A Journey to the Northern Ocean
The Adventures of Samuel Hearne
FOREWORD BY KEN MCGOOGAN
Samuel Hearne
To
SAMUEL WEGG, Esq. - Governor.
Sir JAMES WINTER LAKE, Deputy Governor,
And
THE REST OF THE COMMITTEE
of the Honourable
HUDSON’S BAY COMPANY.
HONOURABLE SIRS,
As the following Journey was undertaken at your Request and Expence, I feel it no less my Duty than my Inclination to address it to you; hoping that my humble Endeavours to relate, in a plain and unadorned Style, the various Circumstances and Remarks which occurred during that Journey, will meet with your Approbation.
I am, with much Esteem and Gratitude,
HONOURABLE SIRS,
Your most obedient, and
most obliged humble Servant,
SAMUEL HEARNE.
CONTENTS
Foreword to the 2007 edition by Ken McGoogan
Map of Hearne’s Journey
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1: November 6th, 1769 to December 11th, 1769
Chapter 2: February 23rd, 1770 to August 11th, 1770
Chapter 3: August 13th , 1770 to November 25th, 1770
Chapter 4: November 28th, 1770 to May 3rd, 1771
Chapter 5: May 3rd, 1771 to July 13th, 1771
Chapter 6: July 14th, 1771 to August 5th, 1771
Chapter 7: August 1771 to December 24th, 1771
Chapter 8: January 9th, 1772 to June 29th, 1772
Chapter 9: The Landscape and its People
Chapter 10: An Account of Flora and Fauna
Endnotes
Index
FOREWORD
by Ken McGoogan
On August 8, 1782, at three o’clock on a cold, grey, blustery afternoon, and in response to the excited shouts of young Hudson’s Bay Company men, Samuel Hearne hurried to the ramparts of Prince of Wales Fort. Putting a looking glass to one eye, he peered across the choppy waters of Hudson Bay. Directly off Eskimo Point, on which the Fort stood, he saw three battleships approaching, all flying the Union Jack—one powerful vessel carrying seventy-four guns, and two speedy frigates with thirty-six guns each.
Not for nothing had Hearne, now governor of the Fort, spent six years in the Royal Navy. Even before he lowered his looking glass, he knew the truth. Despite the British flags and pennons, these were not His Majesty’s Ships that had chanced into Hudson Bay and were coming now to pay a social call. These vessels were French men-of-war, and they were coming, incredibly but certainly, to sack Prince of Wales Fort. “You may cease rejoicing,” Hearne told his excited men. “These are French warships come to wreak havoc.”
The governor knew he faced impossible odds. On the ramparts, he had forty-two cannons, each of which, to fire even sporadically, required a crew of ten or twelve men. Given two or three hundred defenders, he would be able to hold the Fort for a few hours, perhaps one whole day. As it stood, in addition to a handful of visiting Dene and two or three Homeguard Cree, Hearne had thirty-nine men, many of whom were out hunting ducks. Their return would give him six crews of untrained blacksmiths, masons and labourers. The warships that lay just beyond cannon range would carry between four and five hundred trained fighting men. A competent commander would mount a two-pronged attack, landing ground troops on one side of the Fort, and then, on the other, sailing into the river. As the ships commenced firing, blazing away with more than one hundred powerful guns, the trained fighters would advance and overrun the Fort.
Hearne knew that if he offered resistance the invaders would feel justified in commencing a murderous rampage. He had witnessed atrocities. As an admirer of the humanist Voltaire, who condemned warfare and ridiculed patriotism, he concluded that the only rational course would be to surrender the Fort.
The following morning, when a French contingent approached, Hearne ordered the front gates thrown open. Alone and unarmed, holding aloft a makeshift white flag, he marched out to meet the invaders. Taken prisoner, Hearne sought to salvage a single possession—a draft of the book you hold in your hands, first published as A Journey from Prince of Wales’s Fort in Hudson’s Bay to the Northern Ocean in the years 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and best known as A Journey to the Northern Ocean.
