Samuel Hearne - Legacy

Legacy

On 1 July 1767 he chiseled his name on smooth, glaciated stone at Sloop's Cove near Fort Prince of Wales where it remains today.

One of Wales's pupils, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, made a brief notebook entry where he mentioned Hearne's book. Hearne may have been one of the inspirations for the Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Hearne's journals and maps were proven correct by Sir John Franklin when he verified the discovery of the massacre at Bloody Falls during his own Coppermine Expedition of 1819-1822. He wrote:

Several human skulls which bore the marks of violence, and many bones were strewed about the encampment, and as the spot exactly answers the description, given by Mr. Hearne, of the place...

Hearne is mentioned by Charles Darwin in the sixth chapter of The Origin of Species:

In North America the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water.

There is a Junior/Senior High School that was built and named after him in Inuvik, Northwest Territories. A school in Toronto, Ontario was also built in his name in 1973.