Competing stories: Fictions and factions
During the Ahousaht Mid-Trial Proceedings, the parties understood that the original journals and manuscripts resided in archives or perhaps rare book rooms around the world. The court record, rather, was mainly' comprised of transcriptions, reprints, facsimiles, translations, and various other secondary texts.38 Indeed, Madam Justice Garson expressed her reluctance to engage the handwritten originals, saying she had no intention of “booking my ferry' passage over to the archives. Don’t worry'. I can tell you without any doubt.”39
Without original manuscripts, the parties quarreled over the superior edition of the Journals of Captain James Cook. Plaintiffs counsel referred to the problem as trying to make sense of “competing versions of the same event.”40 The two were: (1) The 1967 J.C. Beaglehole (editor) version (The Journals of Captain James Cook on His Voyages of Discovery, the Voyage of the Resolution and Discovery, 1776-1780) and (2) the James Douglas’s A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean Performed under the Direction of Captains Cook, Clerke, and Gore in His Majesty’s Ships Resolution and Discovery in the Tears 1776, 1777, 1778, 1779, and 1780, in Three Volumes written by James Cook, A.W. Strahan, 1784. The defendants’ expert relied on the Douglas version, while the plaintiffs expert used Beaglehole.
The Court questioned the editorial liberties taken by Mssrs Beaglehole and Douglas and their published texts possible absence of Cook’s original entries. Who were Beaglehole and Douglas? The Hakluyt Society (on account of the Cook Bicentennial celebrations in 1978 and 1979) favoured the scholar John Cawte Beaglehole (1901-1971), and his texts of the Cook journals were deemed as the authoritative accounts.41 Dr. John Douglas, Canon of Windsor and St. Paul’s, published his “Cook Journals” in 1777 and 1784.42 Notably, what remains beyond the Court’s scrutiny is Captain James Cook himself—that is, his objectivity and qualifications as an observer and transcriber of aboriginal practices. The wrangling between the parties neglected to consider the faculties, biases, and agenda of the adventurer-author, but rather seemed to question which subsequent publication had fewer embellishments or distortions.
The main disagreement between the experts related to Cook’s statement in the Beaglehole version: “[F]ish seemed to be in greater plenty, though we got none but by truck from the natives, who after the first week supplied us pretty plentifully with a small fish like sardines, if they were not of them, and a small fish like bream, now and then cod.”43 The statement is not contained in the Douglas version. The plaintiffs argued that the statement was an “important piece of evidence because it tends to support the contention that the natives traded fish with the early explorers.”44 They also discredited the Douglas edition: “Douglas took literary license and added his own content.”45 Plaintiffs expert also noted that Douglas may have had commercial literary interests and may have been “catering to his intended audience.” Indeed, the “1784 edition was a best seller that sold out in three days.”46 Ultimately, the Court concluded: “[FJrom the evidence ... that the weight of scholarly opinion on this topic is that the Beaglehole version is more authoritative and reliable than the Douglas «47 version.
The Court emphasized that the expert testimony was used to better understand the documents’ provenance,48 a process that Eva-Marie Kroller characterizes as “the tortured textual history that arises out of the corporate authorship involved in producing Captain James Cook’s travels”.49
The Court summarized how journals were constructed:
There are four distinct processes involved in the preparation of Explorer Records, although not every explorer record went through the same four stages of publication. The first stage is the log or field book, which is a record of daily activities and is usually written close to the time of the activities described. The second stage is a journal, which is a retrospective account written after a voyage, or part of a voyage, has been completed. The journal is next re-worked into a draft manuscript, which is the third stage of production. The journal manuscript is then re-worked into an edited and published text.50
The Court recognized how this would impact her evidential assessment:
[TJhe distinction between these various stages becomes relevant when I consider the reliability and weight of the various Explorer Records.51
Issues of construction, as perceived and addressed by the Court, seemed to be reserved for the last stage. The first three stages of journal construction were largely left unaddressed by all the parties.
The willingness by the parties and the Court to embrace the journal narratives as eyewitness testimony should be assessed against the available and substantial scholarly treatment of the subject. Non-legal scholars commonly question the authority of Explorer Records as “eyewitness narrative.”52 Elizabeth Vibert, who has written about early traders in British Columbia, argues that the notion that such documents could be “treated as objective eyewitness accounts is an illusion.”53 Felix Driver reminds us that historians increasingly view the purported accuracy of scientific accounts, as recorded by explorers, for its aesthetic and literary dimensions.54 Eva-Marie Kroller notes: “Because of its proximity to sensationalism makes it popular, revision for profit, performed by an editor or the author himself can be extensive, and the borderline between truth and fiction becomes blurred.”55 I.S. McLaren states that “the reliability of the eyewitness traveler thus became and should remain for the contemporary' scholars a complex matter of some considerable doubt.” McLaren, who writes extensively on contact zones in British Columbia, adds: “Explorer and travelers were usually chiefly people of action. Books about their movements were demanded of them, but demand alone could not transform them into authors.”57 For him:
[HJastily drawing a straight line between travel and narrative, that is, between eye witness observer, on the one hand, and recorder, on the other, is precarious. Not only is the caught zone fraught with “enormous” problems of communication, but also the records of what happened at contact are deeply conflicted.58
Courts have failed to take into account that explorer record may in fact harbor fictions in the sense that its authors “set out to encounter real knowledge along imaginary roads.”59 Or perhaps they may have constructed imaginary knowledge on real roads. By using fictional as a descriptive term in my title, I do not mean to insinuate that the explorer writings are entirely fictitious or that they are compilations of mistruths. Rather, literature generally, and fiction specifically, are highly imaginative and expressive genres of writing and use various narrative devices and artifices. The comparison may be apt. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries parallels between fiction and history’ were discussed and debated among novelists and critics. Both genres could be concerned with describing and moralizing about human behaviour and social institutions. In making the comparison, “it is important to consider the use each genre makes of the other,” as well as verisimilitude, probability, and the requirement that readers “suspend their disbelief.”60 At the very least, the explorers’ writings are never purely descriptive: they comment, opine, and interpret and define patterns of behaviour (in groups) and social organization.
