Tracing the Franklin mystery in Orkney
Town of Stromness celebrates local man who tried to figure out what happened
STROMNESS — Before crossing the Atlantic on what would prove to be his final and most famous voyage, a disastrous Arctic expedition resulting in the mysterious loss of two sturdy British ships and all 129 crew members, Sir John Franklin stopped here to take on fresh water.
A sign at the well, sealed up in the 1930s, commemorates the visit by HMS Erebus and HMS Terror in 1845. Tourists pause to peer through glass at the murky hole next to the narrow, flagstone-paved main street that winds through town.
Last month the wreck of one of those ships, later identified as Erebus, was sensationally discovered by a Parks Canada-led team off an island in Nunavut, lying in shallow water. The location of Terror remains unknown.
Stromness looks much the same now as when Franklin showed up. Grey stone houses huddle next to a natural harbour that has lured mariners for centuries to this Orkney island seaport at the edge of the North Atlantic.
While the town acknowledges its connection to the English naval officer who went in search of the Northwest Passage, it does much more to celebrate a local Orkney man, the medical doctor and explorer John Rae, who played a key role in the aftermath of the doomed Franklin expedition.
Street plaques also pay tribute to Orkney’s strong ties to Canada forged through the Hudson’s Bay Company, Rae’s employer.
For almost two centuries beginning around 1700, HBC ships stopped in Stromness for food and water, and to hire men for the fur trade in what Orcadians called the Nor’ Wast. By 1800, fully three-quarters of the company’s workforce came from Orkney, a fertile archipelago off the north coast of the Scottish mainland.
“I think the Hudson’s Bay Company heritage is something that people here are quite proud of,” Sheila Garson, curator at the Orkney Museum, said in her office in Kirkwall, a halfhour from Stromness.
“Older Orcadians used to say that an Orcadian measures their success by how far away from home they are.”
A waterfront building once used as an HBC recruiting centre in Stromness now serves, after a brilliant transformation, as a gallery housing the Pier Arts Centre’s collection of 20th-century British paintings by such stars as Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Alfred Wallis.
Windows in the gallery look out on the harbour. In the late afternoon on a day in July, Wallis’s naive boats, for which he is much celebrated, seemed right at home hanging in a space just a stone’s throw from a dock where men were unloading buckets of mackerel from a real-life fishing boat.
At the nearby Stromness Museum, Rae’s snowshoes, octant and shotgun are among exhibits that spotlight his achievements in the Arctic. The explorer charted more than 2,000 kilometres of northern coastline, leading major expeditions and adopting wilderness survival techniques learned from aboriginals whom he befriended.
The museum also displays HBC artifacts such as blankets and tools used in trade for beaver pelts. Relics of the Franklin expedition, including a powder horn obtained by Rae, are shown as well, alongside elaborate, floral-patterned Cree beadwork brought back from Moose Factory in the 19th century.
There are, additionally, hints at what life was like for Orcadians who found themselves dropped into the wilds of Rupert’s Land seemingly a million kilometres from home. A thick binder contains employment records of men who served at York Factory, on the southwestern shore of Hudson Bay, in the 1790s. Among the brief entries: “a good steersman but very dissatisfied”; “a very weak old man, desires to return”; and “a better servant cannot be, humbly hopes a small advance will be made to his present salary.”
Some of the Orkney transplants left an enduring impact on Canada in the form of Metis descendants with Orcadian surnames such as Flett, Louttit, Folster and Linklater.
In 1854 Rae went in search of the lost Franklin ships. He met Inuit with whom he discussed the mystery and returned to England with his bombshell conclusion: starving members of the expedition had resorted to cannibalism.
The upshot was a determined attack on Rae by Franklin’s influential wife, Lady Jane Franklin, who enlisted novelist Charles Dickens in her campaign to discredit the Arctic explorer.
More than a century and a half later, efforts are now being made to give Rae his due.
“At the moment, there is quite a lot of interest in John Rae, and attempts to make people realize his importance, as a result of Mrs. Franklin trying to blacken his name,” said David Mackie, senior archivist at Orkney Library and Archive, which holds some of Rae’s letters.
A life-size statue of Rae, clad in Arctic-worthy fur-lined boots and parka and with a shotgun slung over his shoulder, was unveiled in Stromness harbour in September 2013 during an academic conference marking the 200th anniversary of his birth.
On Tuesday, Rae was honoured with a memorial plaque in London’s Westminster Abbey, the result of a yearslong campaign by Scottish MP Alistair Carmichael. Ironically, Franklin and Dickens are also memorialized in the Abbey.
Rae died in 1893 and is buried in a cemetery next to St. Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall.