Samuel Hearne

Fort Prince of Wales near the town of Churchill on Hudson Bay.

Samuel Hearne (* 1745 in London , † November 1792 in London) was an English explorer, fur trader, author and naturalist. He was the first European to go on a land journey of discovery through northern Canada to the Arctic Ocean . In 1774 Hearne built the "Cumberland House" for the Hudson's Bay Company , the first trading post and the first permanent settlement in what is now Saskatchewan .

biography

His father, Samuel, was from Somersetshire and was a secretary and engineer at London Bridge Waterworks. He died in 1748 at the age of 40. His widow Diana then moved back to their place of birth in Beaminster in Dorsetshire with the three-year-old Samuel and his five-year-old sister Sarah from London . Samuel wanted to go to sea, so he joined the Royal Navy in Portsmouth at the age of eleven. He served on various ships during the Seven Years' War , eventually resigned from the Navy on April 30, 1763 after the war ended and joined the Hudson's Bay Company on February 12, 1766. In August 1766 he finally arrived at his post at Fort Prince of Wales on the Churchill River . There he served for two years on the sloop Churchill as the first helmsman and operated fur trade with the Eskimos north of the Churchill estuary, then he served as the first helmsman on the brigantine Charlotte , which was used to catch beluga whales. With this ship he discovered the remains of James Knight's expedition around 1768 . In the fort he was able to develop his navigation skills, since the two astronomers William Wales and Joseph Dymond (1768–1769) observed the transit of Venus there . In 1769 he was commissioned by the Hudson's Bay Company for an overland expedition to the Copper Mine River.

After the end of his three expedition voyages, Hearne traveled to Fort York in August 1773 , from where he traveled further inland and built the Cumberland House on September 3, 1774 on the Saskatchewan River . There he received instructions on October 4, 1775 that he should become the new governor of Fort Prince of Wales, but he did not get there until January 17, 1776. During the war of independence between the colonies and England, a squadron met in August 1782 French allied to the colonies in front of the fort. Hearne gave up the fort without a fight due to the clear superiority of the enemy. The French then looted and destroyed the fort. However, the commander of the French squadron, the later discoverer Jean-François de La Pérouse , allowed Hearne to keep his records. After the peace treaty between England and the now independent United States in 1783, Hearne was entrusted by the Hudson's Bay Company with the rebuilding of Fort Prince of Wales. He came on September 14, 1785 in place of the old fort on the Churchill River and began to rebuild.

In the summer of 1787 he was finally released from his service at his request and was given permission to return to England. There he died of dropsy in November 1792 at the age of 47 .

In 1795, three years after Hearne's death and 23 years after the end of his successful expedition to the Arctic Ocean, his travel book was published. A German translation by Johann Reinhold Forster appeared in Berlin in 1797, and a French translation in Paris in 1799. His travels and maps have been mentioned in the works of other authors before. His travel report is particularly impressive because of its ethnographic description of the Indians of Northern Canada.

Voyages of discovery

In red the route of Samuel Hearnes' second and third expeditions

Samuel Hearnes map of his 3rd expedition

In 1762 the Indian Matonabbee and another Indian named Idotliazee were commissioned by Richard Norton's son, Moses Norton, to explore the copper deposits on the Coppermine River. In 1767, Matonabbee brought a copper lump from this expedition. This prompted Moses Norton to move the Hudson's Bay Company to a larger overland expedition. The aim of the expedition was to provide evidence of the Northwest Passage , to investigate the copper mines on the Coppermine River , to explore the stretches of land roamed and to induce the Indian tribes to trade with the Hudson's Bay Company.

His first attempt began on November 6, 1769 together with two Europeans, the leader Chawchinahaw and several other Indians. The size of the expedition and the carrying of too much equipment led to the desertion of his Indian companions and the failure of the expedition. His second began on February 23, 1770 under the leadership of the Indian Conneequese and failed because his quadrant broke and much of his equipment was stolen.

