The phenomenology of samuel hearne's journey to the coppermine river (1795): learning the arctic

Abstract

Recent critiques have selected textual evidence for casting Hearne as a failed narrator, because he did not live up to the mercantile or imperialist expectations for late 18th-century explorers, or as a biased narrator, because he never fully moves beyond such valuations. But if we categorize phenomenologically Hearne's experiences as a student of the Arctic throughout his four-year journey, there is more textual evidence for reading it as the account of a civilized narrator's conflicted adaptation to an indigenous society as his consciousness is more and more shaped by Arctic nature. Hearne's A Journey from Prince of Wales's Fort in Hudson's Bay, to the Northern Ocean 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772 (1795) is filled with patterns of experience in which Hearne is learning, often slowly and painfully, a culture of place through his body. Hearne is a developing narrator who moves from experiencing the Arctic as an alien, hostile, and unnatural place to responding directly to its actualities, adjusting over time to the demands the land and its people place on him. As Hearne eventually finds a temporary home in Arctic wilderness, his most significant accomplishment as a narrator is to move the locus of culture into it. As the phenomenologist Edward S. Casey puts it, this results in a ‘thickening’ between the antinomical oppositions of civilization and Arctic. Viewed in light of his own statements in his Preface, the commendation of contemporary reviewers, and the contrasting limitations of pre-Hearne sub-Arctic narratives, Hearne's Journey amounts to a reconfiguration of 18th-century civilized constructs into three roles grounded in Arctic phenomena: as a naturalist, as a traveler across northern terrain, and as a member of a Chipewyan war party. An ur-narrative of land-based Arctic exploration, Hearne's Journey finally demonstrates an integration with the land and the Chipewyans with whom he travels that establishes phenomenological precedents for the reading of all later accounts of land-based Arctic travel.

Notes

 A large portion of Hearne's journey was technically below the Arctic Circle (66 degrees north latitude) and should properly be called sub-Arctic. But enough of Hearne's journey was either in the Arctic or bordering closely enough that the entire experience can be characterized as Arctic. See Pierre Esprit Radisson,The Explorations of Pierre Esprit Radisson, Minneapolis, MN, Ross, 1961, pp. 1–43.

 Pierre Berton,The Arctic Grail: The Quest for the North West Passage and the North Pole, 1818–1909, New York, Viking, 1988, p. 158. Like Hearne, Berton says Rae ‘copied the native way life, adopted native dress, native shelter, native food, and native travelling methods’. Both Hearne and Rae anticipate Vilhjalmur Stefansson, an early 20th century Canadian explorer who, with Inuit companions, perfected techniques for surviving unsupported from the outside on large Arctic ice floes for extended periods. It is tempting to generalize about the overall character of other post-Hearne expeditions, even at the risk of stereotyping. British naval expeditions tended to be disciplined and orderly, even under extreme privations, though class separations between officers and men were sharp. A similar separation often existed between expedition members and the Arctic nature and natives they both encountered. Americans tended to integrate themselves more, though their expeditions sometimes verged on the anarchic, e.g. Elisha Kent Kane's second and Charles Francis Hall's third.

 Barry Lopez,Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape, New York, Scribners, 1986, p. 334.

