There are places on earth that are so vast they still impress upon us the power of nature.
The immense, rugged and varied Canadian terrain never fails to astound me.
This is a record of my journey across this magnificent land,
and back into its history.
A history written by explorers, who should be household names
in their native Britain,
but are as unknown as the land they encountered.
It's a history full of adventure, survival and bushcraft.
Canada is a country that was built on all three.
But this is not a survival series.
Instead, it's about how those skills and attitudes were used to do something else,
something quite remarkable -
to explore one of the largest and most fascinating environments on our planet.
This particular story of exploration starts in the Natural History Museum in London.
It may seem like a strange place to start a journey through Canada,
But you'd be surprised at some of the stories that lie behind
even some of the most humble exhibits, like this piece of copper.
This was carried to Britain by a man who I believe was
one of our greatest explorers, and yet whose name has all but been forgotten from history.
And yet he left us a journal that many still consider to be one of the greatest works of anthropology.
But perhaps most importantly of all,
he established a method of travel that was to unlock a continent.
That man's name was Samuel Hearne.
Although Hearne's exploits were incredible, they are not well known.
To me, however, he has been an inspiration.
In my study of bushcraft, I kept coming across the name of Samuel Hearne.
Everywhere I turned it was the same name.
There'd be a reference to how people prepared skins for clothing.
Field guides would cite his work when describing the medicinal uses of different leaves.
And anthropologists, well, they'd cite chapter and verse from his works...
..describing how people used to live in this part of the world.
So I decided I ought to get on his trail and find out as much as I could about him.
What I discovered was quite a surprise, Samuel Hearne has become a tutor to me in many ways.
He's taught me vital details, practical things like using birch canker as tinder.
But also key bushcraft principles, like learning from local knowledge -
a philosophy that was far ahead of its time.
His is the earliest celebration of indigenous skills I've ever encountered.
It's all in his extraordinary book, A Journey To The Northern Ocean.
Born in Devon in 1745,
Hearne wasn't even a teenager when he joined the Royal Navy
to serve under Captain Hood in the Seven Years' War with France.
At the end of the war, his seamanship caught the attention
of the Hudson's Bay Company, the huge fur trading company that owned much of Canada.
By the late 18th century, the company had branched out into other areas of commerce.
They became interested in a copper mine
over 1,000 miles away from their main base in Canada.
This would prove to be Hearne's big opportunity.
To pick up his trail, I've come to the company's paper archives
here in Winnipeg, the legacy of an obsession with paperwork.
It's a real treasure trove.
These papers are almost 250 years old,
including a letter from a very young Samuel Hearne.
I'm getting real goose bumps. This is the first moment that Samuel Hearne enters the historical archive,
it's a letter from him to the governors of the Hudson's Bay Company.
'Gentlemen, by these few lines I mean to show my gratitude and acknowledge the great obligation I know that
'I lie under to this good company 'and shall always endeavour to behave in a manner
'becoming one in my situation',
and it goes on in that vein.
It's such a humble letter. It's so unprepossessing, it's almost a whisper in history.
And as I follow Hearne's trail, that whisper grows in volume.
This is Sloops Cove on the edge of Hudson's Bay.
The ground here was once covered in great ice sheets,
and since they retreated at the end of the last ice age,
well, the land has been rising about the rate of a metre every 100 years or so.
Hard to imagine, but this was once full of water.
Just 200 years ago, sloops used to come in here and moor and you can still find evidence of that.
There are these iron rings set in to tie up to.
And there's other evidence too. The sailors used to come ashore onto these rocks and carve their names.
It's quite fascinating, the graffiti here tells me quite a few things -
firstly, how good people's handwriting was back in those days.
It's a far cry from the graffiti that adorns the walls of our cities today.
Also, there's a lot of history associated with these names,
and this is an important historical site here in Canada.
George Holt, for example. When the French raided this area
some years later he managed to take one of the ships that was here and get away and escape with it.
There's a lot of history, and Samuel Hearne left his name here too.
And there we go, Samuel Hearne, July 1st 1767, still a very young man.
