RAE AND THE BOOTHIA PENINSULA
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.