Part 2

In 1784, while Hearne was at Churchill, there arrived from England a boy, fourteen years old, named David Thompson, who afterwards became the great geographer of North-Western America. Thompson remained at Churchill for only one year, during which time he copied some of Hearne's Journal, and though he did not carry away any very friendly feelings towards his superior officer, the knowledge which he gained of the interior country, and of the possibilities of travel through it, must have had a stimulating effect on him in after life. His note-books, which are now in possession of the Government of the Province of Ontario, are filled with detailed information about North-Western America, so much of which he subsequently explored. In 1787 Hearne left Churchill and returned to England, and from that date until his death, in 1792, he probably spent most of his time in revising and preparing his Journal for publication.

Before discussing Hearne's character and the extent and value of his work, it will be interesting to recount briefly the circumstances which led up to the expedition to the Coppermine River. In the seventeenth century the search for gold and silver monopolised the thoughts of many of the adventurers in the Southern Seas, but those adventurers who turned their attention to the more northern countries recognised that there were other sources of wealth beside the precious metals. They saw that the furs of many of the wild animals which roamed through the forests might easily be obtained from the natives in exchange for articles of European manufacture of but trifling value, and that these furs might be sold in the markets of Europe and Asia at an enormous profit. In this way what is known as the fur trade had its beginning on the American continent.

The Dutch, French, and English strove for shares in this lucrative trade, and many of the wars and massacres of that time had their origin in the strenuous endeavours of one or other of these nations to outwit its rivals. The Dutch had headquarters on the Hudson River, in what is now the State of New York, the French on the St. Lawrence River, in the present Provinces of Quebec and Ontario, while the English established themselves on the shores of Hudson Bay, founding a fur-trading company, which was destined to survive till the present time, and to be one of the greatest commercial corporations that the world has ever known.

This Company was called "The Governor and Company of Adventurers of England, trading into Hudson's Bay," or in brief, "The Hudson's Bay Company." At first it occupied a few small buildings, called factories or forts, situated at advantageous places near the mouths of rivers on the shore of Hudson Bay, where the Indians, who were accustomed to roam through the great unknown inland country, could come down in canoes to trade their furs for guns, knives, and other commodities brought from England by the white people.

About the beginning of the eighteenth century, some of the Indians who came to the more northern factories or trading-posts, and especially to those situated at the mouths of the Churchill and Nelson Rivers, brought with them rough pieces of native copper, and ornaments and weapons fashioned from this metal. On being asked where the copper came from, they said that they found it on the banks of a river, far away to the north, and that it could be collected from the surface in great abundance, but that the distance through which it was necessary for them to carry it prevented them from bringing much of it to the factories. These stories, along with the specimens which the Indians had in their possession, gradually aroused more and more interest in the minds of the fur-traders. At last they determined that there were far greater riches within their reach than could be obtained by trading with the Indians for furs, and decided to go in search of the copper mines whatever the cost of such a search might be. Among the first to take up this quest was Captain James Knight, a man of about eighty years of age, who had spent most of his life in trading for furs with the Indians, and who for several years had been in charge of York Factory for the Hudson's Bay Company. With him were Captain Barlow, another fur-trader from Fort Albany, and Captain Vaughan.

When the Committee, appointed in 1748 by the British House of Commons to inquire into the state and conditions of the countries adjoining Hudson Bay, was taking evidence, one of the chief witnesses was a Captain Carruthers, who in his evidence stated "that he had heard a good deal of a Copper Mine to the northward of the Churchill River--that the Governor (Knight) was mighty fond of the Discovery, and made great inquiries about it,--that the witness had seen copper which was said to be brought from thence,--that the Governor (Knight) was very earnest in this Discovery, which was always his topic."

Joseph Robson states that "Governor Knight and Captain Barlow being well assured that there were rich mines to the northward, from the accounts of the Indians of those parts who had brought some of the ore to the factory, they were bent upon making the discovery; and the Governor said he knew the way to the place as well as to his bedside."[4] In the year 1719, Captain Knight and his associates sailed from England in two ships, the _Albany_ and the _Discovery_, well provided with stores and provisions, and even with strong iron-bound boxes in which to bring back the copper and other precious metals. Unfortunately the expedition was wrecked on Marble Island, and all the officers and crew were lost, although their fate was not definitely known until nearly half a century later.

