; last revised 1773), they were by no means standardized to the point that they are today; thus, it seems that Glover relies too heavily on errors (which, in any case, a compositor may have made) in order to argue that Hearne is entirely responsible for them given that it is known from his fur trade letters of later years that he was what is considered today an indifferent writer. In fact, in proving quite convincingly that Bishop Douglas probably was not Hearne's editor (or ghost writer), Glover has accepted the corollary—that no one was, or at least no one with much experience in the role. He settles on William Wales as a sort of friend in need, who had the knowledge and inclination to put the finishing touches on the narrative after he purchased the manuscript from the dying Hearne, presumably to ensure that it was published. This suggestion seems plausible, though it does not, of course, clarify the nature and extent of the changes made to Hearne's own words in order to make a book out of them.
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For example: “When I was on my journey to the Fort in June one thousand seven hundred and seventy two …” (A Journey 118); and the famous “even at this hour I cannot reflect on the transactions of that horrid day without shedding tears” (A Journey 100). In the journal, Hearne “arrived at the Copper River on the 13th of July, and as I found afterwards about forty miles from its entrance” (Graham 197). The journal is written entirely in the past tense.
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The absence of the woman in the field note is pointed out by Glover (A Journey 103n.).
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It is interesting, however, to note in this context that the field note has no equivalent for the somewhat nonsensical paragraph-ending sentence of symbolic import: “For the sake of form, however, after having had some consultation with the Indians, I erected a mark, and took possession of the coast, on behalf of the Hudson's Bay Company” (A Journal 106). Surely it is for the sake of only a hollow form, since the company could hardly have been encouraged enough only by Hearne's report of a lack of copper and of deep water to extend its claim beyond the Hudson Bay watershed named in its charter. And for Hearne actually to make this claim after performing, apparently, the face of discussing a corporate fiat with his guides, borders on the ludicrous. It is difficult indeed to credit Hearne with, or, indeed, to blame him for, this sentence.
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For a discussion of A Journey as a vindication of Hearne's reputation, see Glover, Ed. Introd. xxii-xxiii, xl-xlii.
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Glover very helpfully brings to light the typical attitude to the beguiling of travel literature's reader in Hearne's day: “Of his [Bishop John Douglas's] editing of Cook's Second Voyage [1777] he writes: ‘I undertook this task on the earnest Intreaty of Ld Sandwich and on Condition of Secrecy—His Majesty being acquainted with it. I did a great deal to the Captain's Journal to correct his Stile; to newpoint it, and to divide it into Sentences, Chapters and Books. Though little appears to be done by me, the Journal, if printed as the Captain put it into my hands would have been thought too incorrect and disgusted the reader.’ That was the Bishop's maiden effort at editing. Seven years later he had grown bolder. Of Cook's Third Voyage [1784] he says: ‘The Public never knew how much they owed to me in this work. The Capt.'s MSS were indeed accurately attended to; but I took more Liberties than I had done with his acct. of his second Voyage; and, while I faithfully represented the facts, I was less scrupulous in clothing them in better Stile. …’” (“A Note” 254).
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I rely here upon C. S. Houston's transcription of Back's journal, and gratefully acknowledge his generosity in sharing his research with me regarding Back.
I infer that what Franklin's expedition saw were Hearne's field notes rather than his journal. The reason, admittedly not a conclusive one, is that the field notes habitually provide the courses and distances mentioned by Richardson—“walked about 9 or 10 miles between W.N.W. [and] W.N. by W.” (25), for example—while in the fragment of the journal none occur, with only an occasional compass reading given.
It may be that Back saw a different copy of Hearne's field notes than has survived. He uses quotation marks at one point in his entry on the massacre: “The island on which one of them got ‘his thigh freshened’ was pointed out to us.” This expression is not used in the book (A Journey 101), but it faintly echoes Hearne's field note as it appears in the Stowe MS: “… shooting one man thro' the calf of his leg which only served to freshen his way.” However, Back's quotation, by describing the thigh, matches none of the field note's “calf,” the journal's “leg” (Graham 199), or the book's “calf.” Also, Back has located the victim on the island, whereas he is located on the east bank of the river in the field note, the journal, and the book.