He's just come out of the navy,
he's joined a civilian organisation and one that recognises talent.
I think this is the signature of a man who intends to make his mark
on history, and in just a few years from this, he was going to do just that.
His opportunity came early, and it came here.
This is Fort Prince of Wales on Hudson's Bay.
This is where Samuel Hearne found himself posted.
Back then, this was the Hudson's Bay Company toehold on the continent, a symbol of British power.
And for Hearne this was a place full of potential, a place where an energetic man
could make a reputation for himself. But it's a desolate place, it always has been and always will be.
This year, they couldn't open the gates until June because of snowdrifts.
The battlements are really evocative. You can really sense people standing
up here looking out. But, of course, nature is trying
to reclaim the fort, doing a pretty good job of it. And there are a few real surprises, some good berries.
That looks like an arctic bramble there, that's really tasty.
Oh, that's delicious.
And here, that's a little gooseberry, that one's not quite ripe yet.
There's all sorts of things growing here, fascinating.
But I don't think the wind ever stops blowing here. It must have been quite wearing for the people living here.
This bastion of power was the place where Hearne was chosen for the first overland expedition
to find the copper mine over 1,000 miles away.
It was land no white man had ever crossed.
He was literally stepping off the edge of the known world.
You have to picture the scene.
It's 6th November, 1769, and Samuel Hearne is leading his party out of the fort.
With him are two Englishmen and a handpicked group of Indians.
It's a significant moment -
it's the first time the Hudson's Bay Company have got a man capable of
carrying out a survey heading out to explore the interior.
A moment not lost on the governor, who salutes the party with seven of these cannon.
EXPLOSION
It's fantastic up here. I could spend all day just looking.
At first glance, you don't see anything,
but with the power of a binocular, you can start to see the amount of
bird life and wildlife there is out here - camouflaged, difficult to spot. You can hear it more easily.
But, of course, there's lots of insects, there's lots of bird life, and everything that comes with it.
To get to the copper mine, Hearne was going to have to cross country just like this,
but here's the problem. At this time of year, there may be lots to eat out there.
The problem is how do you cross it? It's so wet and boggy.
The easiest time to travel across this terrain
is in the winter when the water's frozen and snow covers the vegetation.
So that's when Hearne travelled, in winter.
Unfortunately, that was about the extent of the party's expertise.
They travelled as Europeans with too much equipment and too little local knowledge.
A month into the journey, the Indian guides simply walked away, deserting them.
Hearne was hundreds of miles from home in unfamiliar country.
He had no alternative but to turn back.
A little over a month after his bold departure, he was back at the fort.
But Hearne was a determined pioneer and a fast learner.
His preparations for another expedition show that he understood that the only way to succeed
was literally to ditch his European baggage and travel as the locals did.
If only buildings could talk what tales they would tell.
Well, we know that on 23rd February 1770,
Hearne sets out on the second expedition to the copper mine.
This time, he's the only white man in the party.
There was so much snow on the battlements that they couldn't fire cannons to salute his departure,
so instead, the governor and all the people of the fort
gathered together and they gave him three cheers to send him on his way.
Of course, Hearne relied completely on local technology.
What he had on his feet were these, traditional mukluks or moccasin-style boots.
When you first encounter them, they seem incredibly inadequate for the task
to deal with these great subzero temperatures,
but actually, they're perfect. They've got no conductive surfaces,
they breathe very well, but most importantly they allow your foot to move, and movement makes warmth.
I really like this sort of technology.
When you first start to use them,
you can't believe how light you feel on your feet.
And I can really relate to the First Nation attitude
that comes with these footwear, which is that with every step
you can feel the earth mother speaking to you as you walk.
It really is very special.
But once more, Hearne was hampered.
Moses Norton, the governor of the fort,
didn't allow him to include women in his party,
even though women played a vital role in traditional life on the land.
It was a short-sighted decision.
It was a hidden blessing that this expedition,
plagued once more by hunger, hardship, and slow progress,
was brought to an abrupt end
when Hearne's quadrant was blown over and broken.
His guides didn't seem to care,
failing even to offer adequate protection.
