Nancy Mills's Reviews > Ancient Mariner: The Arctic Adventures of Samuel Hearne, the Sailor Who Inspired Coleridge's Masterpiece

What a fascinating book, about a British explorer in northern Canada who should be more famous than he is.
Samuel Hearne begins his adventures at the age of 12, when his widowed mother travels with him to Portsmouth to be enlisted as a "captain's servant" for the commander of a ship. This is not quite what it sounds; in this capacity, the "Young Gentleman" was more a "captain's protege" than a servant, and his duties included lessons, with other young fellows, from an onboard teacher; his family was also required to provide him an allowance of 30 pounds annually. So it was more an apprenticeship than simply service. Young Samuel, a strapping, curious boy who disliked his studies, was insistent upon going to sea.
Hearne proved an able sailor but found the navy to be ruthless and brutal. After nearly a decade he found himself working for the Hudson Bay Company, and thereafter begin his adventures exploring what sounds like some of the most hostile environs on Earth. He matured into a competent writer, learned several native languages, and detailed the customs and features of the American Indians, specifically, the Dene, Cree and Inuit; he was also an accomplished artist and his drawings and maps are very charming. He was also an observant and accurate naturalist and described the habits of the wildlife in the area, going so far as to wind up with a house full of pet squirrels, beavers and various other adoptees. Although too impatient as a boy for school, he became very literate and philosophical as he matured and his writings and actions reflect this.
Rather than summarize the whole book, I will comment on 3 points that struck me, particularly.
First, of course, is that I don't think many people of our era can comprehend the hardship and great risks these early explorers endured. These journeys involved backpacking in temperatures plunging well into the double-digits below zero, in areas with few if any trees, carting provisions but still dependent on hunting along the way ... Hearne and his parties, often only native Americans, went without food for days. During the "summer" seasons, snow, sleet and freezing rain still occurs, interspersed with temperatures, incredibibly, soaring to near 100 degrees, or dropping to near freezing or below, after having been rained on for days, unable to build a fire nor get dry, and with the added torment of clouds of mosquitoes. The misery sounds unimaginable.
Interestingly, while European women were left home, the Indian women not only participated in these expeditions, but were regarded as necessities: although the men did the hunting, the women were responsible for just about everything else: turning dead game into food and turning skins into clothing and building snowshoes and serving as beasts of burden. In these societies, Hearne notes that men, even the lowliest in status, ate their fill before the women could have their share, and at times were left without a morsel. Starvation happened. At one point during their travels, an Indian woman spent 2 days in painful labor, while the party waited. Once she had the baby, onto her back it went and off she slogged with the expedition, through swamp and snow, moaning in pain and still toting her regular burden as well as her baby, although someone else did pull her sledge for one day after her travails. Hearne, still a gentleman, expresses some horror at the way women were treated in these societies.
Haunting him for the rest of his life, according to his writings and accounts of witnesses, was a massacre of innocent Inuit by the Dene party who had been contracted to escort Hearne to a rumored rich copper mine and hopefully the northwest passage the British had been fervently hoping to find. Coming upon a small family of Inuit, the Dene warriors apparently unleashed their demons on them, brutally torturing and killing men, women, children and the elderly, seemingly for their own amusement. Hearne, the only European in the party, was powerless to stop them and was seen as weak for trying to dissuade them. The only thing he could do was document the massacre.
Hearne, and other British travelers, were betrayed, robbed and abandoned by their native American cohorts quite often, it seems; casks of rum were hauled inland for trading expeditions (it was also customary to offer gifts) and by the time it was all over, it turned out the men in charge of the casks had consumed it themselves and replaced it with water.
Politically incorrect it may sound now, but I can see where frictions might occur when the European and Indian cultures collided.
The author's notes at the end of the book ... a section I usually tend to just skim through ... is in the case enlightening. The author revisits Hearne's childhood town, and the areas of London where he lived after his retirement, while working on his book, and finds out, disappointingly, that the noble and brilliant explorer has been all but forgotten.
Hopefully this book will help to remedy that!