Notes on Samuel Hearne's Journey from a Bibliographical Perspective

:2.8 Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 3I /2, I2.9 MacLaren : <strong>Notes</strong> on Samuel Hearne's TourneyWest' as Hearne's route, other editions do not agree. In 1798, Dutchand Swedish translations appeared. According to the copies of thesetranslations made in 1982. for CIHM, Dutch readers encounteredHearne walking south west, 'zuidwesten';49 Swedish readers, however,found him ranging north west, 'Nordwast,'SO and he was stillheaded in that direction a year later when met by French readers'Nord-Ouest.'!' In fact, as late as four years later, when the Americanabridgement appeared, Hearne was headed 'north west.'S) Butthe most original resolution was offered in the first translation,published in German in 1797 and with notes, a year before his death,. by Johann Reinhold Forster, whose work would produce the Dutchtranslation the next year. In the German translation, Hearne doesnot set off in one or the other direction towards Point Lake; hesimply goes farther: '... und am folgenden Morgen gingen wirweiter .'B Whether or not Forster, the distinguished scholar andnaturalist aboard Cook's second voyage to the Pacific, observed thatthe London and Dublin editions disagreed and consulted the translatoron the matter (if he did not himself serve in that capacity) isuncertain; what is certain is that a recent German translation, andthe most recent edition in any language, faithfully follows Forsterfarther : '... und am folgenden Tag gingen wir weiter.'s4 "German inventiveness, however, appears to have been matched ina very popular facsimile reprint of the first edition, k~own w.id~lyas the Hurtig reprint.t! This was, however, not the first facsunilereprint of the first edition. That was the Da Capo facsimile, whichwas published in I968. S6 In it, all the signatures appear as they arein the copies of the first edition examined. Also in it, Hearne'sdirection on 8 September 1771 is 'North West' at page 2.02., and thelist of errata appears where one expects it, on the verso of leaf B4.On the other hand, the Hurtig facsimile reprint, made three yearslater, is not identical. Like Da Capo's facsimile, it is a photographic,not a typographic [i.e.re-typeset], facsimile. It too has 'North' ~s thecatchword on page 2.01, but 'South' [i.e, 'South West, by the SIdeofPoint Lake') as the first word of page 2.02., a confusion perhapssuitably metonymic of Hearne's trek but hardly enlightening. Thecopy from which the facsimile was made has not been locat~d andperhaps it does not exist. Mr. Hurtig remembers cl~ar~y that ~s ownpersonal copy was used for the making of the facsimile repnnt, buthis, by agreeing with all other copies of .th~ first e~ti?n that havebeen examined , disagrees with the facsimile repnnt 10 respect of'North West.'57 As well, his copy possesses both the page of erra~aand signatures at the bottom of pages, neither of which appear 10, !j ,t~e HUrtig facsimile . The Canadian edition also has printed correctionsof the oth~r four ~rrata list~d on the first edition 's errata page,~nd perhaps this explams why It does not reprint the errata page~tself'.I~y it n~where includes the map of Hearne's route, which18 p~sl~loned f~c1O~ the title page in the first edition and in the firstfacsimile repnnt,IS another questlon.] In order to accommodate~.H. N~atby'~ n~w introduction, one further change was introducedmto this facsimile reprint [suddenly, a loaded term): all pages withr?~n numer~ ha~e been renumbered in a modem Bembo typesimilar but not Identical to that of the first edition. Indeed because~e word 'South' seems slightly on an angle to the rest o£the firstline of page 2.02. and because no copy of the first edition has yetsurfac~d which bears the change to 'South' in the type itself, onem~st infer, at least until further evidence surfaces, that Hurtig'spnnter [Charles E.Tuttle Company, of Rutland, Vermont) used type~at matched the Bembo type in which the first edition was set and1Ocorporated into Hurtig's facsimile reprint the changes o~ theerrata pa~e of the first edition. This amounts only to unconfirmablespeculatlOn, for correspondence with the Tuttle firm has yielded noeditorial f~e for ~s work, Tuttle no longer employs anyone whoworked WIth the firm when the facsimile reprint was made and~harles Tuttle himself, the president at the time, is prevented byillness from looking further into the question. 58.In the abs~nce of supporting evidence, the usual test of diagonallinear collation was made, setting a straight rule diagonally acrossthe same page 12.02.)in various copies of the first edition in order todiscover if the line passes through the same letters at the samepoints. In this particular case, the rule was set twice, from the firstword and, because it is the questionable one, from the second word~o~ to the left edge of the last letter in the last row. The resultsindicate nothing d~fin!tive, for ~though there is a slight discrepancybetween the line 10 the Hurtig reprint's 'South' and the line inother copies of t~e first edition, there are also slight discrepanciesamong those copies themselves - no Surprise given the commonoccurrence of type shifting.Regrettably, neither has any written information survived in thefile~ of.Hurt~ Publi~hers concerning the copy'used for the Hurtigfacsimile reprint. This leaves one in the perplexity of an unsatisfactoril!tentative conclusion: in the case of the 8 September InIportion of Hearne's route , the Hurtig facsimile reprint is not afacsimile reprint of the first quarto edition . It may be that eightythreecopies, randomly acquired and located at present across a wide