The Last Link? – Rae and Franklin :
A Tale of Tragedy and Heroism
(Dr. Rosalind Rawnsley – A Franklin descendant)
Lecture for the John Rae Society, 30 September 2025
I have entitled this evening’s talk The Last Link – Rae and Franklin :A Tale of Tragedy and Heroism. It is the final chapter of a story which I began in October 2023, when on behalf of the Stromness Museum, I gave an account of Sir John Franklin’s fatal last expedition in search of a navigable sea route to the north of what is now Canada to link the Atlantic to the Bering Strait and the Pacific Ocean.
In the second instalment, yesterday, in order to put the expedition in context, I discussed the historical background and the reasons why the discovery of such a route, if one did indeed exist, was considered, for reasons which evolved over time, to be so important.
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So now at last appears centre-stage Dr. John Rae who, with his customary patience, has been waiting all this time in the wings.
As the Bible has it, ‘a prophet is not without honour, except in his own country and among his own people.’ An observation made by Jesus which is as true today as when it was quoted nearly two thousand years ago by the author of St. Matthew’s Gospel.
Here in Orkney, we are of course among John Rae’s own people in his own country, where he is indeed still honoured and to you, as Orcadians and as members of a Society dedicated to educating the public about the life and achievements of John Rae, I would not presume to try to add to your knowledge and expertise. So, I would like now just to discuss the considerable role he played in the search for Franklin.
Rae’s astonishing achievements in Arctic exploration, and his survival in conditions inconceivable to most of us, were due in no small part to his having learned how to ‘live like a native’ from the Inuit, for whom he had a great respect and affection. More about that in due course.
As Leslie Neatby, in his authoritative account of the search for Franklin, published in 1970 tells us, many months elapsed after the expedition sailed from Stromness on 3rd June 1845 for the Arctic before any anxiety about its progress was expressed. It was well known that the Arctic was normally navigable only for a couple of months during the brief northern summer, and therefore it was most unlikely that the expedition could be completed in a single season. Even in the early months of the following year no particular concern was being expressed in official quarters at the absence of news.
However, by 1847 , when there had still been no sightings of either ship or of any members of the crews, some anxiety began to be felt.
Those who had experience of the Arctic, including Sir John Ross among others, considered that if there was still no news by the end of that year, it was highly likely that Franklin was in serious trouble. Ross, although now in his 70th year, informed the Admiralty that he had promised Franklin that he would personally lead a relief expedition if there was still no news by the end of 1847.
By the beginning of 1848, anxiety really began to be felt in official quarters, and plans were formed for a relief expedition. HMS Plover, carrying mail for the members of the expedition, was to be sent to Bering Strait, between Siberia and Alaska, whence her boats could be used to scour the coast of the Arctic shore of Alaska, while a second boat expedition would search the coast further east, between the Mackenzie and Coppermine Rivers. This plan of operations would, it was thought, cover all the area of Franklin’s intended course. Though straightforward enough on paper, this plan did not allow for the fact that Franklin might have been diverted from his intended course by heavy ice.
Those with first-hand experience of the Arctic considered that this course of action was too simplistic, and made their views known to the Admiralty. Others weighed in with further suggestions – overland expeditions should leave caches of food at strategic points, further searches should be conducted via the great rivers which drained into the Arctic Sea, while other ships should be despatched by sea, taking different courses than those of Franklin’s original intention.
Though of course nobody could have known it at the time, all this was too little, too late.
Between 1847 and 1854 numerous expeditions were sent out by the British Government under the command of various Arctic veterans. In the autumn of 1850, there were no less than fifteen vessels engaged in the search.
Two ships which were ice-bound for four successive winters, eventually did return safely. Two others had to be abandoned, though their crews were fortunately rescued, but in spite of the best efforts of al these expeditions, no trace of either Erebus or Terror or of their crews was found. They had seemingly vanished into thin air.
In the absence of any means of communication other than personal contact or the leaving of written messages various other means of contact were tried. Since the terrain was extremely difficult due to the shifting ice and snow, to cover physically the whole vast area of the Arctic was of course impracticable. Other means of communicating with the lost expedition were therefore tried. Hundreds of balloons were sent up from the rescue ships, with information about the location of caches of food and supplies and the whereabouts of rescue ships. Thousands of printed despatches were scattered and other attempts to make contact involved the use of rockets, flashing lights, gunshots, horns and drums. Carrier pigeons were despatched with messages, and messages were sent with Inuit hunters met with during the search. However, because of the language barrier, and in the absence of interpreters, the difficulty of communication with the Inuit, it was realised that there was little chance of these messages actually reaching the destinatees.
Other more esoteric and tangible means of communication were therefore tried.
