SOURCE: Harrison, Keith. “Samuel Hearne, Matonabbee, and the ‘Esquimaux Girl’: Cultural Subjects, Cultural Objects.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 22, nos. 3-4 (September-December 1995): 647-57.

In the following essay, Harrison analyzes Hearne's changing portrayals of identity and self in Journey to the Northern Ocean.

The heroizing implicit in the trope of exploration is downplayed, even subverted in Samuel Hearne's A Journey from Prince of Wales's Fort in Hudson's Bay to the Northern Ocean …, a sometimes boring narrative tinged with farce and shaped by anti-climax which often represents the narrator as passive. As Bruce Greenfield observes, “Exploration conventionally connoted independence and aggressiveness, the knowledge-gathering process as preparation for outright conquest … [but] Hearne's narrative, in contrast, is full of situations in which he is a passive dependent of the strangers he is investigating” (60). Hearne's reluctance to theatricalize his self may be related to what critics have seen as “his scrupulous concern for...