Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage

by McGoogan, Ken

  Scroggs produced no evidence. But his racist speculation would remain unchallenged for decades. Then the explorer Samuel Hearne, after visiting Marble Island three times, presented a radically different interpretation of what had happened to Knight. In Journey to the Northern Ocean, Hearne described finding guns, anchors, cables, bricks, a smith’s anvil and the foundations of a house, as well as a number of graves. Hearne also discovered “the bottom of the ship and sloop, which lie sunk in about five fathoms of water, toward the head of the harbour.”

  He rejected the idea that the Inuit had anything to do with the demise of the expedition, noting that Knight and his men presented no threat. They were also far better armed than the Inuit and would have been invincible. Hearne writes that he interviewed Inuit eyewitnesses, who explained that sickness and famine decimated Knight’s shipwrecked party. Only five sailors survived the first winter. The following summer, three of them died after eating raw whale blubber. The last two men, Hearne wrote, “though very weak, made a shift to bury” their comrades: “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.”

  For more than two centuries, Hearne’s reconstruction stood as definitive. Who could argue with eyewitnesses? And who could forget the distressing image of those final survivors, scanning the horizon for salvation? The only problem with this evocative rendition is that, two decades after he visited Marble Island, while sitting at his writing desk in London, Samuel Hearne invented it out of whole cloth. In Dead Silence: The Greatest Mystery in Arctic Discovery, authors John Geiger and Owen Beattie make this case at length. The end result, as they observe, was “the most haunting vision of failed discovery in the pageant of Arctic exploration.”

  From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, we can see that, while repudiating the racism of Scroggs’s analysis, Hearne oversimplified the expedition’s fate. Subsequent investigations suggest that Knight’s two ships sustained heavy damage in the shallow, rocky harbour at Marble Island. The aging Knight may well have died during the ensuing winter, although the only graves ever found on the island were those of Inuit.

  If Knight survived, the obsessive old man might have led his men ashore, then started overland for the Far-Off Metal River, only to perish in what he called “the Barrens.” The most likely scenario, however, is that in the spring of 1720, with their ships incapacitated, Knight’s surviving men piled into their open boats, started rowing towards Churchill, roughly five hundred kilometres south, and perished in the wind and the waves.

  4.

  Matonabbee Leads Hearne to the Coast

  Roughly four decades after the death of Thanadelthur, a second outstanding “Northern Indian,” a man named Matonabbee, began emerging into the saga of northern exploration. In the late 1750s, as an informal HBC ambassador in the tradition of Thanadelthur, Matonabbee reduced hostilities among the native peoples. Born around 1737, the son of a Chipewyan-Dene woman taken captive by the Cree, he had spent his youth in the Churchill area, shuttling among the English-speaking fur traders, the Cree and the Chipewyan. By the early 1760s, he had become a “leading Indian.”

  Matonabbee collected furs from Chipewyan-Dene far to the west, and led “gangs” in transporting them to Churchill (Prince of Wales Fort) before setting out again with trade goods. In the autumn of 1770, while returning to the Bay with a dozen men, beating south through cold and howling winds, Matonabbee was astonished to encounter an underdressed HBC man stumbling through the snow with a couple of Homeguard Cree.

  Samuel Hearne, a strapping twenty-five-year-old, was equally stunned when Matonabbee addressed him in English. Hearne was six feet tall, and this singular Chipewyan—“one of the finest and best proportioned men I ever saw”—was able to look him almost directly in the eye. When Matonabbee asked how he had fallen into such straits, the young explorer could hardly believe his ears. Could this be the native leader he had originally hoped to find? The one who had not only visited the Far-Off Metal River, but who had brought back copper from its banks?

  This portrait of Matonabbee (c. 1737–1782) by Ruth Jepson celebrates the Dene leader as a figure crucial to Samuel Hearne’s epic journey. Without Matonabbee, the English explorer would never have established a first location in the southern channel of the Northwest Passage.