As if matters couldn't get worse, the next day, a group of strange Indians turned up, came into his tent
and emptied his bag in front of him and started to help themselves to his goods.
In the end, they left him with very little, just a knife,
a file, an awl, so that he could repair his footwear,
a needle and a razor.
He had two razors. They took one of them with them. He was quite happy cos they took the blunterof the two,
and they left him as much soap as he might need to shave himself on the return journey.
I don't think they thought much of shaving.
But it isn't the loss of his goods that's important.
I think it's the entry in his journal the following day
when he said that he wasn't that unhappy about having all of his goods
taken because they'd lightened his load and travel was the easiest he'd encountered on that journey.
I think that tells you a lot about his spirit.
I think in the case of Samuel Hearne, his glass was always half full.
This was a turning point for Hearne.
Not only had he learned the importance of travelling light,
he also met a local leader by the name of Matonabbee,
an Indian leader who pledged his support for Hearne's expedition.
Matonabbee is still remembered by his people today, people like Ila Bussidor.
Matonabbee was a Sayisi Dene, wasn't he?
He was Dene,
the people that I come from, which is Sayisi Dene,
and they say that he was also part Cree, and...
Cos he could speak some Cree, and he could speak some English, according to Hearne.
He could speak Cree, he could speak English, he could speak Dene, he could speak Inuit.
When I read Samuel Hearne's description of his travel with Matonabbee,
it's very apparent that Matonabbee really knew the country.
Yes, so they travelled everywhere, so if you take a look at the map today
and Coppermine, that is way, way up north,
but they travel on foot. They knew their land. They didn't need a map to go here and there.
So he was a very knowledgeable young man,
and I think when Samuel Hearne came into the picture,
he recognised these qualities about Matonabbee
and he chose him to be his guide.
Why was it important to take women on these journeys?
Well, women are important, number one.
I think back in those days, it would be the women that would be,
like, hauling the load of the household,
or they would be the ones that would go ahead
once they found a place where they would camp
and the women would set up the whole camp.
How did the Dene feel about Samuel Hearne?
He was accepted,
otherwise, they wouldn't have led him where they did.
They accepted him as a brother, as a son,
and he was part of the people for the time that he travelled with them,
otherwise, you know, they would have killed him.
Matonabbee was going to be the key to Hearne's success.
For a start, he'd been to the Coppermine River, and he absolutely agreed with Hearne -
you couldn't cross this country without women.
You needed them to turn the skins of the animals you caught into clothing.
He also was a man of great standing throughout the territory.
That meant it was unlikely that they were going to be robbed.
But most importantly of all, he had the perfect strategy
to get to the Coppermine. And to explain that, I need to make a map.
This is Hudson's Bay.
And this is Prince of Wales Fort.
The Coppermine is on a river up here.
Now, this is the tree line as it crosses the country.
Trees below, tundra beyond.
What most of Hearne's guides had been doing
was heading west and then starting to go north,
taking him into the tundra where there was very little food,
and that was his problem.
What Matonabbee said was, "We won't do that. We'll stay in the trees
"as we head west. Even if it takes us away from the Coppermine, it's better to stay where there's food.
"Then with the coming of spring, we will follow the caribou as they migrate out onto the tundra.
"In that way we will have food." And that's exactly what they did.
They came west in the trees... and headed directly north
to make a lightning strike to the Coppermine River,
returning more or less the same way.
Without that strategy, I think the expedition would have been completely impossible.
The tree line they were following is the edge of the vast Boreal forest
that covers a third of Canada.
This far north, the trees may be smaller and more widely spaced
than in the heart of the forest, but that only adds to its beauty.
Canada is a place where you can actually feel the power of nature all around you.
At times it's overwhelming.
That's a remarkable sight.
It's absolutely fantastic to see a polar bear.
In the summer, this part of the world, Fort Prince of Wales, Churchill,
these places were built on a traditional route for polar bears to migrate.
Sometimes it brings the bears into conflict with human beings.
I could watch this magnificent animal all day. It's truly beautiful.
Might look like a teddy bear, but that's one fierce predator.
