A Year Inland: The Journal of a Hudson’s Bay Company Winterer

From Manuscript to Print

From Manuscript to Print From Manuscript to Print Historical claims for Henday’s exploration of the western plains refer to his journal for evidence of his actions and observations. The earliest of the four extant manuscripts, all conserved in the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, is a copy sent to London a few weeks after Henday ’s return to York in June 1755; the latest was copied about 1782. No holograph survives; no two archival copies agree entirely on the ‘‘facts’’ they record. The copy dated 1782 was published in 1907, as an article in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada. Its editor, Lawrence J. Burpee, published a colleague’s transcription made fifteen years before; apparently Burpee never saw the 1782 manuscript.1 For almost a century, this Transactions article has been the only text of Henday’s journal more or less readily available to scholars: the twentieth-century copy of a nineteenth-century copy of a late eighteenth -century copy of Henday’s lost holograph journal. If this sequence of copying is hard to follow, it is doubly hard to account for the fact that Burpee’s printed text has for so long been considered authoritative. Restricted access to the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives may partly explain its initial acceptance. Even the number of archival copies was uncertain until Glyndwr Williams announced in 1969 that he had found four manuscripts of the journal dating from 1755 to about 1782.2 Despite Williams’s announcement, and despite his intriguing article on the four texts which appeared nine years later, there has been no rush to re-edit Henday’s journal. Their awareness of the multiple texts has not prevented historians and anthropologists from making bold claims for Henday as a western explorer and a witness to Native ways of life. Notes to this section are on pp. 31-36. 15 Henday is supposed to have travelled extensively in what are now the prairie provinces, to have met with Blackfoot chiefs, and to have come within sight of the Rocky Mountains. However, the four early manuscript copies contain omissions, alterations and contradictions which can easily subvert attempts to see the journal as a reliable record of the explorer’s movements and observations. As empirical evidence , Henday’s journal is disappointing. Its vocabulary is limited; the record of courses and distances is unreliable; its landscape descriptions are vague and repetitive; its accounts of contact with Natives are superficial and at times confusing. Instead of providing new information about inland routes and trade, it leaves the continental interior a cartographic blank, and simply repeats what was already known to the Bayside factors. Journals of the kind Henday kept are textual representations of the experiences they record: writing such journals makes the lived experiences into referential narrative statements which allow readers to learn at second hand what the writer has seen and done. In the case of Henday’s journal, the relationship between text and experience is exceptionally elusive. Despite its empirical agenda and its tantalizing evocation of landscapes and cultures, references to places, people and events are so vague and contradictory that a clear sense of where Henday travelled, whom he met and what trade was carried on at the French outposts is difficult if not impossible to achieve. The temptation to force the evidence—to supply, substitute or overlook certain details—is apparent in past readings of Henday’s journal. Responsible use of the journal as a reference for mid-eighteenth-century geographical exploration, Native cultures and the fur trade needs to begin with a close look at the four archival texts. The earliest text of Henday’s journal, b.239/a/40, is a folio notebook of forty-six sheets stitched into covers of heavy marbled paper measuring 32.5 cm x 20 cm. A lozenge-shaped label pasted on the front cover gives a short title, ‘‘M/ Captn Hendeys Journal/ 1754/ a/ 1755,’’ in the bold copperplate of Andrew Graham, ‘‘Accomptant’’ and second-in-command at York Fort. Directed by James Isham, York’s chief factor, Graham made this copy of Henday’s journal for the ‘‘London Committee,’’ the Hudson’s Bay Company’s governing board, to be sent with the supply ship returning to England in September of that year. The paper has a double watermark, one half with the emblem of a crowned lion encircled with the words PRO PATRIA ET USQUE LIBERTATE...