From: historymacA@btinternet.com
To: annarichmac@hotmail.co.uk
You know that song Dick Gaughan sings – No gods and precious few heroes. Think it’s by Brian MacNeil. We’ve both just lost another hero. Dickens – the one with heart and social conscience. Aye, up to a point. I’ve been reading about John Rae – the Orcadian explorer. He brought relics and accounts from the Arctic to London. These revealed the sad end of the Franklin expedition so there was no point in risking more lives in continuing the search. But the Inuit described a scene in full. It included a description of wide pans and boiled and charred bones – they weren’t all animal ones.
The more sensitive details were confined to his report to the Admiralty. They didn’t want to spend any more money on impossible rescue missions because the Crimean war was going to be expensive. So they made everything public.
That’s why Lady Franklin brought Dickens into the war-by-correspondence. This was a slur on her missing husband and Rae had to be discredited. He was only a rough-spoken Orcadian anyway. Even if he was a doctor and a good shot he was not far from a native himself. There are physical objects as evidence but most of the knowledge is from people’s accounts. Rae had respect for his informants and his translator. Dickens had his own views:
‘We believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous and cruel; and we have yet to learn what knowledge the white man – lost, houseless, shipless, apparently forgotten by his race; plainly famine-stricken, weak, frozen, helpless and dying – has of the gentleness of the Eskimaux nature.’
Bloody hell, he’d have been ripe for Mosley, if he’d lived on.
But I’ll get hold of Great Expectations all the same and look forward to it coming back this way again.
Your dinner is booked.
Love, your olman.