John Rae

John Rae was born at the Hall of Clestrain in the Orphir settlement of the Orkney Isles. He trained as a surgeon at the University of Edinburgh and on graduating joined the Hudson’s Bay Company in Canada, spending ten years at Moose Factory.

He embarked on several polar voyages of discovery in which he demonstrated his skills as a hunter and boatsman. During one trip he found out what happened to Captain Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated expedition of 1845, learning from local Inuit people that the captain and his entire crew had perished.

Rae’s account of the tragedy — detailing that the crew had to resort to cannibalism — was met with utter horror from author Charles Dickens and his other funders back in the UK. Although he won prize money for his evidence, his reputation suffered, and the episode detracted from his other achievements.

He subsequently mapped out a navigable shipping route linking the north Atlantic to the Pacific and, in 1860, he also worked on plotting a telegraph line to America, visiting Iceland and Greenland in the process. In his early seventies he explored the Red River for a proposed telegraph line from the United States to Russia.

Canada's native Cree called him 'Aglooka', meaning 'he who takes long strides': a plaque at his late 1850s residence in Hamilton, Canada, notes that in the winter of 1859 he snowshoed more than 40 miles from Hamilton to Toronto in seven hours for a dinner engagement. His death in 1893 was in relative obscurity.