“Freshen” may also just be a coincidence. Hearne uses it in the sense listed by the OED as being transferred from the nautical, “To freshen way: of a ship, to increase the speed; also transf. of a passenger or traveller.” Back, another sailor, may be transferring it from another nautical sense listed by the OED: “To relieve (a rope) [in this case a thigh] of its strain, or danger of chafing, by shifting or removing its place of nip.” If Back is transferring the meaning in such a maudlin way from nautical to anatomical use—perhaps it was idiomatically done in the Navy of his day—his quotation marks may signify as much, rather than any direct quotation of Hearne.
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The review of A Journey that appeared in the Gentleman's Magazine listed “the principal adventures of the route,” and placed “the dreadful massacre of the unoffending Esquimaux by the Indians” (497) at the head of the list. Censorship-cum-titillation is practised by the reviewer for The Analytical Review: “A horrid description is … given of the manner in which many of these harmless people were murdered in cool [sic] blood; but we shall not shock the feelings of our readers with the detail” (458). The review in The Monthly Review also found the massacre “the most interesting part.” Although the reviewer approved of Hearne's “plain unadorned style” in providing throughout his book “such a striking picture of the miseries of savage life,” he quotes the first half of the massacre scene (down to the shedding of tears) as “a specimen of his narrative,” thereby giving it pride of place, but also, oddly, implying that the purple patch typifies the book's style. Moreover, he salutes Hearne for having “copied faithfully from nature,” and states “that it is impossible to read it without feeling a deep interest, and without reflecting on, and cherishing, the inestimable blessings of civilised society” (247). Thus does “the most interesting part” act as a synecdoche in A Journey.
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Back is prepared even to question whether Hearne was an eyewitness: “one of our guides who accompanied him—said that he was two days march from them at the time of their (the Indians) attacking the Esquimaux.” (The guide was Annoethai-yazzeh, brother of Gros Pied [Akaitcho]. See Houston 133, n. 25.) It is well known that the officers of the first Franklin expedition held Hearne in no high regard. In particular, they scorned his erroneous measurements of latitude and longitude, and likely disapproved of his practice, the opposite of theirs, of adopting Indian ways in order to travel among them. No doubt as well, they privately thought less of him for having lost Fort Churchill to the French Navy, under Compte de Lapérouse, on 8 August 1782 without mounting any defence. Naval officers could be hard on one another. However, Back's doubt about Hearne's even witnessing the massacre seems unfounded, despite the identity of his source. Given that the Copper Indians probably inferred that Franklin and his officers thought less of Hearne than of, for example, their King (“the greatest chief in the world” [Franklin 202]), perhaps they gave them a portrait of Hearne commensurate with the inferences they had drawn. That Indians regularly had recourse to such a rhetorical strategy is widely known. Certainly, the field notes make clear that Hearne always travelled with the Chipewyans, and his reason for staying with them on this occasion—they provided him with security and he was able to come back to the river often enough not to interrupt his survey—makes good sense. Back never published this expression of his doubts, and Franklin implied nothing of the sort when he referred in his Narrative (202) to Akaitcho's elder brother's having journeyed with Hearne. It was another officer, surgeon-naturalist John Richardson, who alleged (Back, Narrative 147) that Hearne had not written his book himself, but had had the help of Bishop Douglas. It is that charge that Glover disputes in “A Note,” 255-58, and to which note 8, above, refers.
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In his poem, entitled “Recollections,” from the first Franklin expedition, Back resists the version of events presented in Hearne's Journey. The relevant stanza begins with the Inuit response to the arrival of Franklin and his men:
Their Tents o'erturned—and the poor Natives fled
For much they feared th'approach of numerous band—
But well remembered—whilst in peaceful bed
Their Fathers scalped by Matonnabbe's [sic] handThe scalping is Back's own addition, however; as well, in the note to the stanza, Back only ambiguously refers his reader to “Hearne's description of the Massacre,” not to field notes or some journal (emphasis added). Back's poem is quoted with the kind permission of the Archivist, Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge.
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Although the matter requires further investigation on another occasion, it appears that the portraits of the young and old woman form part of a pattern in A Journey that the field notes do not exhibit. The latter certainly include instances of the violent treatment and neglect of women, but the book exaggerates them. One example must suffice in the present context. Where the field note for 14 April 1772 describes “The Scoundrels of my Crew” as they plunder another group of Chipewyans and “near 10 of them ravished one of their young women[,] used her so barbarously that its [sic] a hundred to one if ever she recovers” (52-53), the book seems unsatisfied with the meagreness of the assault: “The villains … to complete their cruelty … joined themselves in parties of six, eight, or ten in a gang, and dragged several of their young women to a little distance from their tents, where they not only ravished them, but otherwise ill-treated them, and that in so barbarous a manner, as to endanger the lives of one or two of them” (A Journey 184).
