SOURCE: MacLaren, I. S. “Samuel Hearne and the Landscapes of Discovery.” Canadian Literature 3 (winter 1984): 27-40.

In the following essay, MacLaren argues that Hearne's depictions of landscapes in A Journey to the Northern Ocean show his own as well as his countrymen's evolving understanding of nature.

Although the literary merit of Samuel Hearne's A Journey … to the Northern Ocean (1795) has been recognized, and while the narrative has been deemed “one of the most sophisticated early journals and narratives,” a search has not yet been undertaken for demonstrations of this sophistication in either the explorer's writing style or the ways in which his pen and pencil describe and depict the terrain through which he conducted his truly astonishing feats of exploration.¹

Only six years after the publication of Hearne's Journey, Alexander Mackenzie published his Voyages. In his Preface, he recognized that, as a fur trader like Hearne, he was “better...