A Year Inland: The Journal of a Hudson's Bay Company Winterer ed. by Barbara Belyea (review)

238 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 factoring the new entries into the old numbering system will try the patience of even aficionados of descriptive bibliography and the history of the book. But there are other problems. In the last half-century descriptive bibliography has evolved, and Tremaine=s scholarship has in many ways been superseded. The minimum called for here, therefore, is not a separate supplement but a new, one-volume edition of Tremaine that updates, corrects, and adds to her entries as it renumbers them in one easy-to-follow system and as it employs a current definition of >book culture.= This revision might wisely have concentrated on describing the items included as accurately and as completely as possible and providing indexes for various points of access to them. The Brown/Neilson shop records, which make up ninety-six pages of Early Canadian Printing, strike me particularly as a discrete project that could have been handled more appropriately B and more fully B as a separate publication. Above all, although this supplement to Tremaine was begun when computers and databases were not the household tools that they have now become, a descriptive bibliography of pre-1800 Canadian imprints will always be a work in progress, and, therefore, a research tool most suitable for publication as an electronic database that allows each entry to be emended as necessary. When she prepared her magnificent work, Tremaine looked both at the past of Canadian imprints and at their future for historians of the book and others interested in Canadian culture; she undoubtedly also hoped that her excellent scholarship would be further perfected and more widely disseminated. For these reasons alone, the failure of Fleming and Alston to update, revise, and add to Tremaine=s work in the most useful, userfriendly , and ideally electronic ways is especially disappointing. (MARY JANE EDWARDS) Barbara Belyea, editor. A Year Inland: The Journal of a Hudson=s Bay Company Winterer Wilfrid Laurier University Press. viii, 414. $39.95 Of the many enigmatic figures who populate the field of Canadian exploration literature, Anthony Henday is among the most elusive. Born on the Isle of Wight in 1725 and hired by the Hudson=s Bay Company in 1750, Henday is best known for a 1754B55 journey inland from York Fort, made at the orders of its chief factor, James Isham. After his departure from the Honourable Company in 1762, Henday vanishes from the historical record. The documentary record of his great westward expedition is as elusive as Henday himself; the travel narrative has survived in four discrete versions, none of which is in Henday=s hand, and the relationship of these texts to one another, and to a hypothetical original field notebook, is obscure. Barbara Belyea, whose previous work includes an edition of some of the HUMANITIES 239 journals of David Thompson, presents these four journals in their entirety, in literal transcription and arranged consecutively. The texts do not make compelling reading, consisting mainly of courses, cursory descriptions of weather, and scant accounts of Henday=s activities, but they do provide one of the earliest narratives of European travel in what would soon become the great battlefield of the North American fur trade. For the first time the accounts of this journey have been made accessible, and this edition will be of use to scholars of the Canadian West. Ancillary material includes an introduction, plates of manuscript pages and contemporary maps, notes, and four essays. The first of these essays, >From Manuscript to Print,= is worthy of special mention. It contains a meticulous bibliographic description of the four manuscripts, and the editor does a fine job of identifying the problematic aspects of the texts, illustrating in particular the way in which their reliability is subverted by omissions, alterations, and contradictions. Her discussion of the role of Andrew Graham as midwife to Henday=s journal is especially useful. The latter part of this essay is taken up by a discussion of editorial practice . Belyea disparages the tradition of documentary editing in Canada, and here she clearly overstates the case. Her assertion that >early editors of Canadian material gave no account at all of the manuscripts on which their texts were based...