I'm not gonna get any closer.
From Matonabbee, Hearne learned how to travel like an Indian,
travelling fast and light, taking only what they needed from the land.
Along the way, they developed a deep-seated respect for each other.
When Hearne came through this country it was very early in the fur trade
and many of the people that he encountered
still hadn't had any contact with the trade goods that were coming from the east.
He's left us an invaluable record of life at those times because things were going to change very quickly.
It was so early that some of the people he was travelling with didn't actually have metal cooking pots
and were having to use vessels made from birch bark, and that's what I'm gonna try and make right now.
Birch bark's made up of many layers, as you can see.
This is the outside of the bark and I'm peeling it off to clean it
and so that it's even in thickness.
The outside peels very easily,
but the inside of the bark doesn't, and because of that,
the inside of the bark will form the outside of the vessel.
I need to make a template for the basic shape,
which I'll then peg before stitching together with spruce roots.
Birch bark is a lovely material to work with.
It's a bit like cutting leather.
But these are not ideal conditions to work in.
Very difficult to do this out in the cold
cos the bark is cold, my hands are cold.
Crumbs... It's very tricky.
It's difficult because I'm not just making a basket to hold things.
I'm making a basket that will have to be waterproofed
and that presents all sorts of extra challenges.
I don't know whether you can see how wet this basket is.
It's soaking wet, and that is just the weather conditions,.
There's a very, very fine mist in the air,
and it's just saturating everything.
What with the cold breeze and wet hands,
it's making this job incredibly difficult.
I think this is probably the hardest conditions
I've made a basket like this in.
It's an awful lot of work to have a cup of tea.
Well, as I've sewn it up, it's started to gain some strength now.
It's got some structure.
But it won't be complete until I put a rim on the top.
For that I need a thin sapling,
which I'm gonna bind on all the way around the edge,
and then the basic building is done.
I quite enjoy this sort of work.
I haven't made a basket like this for some time, really.
It's quite nice to do this again.
It's very satisfying.
As you start to get closer to the finished item,
the thing gets stronger as you go.
What's lovely is, of course,
these materials are so beautiful to work with...
..and you can start to feel quite a connection to the forest
when you start to work with its fabric in this way.
Makes you cherish it and care for it because it's so giving.
Well, that's more or less it.
Now you can see it's got great strength to it,
but it's not gonna hold water yet.
I can see light coming through there.
To do that, I've got to seal all these seams with spruce resin.
That's gonna be a bit difficult today cos the weather's so wet.
The resin won't stick to wet bark,
so I'll have to see if I can dry it in some way.
And I'll have to finish it another day.
As he crossed this land,
Hearne faithfully recorded detailed observations on the skills that made life here possible,
like snaring wildlife, and drying fish and meat.
This interest in the local ways is what sets him apart.
Thankfully, he recorded them with incredible detail and accuracy.
Travelling with woodland Indians,
he had no choice but to embrace their culture.
But he did this willingly and has left us a unique firsthand account
of life in the forest at that time.
Thanks to Hearne's journal, these life skills were recorded for others to appreciate and to learn from.
After five months,
they'd crossed hundreds of miles, travelling all the way on foot.
Today, the quickest way to cover the same distance is by air.
It gives a unique perspective.
The Canadian wilderness is vast - it just seems to go on forever.
Even if you're in a boat or in a car, you don't get a sense of the scale.
It's only when you get up in the air like this, flying low-level
in a floatplane, that you really come to terms with what's really there, how massive it actually is.
Back in Hearne's day, there weren't maps.
It was a blank sheet of paper.
When he set off with Matonabbee, he surveyed his route.
Experts have looked at what he's done and they say he's never more than about 20 miles out
on his judgment of distance.
Given the tools he had back then, that is a phenomenal piece of navigation.
Canada has almost 400,000 square miles of fresh water.
There is simply no way of moving around without some means of crossing lakes and rivers.
Hearne's journals are full of surprises.
One of them is a description of this type of birch bark canoe.
Now, you may think there's just one type of birch bark canoe, but you'd be wrong.