  Courtesy of HBC Archives (32-28026) [appeared originally in Ancient Mariner, p. 124].

  Born in London in 1745, Samuel Hearne grew up with his widowed mother in Beaminster, Dorset, in South West England. In 1757, already a towering youth, Hearne had joined the Royal Navy under the protection of Samuel Hood, a famous fighting captain who later became First Lord of the Admiralty. As a “young gentleman” who walked the quarterdeck, Hearne served with Captain Hood through the Seven Years’ War. He received an excellent eighteenth-century education while learning all he would ever need to know about chasing down and seizing enemy vessels.

  In 1763, when the end of the war closed off any prospect of advancement, Hearne turned to the merchant marine. Early in 1766, seeking adventure and a chance to make his name, the young sailor joined the fur-trading Hudson’s Bay Company, which was looking to expand into whaling. He signed on to serve as first mate on a whaling ship. During the next three years, while based at Prince of Wales Fort, Hearne demonstrated his navigational skills and began learning the languages of the native peoples with whom he came into contact—the Cree, the Dene and the Inuit.

  The current HBC governor, Moses Norton, had fallen victim to the obsession of James Knight. He, too, wanted to lay hands on the fabled riches of the Far-Off Metal River. He hoped to accomplish this while answering critics who charged that the HBC was not fulfilling its charter obligations to explore the surrounding countryside. And in 1769, he offered young Hearne the chance to seek the Northwest Passage.

  In November, Hearne set out from Churchill with some fellow traders. A guide named Chawhinahaw, paid to lead the party to Matonabbee, instead abandoned them to their own devices. Hearne made it back to Prince of Wales Fort and, in February 1770, set out again, travelling this time with two Homeguard Cree and a party of Dene led by Conneequese. After wending northwest for several months, and getting robbed by passing strangers, Hearne lost his quadrant in an accident. Unable to take the requisite readings, he started back to Churchill and ran into heavy weather. Reduced to shivering and floundering along without snowshoes, he met the one native leader who could appreciate not only how he had come to this, but what he intended still to accomplish.

  Respected by both Cree and Dene, and able to move freely among them, Matonabbee knew how to travel in the North Country. He led an ever-changing retinue that included his five or six wives, who carried supplies, cooked meals, sewed clothing and made snowshoes. On December 7, 1770, two weeks after returning with Hearne to Prince of Wales Fort, Matonabbee led the young Englishman out of Churchill.

  On this third sortie, the ex–Royal Navy man “went native.” Fitted out with a new quadrant and other supplies, Hearne meant to investigate the mouth of the Far-Off Metal River, and either to discover the Northwest Passage or else disprove its existence. “I was determined to complete the discovery,” he wrote later, “even at the risk of life itself.”

  Matonabbee led the party northwest, following the caribou and buffalo. Hearne took notes as he travelled, and later described his harrowing adventure in a work universally recognized as a classic of exploration literature, and best known as Journey to the Northern Ocean. In it, Hearne described Matonabbee as easy, lively and agreeable in conversation, “but
exceedingly modest; and at table, the nobleness and elegance of his manners might have been admired by the first personages in the world; for to the vivacity of a Frenchman, and the sincerity of an Englishman, he added the gravity and nobleness of a Turk; all so happily blended, as to render his company and conversation universally pleasing.”

  Matonabbee “was remarkably fond of Spanish wines,” he added, “though he never drank to excess; and as he would not partake of spirituous liquors, however fine in quality or plainly mixed, he was always master of himself. As no man is exempt from frailties, it is natural to suppose that as a man he had his share; but the greatest with which I can charge him is jealousy, and that sometimes carried him beyond the bounds of humanity.”

