SOURCE: Greenfield, Bruce. “The Idea of Discovery as a Source of Narrative Structure in Samuel Hearne's Journey to the Northern Ocean.” Early American Literature 21, no. 3 (winter 1986-87): 189-209.

In the following essay, Greenfield discusses how the European idea of discovery shaped Hearne's narrative style in Journey to the Northern Ocean.

Most scholars of the discovery of the Americas have understood that, as Quinn says, “there could be no real discovery of North America unless, and until, there was a written record of that discovery.”¹ Among the earliest students of the subject, Richard Hakluyt, the great sixteenth-century editor of voyage narratives, believed that he advanced the “discoverie of the world” by making the written record of exploration available to the general reader. Hakluyt conceived of discovery as a complex process involving not only the adventurer but also the culture from which he set out and to which he returned...