 In line with recent post-structuralist trends, three of the most noteworthy critiques of Hearne in the past 15 years acknowledge the strengths of Hearne's narrative but dwell finally on its limitations or biases. For Bruce Greenfield inNarrating Discovery: The Romantic Explorer in American Literature, 1790–1855, New York, Columbia University Press, 1992, his narrative is a failure when judged by the imperial standards of his day. For Kevin Hutchings in ‘Writing commerce and cultural progress in Samuel Hearne's ‘A Journey … to the Northern Ocean’’,Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 28 (1997), pp. 49–78, when Hearne's discourse is analyzed closely, it can be seen as racist, reflecting an 18th-century four-stage hierarchical construct which puts Chipewyan natives at the lowest level of human development. For Kathleen Vanema, it is Hearne's role as an agent of the Hudson's Bay Company that conditions and ultimately entraps Hearne in European mercantile and cultural values. In spite of his movement through geographical space and toward understanding and accepting Chipewyan practices, Hearne resists crossing over by reclassifying ‘space in all the ways that his institutional, discursive, and bodily allegiance to a European economic world view require’. ‘Mapping culture on geography: ‘distance from the fort’ in Samuel Hearne's journal’,Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en litterature Canadienne, 23 (1998), p. 27. In contrast in ‘The exploration journal as literature’,Beaver, 208 (1967), p. 12, Maurice Hodgson goes so far as to see Hearne's narrative as a literary work in which Hearne, in spite of his captivity, finally achieves in his third voyage a ‘unique degree of integration’ into a primitive culture. Hodgson however sees Hearne's integration as due less to Hearne's becoming a student of the Arctic than to the consequence of circumstantial pressures and the leadership of Matonabbee.

 Edward S. Casey,Getting Back into Place, Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press, 1993, pp. 228, 253, 263. Concerning the culture of place, the phenomenologist Casey writes: ‘Holmes Rolston puts the point thus: “Every culture remains resident in some environment”. That is to say, every culturehas its place in some natural region … Culture, that last fastness of the collective ego, reconnects, despite itself, with a wild realm of natural places. In order to sustain and renew itself, it must touch base with the wild earth from which it arises’. A phenomenological perspective can be ‘one in which neither the subject of one's awareness, nor one's approach of it, would be prior to the other. The reality of the earth is a participatory interaction … between perceiver and perceived, even to the point of the reversal of the very poles of what is perceived and who is perceiving. One's body is revealed by the earth, as much as the earth is revealed by one's body’ (Jim Hatley, email, 17 February 2002).

 Gary Snyder,The Practice of the Wild, San Francisco, CA, North Point Press, 1990, pp. 12–13.

 Review of Samuel Hearne,A Journey from Prince of Wales's Fort in Hudson's Bay, to the Northern Ocean 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, Analytical Review, (1796), part I, p. 457. Review of Samuel Hearne,A Journey from Prince of Wales's Fort in Hudson's Bay, to the Northern Ocean 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, Monthly Review (1796), part II, p. 251. Review of Samuel Hearne,A Journey from Prince of Wales's Fort in Hudson's Bay, to the Northern Ocean 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, Critical Review (1797), pp. 127, 139.

 Samuel Hearne,A Journey from Prince of Wales's Fort in Hudson's Bay, to the Northern Ocean 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772 (1795; Amsterdam, N. Israel and DeCapo, 1968), preface, p. vi—hereafter cited parenthetically in the text and the notes.

 Yet Hearne's civilized and wilderness valuations are conflicted even here. At least twice, Hearne strongly reproves the Chipewyans for the incredible numbers of deer which they destroy frequently only for the ‘fat, marrow, or tongues’ or only for their skins (pp. 117, 195). Speaking as a prudent Englishman, he tries to convince the Chipewyans of ‘the great impropriety of such waste’. The Chipewyans (who have firearms) justify shooting animals in excess, arguing that killing ‘plenty of deer and other game in one part of the country, could never make them scarcer in another’ (pp. 117–118). Hearne acknowledges early on that Chipewyan hunting practices may be justified by their nomadic lifestyle (p. 77). However, the longer he spends with the Chipewyans the more he is angered by their wanton plunder: ‘of everything that came within their reach, that few of them could pass by a small bird's nest, without slaying the young ones, or else destroying the eggs’ (p. 118). Hearne may be out of tune without Chipewyan wilderness practices, but ironically, Hearne's ethic developing out of his phenomenological reactions to the slaughter of specific animals can today be said to have more bio-centric force than the Chipewyans’ holistic rationale.

 Greenfield,Narrating Discovery, p. 41. There is a more direct link between Hearne and Gilbert White. In the winter of 1783, Hearne consulted with Thomas Pennant, the author ofArctic Zoology (London, 1784–85), who is remembered today as Gilbert White's correspondent. Hearne refers to and corrects Pennant's work at the beginning of his chapter 10 on Arctic flora and fauna (pp. 359–61). See Samuel Hearne,A Journey from Prince of Wales's Fort in Hudson's Bay, to the Northern Ocean 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, Editor's Introduction by Richard Glover, Toronto, Macmillan, 1958, pp. xxxviii–xxxix.

