1799 Voyage de Samuel Hearne antique ILLUSTRATED w/ MAP & PLATES AMERICANA

Hearne, Samuel.

Voyage de Samuel Hearne, du Fort du Prince de Galles, situe dans La Baie de Hudson, a L'Ocean-Nord.

Hamburg, 1791

(Voyage of Samuel Hearne, from the Prince of Wales's Fort in Hudson's Bay, to the Northern Ocean, Undertaken by Order of the Hudson's Bay Company, in the Years 1769, 1770, 1771, and 1772, and Executed by Land, for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage. Translated from the English...)

Original calf (dried and chipped with loss); lacking first plate, lower corner bumped, some foxing

 Size about: 8 1/4 by 10 inches

Good condition, endpapers frayed

Folding map, xxxvii, 431 pp., xv pp.

Illustrated with 7 (of 8) folding plates and one large folding map

Text in French
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Hudson's Bay Company fur trader and explorer, searching for the Northwest Passage by river or sea and for copper mines.
"The Pedestrian of the Great North" made the first crossing across the tundra from Churchill in Hudson Bay between 1770 and 1772.
His travelogue has come down to us partly thanks to La Pérouse, who took Hearne prisoner at Prince of Wales Port in 1782.
Hearne's notes, initially confiscated, were returned to him on the promise to publish them, which would not be done until 1792, a few days before his death. The account of his expedition across the Canadian Far North sheds light on the customs of the Indians who inhabited these regions, quite far from the myth of the dignified and ecological "noble savage."
Besides the wanton massacre at Bloody Falls, Hearne was shocked by their general lack of morality, their attitude toward women (including their own), and their lack of foresight and the wasteful game that could be indulged in.
First French Edition, octavo issue. Account by the first white man to travel overland to the Arctic Ocean and the discoverer of Great Slave Lake. Hearne (1745-1792) was sent northward from Churchill to the behest of the Hudson's Bay Company, which had long been interested in investigating reports of copper mines to the north.
Hill declares that "Hearne played an important role in ascertaining the relations between Hudson's Bay and the Arctic Ocean by his exploration of the Coppermine River," and further relates the curious circumstances of the works' publication, which "was due to the navigator Jean François Lapérouse, who captured Fort Albany, Hudson Bay, and found Hearne's manuscript.
The fort afterwards was surrendered to the British, but Lapérouse stipulated that the manuscript be published," and notes that much attention is given to the natural history and the Indian tribes of the region covered.
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