There are many different types, and in this country, the birch trees aren't very large
so the canoes are made from lots of small pieces, carefully stitched together and then glued.
Hearne described exactly this type of canoe. In fact, he illustrated it.
One of the things that's unique about this canoe
is it was used not just to go out hunting for geese and for fishing,
but also when travelling in the tundra to cross the rivers
and the small lakes in the spring and the summer.
And for that reason, the canoe had to be very light and very portable,
which is exactly what these are.
And I'll show you how they're carried.
Canoes would sometimes be carried for days between rivers.
It's very light, and he illustrates a man carrying a canoe just like this.
I can pick it up with one hand.
That's how light these canoes are.
Isn't that amazing? And people say they've got light canoes today.
I don't think so.
This is known as a Dogrib canoe, after the people of the area.
Today, the Dogrib have reverted to their traditional name, Tlicho.
Elders from the town of Rae-Edzo have set up a temporary camp outside town,
to show me a glimpse into the traditional way of life,
the life Hearne encountered, like this soup made from caribou blood.
You want to try it, or...? Yeah, definitely.
OK. And...I always, never throw nothing away
and this is a very good soup.
Have you got salt?
Add salt into it just the way you like it.
I'll just try it first.
So here we go, this is... It's gonna be hot so be careful.
This is something that Samuel Hearne said he really liked. Yeah.
Well, that's good. It's got real...
That's really warming. Needs a bit of salt, I think.
Yeah. What they do as the elders, they don't leave it overnight, and you gotta eat it all.
Once my wife makes a pot like this, full, my kids and my in-laws,
they would all come to my house and they know that...
You would phone them and said, "I have this blood soup."
They would all come. This would keep you really warm. Yes.
As Hearne learnt, the land is a great provider.
Use it well and it will support your journey.
John B Zoe is a senior Tlicho, who actively promotes his culture.
When I came to visit, I was quite concerned that...
at what level of knowledge might still remain
because elders in all of the First Nation communities are now dying
and often at a rapid rate, because of diabetes and other problems.
But I've been very impressed with the knowledge here.
Why do you think that's the case?
Because of the area that we live in. Trees are very low.
Any place that you go into this area, you would need a canoe to go,
and there's no real big ships or big boats can come into this area,
so that early traders back in the 1800s just avoided this area.
They preferred to go up the river and down the Mackenzie River.
And coming into this area, they can only go so far,
so this area was totally isolated
probably until 1961 when they first pushed a road in.
And the development didn't really start to begin until 1970.
But things didn't change very much because there was no...
there was no employment, there's no jobs,
so people still continued to practise
their hunting and fishing and trapping,
and the language was still very strong.
And it's only in the last probably 15 years that things really started to rapidly change.
There's a continuity here that made life possible in this forest,
and even though the Tlicho have moved into the modern world,
it's great to meet Pauline, who keeps the past alive.
I guess in the old days, the piece of equipment that would have
worn out the most would have been the footwear.
Yes. The moccasins like this. It's a working moccasin, isn't it?
It's un-unadorned. These simple moccasins are one of the most beautiful things.
There's a real skill in making it.
Yeah. Uh-huh. Yes, it is.
My dad growing up, I hardly ever saw him without one.
He was always out and about, trapping.
My mom always had a way of fixing them
so it doesn't show, like there was patches under them, yeah.
Are young girls still learning these skills today?
I hardly ever see any of them any more.
I learnt a lot of this myself.
My mom used to do other sewing for me and I just did the beadwork.
And then one day I thought, "My mom's not gonna be with me long," yeah?
"So, who's gonna do the sewing for me when she goes?
"And I can't be carrying my work around to this other lady,"
so I started doing them myself.
Of course, making buckskin is really hard work, isn't it?
I noticed in these bags, they're made from lots of little bits.
Is that because you don't waste anything?
Yes, we don't. If I throw anything away,
my mom would be having a fit, yeah.
RAY LAUGHS
So every little piece, even the smallest piece, are saved,
and the ladies here love...
'Being here, I can sense a line stretching back to Hearne and beyond.
'A line that carries the knowledge to get life from the forest.'
