A Year Inland: The Journal of a Hudson's Bay Company Winterer (review)

Anthony Henday was a Hudson's Bay Company servant whose 1754/5 trade mission to the northern plains set a forty-year pattern of HBC men wintering with Native groups in order to encourage trade. A new edition of Henday's journal (which has survived in four variant texts) has been long overdue, and thus A Year Inland represents a significant contribution to the study of the HBC's early exploration of the western inte- rior. Belyea conceives Henday within this larger context of winterers and HBC inland policy, at the same time as she conceives scholarly treatment of Henday within the larger context of editorial and methodological considerations.

Belyea posits the non-referentiality of Henday's journal and criticizes previous handling of the journal for not recognizing this. She suggests that scholars have taken it too literally and have wrongly treated obstacles to their analysis as puzzles, to be resolved 'more often than not by tautological reference to the situation that the source is supposed to illumine' (3-4). Although she attempts to distance herself methodologically from all previous Henday scholars, the real difference is conceptual, in considering the four versions of the journal as variant copies of a single document 'immune to recension' (3) and in not being overly troubled by that immunity. She censures - quite rightly, I think - other scholars (including me) for seeking to separate the 'right' text from the 'wrong' texts.

Belyea attempts to place her edition of Henday (the first since 1907) within the context of the Canadian tradition of editing historical documents, but the result is an antagonistic and dismissive discussion of that tradition, focusing particularly on a selective reading of work by Jack Bumsted and Jennifer S.H. Brown, and adding little to the reader's appreciation of her own editorial approach. In particular, she laments the 'tradition of fairly heavy emendation, interpolation, and annotation,' (24) and rejects the justification for such editorial interference as being in the interests of the 'non-specialist reader.'

Although Belyea does not have the 'non-specialist reader' in mind in this book, her presentation of the four versions of Henday's journals will be invaluable to scholars. Her transcription of the texts is largely free of editorial interference, in keeping with her stated intention of allowing scholars to compare the variant texts for themselves and to draw their own conclusions about what information is reliable. Her notes to the texts refer to contemporary HBC documents and to selected secondary sources, and are also free of interference: they are not editorial footnotes in the commonly accepted sense, but instead read as excerpts from research notes, like index cards 'paper-clipped' to particular journal entries.

In contrast to the rough and unfinished 'feel' of the journals section, are her three essays of commentary. Belyea modestly calls them 'tentative' (4) and 'deliberately inconclusive' (31), but they are in fact concrete and very useful. As with her introductory remarks, each essay sets about a twin task: demonstrating the non-referentiality of Henday's journal and illuminating the shortcomings of scholarly work that has not realized that. 'Tracing Henday's Route' describes the great detail in which his route has been traced by historians and then argues that we cannot know with any certainty where or how far Henday went, calling his route 'one of the several unsolved puzzles of his journal' (338). 'Indians, Asinepoets, and Archithinues' explores the identities of Native groups mentioned in Henday's journal and suggests that 'Indian,' 'Asinepoet,' and 'Archithinue' were HBC categories that did not refer to particular tribes or bands. She also notes the 'puzzling anomalies of the winterers' journals' (358), including a 'textual pattern of borrowing and copying ... [that] does not inspire confidence in the exactitude of [their] descriptions' (348). This puzzle is exacerbated by the open questions about Andrew Graham's possible roles in shaping their expectations or even their journal descriptions, but unlike previous scholars...