Forgotten Explorer: Samuel Hearne’s Journey to the Northern Ocean.

Volume 4 | Issue 4 - Forgotten People

Article by Sam Ellis. Edited and Researched by Richita Bhattacharyya.

James Cook is a name renowned all over the world. It has always been so for the explorer most often associated with Australia, the pacific, and a grisly death in Hawaii. His journals, published upon his return from the ‘first voyage’ in 1771, were an immediate hit, making him immensely popular and elevating him to celebrity status.

Around the same time, far away from the golden beaches of the Pacific, another British explorer struck out into the wilds of Northern Canada: a young sailor who had left the navy to work for the Hudson Bay Company. His name was Samuel Hearne, a relatively obscure figure alongside the likes of Captain Cook and Joseph Banks.

This is such a shame, as his travels were somewhat unique. From a lonely outpost on the shores of Hudson Bay, Hearne set out to the north across a barren and frozen landscape, in search of the ‘Copper Mine River,’ a prospect the Company and its British investors thought appealing. Laden with supplies, goods to barter and navigation aids, his progress was slow and cumbersome. Worse, the compasses and other apparatus deemed necessary were of poor quality and broke easily. He twice had to turn back, for want of food and a sense of direction.

So in 1770, Hearne tried something radical. He planned a third attempt, with a lot less baggage, a new, longer route into unchartered territory and most importantly, indigenous guides. What followed was quite an achievement: Hearne and his companions travelled thousands of miles, almost entirely on foot, across difficult terrain. They went days without food or fire in freezing temperatures.

Not only was the journey itself remarkable, It shows just how much the European trading companies coveted territory, and the resources that could be had by mastering it. The journey was made, and heavily financed, on the basis of ultimately mythical reports of a river literally flowing with Copper. The metal was an important material in the Caribbean, the New England colonies and the industrial heartlands of Britain. It is a vital part of an Atlantic economy that has been neglected by historians, who have focused predominantly on the trade of Tea, Tobacco, Sugar and Slaves.

Aside from these insights into eighteenth century exploration, the journey has a more haunting legacy. Hearne’s journey climaxed with something shocking, a bloody ambush and massacre on the banks of the river. Hearne’s objective may have been to search for minerals, but he unwittingly brought a large party of warrior-guides to the village of their longstanding enemies, the Inuit people. The event, known as Bloody Falls, is a memory that scars northern Canada even today.

Such an impressive journey, a story of co-operation that is so vividly overshadowed by tragedy, passed by almost unnoticed by contemporaries. Why is this so? Of course it has a lot to do with James Cook – his tales of exotic places and amazing new species caught the imagination a lot more than Hearne’s notes on types of scrubland. What made matters worse was that Hearne had failed. There was no copper to report on. Nor had he found the elusive ‘Northwest Passage’ that would link Britain’s Canadian colonies to the Pacific Ocean. In the decades that followed his journey, more famous geographers took turns to criticise his observations. Captured during the Revolutionary War, traumatized by the events he had seen and the death of his wife, Hearne’s health deteriorated and he died young.

Hearne wrote a diary, an account that was published posthumously, over twenty years after the journey itself, which was by then a distant memory. For this reason it was considerably less successful than other travel narratives. Moreover, Hearne was not an elegant writer. He used various different spellings, ridiculously extensive footnotes and clumsy, wandering sentences. Perhaps he never even intended it to have an audience.

It remains the case today. Hearne’s exploits have been relatively understudied by British Atlantic Historians. It is overwhelmingly overshadowed by other developments, not just the sensational discoveries of Cook, but the fire of revolution that was raging in the American colonies. It has long been perceived as a corner of the eighteenth century world that had fur but no tea leaves.

But this could all change. Academics, perhaps a little tired of tea parties and mythical cannibals, are starting to write a lesser known history of the Atlantic world. Archaeology has proven a useful ally, verifying Hearne’s account of the events at Bloody falls. Oral histories, so important to narratives like that of Hearne and his indigenous guides, are no longer disregarded. They can also shed light on indigenous experience, absolutely crucial to our understanding of this history.

Hearne’s explorations show how knowledge, or lack of it, could play a decisive role in the reshaping of Empires. Europeans squabbled over an American interior that they actually knew very little about, at great expense and of great consequence to them and the indigenous inhabitants. Canada may have seemed bleak, but wars would be fought until people like Hearne could establish its imperial worth.

Hopefully we can now recognize how Hearne’s travels, the encounters he had and relationships he forged, played a vital role for better or worse in the Eighteenth Century Atlantic world.

 

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