Samuel Hearne (1745-1792)

Abstract

... Hearne was born in 1745 in London. He was an indifferent schoolboy and at the age of eleven was in the Royal Navy under the command of Admiral Samuel Hood. He saw action during the Seven Years War but left the Navy and, in 1766, became an employee of the Hudson's Bay Company, which sent him to Fort Prince of Wales at the mouth of the Churchill River. ... During its first century the Company had made no determined attempt to penetrate the interior and only the most half-hearted excursions were sent to seek Anian. By the 1730s, however, significant opposition to Company sovereignty and its implementation of its charter obligations had arisen in both England and America. Arthur Dobbs, Surveyor-General of Ireland, initiated a twenty-year struggle to force the Company to meet its charter terms. His challenges generated enough interest to induce the House of Parliament to offer a prize of 20,000 [Pounds Sterling] for the discovery of a strait. He applied for and was granted permission to lead an expedition into the North, accompanied by two white men and certain Indians, to "promote ... our trade, as well as for the discovery of a North West Passage, Copper Mines, etc. ..." The attempt was a humiliating failure. Two hundred miles northwest of the fort the Indians robbed the white men and left them to reach safety as best they could. Hearne began again in February 1770, with only native companions. He got three hundred miles inland and four hundred miles north of the Churchill before he was robbed. He turned toward home. Nevertheless, it was the farthest north any European had yet explored inland North America. On the return to the Churchill, Hearne met Matonabbee, an important Chipewyan chief, who offered to guide a third attempt toward the Arctic. Norton agreed and between December 1770 and June 1772 Hearne - again the only white man - headed an expedition across the Barren Grounds. ... Starvation and death in arctic storms were constant attendants, but in the end he was at the mouth of the Coppermine River on Coronation Gulf. ... But he had paid a price. He had watched the butchery of Eskimos at Bloody Falls on the Coppermine River and seen starvation decimate his companions. And he was to see his work sneered at by the scientific and military worlds. Among other criticisms, they said there could be no plant life where he reported because there was none on Greenland in that latitude; the sun could never by visible for twenty-four hours as he said; and the Indians could not possibly roam over such vast areas as he claimed. ... Samuel Hearne was the first European to cross the Barren Grounds to the Arctic and thus prove there is no waterway through our continent. He discovered and charted many major lakes, including Great Slave Lake where Matonabbee Point and Hearne Channel credit his work. His record of natural history of the Barren Grounds and the peoples who roamed over them stands unchallenged, and the establishment of Cumberland House saved the great Company from failure and set it on its way to its present eminence as the longest lived commercial venture of all time.