These spruce needles aren't just thrown down.
They're woven together.
Adele, show me what you're doing.
You want to do that? Yeah show me how.
There's a real skill, isn't there?
So it's just like that? Mm-hm.
So you only use the very fine tips, the soft bits.
When you were young, and you lived out this way,
how long does this floor last?
Two day. Every two days?
That's a lot of work.
Yeah. Ha.
I feel privileged to learn skills
directly from the tribes that Hearne would have encountered.
It's incredible for me to see things first-hand that I've read for years in Hearne's journals.
Not just skills, but also stories.
The Tlicho told me the tale of Wanaku, a woman who was living alone,
trapping on the land, when she encountered white men.
It sounds so similar to a passage in Hearne's book
about a woman setting snares that he met as he crossed this land. I'm sure they're the same person.
I must say, being here is certainly bringing his book to life.
But before I leave the Tlicho, I'd like to know one last thing,
and Eddie is the man to ask.
Do you find the forest to be a good provider?
Ha.
HE SPEAKS NATIVE DIALECT
TRANSLATION: Yes, it provides lots of food for me.
You know, I was raised in the bush so I'm used to always eating traditional food
and I like going out fishing, or setting snares for rabbits or even ptarmigan.
That's the way I was raised and I don't like eating too much store food,
you know, like food from a shop.
I don't like eating too much of that stuff.
What is the most important thing for a Tlicho man, in life?
Today it's very important to teach our young people about our way of life,
because in today's society there's lot of changes.
We've got to keep our traditions and our culture strong as well as embracing modern life.
Today we're gonna need both of them in order to understand and survive.
Without education and going to school,
we won't be able to work in the modern world
and we need that cos much of our cultural life we're losing.
But we're still hanging on to the important things,
and it's good to have both of these elements strong.
We call it being strong like two people.
Thank you, Eddie. It's been a real pleasure.
It's been good to be here, such beautiful country.
I sincerely hope that whilst embracing the future,
the Tlicho can continue to keep their traditions alive,
traditions that have allowed me a glimpse of the life Hearne encountered.
Hearne had already travelled around 800 miles, hugging the tree line.
By May 1771, he was camped here,
still two months from his destination.
This is Lake Eileen.
Back in Hearne's day, it was called Lake Clowey.
He didn't get here till early May.
It had taken longer than expected because, with spring coming on,
the snow was starting to thaw, making travel on snowshoes really difficult.
They'd sent two men on ahead with birch bark
and all the wooden parts necessary to build canoes,
and it's a good idea cos there's no mature birch to be found anywhere near here.
This was an important place. There was plenty of food to be had
in the way of fish in the lakes here.
There are big sandy banks here, ideal for building canoes on,
and plenty of spruce trees with resin and roots for the construction.
When he returned, he made a map of his journey.
You can see Lake Clowey here.
It says beside it, "Where we built canoes in Maye 1771."
It also shows the edge of the tree line,
the last chance to build canoes
before heading out into the barren lands.
It takes a couple of weeks to build a canoe
and this area would have been a perfect camp -
plenty of food and water, a safe place to camp
and the natural resources on tap to build fires, canoes and cooking pots.
You can see how much resin there is here on this tree.
It's had a lot of damage to it and all of these lumps sticking out, that's solid resin.
You see, tastes good.
There's no difficulty here at all to gather what you need to make a canoe.
And a very fitting place to complete my bark kettle.
In the pan here I've got spruce resin
that's mixed with a little bit of charcoal
and I'm heating that over the fire.
Have to be very, very careful with this -
if it gets too hot it'll catch fire, be a fat fire, very dangerous.
And it's very hot - you don't want to get this on your skin.
Now, this is the way resin is used now, with a frying pan to heat it up.
It's very easy and convenient. Of course, before the arrival of these trade goods, that was impossible.
What had to happen was you needed a rock that you could heat the resin on beside the fire
and then you'd take a stick
and you start to collect the resin onto the stick.
I'll show you, I'll start to do that here.
Like this.
And as it cools, of course, it hardens,
so you can build up layer by layer on the stick,
so you made a glue stick.