  Travelling northwest, Hearne and his fellows lived a cycle of “either all feast, or all famine,” frequently trekking two or three days on nothing but tobacco and snow water. Then someone would kill a few deer and everyone would gorge themselves. On one occasion Matonabbee ate so much that he fell ill and had to be hauled on a sledge. Hearne learned to eat caribou stomachs and raw muskox, and also to endure long fasts that caused him “the most oppressive pain.” He describes travelling through sparse woods comprising stunted pines, dwarf junipers, and small willows and poplars. The travellers followed deer through ponds and swamps, but would stop for days at a time when the hunting was good.

  But Hearne’s book is cherished, above all, for its vivid portrait of life among the Chipewyan-Dene of the eighteenth century: “It has ever been the custom for the men to wrestle for any woman to whom they are attached; and, of course, the strongest party always carries off the prize. A weak man, unless he be a good hunter and well-beloved, is seldom permitted to keep a wife that a stronger man thinks worth his notice: for at any time when the wives of those strong wrestlers are heavy-laden either with furs or provisions, they make no scruple of tearing any other man’s wife from his bosom, and making her bear a part of his luggage.

  “This custom prevails throughout all their tribes, and causes a great spirit of emulation among their youths, who are upon all occasions, from their childhood, trying their strength and skill in wrestling. This enables them to protect their property, and particularly their wives, from the hands of those powerful ravishers; some of whom make almost a livelihood by taking what they please from the weaker parties, without making them any return. Indeed, it is represented as an act of great generosity, if they condescend to make an unequal exchange; as, in general, abuse and insult are the only return for the loss which is sustained.”

  Scarcely a day would pass, Hearne adds, without such a wrestling match. “It was often very unpleasant to me,” he writes, “to see the object of the contest sitting in pensive silence watching her fate, while her husband and his rival were contending for the prize. I have indeed not only felt pity for those poor wretched victims, but the utmost indignation, when I have seen them won, perhaps, by a man whom they mortally hated. On those occasions their grief and reluctance to follow their new lord has been so great, that the business has often ended in the greatest brutality; for, in the struggle, I have seen the poor girls stripped quite naked, and carried by main force to their new lodgings.”

  Later, Hearne notes, “I have throughout this account given the women the appellation of girls, which is pretty applicable, as the objects of contests are generally young, and without any family.”

  Although these eighteenth-century Northern Indians do not much resemble their contemporary descendants, and would happily rob their fellow travellers not only of their goods but even of their wives, Hearne writes that “they are, in other respects, the mildest tribe, or nation, that is to be found on the borders of Hudson’s Bay: for let their affronts or losses be ever so great, they never will seek any other revenge than that of wrestling. As for murder, which is so common among all the tribes of Southern Indians, it is seldom heard of among them. A murderer is shunned and detested by all the tribe, and is obliged to wander up and down, forlorn and forsaken even by his own relations and former friends.”

  This peaceable approach did not extend to people of other nations, as Hearne would discover to his shock and horror. In May 1771, at a place called Clowey Lake, scores of Dene strangers, on learning that Matonabbee was bound for the Far-Off Metal River, attached themselves to his party. They did so “with no other intent,” Hearne wrote later, “than to murder the Esquimaux, who are understood by the Copper Indians to frequent that river in considerable numbers.”

  During the past couple of years, while sailing up and down the west coast of Hudson Bay, Hearne had met numerous Inuit. He had mastered the rudiments of their language, and he knew the vast majority of them to be peaceful and good-hearted. At Clowey Lake, he urged his companions to approach these people in peace, as possible trading partners, and not with a view to waging war. The newly arrived Dene reacted with derisive fury, accusing Hearne of cowardice. Perhaps he was afraid to fight the Inuit?

  Nearing the Far-Off Metal River, with the warriors clearly preparing an attack, Hearne tried again, and met the same response. He writes: “As I knew my personal safety depended in a great measure on the favourable opinion they entertained of me in this respect, I was obliged to change my tone, and replied, that I did not care if they rendered the name and race of the Esquimaux extinct; adding at the same time, that though I was no enemy of the Esquimaux, I did not see the necessity of attacking them without cause.”

