Meanwhile, Richard Norton of Churchill had died, and his half-breed son Moses Norton had been appointed Governor in his stead. In the year 1767 the remains of Knight's ill-fated expedition were found on Marble Island, and the thoughts of the people on Hudson Bay were undoubtedly again turned to the object for which his voyage had been undertaken. To add to the interest in the copper, the Northern Indians, who came to Churchill in the year 1768, brought with them some fine specimens of ore which they said came from Coppermine River. By this time Governor Moses Norton's interest was thoroughly aroused in the possible value of the copper "mines," and as they were said to be only four hundred miles from Churchill, he determined that, if possible, something definite should be learned about them. Accordingly, that very summer, when the ship came from England, he took passage back in it to London, and laid a plan for the discovery of this supposed great body of copper ore before the directors of the Company and received their approval for its execution. The plan was not to entail any very great expense to the Company. A man was to be sent out with the Indians, who should be supported by them and live as they lived.
Before that time other men had been sent into the wilderness, in the same way, from factories, especially from York, where, in 1690, Henry Kelsey had travelled southward until he met the so-called "Naywatamee poets" or Mandan Indians, somewhere near the banks of the Assiniboine or South Saskatchewan Rivers,[8] and in 1754 Anthony Hendry had made a notable journey up the North Saskatchewan River to the great plains, where he had endeavoured to establish friendly relations with the Blackfeet Indians and their allies, and to prevent them from selling their furs to Luc la Corne and the French merchants from Montreal, who had penetrated into the same country several years before. Both these men had been treated with the greatest kindness by the natives and had brought back intelligent accounts of the countries visited by them, though neither of them had the ability of Samuel Hearne to enable them to prepare a report such as the one here published.
Governor Norton was a man of much more than the ordinary intelligence and strength of character, and he saw that if the expedition was to be a success it must be conducted by some one who would be able to make full and accurate surveys of the route followed, and who could intelligently describe the character and value of the "mine" and determine its latitude and longitude by astronomical observations. For this purpose he chose Samuel Hearne, now a young man twenty-four years of age, who, after his service as a midshipman in the British Navy, was at the time employed as a mate on the _Charlotte_, one of the Company's sloops trading from Churchill with the Eskimos. The story of his journey, the hardships which he endured, and the success which he achieved, form the subject of this book and need not be discussed here.[9]