Bloody Falls

Learning from these mistakes, he decided as the only European to leave with a group of Indians under the leadership of Chief Matonabbee . On the third expedition, Matonabbee, who attributed the double failure to the lack of women, played a key role in the success of the expedition, which lasted almost 19 months from 1770 to 1772. He was an experienced organizer and recognized the indispensable role that women's skills played. This included numerous jobs such as cooking and the manufacture and repair of clothing, the quality of which the survival of the expedition members in the extreme climate depended on. They also knew how the diet had to be composed in order to avoid deficiency symptoms. In addition, the relief of carrying the men gave them better opportunities to swarm in a wide area in search of food. Matonabbee herself had seven wives, Hearne reports. In addition, they adapted their movement through the vast area to the paths of the caribou and bison herds .

Matonabbee had a great reputation with the Chipewyans as well as with the Algonquin . The third expedition started on December 7, 1770, just twelve days after returning from his second voyage. Hearne wanted to reach the Coppermine River in summer, via which he would then use canoes to reach the Arctic Ocean. On July 13th, he reached the Coppermine River, but was disappointed with the existing copper deposits and above all by the fact that the river was not navigable and therefore the copper could not be mined. During the trip, other Indians joined them several times for parts of the journey, so that at times over 200 people made up the group of travelers. On July 17th, shortly after midnight, his Indians massacred around 20 Inuit people on the Coppermine River, known as the "Bloody Falls Massacre". Hearne then named the place Bloody Falls . Shortly afterwards, in July 1771, he sighted the Arctic Ocean.

Matonabbee led Hearne over a wide arch west of Bear Lake back to Churchill (Manitoba) . In the middle of winter he was the first European to discover and cross the Great Slave Lake .

Hearne returned from the 3rd expedition to Fort Prince of Wales on June 30, 1772 after almost 19 months . He traveled about 8,000 kilometers and explored more than 650,000 square kilometers of land. On his travels he crossed what are now the provinces of Manitoba , Nunavut , Saskatchewan and Northwest Territories . Samuel Hearne brought copper samples from the Coppermine River. The Natural History Museum in London owns a 3 kilogram specimen that it received from the Hudson's Bay Company in 1818.

Works

A Journey From Prince of Wales' Fort, in Hudson's Bay, To The Northern Ocean. Undertaken By Order Of The Hudson's Bay Company. For The Discovery Of Copper Mines, A North West Passage, etc. In the Years 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772. London 1795; German first Vossische Buchhandlung , Berlin 1797. Engl. Original
Adventure in arctic Canada. The search for the Northwest Passage 1769–1772. Ed., Vorw. Volker Matthies. Erdmann, Tübingen 1981, ISBN 3-88639-510-3 .

literature

Gerhard Speck: Samuel Hearne and the Northwest Passage. Caldwell, Idaho 1963

Fiction

Martha Baillie: La disparition d'Heinrich Schlögel. Roman, transl. From the English Paule Noyât. Éditons Jacqueline Chambon, Arles 2017, ISBN 978-2-330-07589-7 .

Web links

Commons : Samuel Hearne - album with pictures, videos and audio files

Samuel Hearne . In: Dictionary of Canadian Biography . 24 volumes, 1966–2018. University of Toronto Press, Toronto ( English , French ).
Website ; Full texts of his works, in addition to English also in Dutch, Russian, German (1797, Gothic script ), Swedish, French; from the University of Alberta via Hathi Trust

notes

↑ In the novel, the Canadian author goes in search of a fictional young German, Heinrich Schlögel, who disappeared in the footsteps of Hearnes in northern Canada.

personal data
SURNAME	Hearne, Samuel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	English explorer, fur trader, author and naturalist
DATE OF BIRTH	1745
PLACE OF BIRTH	London
DATE OF DEATH	November 1792
Place of death	London

[1] In the novel, the Canadian author goes in search of a fictional young German, Heinrich Schlögel, who disappeared in the footsteps of Hearnes in northern Canada.