Ancient Mariner: The Englishman who Walked to the Arctic Ocean, by Ken McGoogan, (Bantam Press, £16.99)

SAMUEL Hearne certainly wasn't someone who shirked a challenge.

He could have had a comfortable life as a rural vicar in his West Country home town of Beaminster, or followed his father into the water-supply business, but no - that would have been far too easy.

Instead, he signed-up for a career in the Royal Navy - and in the 18th Century, that was no barrel of laughs.

Even as an officer-in-training, Hearne had to endure cramped, stinking conditions and frequent bloody confrontations with the perennial enemy, the French, though he was spared the brutal punishments meted out to his shipmates, few of whom were there by choice.

But this was only the beginning of Hearne's remarkable story. Unable to get a ship of his own to command, he put himself forward for an even more arduous task - travelling to the frozen wastes of North America as an employee of the Hudson Bay Company.

Hardened to hardship by all those years on His Majesty's ships, Hearne thrived in this hostile environment and was the ideal choice to undertake an expedition to find a fabled copper mine - a 2,000-mile round trip that would become one of the greatest feats in the annals of North American exploration.

A lesser man would not have survived such a journey - it was almost three years before Hearne once again stood before the gates of the HBC base at Prince of Wales's Fort. But Hearne was no ordinary man.

Not only brave, resourceful and strapping, he was a true child of the Enlightenment - an amateur anthropologist, naturalist, linguist and geographer, who had mastered half-a-dozen native languages and was at home with the land and its peoples, though he was often sickened by their savagery.

He never did find that rich seam of copper, but he achieved something more. He became the first European to stand on the North American shore of the Arctic Ocean - and he walked all the way.

Although parts of Ken McGoogan's book are obviously based on conjecture - with frequent use made of the words "probably" and "surely" - we can forgive him a little literary licence for his skill in bringing to life such a fascinating tale.

History would have been much the poorer if Samuel Hearne had stayed at home in Beaminster.

Ceri Vines