You can heat the glue stick by the fire to soften it
and then you can lay the resin
exactly where you want it to go on your basket.
Lay a little bit.
And then if it doesn't seem quite runny enough, you can take an ember from the fire...
..to heat...the resin
and melt it.
So it starts to go smooth, just as you want it.
But I'm gonna do it the easy way, using the pan, because I'm on a bit of a tight schedule today.
I don't think I've done the neatest job here.
Certainly the people who were living with this skill
would have done a much, much better job,
because their fingers would have been used to doing this all the time.
They'd have been more frugal, I suspect,
with the resin.
But we'll see.
It should hold water.
Of course, a wooden container can't go on the fire.
It needs its own way of heating, using hot rocks.
It may take time, but it's possible to bring the water to the boil.
As he left here, the trees thinned still further until Hearne finally left the Boreal forest behind.
Ahead of him, less shelter, more extreme weather, and little food.
In other words, the barrens.
Matonabbee led Hearne out here in synchrony with the caribou herds.
You have to picture the scene - the men in the lead with their weapons looking for meat,
and the women following up behind with the poles for the tents, the tents, the food, everything.
It was a really grim time, very little shelter, and in bad weather it was sheer misery.
But there is a strange beauty to this place. It really is endless, its vastness makes me feel very small.
It's almost like being in the middle of a huge ocean.
No matter how far you think you have walked, the horizon never changes.
It must have taken great strength of character and determination to press on and keep going.
One of the features of this landscape is that there's very little woodland.
It's quite a contrast from the Boreal forest where there's loads of it.
Here the largest wood that I've been able to find is like that,
and this is dwarf birch.
So any little patch of vegetation out here
is like an island in an ocean of nothingness.
It means sanctuary and the potential for warmth and a hot meal.
When Hearne came across here, there were times in the rain when they couldn't light a fire
and they had to eat their food raw. It must have been pretty tough.
The other day, an Inuit man told me that you can burn this dwarf birch green. I've never tried that before,
so I thought I'd give it a go cos in this sort of place, any little tip is an advantage.
We'll see how that goes.
He's right, it does burn,
it's great.
In July 1771, after over 1,000 miles and seven months on foot,
Hearne was finally approaching his goal - the Coppermine River.
These willows are a little bit surprising.
Over the last few years, what with the climate warming,
the willows have really grown, and now they're very high. They should be a lot smaller.
Back in Samuel Hearne's day, they would have been smaller still
because that was a cold period in history.
Back then, they'd probably have been just this high.
So now the vegetation here has changed quite a lot.
WATER FLOWS Can you hear that sound?
That's the reason I've come here.
That was the goal of Hearne's expedition,
but it wasn't to be a triumphal arrival. Far from it, it was a bit of a tragedy.
Hearne may have been here to look for copper,
but unfortunately, his guides had another agenda.
They knew that their sworn enemies, the Inuit,
would be fishing at the river and were set on settling a score.
Hearne became an unwilling member of a war party.
According to Hearne's description, the war party came from over there somewhere.
They came towards the river so they would trap the Inuit between themselves and the river.
Over here there were five Inuit tents.
It's still a campsite today and in fact there's lots of archaeology there.
When they got there, they attacked the Inuit and then they could look across the river
which they couldn't see until then, and found several more tents somewhere over here.
They thought they'd have a go at them too. They got their muskets out and started shooting at them.
The bullets hit the rocks and many of the Inuit had never seen a musket before.
They ran over to see what was causing the disturbance until one of them got hit in the leg.
Then they realised the danger, got in their kayaks and paddled off downriver.
Throughout this horrible scene, Hearne was an unwilling spectator.
He was terribly moved by events that day.
At one point, there was an Inuit woman very badly injured
holding onto his legs and he called for her to be put out of her misery by his party,
at which point they derided him.
I think it shows great strength of character that, in the heat of battle,
he could still stand up for what he believed in.
The impact is still felt here today,
as Allen Niptanatiak, an Inuit from the nearby town of Kugluktuk, told me.