Among them was the use of Arctic foxes, known to travel long distances in search of nourishment. They would often gather near human settlements in the hope of scavenging discarded food. Somebody had the bright idea of embossing special collars with information about rescue efforts, to be fitted to captured foxes which would then be released in the hope that they might be spotted and trapped or shot by members of the lost expedition.
Another idea was embossed postal or ‘rescue buttons’ with the same information, which were given to Inuit hunters who prized them highly, and found many uses for them. (One, used as the bowl for a pipe, was found ten years later and several hundred miles away, by an employee of the Hudson’s Bay Company. It is now in the collection of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington).
All these ingenious rescue efforts were in vain and no trace of the missing men or their ships could be found. Years passed, and even to the most optimistic members of the general public, who had been assiduously following the story all this time, the realisation gradually came to be accepted that Franklin and all the members of the ill-fated expedition must have lost their lives.
In the end more than thirty expeditions were despatched to search for traces of Franklin and the 129 members of his crews who had set off so full of hope from Stromness. Eventually even the powers-that-be, after so much money, effort and resources had been vainly expended in the search, were forced reluctantly to come to the same conclusion.
It was officially declared that it must be assumed that not only Franklin, but the whole of his crew had perished. Their names were then removed from the Navy List.
As far as the authorities were concerned, the matter was now closed.
Almost the only one who never gave up hope however was Lady Franklin. Despite there having been no news whatsoever of the whereabouts of her husband, his ships and his crew for ten years, she had clung to the hope that against all the odds, he must have been successful in his quest, and would somehow, someday return triumphant.
She had badgered the Government to send out search expeditions; she had written among others to Lord Palmerston, to the Czar, and to the President of the United States, asking for help in the search. The latter had responded warmly and had supported a New York merchant, Mr. H. Grinnel, who fitted and sent out two search expeditions in 1850 and 1853 and kept up a regular correspondence with Lady Franklin for many years thereafter. Lady Franklin herself organised and financed several search expeditions, but all in vain.
The whole sorry tale of search expeditions involving many Arctic veterans, politicians and the Admiralty; backbiting, jealousy and misjudgement; and finally, just bad luck and bad weather has been well documented. Theories of what might have happened abounded, and in the event, of course were all proved wrong.
Where does John Rae fit into all this? Rae had been brought up to the outdoor life here in Orkney from his earliest years. As he recounted in an article reprinted in the Orkney Herald in 1887,
“By the time I was fifteen, I had become so seasoned as to care little about cold or wet, had acquired a fair knowledge of boating, was a moderately good climber among rocks, and not a bad walker for my age, sometimes carrying a pretty heavy load of game or fish on my back.”
These accomplishments, as he remarks, were of great service to him in later life after he joined the Hudson’s Bay Company. His first posting, having completed his medical training, was as surgeon on a summer voyage to Moose Factory, the HBC base in North America at the southern end of Hudson’s Bay. He evidently acquitted himself very well, as he was offered a contract by the Company and ended up by remaining at Moose Factory for about ten years.
He cut his teeth as an explorer on an extended leave visit to friends and relations and apparently covered a considerable part of the journey on snow-shoes, an accomplishment which he had already mastered and of which he was destined to make good use in following years.
He early attracted the notice of Sir George Simpson, colonial governor of the HBC, who wrote to him in 1844,
“An idea has entered my mind that you are one of the fittest men in the country to conduct an Expedition for the purpose of completing the Survey of the Northern Coast that remains untraced… As regards the management of the people & endurance of toil, either in walking, boating or starving, I think you are better adapted for this work than most of the gentlemen with whom I am acquainted in the country.”
While that first expedition seems to have been cancelled, Rae did during that winter of 1844-45 undertake a marathon journey of about twelve hundred miles, entirely on snowshoes – two months of continuous travelling, as he was to write later.
R.M. Ballantyne, the Scottish writer of children’s fiction, who spent five years working for the Hudson’s Bay Company, wrote of a meeting with Rae on the Winnipeg River in September 1845:
“In the afternoon we met another canoe, in which we saw a gentleman sitting. This strange sight set us all speculating as to who it could be, for we knew that all the canoes accustomed annually to go through these wilds had long since passed.…Both canoes made towards a flat rock that offered a convenient spot for landing on; and the stranger introduced himself as Dr. Rae. He was on his way to York Factory, for the purpose of fitting out at that post an expedition for the survey of the small part of the North American coast left unexplored… which will then prove beyond a doubt whether or not there is a communication by water between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans round the north of America.
