John Raethe RiverstoneISFP

In April 1854, on the sea ice near Pelly Bay in the Canadian Arctic, John Rae met an Inuk hunter wearing a gold cap band from a British naval officer's uniform. Rae was 40, a surgeon and surveyor from Orkney working for the Hudson's Bay Company. He knew what that band might mean.

For nine years Britain had waited for news of Sir John Franklin's expedition, two ships and 129 men that had vanished into the Arctic in 1845. The hunter, In-nook-poo-zhe-jook, had not seen the place himself. He passed on what others had told him, and Rae wrote it down.

Four winters earlier, about forty white men had been seen hauling a boat south over the ice, looking thin. Later their bodies were found, and the state of some showed that the last survivors had eaten their dead.

Rae bought relics of the lost men, cut short his survey and took the news home. The Admiralty made his report public, and Britain learned that Franklin's men were dead, some driven at the end to eat their companions.

Lady Franklin, the explorer's widow, would not accept it, and she had a powerful ally. In his weekly magazine Household Words, on 2 and 9 December 1854, Charles Dickens turned on the witnesses. “We believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel,” he wrote.

Rae owed the Inuit a great deal. He had learned to travel and live off the land by watching them and doing what they did. Now the people who had taught him were being called liars in front of all England.

He hated writing, and admitted it. He had “little experience in writing,” he confessed, and like many men who had led “a wandering and stirring life,” he had “a great dislike to it.” He answered anyway, in Dickens's own magazine, on 23 and 30 December. Dickens printed every word.

He defended the interpreter, William Ouligbuck, who “speaks English fluently”. Then he told what he had done himself. Alone on the ice, carrying nothing but “a common clasp knife,” he had met four armed Inuit men. “I went up to them, made them shake hands; and, after exchanging a few words and signs, left them.”

And he kept score. When the Inuit told him which way a fallen cairn would lie, he went and looked. “True again,” he wrote.

That is how Riverstones tend to argue: with the thing seen and handled, one checkable fact at a time.

His opinions, he finished, “remain exactly the same as they were when my report to the Admiralty was written.” He did not retract a word. It cost him his good name in London, where many saw him as the man who believed the Inuit over Franklin's officers. He was a man of his century, and used the word “savages” himself. On the one question that counted, he would not move.

He died in London on 22 July 1893, at 79. The Inuit kept the memory of the lost men alive for generations, and their accounts helped guide searchers to Franklin's ships: Erebus in 2014, Terror in 2016. They had been right all along. So had the man who stood by them in print.