SOURCE: McGrath, Robin. “Samuel Hearne and the Inuit Oral Tradition.” Studies in Canadian Literature 18, no. 2 (1993): 94-109.

In the following essay, McGrath compares Hearne's written account of the massacre at Bloody Fall with Inuit oral histories of that and other massacres.

In recent years, Samuel Hearne's A Journey From Prince of Wales Fort to the Northern Ocean has been the subject of considerable academic disagreement. A. J. M. Smith has called the work “a classic of English prose” (Smith 53), and Maurice Hodgeson has said it exemplifies “the best characteristics in the genre of travel literature” (Hodgeson 40), claims denied by Dermot McCarthy who insists that Hearne is “a clumsy and humourless writer, with a meagre vocabulary and an unstinting inability to extend himself beyond his immediate sensory experience” (McCarthy 153). Even Hearne's most negative critics, however, cannot deny the impact that Hearne's work, particularly his description of the massacre of the...