“Dr. Rae appeared to be just the man for such an expedition. He was very muscular and active, full of animal spirits, and had a fine intellectual countenance. He was considered… to be one of the best snowshoe walkers in the service, was also an excellent rifle-shot, and could stand an immense amount of fatigue… he does not proceed as other expeditions have done - namely with large supplies of provisions and men, but merely takes a very small supply of provisions, and ten or twelve men…”
This last was a significant observation, as we shall see.
As you will know of course, as an employee of the Hudson’s Bay Company and engaged in the fur trade in north America, Rae had regular dealings with the Inuit, with whom he was on good terms. Unlike most Europeans, including, unfortunately, the members of the fated Franklin expedition, he had learned the Inuit survival techniques, and when on the Company’s business was able to live like a native.
If Franklin on his earlier overland expeditions to the Canadian Arctic had done the same, his story might well have been different.
It is easy of course to be wise after the event.
In the mid-19th century, when the Royal Navy was at the height of its prestige and influence, the suggestion that any members of the Senior Service might have ‘gone native’ would have been inconceivable.
John Rae, not being a member of the Service, and having been brought up in an entirely different milieu, would have had no such inhibitions.
Some years earlier in 1836, the Hudson’s Bay Company had entrusted to two of its officers, Messrs Dease and Simpson, the task of examining the unexplored part of the North American coastline. In so doing they succeeded in completing a considerable length of hitherto blank space on the map. However, they failed to clarify two important points: was Boothia an island or a peninsula, and was King William Land also an island or likewise part of the mainland?
The answer to these questions remained unsolved for several years until in 1844 it was decided that the HBC should organise a further expedition under the leadership of one of its officers to discover the answers. Dr. John Rae, who had by now more than proved his worth as an explorer, was an obvious choice.
If, as was hoped, Boothia was found to be an island, separated from the continent by a strait, and that there was a continuous stretch of coastline from the south side of Fury and Hecla Strait, round the south end of the Gulf of Boothia to the land on the south side of the hypothetical strait, Rae would not only have completed the survey of the North American coastline, but would also at last have discovered the fabled North-West Passage. Or would he?
By June 1846 Rae had completed his preparations and set off from York Factory with a party of just ten men and two boats. His orders from Simpson made it clear that he and his team should as far as possible be self-sufficient, in other words by ‘living off the land’ - by hunting and fishing; a new departure in Arctic exploration, of which in the future Rae would become the foremost practical exponent.
In the course of this journey, though unable to settle all the outstanding questions, he did establish beyond doubt that Boothia was not an island.
The success of this expedition established Rae’s reputation as an Arctic explorer, He returned to England, and his official report was published in The Times. He subsequently gave a complete account of the journey in his book Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Arctic Sea in 1846 and 1847.
Rae’s name thereafter became as familiar to the general public as those of Parry, Franklin and Ross.
At this point we retrace our steps to England where in 1845, it had been hoped that the expedition led by Franklin would settle once and for all the question of the existence or otherwise of a North-West Passage. No expense should be spared to ensure the success of this venture, and the Hudson’s Bay Company was requested to provide every possible assistance if called upon; such assistance to be at the charge of the British Government.
Thus began the HBC connection with the Franklin expedition and the subsequent search for survivors, or at least news of what had happened, once it was realised that the expedition must have met with disaster. That connection would be maintained intermittently for the next eleven years.
By 1847, although there had still been no news, as I said earlier, there was no particular anxiety felt in official circles about the fate of Franklin and his crews. However, the Admiralty did receive two communications from Sir John Ross, who evidently was concerned for his old friend. This prompted their Lordships to ask the Arctic veteran Sir James Parry for his opinion, suggesting that he might wish to canvas Sir John Richardson and others for their ideas.
Richardson put forward several suggestions, including the despatch of a search party in boats. Such a party should go down the Mackenzie River, travel east, examining Wollaston Land, Victoria Land and the neighbouring islands and then return south up the Coppermine River to the north end of Great Bear Lake to overwinter. If the ice conditions did not allow this mission to be completed by the end of the summer, it should be continued in 1849.
This suggestion being accepted, suitable boats were built at Portsmouth and Gosport naval dockyards; 20 men, 15 from the Corps of Royal Sappers and Miners and five Royal Navy seamen were recruited, and men, boats and stores were embarked from England in one of the Hudson’s Bay ships. They arrived at York Factory, on the west coast of Hudson’s Bay, in September 1847, where they awaited the arrival of Richardson.
As there was still absolutely no news or reported sightings of either of Franklin’s vessels, even by whaling ships returning from Davies Strait in the late autumn, it was decided that Richardson should leave England early in 1848 to join his men.
