In order to preserve the chronological order of events, it is now necessary to leave the Franklin expedition for a while, and to take up the thread of the exploration of Northern America where it was dropped by Dease and Simpson. It will be remembered that shortly before his untimely death Simpson had written a letter to the Governors of the Hudson’s Bay Company, suggesting that he should conduct an expedition along the undiscovered shores that lay between the Castor and Pollux River and Fury and Hecla Strait. Though he was destined never to know it, the plan was very favourably received by the directors, and their letter, conferring on him the sole command of the expedition, reached America very shortly after his death.

The immediate result of this sad event was that all plans for prosecuting the exploration of Northern America were held in abeyance for some years—till, indeed, 1845, when the news that England was fitting out a fresh expedition, with a view to discovering the North-West Passage, urged the Company on to further efforts. The command of the new expedition was offered by Sir George Simpson, who was still Governor-in-Chief of the Company’s territories, to Dr John Rae, then new to Arctic exploration, though he subsequently proved his worth, not only by the success which he achieved on the present journey, but also by the good work that he did in his search for Franklin.

The plan of campaign arranged by the Company differed materially from that originally propounded by Simpson. Simpson had proposed to travel eastward from the Castor and Pollux River and, after surveying Boothia Felix, to make his way, if possible, to Hudson’s Bay. Rae’s expedition, on the other hand, was to set out from Hudson’s Bay and to make its way up Rowe’s Welcome to Repulse Bay. There it was to cross the isthmus connecting the Melville Peninsula with the mainland, which, if the Eskimo stories were to be believed, was not more than three days’ journey, and, on reaching the sea on the other side, it was to push on till it had reached the point where either Ross or Dease and Simpson had left off. It must be remembered that at this time it was not known whether Boothia Felix was an island or a peninsula. If it proved to be the former, Rae was to make his way through the passage that divided it from the mainland and so into the Arctic Ocean. If the latter, he was to travel up its western shores until he reached some point that had been visited by the Rosses in the Victory.

The journey was likely to prove adventurous, for there was no degree of certainty that the party would be able to obtain sufficient provisions to keep them from starving. Rae was only to take two small boats with him, so that it would be impossible for him to equip himself with any great quantity of food, and he would be obliged to depend on such poor supplies as the barren country had to offer. As, therefore, it seemed more than probable that the party would have to face the unpleasing alternatives of being either starved or frozen to death, he had some difficulty at first in obtaining volunteers.

On June 1846, however, the preliminary difficulties having been overcome, Rae, with ten men, set out from York Factory. His boats, which were named the North Pole and the Magnet, were strong, clinker-built craft, 22 feet long by 7 feet 6 inches broad. In addition to the ordinary equipment, he carried an oiled canvas canoe and one of Halkett’s air-boats which had never been tried on one of these expeditions before, and proved eminently satisfactory.

The first part of the journey was necessarily slow, as in many cases the sea was still blocked with closely-packed ice, which needed careful negotiation. On July 24, however, the boats rounded Cape Hope and entered Repulse Bay, where the original exploration was to begin. On landing in Gibson Cove, they came upon a party of Eskimos, from whom they learnt the good news that the isthmus was not more than forty miles across, and that over a full thirty-five miles of this distance a chain of lakes afforded a waterway.

On the following morning the ladies of the tribe paid Rae a state visit. “They were all tattooed on the face,” he writes, “the form on each being nearly the same, viz. a number of curved lines drawn from between the eyebrows up over the forehead, two lines across the cheek from near the nose towards the ear, and a number of diverging curved lines from the lower lip towards the chin and lower jaw. Their hands and arms were much tattooed from the tip of the finger to the shoulder. Their hair was collected in two large bunches, one on each side of the head, and, a piece of stick about ten inches long and half an inch thick being placed among it, a strip of different-coloured deer-skin is wound round it in a spiral form, producing far from an unpleasing effect. They all had ivory combs of their own manufacture, and deer-skin clothes with the hair outwards; the only difference between their dresses and those of the men being that the coats of the former had much larger hoods (which are used for carrying children), in having a flap before as well as behind, and also in the greater capacity of their boots, which come high above the knee, and are kept up by being fastened to the girdle.” Curiously enough, one of these women had visited the Fury and Hecla twenty-three years before, and among her most prized possessions were some beads which Parry had given her.

