The Inadmissible Witness
In 1854 a man walked out of the Arctic with an answer no one wanted. The most trusted writer in England spent his good name making sure nobody believed it.
In July of 1845, at a whaling anchorage off Greenland, two Royal Navy officers sat writing down Inuit words. They were making themselves a little dictionary, so they could talk to the people they figured they would meet up in the ice. It is the last thing anybody recorded them doing, in the last letters that ever reached home.
Their ships were the best-outfitted vessels ever sent into the Arctic. Erebus and Terror had steam heat, propellers that pulled up out of the ice, libraries running to hundreds of books, and eight thousand tins of food. The food contract went out on the first of April, seven weeks before they sailed. It was the one part of the outfit that got done in a hurry. The commander was Sir John Franklin, a beloved old hand at the ice, nearly sixty. Under him on Erebus was Captain James Fitzjames, thirty-two, whom a fellow officer would later remember as just about the perfect Arctic man.
A whaler traded a few words with them in Baffin Bay that July. Then the ice closed in, and nothing came back. Not a letter, not a spar. A hundred and twenty-nine men had sailed into silence.
The Vigil
Britain waited nine years, and the waiting turned into an industry. The Admiralty sent ships. Franklin’s wife, the formidable Lady Jane Franklin, paid for her own and kept the whole thing alive on willpower. The government put up a reward of twenty thousand pounds, a fortune, more than a working man could earn in ten lifetimes. Search parties charted thousands of miles of coastline hunting for two ships and came home with geography.
Then, in the fall of 1854, a man walked out of the Arctic carrying answers nobody had asked for.
The Man Who Came Back
John Rae was not a Navy man. He was a surgeon for the Hudson’s Bay Company, an Orkney man who had gone further into the country than any Navy officer would. He traveled the way the Inuit did, hunting his own food, sleeping in snow houses, covering ground the Navy could not touch. The Inuit knew him by name. And he knew them by name. In everything he wrote, he set down the names of the native people he met, companions and strangers both, more of them than any explorer of his age thought to bother with. To him they were people whose word was worth writing down.
That April, near Pelly Bay, he met a man named In-nook-poo-zhe-jook, who had a band of gold naval braid on his cap and a story to go with it.
Four winters back, Inuit families had watched about forty white men hauling a boat and sledges south along the shore of King William Island, nearly all of them pulling on the ropes. The men were thin. Later that season the bodies turned up near the mouth of a big river. Some had been cut. There was human flesh in the kettles.
Rae talked to every witness he could reach, twenty or twenty-five of them over two months, through his interpreter William Ouligbuck Jr. Every account matched, “without variation in any material point.” Then he bought what the families had kept. Silver forks and spoons with the crests of Franklin’s officers. A little silver plate that read Sir John Franklin, K.C.H. The star of a knightly order, the same one hanging at Franklin’s neck in his last photograph. And on some of that officers’ silver, scratched in under the engraving, the initials of ordinary seamen. One of Sir John Franklin’s own forks came back with the letters W C cut roughly into the handle, the mark of an able seaman named William Closson. Whatever happened out there had reached further than the bodies. The officers’ good silver had been handed down through the ranks, and the class system got shared out with the cutlery.
Rae wrote it up twice, a careful version for the public and the full one for the Admiralty, and the full one carried the sentence that would follow him to his grave: the survivors had been “driven to the last resource — cannibalism — as a means of prolonging existence.” The full one was the version that got out. London read it in The Times on the twenty-third of October, 1854, over breakfast.
Nine years of waiting for the heroes to sail home, and the morning paper said they had eaten each other. On the word of hunters nobody had named, out at the edge of the map, passed through an interpreter and carried home by a Company man who had never seen a single body. He had not seen any of it. He had believed the people who had. That was his whole case, and he put his name on it.
To a modern person who has seen a movie like Alive, about the survivors of a plane crash in the Andes, this would not come as much of a shock. To an Englishman in 1854 it was not survival. Eating the dead was the mark of a savage, the bright line that was supposed to separate a Christian gentleman from the people the Empire was out civilizing. So Rae had not just brought home bad news. He had accused the best officers in the Navy of doing the one unthinkable thing. Lady Franklin set out to clear the record, and for that she needed the one man in England whose word on human character outweighed anybody else’s.