 William C. Horne, ‘Eighteenth-century accounts of Hudson's Bay and the phenomenology of Samuel Hearne'sJourney (1795)’,East-Central Intelligencer, 15 (2001), pp. 3–7.

 Henry Ellis,A Voyage to Hudson's Bay, by the Dobbs Galley and California, in the years 1746 and 1747, for Discovering a North West Passage, London, 1749, p. 204; Joseph Robson,An Account of Six Years’ Residence in Hudson's Bay, from 1733 to 1736 and 1744 to 1747, London, 1754, pp. 27–29.

•  This writer's experience with tussock grass on a traverse of Pangnirtung Pass in Auyuittuq National Park in 1994 was to try to avoid it by walking along the sandy banks of the Owl River. This seemed just like walking on the ocean beach at high tide near my home in Maryland. Warning me of quicksand and getting boxed in by the twisting river, the trip guides were quick to dispel me of my illusory construct and bring my heavy pack and me back on the tussocks. Stepping on top of the tussock threatens to turn one's ankle, and the space between them tends to be spongy bog.

• Nineteenth-century exploration narratives, especially those of British naval expeditions, are rife with accounts of foot travel in which the difficulty of the terrain is underestimated or travel logistics are inappropriate. The technique of man-hauling of sledges, especially before it was learned from the Inuits to ice the runners, was especially brutal for the enlisted men put in harness. Man-hauling persisted into the 20th century on Robert Scott's last South Pole expedition of 1910–12 after his plans to use steam-driven motor sledges and ponies proved unworkable.

 Hearne,A Journey, ed. Glover, p. xi.

 Hearne,A Journey, ed. Glover, p. xviii.

 Hearne's private letter to Hudson's Bay Company cited in Hearne,A Journey, ed. Glover, p. xviii.

 Hearne,A Journey, ed. Glover, p. xxviii.

 Critical Review, p. 127;Monthly Review, pp. 247, 250.

 Greenfield's emphasis falls on Hearne's failure to carry out the goals civilization had set for him. He tends to see Hearne's adaptation to ‘Northern Indian’ patterns as a loss of purpose and control which ‘threatens the success of his own discovery narrative’. Hearne's developing relationship with the Chipewyans involves, as he puts it, ‘dependence, apprenticeship, and adoption’.Narrating Discovery, pp. 27, 40. See note 4 above for Hutchings and Vanema.

 Joseph Snader, ‘American captivity and failed adoption in the British novel’ (unpublished, 1997), pp. 2–3.

 I. S. MacLaren, ‘Samuel Hearne's accounts of the massacre at Bloody Fall, 17 July 1771’,Ariel, 22 (1991), p. 38.

 Hearne is conflicted in idolizing Matonabbee. Matonabbee, Hearne reveals, has difficulties in holding onto and controlling his seven wives. This leads him to commit a number of actions which Hearne sees as brutal: stabbing the new husband of a former wife who had eloped (p. 104) and beating a wife so severely that she eventually dies. Hearne's reaction to the beating is disapproving, though, disturbingly, Hearne seems almost to hold the wife responsible for her own death. He says her ‘piece of satire, however true, proved fatal to her’, for the ‘great man, Matonabbee … took it as such an affront’ that he ‘bruised her to such degree, that after lingering some time she died’ (p. 265).

 In his Preface, Hearne defends himself against a Mr Dalrymple who questions the accuracy of his latitude readings (pp. v–x). At the mouth of the Coppermine, Hearnewas well above the Arctic circle. However, Hearne's mishap with his Harrison on his second voyage and his Elton quadrant here, the scantiness of his recorded latitude readings, and the difficulty of reconciling place names in theJourney with modern ones support the argument that at times Hearne was officially, though not effectively, lost.