With immense labour the boats were dragged up the stream which connects Repulse Bay with the chain of lakes, and the serious work of the expedition began. Rae found that he had not been misled by the stories of the Eskimos, and by August 1 he was on the shores of Committee Bay, the southernmost arm of Prince Regent Inlet. His first hope was that he would be able to sail round the bay and survey its shores. Ice and fog, however, rendered this quite impossible, so he decided, as there seemed to be no chance of the ice breaking up that season, to turn back to Repulse Bay and to hope for better luck in the following summer.

Game, fortunately, was plentiful at that time of the year, and the doctor, who was an enthusiastic sportsman and an excellent shot, soon relieved his party of any dread that they might have of death from starvation. The sporting-book for September showed that 63 deer, 5 hares, 1 seal, 172 partridges, and 116 salmon and trout were brought into Fort Hope—the name given to their winter quarters—while in September he accounted for 69 deer. Fuel, however, was exceedingly scarce, and, as bitterly cold weather set in in the middle of October, the party was put to no small inconvenience. At first the frost was hailed as an unmixed blessing, for it hardened the wet clay with which the walls of the house had been dressed, and made the place weatherproof. Anything that was at all damp, however, was instantly frozen solid, and when Rae attempted to open some books which had been lying on a shelf, he found their leaves a solid mass. As fuel grew scarcer, the doctor forbad its use for any purpose except cooking, and a member of the party who wished to dry his wet clothes was obliged to take them to bed with him. The evaporation arising from them always froze on the blankets, which in consequence generally sparkled with hoar frost.

Almost the only form of exercise which the party was able to take was an occasional game of football on the snow. These games were not unattended by difficulties, for the snow was so hard that several pairs of heels were usually to be seen in the air at the same time, while the air was so bitter that the players were obliged to rub their faces continually in order to prevent them from being frost-bitten. A part of the time was also spent by the men in mastering the art of building snow houses after the Eskimo fashion, an accomplishment which proved of inestimable service to them later on when they were engaged in the exploration of Boothia and Melville Peninsula.

At this time the Eskimos of the neighbourhood engaged a good deal of Rae’s attention. They appear to have been an extraordinarily hardy race, who suffered no inconvenience even in the bitterest cold. On one occasion he found a member of the tribe engaged in repairing the runners of his sledge. “The substance used,” he writes, “was a mixture of moss chopped up very fine, and snow soaked in water, lumps of which are firmly pressed on the sledge with the bare hand, and smoothed over so as to have an even surface. The process occupied the man nearly an hour, during the whole of which time he did not put his hands in his mits, nor did he appear to feel the cold much, although the temperature was 30° below zero.” On another occasion he paid a visit to their camp, where he acquired the interesting intelligence that it was their custom to strip off all their clothes before retiring to bed even in the depth of winter. They kept their huts comparatively warm, however, by an ever-burning lamp, and Rae observed with some astonishment that, during the visit in question, his waistcoat thawed. That article of his attire had been frozen solid some time before by the congelation of his breath, and had had no opportunity of returning to its normal condition in his own comfortless quarters.

On April 5 Rae started off on his second journey across the isthmus which now bears his name, his object being to explore the western shores of Committee Bay and to discover whether any waterway led westward from it to the Arctic seas. With the details of the journey we need scarcely concern ourselves, for it was not enlivened by any incident of special interest. It will be sufficient to say that his efforts were attended by complete success, for on April 18 he reached Lord Mayor’s Bay, the most southern point reached by Ross, thus completing the discovery of the southern and western shores of Prince Regent’s Inlet, and proving that Boothia was a peninsula.

Having duly taken possession of the newly-discovered country in the name of the Queen, he set out on the return journey to Fort Hope, which he reached on May 5. The eastern shores of Prince Regent Inlet still remained to be explored, and as the season was early, Rae decided to waste no time in setting about that part of his task. Accordingly he only rested at Fort Hope for a few days, and then, taking with him four men and a good supply of provisions, he set off again. By May 27 they were close to Cape Ellice, which is within ten miles or so of Fury and Hecla Strait. The journey, however, had been exceedingly exhausting and food was running short, so Rae decided that it would be madness to attempt to push his exploration any further. Accordingly the party turned homewards again and arrived at Fort Hope early in June, tired and very thin, but in excellent spirits. They finally reached York Factory on September 6, after a most successful journey, in the course of which they had discovered several hundred miles of unknown coast-line and had considerably reduced the area in which the North-West Passage must be sought.