Pauline Ross's Reviews > Fatal Passage: The Story of John Rae, the Arctic Hero Time Forgot

An utterly compelling book on many levels. I went into it having never heard of John Rae, and only knowing Sir John Franklin as the leader of an ill-fated Arctic expedition, lamented in a folk song. I learnt a great deal about both of them.

The bulk of the book is, to me, the most interesting, telling the story of Orkneyman John Rae’s life and explorations up to the point of collision with the Franklin story. Rae seems to have been an extraordinary man, almost super-humanly fit, capable of incredible feats of endurance under extreme conditions, a man of attention to detail but also open to different ideas. He joined the Hudson Bay Company at the age of 19 as a fully qualified doctor, having begun training at Edinburgh University at the age of 15. Right from the start he was drawn to the Arctic, and soon abandoned his original plan to be a ship’s doctor and settled into life as a Company man.

Within a very few years, he had become a consummate man of the Arctic. His success was founded on three skills. Firstly, his physical fitness, strength and endurance, even under the most harsh conditions. Secondly, his ability to hunt and provide food for himself and his travelling companions wherever he went. And thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, his willingness to befriend and learn from the Inuit, called Eskimaux in those days. He learnt to build igloos, to drive huskies the native way, to make native clothes, to improve sledges and boats, and much more besides. He took interpreters on all his journeys and made a point of talking to the Inuit whenever he met them, exploiting their local knowledge and trading with them for better equipment or information.

The end result was that he could move through the hostile environment of the polar regions, even in winter, and not merely survive but actually thrive. The journey that most impressed me was a fifteen-month expedition, covering two short Arctic summers and the winter in between, when Rae took with him only enough supplies for three months. He had trouble convincing people to join him, for they thought it was a suicidal mission, but he knew he could provide enough food and shelter to survive, and so it proved.

The contrast with the navy-supported expeditions from Britain could not have been greater. Franklin’s expedition consisted of two large ships equipped with every technological advantage that Victorian Britain could provide, and enough food and other supplies for three years. Yet Franklin and all his men perished in the most dire circumstances, of starvation and illness. 129 men died on that one expedition, yet John Rae, in his whole life, lost only one man, and that from a stupid accident. Those statistics alone prove Rae’s calibre more than any other.

This culture clash is really the theme of the whole book. Rae and Franklin both started out as sons of firmly middle-class families who made their way on merit, Rae in the Hudson Bay Company and Franklin in the Royal Navy, both were successful explorers but only one of them became an iconic British legend. Rae was the laconic get-on-with-it Scot, always an outsider in British society, while Franklin was absorbed effortlessly into the establishment, was knighted and became a hero, even though his final expedition was a failure by any measure. Rae was successful in using native methods and respected the Inuit people and culture, while Franklin, like most of Victorian society, looked down on the Inuit as primitive, untrustworthy people. Rae had to fight for any recognition at all of his achievements. Franklin had his wife and Charles Dickens to glorify him.

I’m not sure what to make of the author’s characterisation of Lady Franklin. He imputes all the worst motives to her, such as that she only married Franklin because she knew he was about to be knighted, which sounds incredibly cold-blooded. I don’t think the author is entirely unbiased, so maybe Lady Franklin wasn’t quite the witch he makes her out to be.

I was amused at the end where the modern-day Rae fans are on their way to place a plaque commemorating his achievements. They feel they ought to do it Rae-style, but one of them comments that, “It’s too much work, this Rae stuff.” I couldn’t agree more. Reading about some of his expeditions and the terrible conditions he encountered, like the ice-balls they had to dodge, makes it sound like some kind of real-world videogame, with one torment after another. That Rae and his companions not merely survived, but thrived and accomplished so much is astonishing. I’m very glad I read this book, and gained some appreciation of the life of a remarkable man.