The Conscience of England
By 1854 Charles Dickens was more than famous. People treated him as about the closest thing they had to a national conscience, and he had come by it honestly. This is the man who gave us Tiny Tim, who made a whole country look at a workhouse boy holding up an empty bowl. Respectable England looked at the poor and mostly saw a character flaw: idleness, or drink, or a refusal to lift themselves up. Dickens did basically one thing his entire career. He took people who had it good and made them look at people who did not, and he would not let them look away until they got it. You are judging people you know very little about, he had been telling England for twenty years. You just do not know them. You have never spent a day in their shoes. Come and see. He had turned it into a machine. A Christmas Carol fixes Scrooge with three ghosts who walk him through the exact things he had spent his life not looking at. And just months before Rae’s report broke, Dickens had wrapped a whole novel in his own magazine about factory families getting ground down.
If anybody alive was built to give desperate men the benefit of the doubt, it was this one. Lady Franklin came to him, and he took the case in that same magazine, two long pieces that December.
He starts off fair. Rae is blameless, “we thoroughly acquit him of any trace of blame”; the man did his job, and it was the Admiralty that published. Then he gets to the evidence, and honestly the first part sounds like a sharp editor today. It is all secondhand. It came through an interpreter, and who vouches for the interpreter? Nobody saw it happen, only what was left. Would an English court convict on this? When somebody tells him one witness had put his own mouth to his arm to show what the starving men had done, Dickens says the gesture “would quite as well describe a man having opened one of his own veins, and drunk of the stream that flowed from it.”
Then he writes this: “the better educated the man, the better disciplined the habits, the more reflective and religious the tone of thought, the more gigantically improbable the ‘last resource’ becomes.” He is saying the men were educated officers, so it could not have happened. Their breeding is the proof. Not one word about the bodies. And if something did happen, well, maybe it was bears, maybe scurvy, and maybe, he floats, the survivors “were not set upon and slain by the Esquimaux themselves.” He would sooner hang an unprovoked massacre on the witnesses than believe the kettles. Under all of it, said flat out because his century did not blink at it: “We believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous and cruel.”
Then his own evidence turns around and bites him. Building the case that disciplined men starve like gentlemen, he reaches for the story of Michel, an Iroquois hunter on Franklin’s own first expedition thirty years earlier. By the account of John Richardson, the Navy surgeon who was there, Michel had killed members of the party and fed on the dead, and Richardson shot him for it. Dickens waves it away in a phrase: Michel was “unsupported by a belief in the divine truths of Christianity.” The exception walks out on the same passport that convicted the witnesses. What Dickens did not know, or did not say, is that the scholar who later edited Richardson’s own journal found that Richardson and another Navy man had themselves eaten human flesh on that march, whether they understood it at the time or not. The disciplined Christian officer he was holding up as proof, the man England would knight as Sir John Richardson, had done the very thing his argument said such men could never do. The evidence that should sink the theory gets fed right back in as proof of it, in the best prose in England.
Rae wrote back in Dickens’s own magazine, and he argued it like the surveyor he was: twenty-five witnesses, two months of questions, not one story that shifted on him, and the Inuit vouched for by every explorer who had actually wintered among them. Dickens took the last word anyway. Two years later he staged and starred in a melodrama about noble Arctic death, The Frozen Deep, and audiences watched Charles Dickens die beautifully in the snow, innocent of appetite, night after night. He cried. The house cried. He was not lying to them. The grief was real. He just had the wrong model, and nobody in that theater knew it yet, him least of all.
