Yes, and very soon British traders were doing the same—especially Scotsmen, who flocked over when King Louis gave up Canada to King George.
The Company found that its easy-going habit of [a]Hearne Makes for the Coppermine] staying on the sea-shore did not pay. Easy-going habits don’t. Besides, other British merchants, who wanted to get into Hudson Bay and share its trade, began to complain. They said: “The Company only got the privilege of keeping all the trade to itself because it made big promises, to attempt the discovery of the North-west Passage to Asia, and to search for minerals as well as fur. It has not kept its promises.”
Something more had to be done, the Company saw that. So it sent off one of its best men, Samuel Hearne, on an exploring trip inland from Prince of Wales Fort, at the mouth of Churchill River. He set out in November, 1769, with two other white men and four Indians; but the Indians deserted, and he had to come back. In February he started again, and got up into the “barren lands,” where his party nearly starved. At last he came upon the herd of caribou on their spring procession from the woodlands in the west where they had spent the winter. Meat was now plentiful; but the explorer’s quadrant was broken, and without that instrument he would not be able to put his route on the map for future travellers; so again he had to turn back. It was nearly the end of November when he reached the Fort.
After such hardships he must have been greatly tempted to stay there until spring. But no; he would not rest until he had won the double goal he had set before him. He was bent on reaching a mysterious river, where Indians said that enormous masses of copper were found; and as the river was believed to flow north he hoped it would lead him to an unknown sea-way uniting the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. If he waited till spring for his next start, he could not reach that sea before winter, when it would all be hidden under [a]He Comes to the Arctic Sea] ice. So, after only twelve days’ rest, he plunged once more into the wilderness, alone with five Indians.
It was a year and a half before his white comrades saw him again. Now, however, he had great things to tell. He had not only found the Coppermine River, but had followed it down and down to its very mouth. There at last, on the 17th of July, he had looked out upon the Arctic Sea. It was truly the North-west Passage, or one of the North-west Passages, that lay before his eyes, for its waters connect with both oceans, east and west; but he could not be sure of that. Indeed it took a hundred years more of exploration to prove the fact.
The young explorer had a bitter experience in the far north, the country of the Eskimo. These “Usquemows,” as the old travellers called them, were an interesting and generally harmless folk. Captain Coats gives a quaint description of them, as he used to see them on his many voyages through Hudson Straits: “Bold, robust, hardy people, undaunted, masculine men, no tokens of poverty or want, with great, fat, flatt, greazy faces, little black piercing eyes, good teeth, lank, black, matted hair, with little hands and feet, under proportion; a well made back and shoulders; loyns, buttocks and haunces well fortified; thighs are pretty full, but their legs taper to a little foot.” The women, he says, are “very fair when free from greese, very submissive to their men, very tender of their children, and are indefatigable in the gew-gaws to please their men and children,”—little ivory toys carved like fishes, fowls, animals, people, ships and boats.
The Indians, however, had “no use for” the Eskimo, except to raid and rob and kill them. A band of Indians [a]Indians Massacre Eskimo] who had joined Hearne’s party, apparently for this very object, attacked an Eskimo village, without the slightest provocation, while the people were asleep in their tents, and slaughtered them, men, women and children. The horrified white man tried to stop the massacre, but the Indians pushed him aside. The Eskimo had furs, the white men wanted furs, and the Indians thought it unreasonable for a white man to object if they got those furs by murder.
As for the mountains of copper which the Indians had described, Hearne found only “a jumble of rocks and gravel,” and the best specimen he could find was a lump of ore weighing about four pounds.
Coming back from the Arctic, on Christmas Eve he found himself looking out upon a vast lake which no white man had seen before and few have seen since. We know it on the map as Great Slave Lake. In Hearne’s time, buffalo beyond numbering roamed the plains up to its southern shore. He spent the rest of the winter among the Indians, and when spring came a party of them accompanied him down to the fort on Hudson Bay.
From this time forward the Company sent its officers back into the country that Hearne had explored, and other parts of the interior, where they built trading forts on the shores of many a river and lake. Fort Cumberland was the first of them, on the lower Saskatchewan. The trade picked up, but if the Company thought it would now be allowed to have things all its own way it was much mistaken. The revolutionary war broke out between the British colonists down east and the Mother Country. The King of France, though he ruled his own people with tyranny and hated the idea of [a]The Rival North West Company] popular freedom, hated England more, and he was delighted to help anyone who would injure her. So, while his soldiers were sent over to help the American colonists on land, his sailors raided Hudson Bay, where they captured, looted and destroyed the English Company’s forts. Hearne was by this time in command of Fort Prince of Wales, but his handful of clerks and traders could do nothing against three ships of war.