Rae, by now having established his reputation as a capable explorer ideally qualified for such an undertaking, was proposed by Richardson to be his second-in-command. HBC agreed to release him, and he was instructed to make all the necessary arrangements.
Richardson and Rae left Liverpool on 25th March 1848, joined up with the boat party from England, and by stages descended the Mackenzie River to the sea, which they reached by 3rd August. They then proceeded east along the coast leaving caches of pemmican and stores at various points, and then by boat and on foot up the Coppermine River to Fort Confidence, which they reached on 15th September. During the whole of this journey no trace whatsoever of Franklin’s expedition was found.
It was finally agreed between Rae and Richardson that the latter should return to England and that Rae would complete the remainder of the assignment without him. It appears from his reports to Sir George Simpson (though not of course in Richardson’s book describing the expedition or in his official report to the Admiralty, that not only did Rae find Richardson irritating, and criticised his methods, but also that he found the men recruited from England, “the most awkward, lazy and careless set I ever had anything to do with”!
Richardson on the other hand had great admiration for Rae, writing of him in his book, “His ability and zeal were unquestionable, he is in the prime of life and his personal activity and his skill as a hunter fitted him peculiarly for such an enterprise…”
Rae carried out the detailed orders he had received from Richardson but still found no trace of Franklin or of his expedition.
By November 1849 when Richardson arrived back in England, he found the alarm bells ringing at last, as there was still no news. Franklin’s ships had been provisioned for three years’ absence and after four years there was still no sign of either ships or crews. The last sighting had been in Baffin Bay at the end of July 1845.
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It is perhaps timely, in these days of instantaneous communication from one side of the globe to the other, to recall that at that time the physical difficulties of communication between England and those ‘on the ground’ in the Arctic regions caused even more delays than there had been hitherto.
Rae was in consequence unaware that very detailed orders as to where he should search had been sent out from England in 1850, requiring him to continue the search. He therefore returned to his normal duties at the HBC depots in connection with the fur trade.
He did eventually receive these orders, but by then it was too late to put them into action until the following year. In 1851, having belatedly at last received his orders, he meticulously carried them out to the letter.
This proved to be unfortunate, as if he had followed the route he had in the meanwhile marked out for himself, he would unquestionably have found out then and there the fate of Franklin’s expedition.
What a pity.
Time does not permit me to go into every detail of Rae’s search expeditions, which are discussed at length in the fascinating account given in Rae’s Arctic Correspondence, published by the Hudson’s Bay Record Society. However, it is worth noting that in 1851 he did find two pieces of wood washed up on the shore of Parker Bay. One, he identified as the end of a small pinewood flagstaff and the other appeared to be an oak stanchion. These had almost certainly come from one or other of Franklin’s ships.
The next year Rae received leave of absence to go to England, where he was awarded the Founder’s Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society for, as the citation noted, “his survey of Boothia under most severe privations in 1848 and for his recent explorations on foot and in boats, of the coasts of Wollaston and Victoria Lands, by which very important additions have been made to the geography of the Arctic Regions.”
Unfortunately, Rae was not in London to receive the medal in person, having returned home to Stromness, and he was therefore not present to hear the congratulatory speech made by Sir Roderick Murchison, Director General of the British Geological Survey. Sir Roderick, referring to Rae’s 1851 expedition, drew the attention of the audience to the “most extraordinary feat, setting out with two men only, and relying solely for shelter on snow-houses, which he taught his men to build, he accomplished a distance of 1060 miles in 39 days, or 27 miles per day including stoppages – a feat which has never been equalled in Arctic travelling.”
The medal was accepted by Sir George Back on behalf of ‘the honest and unassuming traveller, who in his severest trials evinced a judgement always equal to the occasion.”
But that was not the end of the story. Rae, on his return to London, submitted to the Hudson’s Bay Company a plan for the completion of the survey of the northern shores of America, of which, he wrote, “a small portion along the west coast of Boothia is all that now remains unexamined.” In 1847 he had established to his own satisfaction that Boothia was part of the mainland, not an island, though some authorities at the time did not agree that this had been proved.
HBC accepted his proposal, so Rae returned to York Factory, on Hudson’s Bay, and set off thence with two boats and thirteen men.
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Though of course he could not know it at the time, this would prove to be the fateful expedition during which he would at last discover what had happened to Franklin’s crew. An Inuit named Munro accompanied him, and on the way north, he engaged another Inuit interpreter, Ouligbuck the younger, who had also taken part in Rae’s first expedition.
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On the 21st of April Rae received the first intelligence of the demise of some white men, numbering at least 35 to 40, who had starved to death to the west of a large river a long distance off, perhaps ten- or twelve-days’ journey. This information by itself was too vague for him to act upon, but on his return journey Rae met other Inuit who confirmed the intelligence he had earlier received, and he realised that the river concerned must be Back’s Great Fish River, further to the east.