Three years later, when the two ships had not returned, and no word had been received from them, Captain Scroggs was sent by the Hudson's Bay Company from Churchill to look for them, and at the same time to continue the search for copper. The story of his journey, as given by Dobbs in his "Account of the Countries adjoining to Hudson's Bay" (London, 1744), says nothing about the explorers who had been lost, but comments on the copper deposits as follows:--

"He [Scroggs] had two Northern [Chipewyan] Indians with him, who had wintered at Churchill, and told him of a copper mine somewhere in that country upon the shore near the surface of the earth, and they could direct the sloop so near it, as to lay her side to it, and be soon laden with it; and they brought some pieces of copper from it to Churchill that made it evident there was a mine thereabouts. They had sketched out the country with charcoal upon a skin of parchment before they left Churchill, and so far as they went it agreed very well. One of the Indians desired to leave him, saying he was within three or four days' journey of his own country, but he would not let him go. Captain Norton, late Governor of Churchill, was then with him."

The Captain Norton here mentioned was the father of Governor Moses Norton who afterwards despatched Hearne to look for the Coppermine River. Captain Carruthers, who is mentioned above, and who, according to his own statement, had "quitted" the service of the Hudson's Bay Company thirty-five years before 1748, said that he "himself carried Mr. Norton, who was afterwards Governor, and two Northern Indians to Churchill where he put them in a canoe, and the purpose of their voyage was to make discoveries and encourage the Indians to come down to trade and bring copper ore."[5]

The journey of Mr. Norton referred to by Captain Carruthers was probably undertaken about 1714, in which year York Factory was restored to the English, after having been occupied by the French for seventeen years. Probably it was on account of this and similar journeys that, in 1719, a gratuity of £15 was voted to Mr. Norton by the Hudson's Bay Company, on account of having endured "great hardships in travelling among the Indians." In 1733 the same Mr. Norton wrote to the directors of the Hudson's Bay Company in London that he had "served your Honors many years and gone through many difficulties and hardships in taking long journeys with the natives to promote your trade with them, even many times to the hazard of my own life."[6]

In the same Parliamentary Report Alexander Browne, a surgeon who had been for six years in the Company's service, testified "that the Indians brought down the ore at the request of Governor Norton," and also "that he had heard the late Mr. Norton say that he had been at this mine and that a considerable quantity of copper might be brought down."[7] It is not probable that Browne's statement with reference to Norton having visited the Coppermine River is correct, but it would be rash to deny that such a journey had been accomplished until the letters and records of the Hudson's Bay Company are finally made public.

After the unsuccessful voyages of Captains Knight and Scroggs, several other expeditions were sent from Churchill northward along the shore of Hudson Bay. Most of these doubtless more than paid their way by trading for furs with the Eskimos, but to the outside public they were ostensibly to find the North-West Passage to China and the "mine" of copper ore. The most important of these expeditions were those of the _Furnace_ and _Discovery_ under Captains Middleton and Moor, in 1741-2, and of the _Dobbs_ and _California_ under Captains Moor and Smith in 1746-7. After these expeditions, interest in the copper may have languished for a while, but the numerous references to it in the Hudson's Bay Report of 1749 show that it was not by any means forgotten.

Meanwhile, Richard Norton of Churchill had died, and his half-breed son Moses Norton had been appointed Governor in his stead. In the year 1767 the remains of Knight's ill-fated expedition were found on Marble Island, and the thoughts of the people on Hudson Bay were undoubtedly again turned to the object for which his voyage had been undertaken. To add to the interest in the copper, the Northern Indians, who came to Churchill in the year 1768, brought with them some fine specimens of ore which they said came from Coppermine River. By this time Governor Moses Norton's interest was thoroughly aroused in the possible value of the copper "mines," and as they were said to be only four hundred miles from Churchill, he determined that, if possible, something definite should be learned about them. Accordingly, that very summer, when the ship came from England, he took passage back in it to London, and laid a plan for the discovery of this supposed great body of copper ore before the directors of the Company and received their approval for its execution. The plan was not to entail any very great expense to the Company. A man was to be sent out with the Indians, who should be supported by them and live as they lived.

Before that time other men had been sent into the wilderness, in the same way, from factories, especially from York, where, in 1690, Henry Kelsey had travelled southward until he met the so-called "Naywatamee poets" or Mandan Indians, somewhere near the banks of the Assiniboine or South Saskatchewan Rivers,[8] and in 1754 Anthony Hendry had made a notable journey up the North Saskatchewan River to the great plains, where he had endeavoured to establish friendly relations with the Blackfeet Indians and their allies, and to prevent them from selling their furs to Luc la Corne and the French merchants from Montreal, who had penetrated into the same country several years before. Both these men had been treated with the greatest kindness by the natives and had brought back intelligent accounts of the countries visited by them, though neither of them had the ability of Samuel Hearne to enable them to prepare a report such as the one here published.