The foregoing account, and also the thrust of what follows, will be vaguely familiar to readers of my book Ancient Mariner: The Amazing Adventures of Samuel Hearne, the Sailor Who Walked to the Arctic Ocean. That work owes its existence to this one, which is widely recognized as the first classic of northern exploration literature. In this volume, Hearne tells the story of his three-year odyssey in the subarctic Barrens, and of how he became the first European to travel overland to the Arctic coast of North America. With that accomplishment, he demonstrated that no Northwest Passage dissected the continent, and fixed a first point along the southern channel of what would prove to be the only way across the top of the world for ships of that century or the next.
During his unprecedented trek, Hearne travelled more than thirty-five hundred miles through uncharted territory, mostly on foot, occasionally by canoe. He did so not as a native, for whom such journeys were commonplace if difficult, but as a visitor from another world, an alien creature who managed to adapt and survive and eventually to communicate what he learned to those at home. Hearne demonstrated that to thrive in the north, Europeans had to apprentice themselves to the native peoples who had lived there for centuries—a lesson lost on many who followed.
With his Journey to the Northern Ocean, Hearne not only left a cracking good tale but made other contributions. As an anthropologist before anthropology was born, he painted a vivid word-portrait of a people, the Chipewyan Dene, and a way of life—including customs, spiritual beliefs, hunting practices, and male-female relations—that because of a smallpox epidemic disappeared soon after he wrote about it. As an untrained yet gifted artist, Hearne created the earliest good sketches of Prince of Wales Fort,York Factory and Great Slave Lake, and also of many aboriginal artifacts—images that, because they are unique and irreplaceable, continue to turn up in new books on northern history.
Hearne did pioneering work as a naturalist, devoting more than fifty pages of his book to describing the animals of the subarctic. He not only maintained an ever-changing menagerie of curious pets, from minks to foxes and beavers, but accomplished experiments and dissections to determine fine differences among specimens. Twentieth century historian Richard Glover summed this up best when he asserted that Samuel Hearne showed himself “head and shoulders superior to every other North American naturalist who preceded [John James] Audubon.”
As an author, Hearne produced the only written record of one of the most controversial moments in Canadian history—the massacre of innocents at a place he named Bloody Fall. Also, by living for a long period in a foreign subculture, Hearne practiced what would later be called “immersion reporting.” His Journey constitutes one of the earliest contributions to a tradition that would evolve through works by Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Piers Paul Read and Bill Buford—the tradition of “creative non-fiction.”
Samuel Hearne was born in London in 1745. His father, manager and chief engineer of the London Bridge Water Works, died of a fever when Samuel was four, leaving the boy to grow up in Beaminster, Dorset, in southwest England, where his mother had been raised. In 1757, as a strapping, irrepressible youth, Hearne joined the Royal Navy under the protection of Samuel Hood, a famous fighting captain who later became First Lord of the Admiralty.
As a so-called “young gentleman” who walked the quarterdeck, Hearne served with Captain Hood through the
Seven Years War, learning all he would ever need to know about chasing down and seizing enemy vessels—and about firing cannons. In 1763, when the end of the war closed off any prospect of advancement, the ambitious Hearne went to London, a city of five thousand coffee houses. This was Dr. Johnson’s London, where men wearing periwigs and breeches and square-buckled shoes debated the merits of Voltaire and Rousseau into the wee hours.
Early in 1766, seeking adventure and a chance to make his name, the young merchant mariner joined the fur-trading Hudson’s Bay Company to work as first mate on a whaling ship. During the next three years, while based at the company’s northernmost outpost, Prince of Wales Fort, the scientifically minded Hearne became friends with William Wales, a visiting mathematician, and Andrew Graham, a committed naturalist, while applying himself to learning the languages of the native peoples with whom he came into contact—the Cree, the Chipewyan Dene and the Inuit.
