Canadian Exploration Literature: An Anthology

M. Morgan Holmes teaches English at McGill University.

This anthology of exploration narratives—the first English-Canadian
“literature”—is a valuable contribution to the ongoing
reassessment of how the past impinges on the present ideological and
material circumstances of all Canadians. In her brilliant introduction,
Warkentin points out that “[l]ike most societies which are the product
of European expansionism, we began our social existence by consuming
Satan’s apple.” As her metaphor suggests, the exploration of what is
now Canada involved not only new knowledge but also the destruction of
millennia-old First Nations societies. Warkentin’s sustained
sensitivity to this issue is one of the volume’s most important
features.

The book begins with a 1660 account by Pierre Esprit Radisson’s trip
to Lake Superior and ends 200 years later with Captain John Palliser’s
prospectus on Prairie settlement. Warkentin has brought together
documents that challenge canonized notions of what European business,
travel, and settlement in North America looked like and how it was
documented. One of her most important insights is that exploration
narratives were rarely unmediated realist documents of first-person
experience, as has for a long time been believed. Exploration texts
attest to “cultural crisis” and complexity every bit as much as
supposedly more sophisticated novels. A potent example of their
multifacetedness is the fact that, while trade may have been the
ostensible reason for exploring the interior, the metaphoric properties
of Rupert’s Land as “the first great unimagined space in our
national consciousness” must be considered when documenting a history
of Canadian culture and literature.

In addition its being the first collection of this virtually
inaccessible material, the merits of Warkentin’s volume include short
but helpful biographical sketches and copious notes. Of a primarily
historical nature, the notes unlock numerous opacities, such as the
meanings of words in native tongues, the identities of people to whom
explorers refer, and the intricacies of interpersonal relations. The
volume concludes with four pages of suggestions for further reading, a
tool that adds to the suitability of this text not only for use in
university and advanced secondary history and literature classes, but
also for use by casual readers who gets hooked by these fascinating
tales and wants to do more exploring on their own.