The thaw which had now started meant that he could not at once make a sledge journey to the river. In any case, even had he succeeded in reaching it, not having a boat he would have been unable to cross to the other side. There was no urgency, as Rae saw it, since his informants had assured him that all the white men were dead and had been dead for four years. There was therefore no likelihood of finding any survivors, even had he succeeded in making the journey.
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In the event, it was most unfortunate that Rae was unable to reach the site where the bodies had been found, as had he done so he might have found evidence, including perhaps written records, of the fate of the expedition.
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A further five years were to elapse before Captain McClintock, in 1859 in the Fox, a steam yacht chartered by Lady Franklin, reached King William Island, where it seemed most likely that Franklin’s ships, or if not the ships, some other traces of his expedition, might be found. McClintock’s second in command was Lieutenant Hobson, who had earlier served in the Plover. While McClintock searched the east coast of the island, he instructed Hobson to explore by sledge the west coast of the island, where it was most likely that clues might be found. It was therefore Hobson who dismantling a cairn, at last found the evidence which had so long been sought – a metal cylinder containing a printed Navy form with two distinct entries.
The first entry, dated 28 May 1847 giving details of the route which they had sailed, gave the position at which Erebus and Terror had wintered in the ice off Beechey Island, and ended: “Sir John Franklin commanding the expedition. All well.”
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The second entry, dated 25 April 1848 told a different story:
“25 April 1848 – H.M. Ships Terror and Erebus were deserted on 22nd April, 5 leagues north-north west of this, having been beset since 12 September 1846. The officers and crews, consisting of 105 souls, under the command of Captain F.R.M. Crozier, landed here… Sir John Franklin died on the 11 June 1847; and the total loss by deaths in the expedition has been to this date 9 officers and 15 men.
James Fitzjames, Captain, H.M.S. Erebus”
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And in another hand,
“start tomorrow, 26, for Back’s Fish River. F.R.M. Crozier, Captain and Senior Officer”
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‘A sadder tale was never told in fewer words,’ as McClintock observed.
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So, we return now to where we left Dr. Rae in 1854.
Rae returned to York Factory at the end of August that year and the following day composed his report for the Governor.
“SIR,
I HAVE the honour to report for the information of the Governor, Deputy Governor, and Committee, that I arrived here yesterday with my party all in good health, but from causes which will be explained in their proper place, without having effected the object of the expedition. At the same time information has been obtained and articles purchased from the natives, which prove beyond a doubt that a portion, if not all, of the then survivors of the long-lost and unfortunate party under Sir John Franklin had met with a fate as melancholy and dreadful as it is possible to imagine.
“20th April. The fresh footmarks of an Esquimaux with a sledge having been seen yesterday on the ice within a short distance of our resting place, the interpreter and one man were sent to look for them…
“After an absence of eleven hours the men sent in search of Esquimaux returned in company with seventeen natives… They would give us no information on which any reliance could be placed, and none of them would consent to accompany us for a day or two, although I promised to reward them liberally.”
“We had barely resumed our journey when we were met by a very intelligent Esquimaux driving a dog's sledge laden with musk ox beef. This man at once consented to accompany us two days journey, and in a few minutes had deposited his load on the snow and was ready to join us. Having explained my object to him, he said that the road by which he had come was the best for us, and, having lightened the men's sledges, we travelled with more facility.
“We were now joined by another of the natives who had been absent, seal hunting yesterday, but being anxious to see us, had visited our snow house early this morning and then followed up our track. This man was very communicative, and on putting to him the usual questions as to his having seen "white men" before, or any ships or boats, he replied in the negative, but said that a party of "Kabloonans" had died of starvation a long distance to the west of where we then were, and beyond a large river. He stated that he did not know the exact place, that he never had been there, and that he could not accompany us so far.
“The substance of the information then and subsequently obtained from various sources was to the following effect :- In the spring, four winters past (1850), whilst some Esquimaux families were killing seals near the north shore of a large island, named in Arrowsmith's charts, King William's Land, about forty white men were seen travelling in company southward over the ice, and dragging a boat and sledges with them. They were passing along the west shore of the above-named island. None of the party could speak the Esquimaux language so well as to be understood, but by signs the natives were led to believe the ship or ships had been crushed by ice, and that they were then going to where they expected to find deer to shoot. From the appearance of the men (all of whom, with the exception of one officer, were hauling on the drag ropes of a sledge, and were looking thin) they were then supposed to be getting short of provisions, and they purchased a small seal or piece of seal from the natives. The officer was described as being a tall stout middle-aged man. When their day's journey terminated, they pitched tents to rest in.
