The Legacy of Sir John Rae
The Rae craton forms a large portion of the Northwest Canadian Shield and is comprised mostly of Archean-aged meta-plutonic rocks commonly overlain by Paleoproterozoic meta-volcanic and meta-sedimentary rocks. The Shield forms the heart of North America, spanning from Baffin Island into the continental US. It is built of several Archean (4 to 2.5 billion years old) cratons (i.e. Slave, Rae, Hearne, Superior) which were amalgamated during Paleoproterozoic (2.5 to 1.6 billion years old) collisional events. These rocks are some of the most extensively reworked continental crust on Earth and have an extremely complex metamorphic history, with some parts of the shield having seen more than eight separate tectonic events.
The Rae Craton is named for Sir John Rae (1813 – 1893), one of the first Europeans to explore the area nearly 200 years ago. Rae was born in Orkney (Scotland) and later attended medical school in Edinburgh. In 1833, he travelled to Canada aboard a Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) ship to Moose Factory, a small outpost on the shores of Hudson’s Bay (Ontario, Canada) where he resided for 10 years. His first chance to lead an arctic expedition came in 1844 when he was selected by Sir George Simpson to survey unexplored areas of the Canadian Arctic coastline for HBC. The harsh landscape and weather made survival in the arctic challenging, and Rae stood out for his eagerness to learn traditional methods of survival from the local Inuit populations, going against the accepted code of conduct for European explorers of the time.
Between 1846 and 1854 Rae made four more Arctic expeditions to what is now Nunavut, travelling more than 10,000 miles on foot or in a small boat, and surveying a staggering 1,800 miles of previously uncharted arctic coastline. Rae and his crew surveyed many previously uncharted areas of the Arctic coast including Committee Bay, Simpson Peninsula, Melville Peninsula, and Pelly Bay. Rae’s most famous discovery came in 1854, when he realized King William Land was not a peninsula but an Island, discovering the Rae Strait and the last link in the famed Northwest Passage.
Controversy surrounding Rae began in 1848, when it became clear that the infamous Northwest Passage expedition lead by Sir John Franklin would not return. In their search for the missing crew, Rae and Sir John Richardson made several overland expeditions. They found little evidence of Franklins crew; only a few pieces of lumber and several artifacts in the possession of the local Inuit. It was the Inuit who told Rae that Franklin’s desperate crew had resorted to cannibalism. The inclusion of this in his 1854 reports lead to his defamation and discreditation, lead by Lady Jane Franklin and Charles Dickens to preserve Franklins name. Later surveys, including that in 2014 which located Franklin’s ship the Erebus, confirmed Rae’s findings.
Rae is regarded as one of the greatest arctic explorers of all time; a testament to both the great lengths of coastline he mapped and his respect for Inuit knowledge and traditions.
CD
References https://bit.ly/2x5QbI1 https://bit.ly/31wtzhz https://bit.ly/2KRwM5C https://bit.ly/2MPvLgO https://arcticreturn.com/john-rae/
Photos D. Melanson (Melville Penninsula). Used with permission. https://bit.ly/2MQr4DG