Snow Man: John Hornby in the Barren Lands

Kerry Abel is a professor of history at Carleton University. She is the author of Drum Songs: Glimpses of Dene History, co-editor of Aboriginal Resource Use in Canada: Historical and Legal Aspects, and co-editor of Northern Visions: New Perspectives on the North in Canadian History.

John Hornby was a “gentleman adventurer,” an eccentric Englishman
who made no real contribution to scientific knowledge of the Canadian
Arctic or of its people, but who has been the subject of several
book-length studies and at least one novel. The reissue of this account
of one of his expeditions, originally published in 1931, includes a new
introduction by Lawrence Millman (in which Samuel Hearne’s name is
twice misspelled), but the text is otherwise unchanged.

In 1923, Hornby and former army officer James Critchell-Bullock set out
to winter in the Barren Lands and travel from Great Slave Lake to Hudson
Bay. Though Bullock made a half-hearted attempt to justify the adventure
by collecting scientific information, their journey was really motivated
by more personal goals. Both men wanted to bring to their lives a sense
of direction. Hornby wanted publicity and recognition that a British
gentleman could “out-Indian” the Natives in living off the land.
Journalist Malcolm Waldron uses Bullock’s diary as the basis of this
dark adventure story. Written as an epic romance, it reveals Hornby as a
tragic yet ultimately noble hero.

Unfortunately, the book is riddled with clichés of the Arctic epic:
shooting the beloved lead dog, extracting a tooth by means of an unusual
technique, starving to the accompaniment of food fantasies, and
attempting to raise a litter of wolf pups. Native people are invariably
portrayed as dirty, contemptible, and slightly sinister. As an example
of a once-popular genre, it is a fascinating historical artifact that
sheds light on a particular class of British imperialists; as
contemporary entertainment, it is less useful.