“At a later date the same season, but previous to the disruption of the ice, the corpses of some thirty persons and some graves were discovered on the continent, and five dead bodies on an island near it, about a long day's journey to the north-west of the mouth of a large stream, which can be no other than Back's Great Fish River... Some of the bodies were in a tent or tents, others were under the boat, which had been turned over to form a shelter, and some lay scattered about in different directions. Of those seen on the island it was supposed that one was that of an officer (chief), as he had a telescope strapped over his shoulders, and his double-barrelled gun lay underneath him.
As far as he had been able to ascertain from the natives, no violence had been offered to these men either before or after death.
“From the mutilated state of many of the bodies, and the contents of the kettles,” his report continued, “it is evident that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last dread alternative as a means of sustaining life.
In other words, cannibalism.
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Rae purchased from the Eskimos several artefacts, including monogrammed items of silver cutlery and a medal presented to Sir John Franklin engraved with his name, which proved beyond doubt that the men who had starved to death were indeed the remaining crew of the Franklin expedition who had abandoned ship.
Rae obtained leave from the Hudson’s Bay Company and returned to England with all haste, arriving at Deal in October 1854, whence he proceeded at once to the Admiralty to make his report. He felt it imperative to do so, in order to prevent further fruitless searches in the Arctic in the wrong places. At the same time, he handed over the items he had purchased from the natives.
This brief report, giving only the salient points and omitting much of the detail, was written only for My Lords of the Admiralty. Never intended for publication, it was unfortunately immediately leaked to The Times.
As Rae was simply doing what he perceived to be his duty, it was most unfortunate for him that it was he who had brought back the first, fateful news of what had happened to the survivors of Franklin’s expedition after they had abandoned ship.
Lady Franklin, up to that time, had been on very friendly terms with John Rae and his family. At some point she had presented him with an inscribed silver-plated shotgun, a gun which in less happy times he sold to a Customs man (whose descendants, now living in Shetland, apparently still have the gun in their possession.)
In 1849 on one of several visits to Orkney in search of news of her husband, Jane Franklin had, according to her diary, described the street in Stromness and the place where she stayed. From the description, Bryce Wilson identifies it as the Mason’s Arms, now the Orca . She evidently called on Mrs. Rae, John’s mother, who, she recorded, received her in her parlour and insisted on giving her cake and cherry brandy, and on another occasion a present of four smoked buffalo tongues.
Sophy Cracroft, Sir John Franklin’s niece, lady Franklin’s constant companion, wrote at the same time a very long letter to Catherine Rawnsley, my great-great-grandmother, who was another of Sir John’s nieces. After a lengthy description of Shetland, she writes:
“The people here, as in Shetland are all kindness and a special interest attaches to Stromness from my Uncle’s being so well known there. He was a fortnight there when starting upon his first Expedition, and the ships were there some days in 1845. Everyone knows him personally, & they will talk of him which is very trying to my Aunt. A man is living there who was with him on one of his Expeditions & who wanted exceedingly to go this time, “but his missis wouldn’t let him” He goes by no other name than that of Franklin. In Stromness too resides the mother of Dr Rae… the most beautiful old lady I have ever beheld.”
John Rae, for his part, had written in a letter to the Governor of the HBC, that Lady Franklin, “ was frequently with my dear old mother, and made herself a great favourite with everyone by her kindness of manner and affability.”
When she learned of Rae’s report, Lady Franklin was of course distraught. After so many years devoted to the search, during which she had clung to the increasingly vain hope that her beloved husband and other members of the expedition would miraculously be found alive, she simply refused to believe the evidence. She particularly could not entertain the appalling notion that upright, honourable, well-trained members of the British Royal Navy could, even in the direst circumstances, engage in the unspeakable, unthinkable act of cannibalism.
In a classic case of ‘shoot the messenger’ Lady Franklin promptly turned against the hapless Rae.
‘Rae must be wrong. Rae must have been misinformed. Rae did not after all himself go the Great Fish River to see the evidence for himself. Rae was guilty of dereliction of duty.’ And so on, and so on.
To protect her husband’s reputation and that of his crew she was determined that Rae should be repudiated. Without the resources of today’s social media, she mustered all the influential sources she could to convince the world that Rae had been misled. She enlisted the help of many of the great and good, among them Charles Dickens, then at the height of his fame as a writer and journalist, in a concerted campaign to discredit Rae. Dickens, though a very busy man, dropped everything when sent for by Lady Franklin, and was rapidly won over to her point of view. He then proceeded to publish a detailed two-part analysis of the story in his influential publication, Home Words, which reached a very wide audience. He castigated the Admiralty for publishing Rae’s report without considering the consequences of such a bombshell. Dickens had the grace to acknowledge that Rae had a duty to report what he had been told by the natives, but at the same time strongly criticised him for his conclusions, maintaining that the evidence he had presented did not by any means make the case for cannibalism having been resorted to.
