Although Arctic explorer and Hudson Bay Company surveyor John Rae (1813–1893) travelled and recorded the final uncharted sections of the Northwest Passage, he is best known for his controversial discovery of the fate of the lost Franklin Expedition of 1845. Based on evidence given to him by local Inuit, Rae determined that Franklin’s crew had resorted to cannibalism in their final, desperate days. Seen as maligning a national hero, Rae was shunned by British society.

This collection of personal correspondence—reissued here for the first time since its original publication in 1953—illuminates the details of Rae’s expeditions through his own words. The letters offer a glimpse into Rae’s daily life, his ideas, musings, and troubles. Prefaced by the original, thorough introduction detailing his early life, John Rae’s Arctic Correspondence is a crucial resource for any Arctic enthusiast.

This new edition features a foreword by researcher and Arctic enthusiast Ken McGoogan, the award-winning author of eleven books, including Fatal Passage: The Untold Story of John Rae (HarperCollins, 2002).

John Rae was a Scottish doctor and explorer born on September 30, 1813, in Orkney. As a child, he enjoyed sailing, climbing, hunting, and fishing—skills that would serve him well in his future exploits. In 1833, shortly after graduating from medical school, Rae was appointed surgeon of the Prince of Wales, a Hudson's Bay Company ship bound for Moose Factory, Ontario, where he remained for the next ten years. He had great respect for the peoples native to northern Canada and adopted many of their survival skills. He learned to hunt caribou, store meat, construct shelter, and walk using snowshoes. He was particularly known for this last skill, once walking 1,200 miles in snowshoes through winter forest in order to learn how to survey, earning him the Inuit nickname Aglooka, "he who takes long strides."

Rae embarked on his first expedition in 1846. Over the next decade, he explored much of northern Canada's coastline and, in fact, discovered the final link in the Northwest Passage. However, his achievements have gone largely unrecognized due to the discovery he made in 1854. While exploring the Boothia Peninsula, Rae obtained the first information about the fate of the Franklin expedition, which had been missing since 1845. He met a group Inuit who claimed to have seen the missing men four years earlier. Through their reports, Rae concluded that the last survivors of the Franklin expedition had resorted to cannibalism, before perishing in 1850. Upon his return to England, he was heavily criticized by Franklin's wife, Lady Jane, and the author Charles Dickens, and shunned by the British establishment.

John Rae retired from the Hudson's Bay Company in 1856 but retained his love of exploration. In 1860, he was hired to explore Iceland and Greenland in an effort to establish a telegraph line to America. And in 1884, at the age of seventy-one, he was hired by the HBC to survey another telegraph route, in the west of Canada, from Red River to Victoria.

John Rae died in London on July 22, 1893. He was the only major explorer of his time not to receive a knighthood.

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KEN MCGOOGAN is the best-selling author of a dozen books, among them 50 Canadians Who Changed The World, How The Scots Invented Canada, Fatal Passage and Lady Franklin’s Revenge. He has won the Pierre Berton Award for History, the University of British Columbia Medal for Canadian Biography, the Canadian Authors’ Association History Award, the Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize and an American Christopher Award for “a work of artistic excellence that affirms the highest values of the human spirit.” Before turning mainly to books, Ken worked for two decades as a journalist at major dailies in Toronto, Calgary and Montreal. He teaches creative nonfiction writing through the University of Toronto and in the MFA program at King’s College in Halifax. Ken served as chair of the Public Lending Right Commission, has written recently for Canada’s History, Canadian Geographic and Maclean’s, and sails with Adventure Canada as a resource historian. Based in Toronto, he has given talks and presentations across Canada, and in faraway places as different as Edinburgh, Sydney, Stromness, and Hobart. www.kenmcgoogan.com

Ken McGoogan's profile page