A Journey from Prince of Wales's Fort in Hudson's Bay to the Northern Ocean in the Years 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772new Edition with Introduction, Notes, and Illustrations

This is one of the great unsung adventure narratives in English literature. In 1769, the Hudson's Bay Company dispatched a young Samuel Hearne northward from their fort on Hudson's Bay to find legendary copper mines and a Northwest Passage. What followed was a three-year ordeal of survival against impossible odds: bitter arctic winters, starvation, frozen rivers, and a landscape so barren that the party resorted to boiling their leather boots for sustenance. Hearne became the first European to reach the mouth of the Coppermine River and touch the frozen Northern Ocean. But the journey yielded something more valuable than copper: a detailed, often intimate account of the Chipewyan people and their frozen world, recorded with an accuracy that would influence generations of Arctic explorers. The book stands as both an extraordinary feat of endurance and an invaluable historical document of a time when vast stretches of North America remained completely unknown to European maps.