John Rae

John Rae was born on the Orkney Islands, a doctor by training who worked for the Hudson Bay Company. He became very skilled in overland travel while travelling to treat company employees. He had remarkable stamina and could live off the land by hunting, so travelling light in a similar way to the Inuit of the area in contrast to most explorers and travellers in wild places in the Victorian age. The Inuit he encountered gave him the name Aglooka, that translates as "long strider".

In 1854 at the age of 40, Rae encountered a group of Inuit, one of whom had a gold hat band. They told him it came from a place where a group of about 35 white men had starved to death some years beforehand. A month or two later he met some more Inuit who told of a group of 40 men a few years previously who were dragging a boat after their ship had been crushed. The following spring in the same area, the Inuit had found the corpses of the men and told of signs of cannibalism. They sold Rae some items they had found, one of which was marked "Sir John Franklin, K.C.H." Rae sent his story to England where it was met with horror and disbelief by Lady Franklin and the establishment, though it proved subsequently to be true. He was never fully acknowledged for his work which included finding the final element of the North West Passage, the missing link that was followed by Amundsen in 1905 in the very first successful traverse.