Governor Norton was a man of much more than the ordinary intelligence and strength of character, and he saw that if the expedition was to be a success it must be conducted by some one who would be able to make full and accurate surveys of the route followed, and who could intelligently describe the character and value of the "mine" and determine its latitude and longitude by astronomical observations. For this purpose he chose Samuel Hearne, now a young man twenty-four years of age, who, after his service as a midshipman in the British Navy, was at the time employed as a mate on the _Charlotte_, one of the Company's sloops trading from Churchill with the Eskimos. The story of his journey, the hardships which he endured, and the success which he achieved, form the subject of this book and need not be discussed here.[9]

Hearne's character, which had been moulded to a large extent by his surroundings, can be fairly well understood from a careful reading of his book. He was diligent and reasonably accurate but not strong or forceful. In this latter particular he differed from his great successor, Sir Alexander Mackenzie, who descended the Mackenzie River eighteen years after Hearne had reached its waters at Great Slave Lake. Alexander Mackenzie was a man of masterful temperament, and those who accompanied him, whether white men or natives, were merely so many instruments to be used in the accomplishment of any purpose which he had in hand. Their likes and dislikes, and their habits of life, were merely interesting to him in so far as they affected the results that he wished to attain. His book is a detailed description of the directions and distances which he travelled each day, and of the incidents of travel as they occurred. To Samuel Hearne the natives with whom he travelled were beings whose thoughts and habits of life he found supremely interesting. Their intentions and desires largely controlled the expeditions on which he had embarked. With the exception of the accomplishment of the main object in view, of reaching the Coppermine River, their wishes were everything, his nothing.

His first expedition was a complete failure, as the Indians simply took him off with them for a couple of hundred miles into the wilderness until they became tired of his company and then robbed him of everything he had and left him to find his own way back to Churchill as best he could. His second expedition was more successful, as the Indians tolerated his company for eight months and supported him as long as food was plentiful, but their enthusiasm, or duty to the Master at Churchill, did not last long enough to carry them to the Coppermine River.

Of his third and successful expedition Hearne was the historian and surveyor, while Matonabbee, a bold and forceful Chipewyan Indian about ten years his senior, was its leader. If at any time Hearne tried to interfere with the arrangements made by the leader he was promptly told to follow instructions if he wished to reach the copper mine. While Matonabbee probably reciprocated, to some extent at least, Hearne's affection for him, he was evidently thinking of and working for Moses Norton, the rough but powerful governor of Fort Prince of Wales, rather than for the quiet and observant young man who was accompanying him. Hearne's sketch of the life of Matonabbee is one of the most appreciative and sympathetic accounts of a North American Indian that has come to my notice.

Hearne was evidently gifted with a very retentive memory, and had the artist's faculty of seeing the interesting features of his surroundings in their true perspective. Though, like Robert Louis Stevenson and many others, he had not been a brilliant student at school, he possessed the literary ability to present what he saw or knew in an interesting and attractive form. In the ordinary quietude of his tent or office, when thinking of nothing but the subject which he was describing, he undoubtedly recorded his observations with accuracy. But in the warmth of dispute, when endeavouring to overcome the criticisms or objections of others, he was liable to be carried beyond the points of strict accuracy and, in order to strengthen his argument, to fill in blanks in his record from his imagination. He says, for example, that the sun was above the horizon at midnight at the mouth of the Coppermine River. But it is certain either that, on the night which he spent there, the weather was too cloudy to permit of seeing the sun, if it had been above the horizon, or that, even if the weather was clear, the sun must necessarily have been below the horizon at the time. His sketch of Moses Norton also has the appearance of being highly coloured by his evident personal dislike of the man. No one can justly accuse Hearne of lack of personal courage, for the annoyances, hardships, and sufferings, which he endured without complaining, put the thought of personal cowardice entirely out of the question. He had acquired the stoicism of the Indian and he suffered quietly, just as an Indian is prepared to suffer. During the years which Hearne spent among the Indians, living on what they were able to obtain from day to day, as well as in his general intercourse with them as a trader bartering for the furs which they were able to collect and bring to him, he had learned to endure privations, to compromise rather than to fight, and to accomplish his purpose by politic and peaceful, rather than by warlike, methods. Naturally of a complaisant disposition, he had learned to give whatever was demanded of him, no matter who made the demand. Nothing could be more typical of the habits which he had thus acquired than the little experiences in trading, recounted on page 285, where, after an Indian had received full payment for the furs which he had brought in, he was given in addition the long list of articles there enumerated. Apparently, the Indian was not refused anything if he persisted in asking.