  As the only European in the party, Hearne had no hope of averting what was coming. He talked with Matonabbee, but even that leader felt powerless to deflect “the current of a national prejudice which had subsisted between those two nations from the earliest periods, or at least as long as they had been acquainted with the existence of each other.”

  In June, leaving behind most of the women and children, Matonabbee and Hearne proceeded northwest with about sixty warriors from various groups, many of whom they had only just met. Trekking through rain, sleet and driving snow, they covered almost three hundred kilometres in sixteen days. With his quadrant, Hearne determined that he was roughly a thousand kilometres northwest of Churchill, although he had travelled more than twice that distance. The party pushed on, and after a final forced march of fifteen or sixteen kilometres, reached the Far-Off Metal River—today’s Coppermine.

  It looked nothing like the glorious waterway of legend. Fewer than two hundred metres across, and marked by rocks and shoals, it would never accommodate European ships. Indeed, even canoeists would find it hard to navigate. Hearne spent a couple of days surveying the river. Then, on July 17, 1771, he witnessed one of the most infamous actions in exploration history.

  In my book Ancient Mariner: The Amazing Adventures of Samuel Hearne, the Sailor Who Walked to the Arctic Ocean, I devote several pages to analyzing how and why it happened. The bare facts are these. At one o’clock in the morning, after scouts had spotted about twenty Inuit camping by the river, the Dene warriors secretly assembled and waited until the Inuit had retired to their tents. Then they fell upon the sleeping innocents. Hearne writes: “In a few seconds the horrible scene commenced; it was shocking beyond description; the poor unhappy victims were surprised in the midst of their sleep, and had neither time nor power to make any resistance; men, women, and children, in all upwards of twenty, ran out of their tents stark naked, and endeavoured to make their escape; but the Indians having possession of all the landside, to no place could they fly for shelter. One alternative only remained, that of jumping into the river; but, as none of them attempted it, they all fell a sacrifice to Indian barbarity!”

  Hearne goes into harrowing detail. “The terror of my mind,” he concludes, “at beholding this butchery, cannot easily be conceived, much less described; though I summed up all the fortitude I was master of on the occasion, it was with difficulty that I could refrain from tears; and I am confident that my features must have feelingly expressed how sincerely I was affected at the barbarous scene I then witnessed.” Hearne adds that even decades lat
er he could not “reflect on the transactions of that horrid day without shedding tears.” He named the site Bloody Falls. In 1996, Dene and Inuit representatives participated in a healing ceremony at the spot, and today it is a territorial park.

  Original map by Dawn Huck [appeared originally in Ancient Mariner, p. 132].

  In 1771, after tracking the river north for another fifteen kilometres, Samuel Hearne became the first European to reach the Arctic Ocean. At present-day Kugluktuk, he established a first geographical point on the northern coast of North America—and, not incidentally, the first location along what would one day be recognized as the southern channel of the Northwest Passage.

  During his pioneering trek, Hearne travelled 5,600 kilometres through uncharted territory, mostly on foot, occasionally by canoe. He did so not as a native, for whom such difficult journeys were commonplace, but as a visitor from another world, an alien creature who managed to adapt and survive and eventually to communicate what he had learned to those at home. Hearne was one of the first to demonstrate that to thrive in the North, Europeans would be wise to apprentice themselves to the native peoples who had lived there for centuries—a strategy that eluded many who followed.

  In 1772, back at Prince of Wales Fort, Hearne turned his field notes into an official report. The highly regarded Andrew Graham, acting chief factor at York Fort, appreciated his accomplishment and wrote in support: “Mr. Samuel Hearne, a young gentleman of good education, being employed by the Hudson’s Bay Company to examine the country to the NW of Churchill River, in order to find whether or not there were any passage by water from the Bay to the South Seas; after being absent three years returned, having travelled to Coppermine River . . . without crossing any river worth notice . . . This great undertaking has fully proven that no passage is to be expected by way of Hudson Bay.”