Has Captain Ross anything to do with this man, Dr John Rae?"There is a road in Stromness named after Franklin, but [Orkney author] George Mackay Brown once said it should be called Rae Road, for the real hero of the tragedy that wiped out the Franklin expedition was a Stromness man. [Dr John] Rae, chief trader with the Hudson Bay Company, played a major role in mapping out Northern Canada and was also the first man to discover what happened to the crews of the Erebus and Terror. [...] When he was asked to join the search for Franklin in 1847 he had just successfully charted 625 miles of coastline, travelling 1,200 miles on foot, living off the land. He was a loner. His relationship with his Navy colleagues on the Franklin search was an uneasy one. They could never understand a man who appeared to be as primitive as the natives, who copied the Eskimo way of life [...]. The 1847-48 expedition shed no new light on the fate of Erebus and Terror crews and the search dragged on long after hope of finding anyone alive had been abandoned. In April, 1854, while surveying the Boothia Peninsula, Rae found the first key to the Franklin mystery - and put himself in line for an award worth £ 10,000. At Pelly Bay he met an Eskimo, Innook-po-zhee-jook, who said he had heard stories from other natives of thirty-five or forty white men who had starved to death some years earlier, about twelve days' journey away. Later that year, it was established that the bodies had been found near the estuary of the Great Fish River. The Eskimos brought a mass of relics to Rae at Repulse Bay - one of Franklin's decorations, a small plate with his name on it, silver forks and spoons, a surgeon's knife, a gold watch, and other items. They also told Rae that Franklin's starving men had committed acts of cannibalism. When this news reached Britain the reaction was shock and disbelief. The writer Charles Dickens, while obviously believing that the 'treacherous and cruel' Eskimos might eat each other, thought it was 'in the highest degree improbable' that Englishmen would eat Englishmen. Doubt was cast on both Rae's discovery and on the cannibalism report, but the Orkney explorer held his ground. He got his £ 10,000, with £ 2,000 of it going to his men.
The house where John Rae spent his childhood ['The Haven'] can still be seen in Stromness [...]. In 1851, Lady Jane Franklin and her niece Sophia stayed at The Haven while visiting Stromness during the hunt for her missing husband. [...] At that time Lady Franklin had a high regard for the Orkneyman, but her admiration diminished after she had heard his report about members of the Franklin expedition engaging in cannibalism. (from Smith, The Whale Hunters, p49ff)