When I found out about it, when I got older and I started reading it, you know, it was upsetting,
cos now I think back, "Could some of these have been, you know, our relatives?"
But we have no control of that, so it's...
Today there's no hard feelings between our groups and the other groups
because we've put all that behind because it's...
You can't live in the past. You have to keep on going - life is too short.
And in that description, there was an old woman fishing with a spear at the falls.
Whereabouts would that have been?
Where they used to spear fish is straight along the base of the edge here,
because the fish go right against the rock, the rocks,
and there's more current out there in the rocks, there's some eddies.
And we still do it, in fact - we go right there with a kakivak.
It'll be right in this area here that they were always fishing,
so just a very hot spot and you can see all the trails
and today people are still fishing every day.
Do you think it's a shame it's called Bloody Falls?
In our language it's called Kugluk, which means place of large rapids.
But the English name, Bloody Falls, refers to the tragedy,
But in our language it's called Kugluk.
What do you make of Samuel Hearne?
Samuel Hearne, from reading about him in all the books,
he did a lot of great things for Canada.
He opened up the north to the south by travelling up here,
and his, some of his travelling methods
was adapting the aboriginal group's clothing,
their way of travel and the understanding, and taking them along asguides.
So by doing that he, his survival and his success rate was higher than a lot of the others.
It feels very strange to be here.
I've been reading about Samuel Hearne for many years now,
and to actually get here is quite astonishing and no easy feat,
even by today's standards. But I didn't have to walk like he did.
My respect for him is just immeasurable.
I've always respected him, but now coming to the ground and actually seeing it, it's even moreprofound.
People criticised him - there were people who said he'd never been here. How wrong they were.
I've even got the right sort of mud on my boots, he described that much detail when he came here.
It's just struck me that just like Hearne, this is the apex of my journey.
The culmination of literally years of research and endeavour.
It's hard to put into words quite what that means.
But one thing I can say is, it's been worth it.
After all that, Hearne did find copper on the way home,
but it was not plentiful enough to be worth commercial exploitation.
Back at Fort Prince of Wales, people imagined that there would actually be an underground mine here,
but of course this IS the copper mine -
in this area lumps of copper occur naturally in the landscape.
And a few days later down that way,
his party searched around until they found a few lumps, and there was one particularly large one
that looked like a sleeping hare, and that's the piece you can still see in London today.
Hearne finally made it back to Fort Prince of Wales in June 1772.
His standing within the Hudson's Bay Company had never been higher
and he went from strength to strength.
He was invited to set up the company's first ever inland trading post.
He married Mary Norton, the half Indian daughter of the governor at Prince of Wales Fort,
and shortly after, he was made governor of the fort himself.
The fort was meant to be a stronghold and a deterrent to French invaders,
but though it looks impressive, it's fatally flawed as it has no source of drinking water.
It was also drastically undermanned.
So when French warships sailed into Hudson's Bay,
Hearne had no option but to surrender and was taken prisoner.
When Samuel Hearne left here as a prisoner of the French,
he couldn't guarantee the safety of his wife, Mary Norton,
particularly as she was half Indian, so instead he had to leave her behind.
He didn't manage to get back here until September 1783,
only to discover that she had starved to death in the particularly hard winter.
He was heartbroken.
In his journal he has an engraving that he made of the fort
from more or less this position
and in the foreground there are two characters - a man and a woman.
We've no idea who they are,
but I like to think that it's Sam Hearne and the love of his life, Mary Norton.
Hearne's book is a fascinating story and a unique record of a disappearing world,
a world I feel privileged to have stepped briefly into
and experienced with the help of the Tlicho people.
The book may be a definitive work,
but his legacy isn't just in the pages of his book.
It's out here in the vast northern wilderness of Canada.
Hearne was the first European to truly grasp
the magnitude of this country because he'd walked so much of it.
And he was the man who showed the way,
who pioneered the method by which this continent would truly be explored -
by travelling using local technology.
And all the most successful explorers that would follow would be those that used his methods.
And next I travel north, to see how a doctor from the Orkney Isles
applied Hearne's methods to become one of our greatest Arctic explorers ever.