Hearne, Samuel, 1745-1792 : Explorer and fur-trader.
Samuel Hearne (1745-1792) was born in 1745. He was the son of Samuel Hearne (d. 1748), managing engineer of the London Bridge Water Works, and his wife, Diana Hearne. After his father's death, his mother took him to Beaminster, Dorsetshire. After some elementary education, Samuel Hearne joined the Royal Navy in 1756 at the age of 11, as a servant to Captain Samuel Hood. He saw considerable action during the Seven Years' War and left the navy at its end in 1763. In 1766, he joined the Hudson's Bay Company as a mate on the sloop Churchill, which was then engaged in the Inuit trade out of Prince of Wales Fort (Churchill, Manitoba). Two years later, he became involved in the H.B.C.'s black whale fishery as mate of the brigantine Charlotte.
In 1769, Hearne was chosen to lead the expedition to search for the copper mines reported by Indian explorers and investigate the navigability of the adjacent Coppermine River, N.W.T. That expedition and the subsequent one in the following year, both organized by the H.B.C. factor at Prince of Wales Fort, Moses Norton (ca. 1735-1773), failed. The third, however, for which Hearne insisted on choosing his own guide, the Chipewyan Matonabbee (ca. 1737-1782), proved successful. In 1773, Hearne was chosen to found the Company's first western inland post at Cumberland House, Saskatchewan. In 1776, he was appointed chief at Prince of Wales Fort, which he had to surrender to a French force under the Comte de Lapérouse in 1782, but re-established in 1783.
Hearne retired in 1787 and spent his retirement in giving assistance in their researches to naturalists such as Thomas Pennant (1726-1798), and in preparing his travel journals for publication. They were published three years after his death as A journey from Prince of Wales's Fort, in Hudson's Bay, to the northern ocean .... in the years 1769, 1770, 1771, & 1772 (London, 1795). By 1802, the work had gone through three editions and been translated into German, Dutch, Swedish, French, and Danish. Two modern editions appeared in 1911 and 1958, edited by Joseph Burr Tyrrell and R.G. Glover, respectively. There are significant differences between the Stowe manuscript and the published versions.