The public was outraged on several counts, not the least of which was that it was assumed that Rae had returned to England with indecent haste and only hearsay evidence without first establishing the facts, just in order to claim the reward of £10,000 offered by the British Government for news of the fate of the expedition. (Poor Rae - until he set foot in England, he was quite unaware of the existence of any such reward).
It was likewise considered that despite Rae’s assurances to the contrary, it was more than likely that the survivors had been attacked and killed by the Eskimos. There was every reason to suspect treachery and violence. Wild beasts had mutilated the corpses. None of Rae’s informants had actually seen the white men, so all the information he had received was second-hand. Furthermore, he had not personally visited the site where it was said the bodies had been found; the Eskimo interpreter may not have perfectly understood the dialect spoken by the natives who claimed to have seen the white men, so he may have passed on misleading information, and probably exaggerated.
Finally, and most important of all, the religion, courage, discipline and sense of duty of Franklin’s men would certainly have rendered anything so unspeakable as cannibalism unthinkable. This moral improbability would have outweighed what was described as ‘the wild tales of ‘a herd of savages’. And so on and so on.
Poor Rae, we may justifiably say, but also, poor Jane Franklin.
Even today, talk of cannibalism in the so-called ‘civilised’ world is a topic which though no longer perhaps as taboo as it was in 1854, still raises a shudder. A century later, in 1957, Michael Flanders and Donald Swann in their memorable and very funny show Beyond the Fringe felt able to include a song entitled ‘The Reluctant Cannibal’. The refrain was, ‘I don’t eat people, I WON’T eat people, Eating people is WRONG.’ On the menu for this unfortunate individual was, among other tempting dainties, ‘roast leg of insurance salesman’ , if my memory serves me correctly.
A hundred years earlier such a song would have been absolutely unacceptable and would have raised a storm of protest.
By contrast, slavery, such a hot topic today, in 1854 was still practised in America. It was not abolished there officially until 1865. Attitudes change over time.
Lady Franklin has often been cast as the villain of the piece, orchestrating the national outcry to discredit John Rae. But perhaps we should cut her a bit of slack? She was absolutely devoted to her sailor husband, who was as a character perhaps the antithesis of herself.
She had waited all these years in vain for news, till the last, convinced that her hero would somehow miraculously reappear victorious. Even after all hope might have been abandoned, she still longed to know his fate and that of the expedition which could not fail. Had he not met a glorious death, having achieved his objective?
According to Ken McGoogan in his Foreword to Rae’s Arctic Correspondence, to blame Lady Franklin for Rae’s discredit is a distortion of the truth. McGoogan lays the blame at the feet of Charles Dickens, and suggests that there was a feud between Dickens and Lady Franklin, a claim which appears to be entirely without foundation.
Be that as it may, to disentangle the true story from the plethora of conflicting accounts of what happened would be impossible in the space of one evening.
But three things are certain: while John Rae did eventually receive the £10,000 reward which the British Government had offered for news of the Franklin expedition, he was never accorded the knighthood he so richly deserved for his work in Arctic exploration, nor was he given the credit at the time for discovering the waterway to the south of King Willam Land, later named after him.
Rae Strait was in the event NOT the final link in the long sought after North-West Passage, as has been claimed by at least one writer, a statement which has gained credence by repetition. A first navigable link possibly, but as Rae himself indicated in his 1891 review of Captain Albert Markham’s book Sir John Franklin’s Life in the Journal of the American Geographical Society, while he had himself explored and mapped almost 800 miles of coastline which were still unexplored in 1839, in 1854 there remained undiscovered a considerable length of coastline between Bellot Strait and the Magnetic Pole on the west coast of Boothia further north, which once mapped by later explorers became known as Franklin Strait and Larsen Sound.
So while John Rae did not himself discover the very last link in the long-sought North-West Passage, his reputation as perhaps the greatest Arctic explorer of all time is irrefutable. It is tragic that his great achievements were overshadowed by the scandal of the fate of the Franklin expedition.
The whole story of the fate of Sir John Franklin’s expedition is reminiscent of a Greek tragedy – while all who took part in the expedition itself and in the searches for information as to its fate did so with devotion and enthusiasm, the whole enterprise was doomed from the start by a combination of a succession of misunderstandings, miscalculations, prejudice, bad luck, and in the end, simply bad weather.
