I bought this book in a giftshop in Orkney, after Jason and I saw John Rae's memorial in the nearby St. Magnus Cathedral. I was intrigued by the idea of an explorer whose work was pushed down and forgotten simply because he reported facts that rubbed the bigwigs in the wrong way. I had actually been putting this one off for a while, though - another non-fiction book about Scottish history that I picked up on our trip was drier than I had hoped and I was concerned this might be, too. Fortunately, I was wrong - Oh, my goodness, John Rae was a character!
So, imagine this. You work hard. It's a demanding job, but you love it. You're willing to work with a team, provided everyone does their share of the work; in fact, you generally work even harder than some of the people on your team so that you can ensure success. You keep asking your supervisor for time off (it IS hard work, after all) and they keep hedging. Your job doesn't leave you time for a love life and you're not getting any younger. People on your team complain, "that's not my job." They don't follow your directions and someone gets hurt. But you finally finish that big project - the one you've been working toward for so long... and someone else gets the credit. You make honest reports and no one believes you - or worse, cast you as an attention seeker.
Ladies and gentlemen, meet John Rae, mid-nineteenth century Arctic explorer. He's just like you. Actually, he's cooler than you, but we'll get to that.
Who watched the TV show The Terror? It was on AMC a couple years ago and was based on the novel of the same name. The novel was inspired by the true events of the Franklin Expedition, a mid-nineteenth century British expedition to find the final link in the Northwest Passage. The book and show take what little we know about the expedition - that the ships were trapped in ice and, presumably, the whole crew died - and expands into some supernatural scariness (and the show in and of itself is worth a watch if it's still available out there). How did we find out what happened to the Franklin Expedition? John Rae.
But let's back up. The book Fatal Passage begins with plucky John Ray, a 19-year-old newly graduated surgeon from Orkney*, Scotland. He set off for Canada, to join the Hudson's Bay Company. The HBC was a company of traders and explorers in arctic Canada and had been heavily involved, along with the British navy, in charting as-yet-unmapped areas and searching for a navigable passage from the Northern Atlantic to the Northern Pacific (the Northwest Passage).
*Fun fact - people from Orkney are called Orcadians, which I think is flippin' fantastic.
Rae gleefully spent the next several years getting to know the arctic landscape; learning native hunting, building, and dressing styles; and snowshoeing across hundreds of miles in the winter just for kicks. He started as a "surgeon" (comparable to a nurse practitioner today) and worked his way up the ranks as a general Jack of all trades, eventually becoming Chief Factor (director) of a major trading post (called a "factory" at the time). He was well-respected by peers and supervisors, as well as by French fur traders, and native and mixed-race locals.
Not only that, Rae was rather progressive. He was incredibly vocal in how much he admired the natives' (mainly Inuit, but some Cree, Ojibwe, and other groups) ingenuity, and thought that "half-breeds" (mixed-race European and Native American) were the best men that could be had for any job. He also made notes in his own correspondence that he does not use the term "half-breed" as an insult, as many do.
Rae was eventually tasked with exploring uncharted coastline in search of the Northwest Passage, which everyone and his brother was doing those days. Rae usually put together his own team. It was usually comprised of just as many natives and half-breeds as full-Brits, as they were used to the terrain, the weather, the work, etc. In fact, the only time he used naval officers that he was told he had to use rather than men he chose was the only expedition in which anyone died - which was EXTREMELELY unusual for 19th century arctic expeditions. Rae was not only the first European explorer to winter in the Arctic "Native style," but also the first European to winter in the Arctic without losing a member of his team. Given that his teams were usually much smaller (10 or so hardy men) that the large HBC and naval expeditions (100-200 sailors, often with no Arctic experience), this is really saying something.
Rae relished the work early on. He loved snowshoeing and hunting - he considered "a long day's march in snowshoes is about the finest exercise a man can take." He enjoyed living off the land and taking as few supplies as possible. (This man often slept outdoors in the Arctic on a sleeping skin with one blanket. I get cold in a 72-degree house with 2 blankets.) He didn't shy away from doing MORE than his share of the work: shooting the majority of the food his group would eat, taking meticulous weather and geological measurements, trying to thaw his frozen Complete Works of William Shakespeare, and sleeping in his own individual igloo* rather than with the rest of his team for warmth because all the others were smokers.
*The term used in the book is "ice hut,” but I wanted to use igloo this first time to indicate the native-style building.
His most successful journey - the one in which he not only discovered the last link in the Northwest Passage (a strait later named for him) but also was the first to encounter anyone with knowledge of and artifacts from the doomed Franklin expedition.
Having returned to his summer mooring, after having spent much of the winter trekking around and mapping - he was approached by natives who had cutlery and other items, some of which had very distinct initials and the family crest of Sir John Franklin himself. He paid the natives well for these items, and interviewed the entire group separately, using his trusted interpreter (even though he himself spoke some of the Inuit language). They all reported the same thing - a couple years prior (approximately five years after the Franklin expedition set sail) they had seen a group of ragtag white men (none in this group had ever seen Europeans before) dragging a boat like a sled, and heading south. Later, another group of natives had reported to them that they had found the remains of this group - all dead, but many having been mutilated. Rae came to the same conclusion as his second-hand witnesses - the last survivors of the Franklin expedition had resorted to butchering and eating their dead companions.