This habit of acceding to requests to avoid dispute and difficulty, rather than any real fear of personal danger, accounts for Hearne's surrender of Fort Prince of Wales to the French without a struggle. In this case it is quite possible that, in spite of the great strength of the fort which he occupied, he was really not able to make effective resistance against his powerful and determined enemy, who outnumbered him more than ten to one. Although the fort mounted forty heavy guns, and was provided with plenty of ammunition and small arms, it had only thirty-nine men within its walls at the time. But even if Hearne had had a stronger garrison, it is doubtful whether he would have attempted resistance, for his training in the service of the Hudson's Bay Company had taught him to preserve the peace at any price, and it was impossible for him to set aside at a moment's notice what had become second nature to him.

We have seen that Hearne had not the forceful character possessed by Alexander Mackenzie; yet, as a man must be judged by the results which he achieves, it is perhaps all the more creditable to him to have done what he did with his more complaisant and observant disposition. Though he could not control the Indians with whom he travelled, he nevertheless accomplished his purpose of making the journey, and has left a splendid record of it to enrich posterity. He was hardly a great geographer, though he added largely to the geographical knowledge of Northern Canada west of Hudson Bay. It was he who finally set at rest the question of a north-west passage by sea to China and the Orient, south of the mouth of the Coppermine River. He knew nothing of mines or ores, and the information he brought back about the "mine" of copper which he was sent to explore was exceedingly meagre. He verified the report of the existence of native copper on the surface in uncertain quantity. Incidentally he showed that the place where it occurred was too remote and difficult of access to permit of a copper mine being worked at a profit, even if the copper should be found in great abundance. But that was all. In fact, even to the present time, we have very little accurate knowledge of the character and extent of this copper deposit near the Coppermine River, as may be seen by referring to the notes on pages 194 _et seq._

On Hearne's first and second journeys he had quite adequate scientific apparatus, and so could take astronomical observations to determine his true position. So we find that he occasionally made use of his quadrant and took such observations; consequently the positions given on the map for the principal points in these two journeys are approximately correct. But he started on his third journey with very faulty instruments, and he would appear to have made very little use even of them. The map of the course followed by him on this journey strongly suggests a rough sketch made by his Indian guide, rather than a careful plan worked out by himself, from day to day, or week to week. For example, between Island and Kasba Lakes, near the beginning of his journey, and shortly after he had diverged from his course of the previous year, he began to go wrong. If he was using his compass at all, it is possible that some source of local magnetic attraction was influencing it, for the position of the last-named lake (on his map) is some sixty or seventy miles too far north. It is inconceivable that he could have made any serious effort to correct this faulty course by astronomical observations with his quadrant. His book is chiefly valuable therefore not so much because of its geographical information, but because it is an accurate, sympathetic, and patently truthful record of life among the Chipewyan Indians at that time. Their habits, customs, and general mode of life, however disagreeable or repulsive, are recorded in detail, and the book will consequently always remain a classic in American ethnology.

The manuscript report on Hearne's exploration was submitted to the directors of the Hudson's Bay Company immediately after his return, and they highly commended him for the work he had done, and gave him a handsome bonus.[10] The first account of his journey which seems to have been published was given to the world in 1784 in the "Introduction to Cook's Third Voyage," pp. xlvi-l, written by Dr. John Douglas, Bishop of Salisbury, who later also edited Hearne's own book. The route followed by Hearne on his successful third journey is incorporated in the general map of the world accompanying this book. A Mr. Roberts, who prepared this map, makes the following note with regard to it:--

"The whole of Hudson's Bay I took from a chart compiled by Mr. Marley, from all the most authentic maps he could procure of those parts, with which I was favoured by Samuel Wegg, Esq., F.R.S., and Governor of that Company, who also politely furnished me with Mr. Hearne's Journals and the map of his route to the Coppermine River, which is faithfully inserted in the chart.

"(Sgd.) HENRY ROBERTS. "SHOREHAM, SUSSEX, _May 18, 1784_."[11]

Another brief account of Hearne's trip is given in "Pennant's Arctic Zoology," also published in 1784, while his map is incorporated in one of the maps published in "Pennant's Supplement to Arctic Zoology," 1787. Some of the names used on these two maps were continued on the map accompanying Alexander Mackenzie's "Voyages," and also on Arrowsmith's maps up to comparatively recent dates.