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The Gothic setting of the massacre in the book's account is discussed by me in “Samuel Hearne” 31-34. Two other Gothic elements play a part in the massacre staged in the book, but at different points in the narrative. Throughout the description of the bedlam at Bloody Fall, no motive is given; thus, the reader is seized by the added horror that the murders are gratuitous. As there is a delay, until after the episode, in informing the book's reader that the attack has not occurred under the cover of Gothic darkness even though it began at “one o'clock in the morning” (cf. “Samuel Hearne” 33), so there is a delay in providing any reason for the attack; indeed, it does not come for over one hundred pages of the book (it never comes in the field notes). When it does, it replaces one Gothic element—gratuitous violence—with another—superstition: “When any of the principal Northern Indians die, it is generally believed that they are conjured to death, either by some of their own countrymen, by some of the Southern Indians, or by some of the Esquimaux: too frequently the suspicion falls on the latter tribe, which is the grand reason of their never being at peace with those poor and distressed people” (A Journey 216-17). A final Gothic effect, that of the horror of remembered horror, is thereby realized by the book.
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See Frank 433 on algolagnia, and 219-20 on The Danish Massacre. The sharp distinction between terror and horror in Gothic fiction tended not to be drawn until after the publication of A Journey, when both Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and M. G. Lewis's The Monk: A Romance (1796) had appeared.
Peter C. Newman, the sensationalist history writer, even tries to outgothicize the massacre scene of A Journey: “The scene was more reminiscent of an abattoir than of a battle, with the panic-stricken victims rearing out of their cozy tents and being impaled on out-thrust spears. More than twenty men, women and children, their faces still sweet from interrupted slumber, were slain within minutes, their death rattles despoiling the Arctic silence” (353). Newman then quotes most of the paragraph about the young woman, and accords a paragraph to each of the old woman, the corpses, and the old man. Without the Gothic elements, his version of the history would have been bereft. A more balanced recent treatment is essayed by Stephen Hume.
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Similarly, the Hearne of A Journey suffers “great marks of derision” (74) in May 1771; these are not directed at him in the field notes (16), and although they may perhaps be inferred from the journal (Graham 196), they are not explicitly mentioned in it.
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Glover notes this discrepancy (A Journey 98n.).
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See, for example, Batten Jr., ch. 2.
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The published persona is comprised of more than the Gothic dimension, of course. As Bruce Greenfield has convincingly argued, the figure of the first-person eyewitness served as “a kind of imagining factotum, a literary handiman, whose personal experiences in strange environments represented many other imaginative efforts to incorporate the new lands and peoples of the Americas into a European world view” (“Rhetoric” 57). The persona into whom Hearne metamorphosed in the book encounters problems trying to satisfy all the demands—of employers, of scientists, of general readers—that he thereby faces. Greenfield discusses some of these in “Rhetoric” 58-61, and pursues them in “The Idea of Discovery.”
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Like the book (A Journey 74), the field notes mention that the Indians “prepared a target or shield of wood while among the woods” (15) six weeks before encountering the Inuit. So too does the journal (Graham 196-97).
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In the context of the present discussion, the chief example of such suspensions is the bizarre interjection into the massacre scene of a paragraph on the Inuit mode of fishing salmon (A Journey 103). This paragraph does not occur in the journal.
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See above, note 15.
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T. D. MacLulich has offered a reading of A Journey in terms chiefly of the Odyssey, as distinct from the Ordeal or the Quest.
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I am indebted to D. M. R. Bentley for drawing Meek's study of the four-stages theory to my attention. His fine interpretation of it in another Canadian context may be found in “Savage.” Meek's findings should not be over-emphasized. The reviewer of the Journey in the Critical Review recommended the book as a corrective to Noble Savagery: “Our ears are repeatedly stunned with the praises of savage life: and the admirers of the state of nature, as it is foolishly called, take pleasure in contrasting the defects of civilization with the little solid comfort to be found in their favourite state of independence” (127).
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“A Traveller” [Benjamin Franklin]. Letter to the Editor. The Public Advertiser 22 May 1765. Rpt. in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin. Vol. 12. Ed. Leonard W. Labaree et al. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1968. 132-35.
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