Torn, Rae debated whether he should return to the area that the Natives had indicated to confirm the story. But it would require back-tracking quite a long distance (ironically, the strait he discovered was quite close to where the doomed encampment lay). It was too late in the season for him to make that trek and return while his route back to "civilization" (in this case a rural fort) was still navigable. Many of the waterways he was using were ice-blocked for 10-11 months out of the year - basically, if you weren't traveling in August you were out of luck.
In the end, he made the decision based on the state of his team. Two of his men were very badly worse for the wear - one had frozen off two toes and could barely walk, let along keep up the strenuous pace needed to get to the Franklin crew site and back before winter set in and they had to hole up in ice huts, and hope that they had enough supplies.
It was a difficult decision for him, but he ultimately decided that he would not risk his men's lives, especially since it was now all but impossible that Sir John Franklin or any of his men had survived. There were other rescue expeditions out there, too, and they deserved to know the truth so they could also decide how much of a risk they were still willing to take for what now was not a rescue mission, but one to confirm the location of the bodies.
Rae, an honest man who was always meticulous in detailed record-keeping, wrote a very thorough letter to his superiors. Unbeknownst to him at first, it was then sent to London and published by the Times. And then... oh, the scandal! Even though Rae had made clear what had happened, he still euphemized, still skirted using gory language. He reported that the "the state of the bodies and the contents of the kettles" indicated that the last few survivors had been forced to use "the last resort."
Still, Victorians knew how to read between the lines and they were most definitely not happy. What, cannibalism? Not, not our fine British officers! The kindest opinions toward Rae were along the lines of, Oh, this poor Orkney yokel, poor naive man, taken in by the lies of the nasty, tricksey savages*. General opinion, however, was even more harsh. Many speculated that Rae himself fabricated the story to tarnish the reputation of Sir John (who, honestly, was a less-than-stellar explorer and politician anyway) so that he could get the reward money. Rae hadn't even known there'd been a reward until he traveled to London after the letters had already been published - without his knowledge.
*The assumption that any and all natives will lie whenever they get the chance is something consistently repeated in the articles and letters of the time and is REALLY uncomfortable to read. Rae, to his credit, defended his interpreter and the natives - going to so far as noting that the one time his interpreter tried to lie about something when he was much younger (Rae had known him for over a decade at this point) that he had been absolutely dreadful at it because he had never lied before.
Chief among Rae's detractors was Lady Franklin, who for years had refused to believe her husband was dead (this news coming ten years after he had last been seen), and of course was appalled at the insinuation that her husband might have been among those final men desperate enough to eat their fellows (documents were found during another expedition that eventually confirmed he had died before the ships had become ice-locked and therefore couldn't have been one of the cannibalistic "survivors"). She continued to send out search parties - funding many of them in large part herself. She continued to smear Rae's name to the point that several other explorers were credited with his discoveries including, most egregiously, Franklin himself.
There was quite a bit of arguing of semantics. Should the discoverer of the passage be the person who found and theorized that passage was navigable? Should it be the first person to traverse it on foot? In the latter instance, Franklin's crew was credited for a while on the assumption that they had dragged their boat over the frozen last link in the passage before they died. Other explorers were credited with finding other passages that would later turn out to not be navigable with nineteenth-century ships. This is how they treated the man who not long before was their go-to for any Arctic expedition - "Oh Rae's in that quarter, Rae will do that."
Interestingly, while the British continually tried to downplay his achievements, even question his sanity for "going Native" and using Inuit methods of survival rather than "tried and true" modern techniques, the Norwegian explorers of the same period seemed to appreciate Rae much more - "This guy! This guy knows what's going on!" (Ok, that's not an actual period quote.) In fact, it was a Norwegian explorer in the first decade of the 20th century who finally successfully navigated the Northwest Passage, using Rae's route - 50 years after he discovered it, and after so many others had died trying to disprove Rae's journey.
Rae himself eventually retired from the HBC, married, and gave up Arctic exploration. His last excursion was an exploration of the Canadian Rockies to determine the best route for a telegraph line. He took his wife along for part of the journey, which was extremely unusual for the time.
Rae was a really interesting guy. Even after his retirement, he kept active - hunting and hiking. It was not unusual for him, even in his 70's, to walk 20 miles to the train station. He lived to be nearly 80 years old. He kept a massive collection of Inuit artifacts, referring to the native people as "my friends the Esquimaux.*" He was progressive man, a man ahead of his time. He understood that smoking was unhealthy, and theorized that scurvy was caused by "lack of something [the body] gets from vegetables" decades before vitamins were discovered. He was a man who respected and admired Native Americans - to the point that he not only paid those on his teams well, but usually provided them more pay than originally contracted once they returned due to how arduous the work was. He was so progressive that at times while reading the book, I chuckled to myself, "Huh. Wonder if he was a time traveler." It kind of wouldn't surprise me.
*We know now that "eskimo" is a Cree slur that means "snow-eater," but Rae didn't know that.
All (actual) quotes are from Fatal Passage by Ken McGoogan, who himself is usually quoting Rae's own correspondence.
The memorial commissioned by John Rae’s wife, Kate. Rae sleeps beneath a buffalo skin blanket, wearing his mocccasin boots, as he was wont to do.
The exterior of St, Magnus’s Cathedral in Orkney. Rae is buried in the church yard in the back. No, this isn’t brick - it’s red sandstone, local to Orkney.
The interior of St. Magnus’s Cathedral.