John Rae (1813–1893): The Arctic Explorer Who Found Truth Where Empires Feared to Look
In the canon of 19th-century exploration—so often populated by doomed heroes, frozen martyrs, and imperial delusions—John Rae stands apart: a man of science and pragmatism, a Highlander whose life was forged not in the salons of empire but in the unforgiving whiteness of the Arctic. While others sought glory, Rae sought truth. He did not die seeking it. He lived in it. A surgeon, surveyor, and fur trader turned explorer, Rae mapped thousands of miles of polar coastlines, discovered the final link in the Northwest Passage, and uncovered the terrible fate of Franklin’s lost expedition. But he paid a price. In choosing to report truth rather than protect national myth, Rae was slandered, sidelined, and—until recently—forgotten. “He was the greatest Arctic explorer of them all,” wrote historian Ken McGoogan, “but he told the wrong story at the wrong time” (McGoogan, Fatal Passage, 2001).
Born in Orphir, Orkney, in 1813, Rae grew up amid the wind-whipped barrenness of Scotland’s northern isles—a place that taught him early to respect nature and endure hardship. He trained as a physician at Edinburgh University, but his real education began in the service of the Hudson’s Bay Company in what is now Canada. Rae was no military leader in uniform, yet he operated in a landscape that demanded the tactical instincts of a general. Armed with surveying instruments and a flintlock, he led his small bands of voyageurs and Inuit guides across thousands of miles of ice and tundra—without losing a man to starvation, scurvy, or exposure, a claim that no other Arctic commander of his era could make.
Rae’s greatest triumphs were cartographic and anthropological. Between 1846 and 1854, he completed detailed surveys of the Canadian Arctic coast, closing the last uncharted gap of the elusive Northwest Passage—the dream that had lured generations of British explorers to their deaths. Yet it was not only what he mapped that made history, but what he learned. In 1854, while traveling near the Boothia Peninsula, Rae encountered Inuit hunters who told him of white men who had died years earlier near King William Island, some having resorted to cannibalism to survive. Rae collected artifacts—silverware engraved with Franklin’s name—and corroborated the reports with Inuit testimony. He relayed his findings in a report to the British Admiralty, stating with precision and restraint what no one in London wished to hear: that Franklin’s men had perished slowly, and not nobly.
The backlash was ferocious. Charles Dickens, the literary lion of Victorian respectability, dismissed Rae’s Inuit sources as savages and accused Rae of slandering English heroes. The Royal Geographical Society, rather than honoring Rae, turned cold. Rae’s truth challenged not only the romantic narrative of Franklin the martyr, but also the empire’s self-image. “He did not understand that in imperial Britain, the story mattered more than the facts,” wrote historian Margaret Atwood. “To suggest that English officers had failed—had eaten their comrades—was heresy” (Atwood, Strange Things, 1996). Rae, proud and unyielding, refused to retract his account. The result was that others received the credit for discoveries Rae had made. His role in completing the Northwest Passage was minimized. His name faded from the public record.
Yet Rae was undeterred. He returned again to the north, surveyed thousands more miles of Arctic coastline, and continued to champion Inuit knowledge and survival techniques, decades before cultural sensitivity became fashionable. He adopted native clothing, sledding, and hunting practices, believing that one had to learn from the land, not conquer it. He became fluent in the ways of the Arctic—walking forty miles a day in snowshoes, building igloos, surviving on caribou and seal. While others froze in wool coats and stiff collars, Rae thrived in fur and silence.
Back in Scotland, Rae’s homeland remained ambivalent. The empire loved explorers, but not uncomfortable truths. Yet in Orkney and among Arctic historians, his stature quietly grew. Rae represented the best of the Scottish Enlightenment transplanted into imperial frontiers: scientific, skeptical, humane. He was, in a sense, a general of truth in hostile territory—leading not armies, but facts through the blizzards of denial. His greatest battlefield was not ice, but memory.
John Rae died in 1893 in London, buried in St. Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall, Orkney. Only long after his death would recognition begin to stir. In 2014, after decades of advocacy by historians and descendants, the Royal Museums Greenwich finally installed a plaque honoring Rae in Westminster Abbey—next to the monument to Franklin, whose glory had once obscured him.
Rae left behind more mapped coastlines than any other Arctic explorer of his century, and a legacy of respect for Indigenous knowledge that was revolutionary in its time. For Scotland, he remains a quiet giant—not the empire’s knight, but its conscience. As McGoogan concluded, “John Rae did not just find the Northwest Passage. He found the truth—and it nearly broke him.”
References
- McGoogan, Ken. Fatal Passage: The Untold Story of John Rae, the Arctic Explorer Who Discovered the Fate of Franklin. HarperCollins, 2001.
- Jeal, Tim. Explorers of the Nile. Faber & Faber, 2011.
- Atwood, Margaret. Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature. Oxford University Press, 1996.
- Houston, C. Stuart. Arctic Ordeal: The Journal of John Richardson, Surgeon-Naturalist with Franklin, 1820–1822. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1984.
- Ross, John. Narrative of a Second Voyage in Search of a Northwest Passage. London: A.W. Webster, 1835.