"Mr. Samuel Hearne was born in the year 1745. He was the son of Mr. Hearne, Secretary to the Waterworks, London Bridge, a very sensible man, and of a respectable family in Somersetshire; he died of fever in his 40th year, and left Mrs. Hearne with this son, then but three years of age, and a daughter two years older. Mrs. Hearne, finding her income too small to admit her living in town as she had been accustomed to, retired to Bimmester, in Dorsetshire (her native place), where she lived as a gentlewoman, and was much respected. It was her wish to give her children as good an education as the place afforded, and accordingly [she] sent her son to school at a very early period, but his dislike to reading and writing was so great that he made very little progress in either. His masters, indeed, spared neither threats nor persuasion to induce him to learn, but their arguments were thrown away on one who seemed predetermined never to become a learned man; he had, however, a very quick apprehension, and, in his childish sports, showed unusual activity and ingenuity; he was particularly fond of drawing, and though he never had the least instruction in the art, copied with great delicacy and correctness even from nature. Mrs. Hearne's friends, finding her son had no taste for study, advised her fixing on some business, and proposed such as they judged most suitable for him; but he declared himself utterly averse to trade, and begged he might be sent to sea. His mother very reluctantly complied with his request, took him to Portsmouth, and remained with him till he sailed. His captain (now Lord Hood) promised to take care of him, and he kept his word; for he gave him every indulgence his youth required. He was then but eleven years of age. They had a warm engagement soon after he entered, and took several prizes. The captain told him he should have his share, but he begged, in a very affectionate manner, it should be given to his mother, and she should know best what to do with it. He was a midshipman several years under the same commander; but, either on the conclusion of the war, or having no hopes of preferment, he left the navy, and entered into the service of the Hudson's Bay Company as mate of one of their sloops. He was, however, soon distinguished from his associates by his ingenuity, industry, and a wish to undertake some hazardous enterprise by which mankind might be benefited. This was represented to the Company, and they immediately applied to him as a proper person to be sent on an expedition they had long had in view, viz. to find out the North-West Passage. He gladly accepted the proposal, and how far he succeeded is shown to the public in his Journal. On his return he was advanced to a more lucrative post at Prince of Wales Fort, on Hudson Bay, and in a few years was made Commander-in-Chief, in which position he remained till 1782, when the French unexpectedly landed at Prince of Wales Fort, took possession of it, and after having given the governor leave to secure his own property, seized the stock of furs, &c. &c., and blew up the fort. At the Company's request Mr. H. went out the year following, saw it rebuilt,[1] and the new Governor settled in his habitation (which they took care to fortify a little better than formerly), and returned to England in 1787. He had saved a few thousands, the fruits of many years' industry, and might, had he been blessed with prudence, have enjoyed many years of ease and plenty; but he had lived so long where money was of no use that he seemed insensible of its value here, and lent it with little or no security to those he was scarcely acquainted with by name. Sincere and undesigning himself, he was by no means a match for the duplicity of others. His disposition, as may be judged by his writing, was naturally humane; what he wanted in learning and polite accomplishments he made up in native simplicity and innate goodness; and he was so strictly scrupulous with regard to the property of others that he was heard to say a few days before his death, 'He could lay his hand on his heart and say he had never wronged any man of sixpence.'
"Such are the outlines of Mr. Hearne's character, who, if he had some failings, had many virtues to counterbalance them, of which charity was not the least. He died of the dropsy, November 1792, aged 47."
He seems to have entered the service of the Hudson's Bay Company and to have been sent to Fort Prince of Wales, the great stone fortification on the low bare rocky point at the mouth of the Churchill River on Hudson Bay, when he was about twenty years old. For several years he was engaged in the fur trade with the Eskimos, up and down the coast of Hudson Bay, north of Churchill River. One little glimpse is caught of him, on July 1, 1767, for on that day he chiselled his name on the smooth hard rock of Sloops Cove, on the west side of Churchill harbour. When I visited the place, in 1894, the name was as fresh and plain as if his hammer and chisel had just been laid aside.
Being possessed of much more than the average amount of ability and enthusiasm, he was chosen by Moses Norton, the energetic Governor of Fort Prince of Wales, to go out with the Indians into the vast, and as far as that was then known, limitless, territory west of Hudson Bay, in order to find and prospect the place where the native copper had been found which the Indians often brought with them to the fort.
During the year preceding his departure on his first expedition, he had had an excellent opportunity to perfect himself in a knowledge of astronomical and geodetic work, for in the summer of 1768 the annual ship had brought William Wales, F.R.S., and Joseph Dymond from London, commissioned by the Royal Society to remain at Fort Prince of Wales throughout the ensuing year in order to observe the transit of Venus over the sun on the 3rd of June 1769.[2] They remained at the fort until the ship left again for London in August of the following year (1769). Mr. Wales was one of the foremost astronomers, mathematicians, and litterateurs of his age. Shortly after his return to England he was appointed to accompany Captain Cook on his voyage around the world in the Resolution in 1772-74, and again on his last voyage in 1776-79. His presence for more than a year among the little band of white men assembled at this remote fur-trading post on Hudson Bay must have had a helpful influence in preparing Hearne for his great explorations overland to the Arctic Ocean. This book is an account of three journeys which he undertook in rapid succession into the country west of Hudson Bay and north-west of Fort Prince of Wales in search of the fabled bed of copper ore, from which pure copper could be loaded directly into ships at trifling expense. In the first and second journeys he was obliged to turn back before reaching his destination, but in the third journey all difficulties were finally overcome, and he was taken to and shown the "mine" of copper.
It has been my good fortune to travel over parts of the same country through which Hearne had journeyed one hundred and twenty-three years before me, and into which no white man had ventured during the intervening time. The conditions which I found were just such as he describes, except that the inhabitants had changed. The Chipewyan Indians, whom he found occupying advantageous positions everywhere as far as the north end of Dubawnt Lake, had disappeared, and in their places the country had been occupied by scattered bands and families of Eskimos, who had almost forgotten the ocean shores of the north, from which they had come. They were depending entirely, for food and clothing, on the caribou, which they killed on the banks of the inland streams and lakes. Traces of old Indian encampments were seen in a few of the scattered groves that are growing along the banks of Dubawnt and Kazan Rivers, but these camps had evidently not been occupied for many years.[3]
Whether Hearne remained at Fort Prince of Wales after his return is not certain, but it is possible that he may have gone to some of the other factories near the southern shore of Hudson Bay, and the plans of Albany, Moos, and Slude (East Main) Rivers, at the end of this book, the first two of which are dated 1774, may have been made by him at this time. In the latter year, however, he was at York Factory, and from there, in May or June, he was sent inland to the Saskatchewan River, where he established Cumberland House on Pine Island Lake, close to a trading-post which had been previously built by Joseph Frobisher, an enterprising merchant from Montreal. The following year he was recalled to Hudson Bay to take charge of his old home, Fort Prince of Wales, in the place of Governor Norton, who had died, and there he remained quietly trading with the Indians till August 1782, when the fort was taken and burnt by the French under Admiral La Pérouse.