In spite of Rae’s discovery of the Strait which now bears his name, it was only 50 years later, in 1905, long after his death that he was finally vindicated when the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen became the first European successfully to navigate the whole of the North West Passage and to reach the Bering Strait, the first European to do so.
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In 2012 my sister Jane Maufe was the first woman to make the entire journey from east to west through the north-west passage, in the company of David Scott Cowper in Polar Bound, a vessel specially-built for Polar navigation. They did not however navigate Rae Strait but negotiated the Bellot Strait which separates Somerset Island from the Boothia Peninsular, to the north of Rae Strait, a route which would have been impassable in Rae’s time due to ice – the length of coastline still blank on the charts, as he acknowledged. Today, thanks to global warming, there are six navigable routes through the maze of Arctic islands, and in the summer even cruise ships can make the voyage.
Whether that is a good thing or not I leave it to you to decide.
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Rae’s involvement in the search for Franklin ended with the discovery of the bodies of the last members of the crews, but a host of others had been involved in the search during the years since the expedition vanished. Many of those are commemorated on the maps with an island, a cape, a bay, a river, or a channel named after them.
(This raises an interesting point: All these locations have been named by and for Europeans for inclusion on European maps. Nobody seems to have thought of asking the Inuit whether they already had names for them – an observation of course which would apply to almost anywhere ‘discovered’ and perhaps colonised by Europeans.
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But I digress. While all the protagonists in this tale of tragedy and heroism are long since departed to higher things, the story is by no means ended.
In the years since the tragedy, and Rae’s discoveries, there have been countless fruitless searches for the wrecks of the abandoned ships. Success came at last only in 2014, when partly thanks to global warming and the consequent melting of the Polar ice, the ongoing ground searches, analysis of Inuit testimony, the use of modern sonar technology, and sheer good luck, the wreck of the Erebus was finally located; roughly in the area where Inuit oral tradition had indicated that she had sunk.
By chance, less than two years later, following the sighting of a mast protruding from the ice, the Terror was also quite unexpectedly found; by coincidence in the bay named after her.
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Since that time, the lengthy and difficult process of investigating the wrecks has been undertaken by Parks Canada. The most immediate priority has been to examine the Erebus who, as she lies in relatively shallow water, is more at risk than Terror from being broken up by ice and strong currents. A considerable number of items recovered from her have been exhibited at the National Maritime Museum in London and in Canada. A most poignant display.
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Over the years many theories have been aired in print as to the causes of the tragic failure of Franklin’s expedition, but so far, they remain speculation. That speculation may now give way to certainty in the foreseeable future.
As part of their investigation of the wreck of HMS Terror, a remotely-controlled underwater device has been used by Parks Canada’s investigators to obtain video footage of her interior, much of which, including the Captain’s cabin, is still intact. In his desk may still remain Crozier’s log. If, in the future, it can be recovered and is still legible it might settle at last the question of what went so terribly wrong. That would indeed be a red-letter day. I hope I will live long enough to see it dawn. I keep my fingers crossed!
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Sir John Franklin is memorialised with a plaque in Westminster Abbey, a statue in Waterloo Place in London, another in Hobart, Tasmania and a third in the main square in Spilsby, his birthplace in Lincolnshire. All these memorials were erected in the course of the 19th century.
John Rae is buried in Kirkwall and reposes in effigy in St. Magnus Cathedral. It was only in 2011 that a blue plaque was affixed by English Heritage to the house in London where he spent his last years. In October 2014, a plaque dedicated to him was, belatedly, installed in Westminster Abbey.
Here in his home town of Stromness on the 200th anniversary of his birth, Rae was most fittingly commemorated by the unveiling of his statue on the pierhead whence he gazes out into the Atlantic. The plinth is inscribed, as you will know:
“Dr John Rae was born in Orkney at the Hall of Clestrain. He became an explorer with the Hudson’s Bay Company, learning from the native people how to survive in the Canadian Arctic. He led three of the four expeditions in which he took part, travelling 3,645 miles on foot & 6,700 by boat, tracing 1,765 miles of unknown Arctic coastline. In 1854, he discovered Rae Strait, the last link in the first navigable NORTH-WEST PASSAGE. between the Atlantic & Pacific Oceans, and the demise of the ill-fated Franklin expedition.”
A fitting tribute to a great and humble man.
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And so ends this epic tale of hope, heroism, disaster and despair; misunderstanding, prejudice, lack of communication bad luck and blind fate, as I said, fitting plot for a Greek tragedy.
But in spite of it all John Rae’s unsurpassed achievements in Arctic discovery remain his most enduring monument, and on this the 212th anniversary of his birth, in this his own country, we give him due honour once more today.
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