John Rae, an Orkney-born surgeon-surveyor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, was the most capable Arctic traveller of his age precisely because of the quality his era held against him: he learned from the Inuit. He travelled light, in native dress, on snowshoes, hunting as he went, sleeping in snowhouses his parties built in an hour — covering distances that killed navy expeditions dragging sledges in wool. In four surveys he mapped some 1,800 kilometres of Arctic coastline.
In spring 1854, surveying the Boothia Peninsula, Rae met Inuit with fresh news and old horror: some years before, about forty white men had been seen dragging a boat south on King William Island, starving; later, some thirty bodies had been found — with kettles containing human remains. The famished survivors of Sir John Franklin’s expedition, lost since 1845 with 129 men while the empire mounted search after search, had, in Rae’s careful official phrase, been driven to “the last resource — cannibalism.” He bought from the Inuit the proof: silver forks and spoons with officers’ crests, a plate engraved Sir John Franklin, the round Hanoverian order from his uniform.
The verdict on the messenger
Rae’s confidential report to the Admiralty leaked to the press whole. Victorian Britain could absorb dead heroes; it could not absorb that. Lady Franklin, formidable manager of her husband’s myth, recruited the most powerful pen alive: Charles Dickens, who in his magazine Household Words dismissed the testimony of “the savage” as worthless — covetous, treacherous, and cruel, he wrote, with no claim against the word of English gentlemen — and insinuated the Inuit themselves had done the killing. Rae’s measured replies defended his sources point by point and were shouted down. He collected the £10,000 government reward for ascertaining Franklin’s fate — over Lady Franklin’s opposition — and paid for it with his standing: alone among the great Arctic surveyors of his century, he was never knighted, and polite society closed to him.
Vindication, entire
Everything afterwards took Rae’s side. McClintock’s 1859 expedition found the skeletons and the one written record on King William Island, where the Inuit had said to look. Twentieth-century forensic work on the crews’ bones found the cut marks of defleshing — cannibalism, exactly as reported. And the wrecks themselves, Erebus (2014) and Terror (2016), were found by Canadian teams guided by the same Inuit oral tradition Dickens had dismissed — within sight of where it had always placed them.
Rae’s own greatest find was geographic: the strait now bearing his name, the final missing link of the Northwest Passage — the channel Amundsen actually used in 1903-06, travelling, as Rae had, by learning from the people who lived there. Orkney raised his memorial; Westminster Abbey added a plaque only in 2014, beside Franklin’s — the messenger admitted, a century and a half late, to the company of the man whose story he had told truthfully.