Sir George Simpson had not expected Rae to complete his tasks nearly as fast as he had. He therefore offered the explorer free time to do what he wished before his duties would require him in 1848. Simpson assumed that there would only be enough time for a trip within Canada. Rae had other ideas. He had not seen Scotland for fourteen years, so, on September 24th, 1847, only three weeks after his return from the north, Rae boarded a ship for home.
In Britain, Rae visited his mother and other relatives in Orkney. He also met Sir John Richardson, a famous naturalist and Franklin’s companion on two expeditions to the Arctic in the 1820s. Richardson wanted to go looking for his old friend, and he wanted Rae to come with him. The whole of Britain was becoming obsessed with finding Franklin, so how could Rae resist? On March 25th, 1848, after writing to inform Simpson of his plans, Rae set off from Liverpool for the Arctic.
The Inuit had adapted to their environment in ways that Europeans did not understand. Here a man wears sun goggles (made of wood, bone, ivory or leather) that cut down on the sun’s glare and helped prevent snowblindness.
One opinion in Britain in 1847 was that if uneducated natives could survive in the Arctic, then it would be easy for civilized men to do the same. This stupid assertion must have made John Rae shake his head. He knew first-hand how difficult it was to hunt caribou and muskox, what incredibly specialized skills and patience were necessary to kill and retrieve seals, and how little game there was in the Arctic at certain times of the year. Rae had thrived with a small party of highly skilled men. He must have been very worried about how much the ten times larger and vastly less experienced party under Franklin would have been suffering at that very moment.