In 1769, when he was twenty-four, Hearne set out on the quest that provides the backbone of this book. Striking off into uncharted territory, he hoped to find the Northwest Passage, or else to disprove its existence, and also to discover certain fabulous copper deposits rumoured to exist at the mouth of the Far-Off Metal River. After failing once, and then again, the determined Hearne set out a third time, joining forces with the remarkable native leader Matonabbee, and travelling ultimately as the sole European among a group of Chipewyan Dene, whose language he was still learning.
It would take three years, and require all his courage and fortitude, but Samuel Hearne would pursue his quest to the end, making notes and maps as he went. Back at Prince of Wales Fort, Hearne turned his field notes into an official report and sent that document to London, prompting the committee to award him a considerable bonus.
Hearne resumed sailing as a first mate, and then at Cumberland House established the HBC’s first inland trading post, opening a new chapter in the history of the northern part of the continent. In 1776, Hearne became governor of Prince of Wales Fort, and so gained the freedom not only to conduct his scientific experiments but to take as his country wife the mixed race daughter of the previous governor. His marriage to Mary Norton—revealed, as so much of significance in Journey, in long footnotes that Hearne never did integrate into the text—emerges as easily the most tragic story of star-crossed love in fur trade history.
While serving as governor, Hearne began fleshing out his original, bare-bones report about his northern odyssey, with a view to publishing it as a book. In 1782, when the French took him prisoner and razed Prince of Wales Fort, Hearne strove to minimize the impact on the native peoples who remained behind—and especially on the love of his life, Mary Norton. Of confiscated property, he sought the return of a single item—the manuscript on which he had been sporadically working for a dozen years.
By a stroke of luck, the leader of the three-ship expedition proved to be the cultivated Compte de la Perouse, who would become famous as the foremost French navigator of the age. Hearne drew on his own naval background and appreciation of Voltaire to establish a rapport with this officer, who read his manuscript and returned it on one condition—that Hearne get it published as soon as possible.
With winter looming, and the French lacking experience in northern waters, Hearne struck a deal: he would instruct an experienced man to guide these ships through Hudson Strait if La Perouse would then release him and his men to cross the Atlantic in a small sloop that the French vessels were towing. Having passed through the strait, and against the cautionary advice of La Perouse, Hearne debarked into the sloop and, with thirty-two men, sailed to Orkney and then to Portsmouth.
Arriving back in London, Hearne found himself lionized as a result of his misadventure with La Perouse. And now, again, his draft manuscript impressed influential people—not just his old friend William Wales, the mathematician and astronomer, but Dr. John Douglas, the canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral and later Bishop of Salisbury, who was editing the journal of the third voyage of Captain James Cook. In his introduction to that work, Douglas not only summarized Hearne’s odyssey, but quoted two long passages and suggested that the journal should be published.
While yearning for that publication, Hearne had one greater priority. The following spring, he departed London on the first ship to Hudson Bay, bent on returning to Churchill and rebuilding his life with Mary Norton. Soon after he arrived, however, he learned that, during his absence, his wife had starved to death.
From this devastating news—and the further discovery that his friend and business partner Matonabbee had despaired and hanged himself—Hearne did not soon recover. He went through a rough patch—depression and drinking, probably to the extent of damaging his liver and kidneys—during which he made little progress on the book. In 1787, Hearne resigned his post and returned to England, carrying his manuscript with him.
In London, Hearne took rooms in Red Lyon Square. Drawing on his long experience in the northwest, he began serving as a consultant to the London committee of the Hudson’s Bay Company. This work gave him access to the Company’s extensive archives. Endlessly curious, Hearne turned his attention to the enduring mystery of the lost expedition of James Knight—and not for the first time.
In 1719, acting on behalf of the HBC, the aging but irrepressible Knight had sailed from London with forty men and two ships, bent on discovering the entrance to the Northwest Passage and, more concretely, those vast quantities of gold and copper said to exist near the mouth of the Far-Off-Metal River. Knight and his men sailed into Hudson Bay and were never heard from again. Early in the 1720s, an HBC captain named Scroggs had found some wreckage on Marble Island, a few miles off the coast near Chesterfield Inlet, and concluded that both ships had sunk and “every man was killed by the Eskimos.”
In July 1767, Hearne himself had sailed north as first mate of the sloop Success. At Marble Island, one of the sloop’s small boats, while searching for whales, chanced upon wreckage from the Knight expedition. Hearne arrived soon afterwards. Despite a threatening storm, he went ashore and found guns, anchors, cables, bricks, a smith’s anvil, and the foundations of a house. Logbooks of the two HBC sloop captains mention that in his quest for information, and despite a fierce lightning storm, the first mate also dug up graves.
Talking later with two Inuit interpreters, Hearne concluded that Scroggs had been wrong. Knight and his men would have presented no threat to the Inuit. Besides, the voyagers were far better armed. The following summer, Hearne again visited the site of the wreckage. This time he collected relics and sent them to London as evidence that the expedition “had been lost on that inhospitable island, where neither stick nor stump was to be seen.”
In 1769, Hearne visited Marble Island once more, as first mate on the brigantine Charlotte. During this visit, he would later write, he was rowing around looking for whales when he spotted some Inuit walking on the island. Perceiving that a couple of them “were greatly advanced in years,” he went ashore and interviewed them. By this time, Hearne could speak some Inuktitut. Also, he drew on the help of an Inuit youth with whom he had sailed annually, and who enabled him to elicit a narrative that was “full, clear, and unreserved.”
According to these old Inuit, sickness and famine decimated the shipwrecked English. By the second winter, only twenty remained. The Inuit now erected their own camp on Marble Island, building snow huts on the opposite side of the harbour and providing the visitors with whale blubber, seal flesh and oil. In the spring of 1721, the natives paddled to the mainland to hunt. That summer, when they returned, Hearne wrote later:
they only found five of the English alive, and those were in such distress for provisions that they eagerly ate the seal’s flesh and whale’s blubber quite raw, as they purchased it from the natives. This disordered them so much, that three of them died in a few days, and the other two, though very weak, made a shift to bury them. Those two survived many days after the rest, and frequently went to the top of an adjacent rock, and earnestly looked to the
South and the East, as if in expectation of some vessels coming to their relief. After continuing there a considerable time together, and nothing appearing in sight, they sat down close together, and wept bitterly. At length one of the two died, and the other’s strength was so far exhausted, that he fell down and died also, in attempting to dig a grave for his companion. The skulls and other large bones of those two men are now lying above-ground close to the house. The longest liver was, according to the Esquimaux account, always employed in working of iron into implements for them; probably he was the armourer, or smith.
For decades, and indeed centuries, Hearne’s reconstruction of the expedition’s fate stood as definitive. Who could argue with eyewitnesses? And who could forget the image of those pathetic, final survivors, scanning the horizon for salvation? The only problem with this evocative reconstruction is that Hearne made it up. The logbooks of the HBC vessels on location in 1769 make no mention of his encounter with “eyewitnesses.” This looks more than suspicious, given the detailed reports of his previous visits to Marble Island, and also the continuing interest in the Knight expedition. What really happened is that, two decades after he visited, while sitting at his writing desk in London, Hearne conjured both eyewitnesses and survivors out of his imagination. He created a fiction.
In Dead Silence: The Greatest Mystery in Arctic Discovery, authors John Geiger and Owen Beattie make this case at length. And they put it beyond doubt. That said, I believe they misjudge Hearne’s motivations.They suggest that Hearne fictionalized his narrative for monetary reasons—to make his book more salable. But for this they provide no evidence. And considering Hearne’s passion for scientific experiment, and the joy he took in solving natural mysteries for their own sake, another scenario emerges as at least equally plausible.
After perusing the relevant journals for the first time, and adding their supply of facts to his own hard-earned knowledge, Hearne honestly believed he had solved the riddle of Knight’s fate. To communicate his understanding, and to tell as much of the truth as he knew as convincingly as possible, Hearne invented eyewitnesses. The end result, as Geiger and Beattie rightly observe, was “the most haunting vision of failed discovery in the pageant of Arctic exploration.”
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