England picked its verdict, and Rae paid for it the rest of his life. He had wanted a knighthood, and his friends thought he had earned it years before. The surest way to keep one in reach was to let the cannibalism story die quietly, and he would not do it. He kept saying, in print, that the Inuit had told him the truth and that he believed them. So the honors went to other men. When a search party finally turned up Franklin’s written record under a cairn, its commander, Leopold McClintock, got the knighthood, five thousand pounds, the honorary degrees, and his name carved into Franklin’s memorial in Westminster Abbey. Rae, who had found the answer first, and found it on the word of people nobody would credit, got one private line from an admiral, “Rae would tell the truth, even to his injury,” and nothing else. He kept publishing and correcting the record until he died at eighty, one of the very few celebrated Arctic explorers of his generation the Crown never knighted, while Parry and the Rosses and Franklin and McClintock all wore the title.
The File Objects
The evidence kept showing up anyway, for the next hundred years.
In 1859, McClintock’s expedition, the one Lady Franklin paid for, found a note under a cairn on King William Island, a printed Admiralty form with two rounds of handwriting on it. The first, from May 1847, is all confidence: ships wintering fine, officers listed, all well. The second, crammed into the margins eleven months later, is a different hand and a different world: Franklin dead, two dozen more dead, ships abandoned, the survivors setting out on foot for the Back River. Right where the Inuit had said the bodies were. The same searchers found a ship’s boat on the island with two skeletons in it, five watches, scented soap, silk handkerchiefs, and a copy of The Vicar of Wakefield. The boat was on a sledge, and the sledge pointed north-east, back toward the ships. Nobody could explain that, so nobody tried very hard. What London cared about was what the note left out. It said nothing about the kettles. The officers’ paper record was silent on the worst part, and a gentleman’s silence counted for more than a hunter’s word. The story adjusted its dates and kept going.
The testimony kept coming too. In 1869 the American explorer Charles Francis Hall sat down with In-nook-poo-zhe-jook again, the same man who had talked to Rae, and this time he drew a map, marking where one of the ships had gone down. Later expeditions gathered more of it, from named witnesses through good interpreters, and dug up graves and bones right where the witnesses pointed. The verdict did not move. Franklin got a bust in Westminster Abbey with a verse by Tennyson, and monuments calling him the man who discovered the Northwest Passage, a title a committee had basically built out of a guess. The stone said discovery. The margins had said catastrophe. People read the stone.
And up in the Arctic, for a hundred years, the Inuit held the account. They knew where the ships were. Nobody with a research budget was asking them.
The Instruments
What finally reopened the file was not a change of heart. Nobody’s mind had changed. The tools got better.
In 1984, a University of Alberta anthropologist named Owen Beattie dug three of Franklin’s men out of the permafrost at Beechey Island, and one of them, a young stoker named John Torrington, came up whole, his face still there after a hundred and thirty-eight years. The photographs went around the world, and all at once the expedition stopped being marble and turned back into men. Then the real forensics started. In 1997, Anne Keenleyside went through about four hundred bones from a site the old searchers had walked past. About a quarter of them had cut marks, the kind you get from stripping flesh and taking joints apart, on at least four different people, with the long bones cracked open. That last part matched what Hall’s informants had said in 1871 about bones “broken up for the marrow in them.” In 2015 came the pot polish, a smoothing you only get from broken bone ends stirred around in a cooking pot. The kettles, confirmed down at the level of the bone, a hundred and sixty years late.
Then the ships. A Gjoa Haven historian named Louie Kamookak had spent thirty years gathering the elders’ stories and matching the old place names against modern charts. “I listened to those stories as absolute truth,” he said. “I had no reason to question them, but to understand them.” In September 2014, Parks Canada found Erebus in the shallow Utjulik waters. In-nook-poo-zhe-jook had told Rae the story in 1854, and told Hall in 1869 that a ship had gone down out there, in water shallow enough that its masts once showed above the surface. That was the stretch the wreck turned up in, a hundred and forty-five years on. The oral record narrowed it to those waters; a survey crew found the hull. One witness the white world checked and doubted and checked again, and found right every time. Terror turned up in 2016, in Terror Bay, after a Gjoa Haven man named Sammy Kogvik happened to mention he had once seen a mast sticking out of the ice there. The two finds prove the testimony two different ways: one delivered on a map five generations old, the other came from a living man who had barely bothered to bring it up, because who had ever listened. Both answers had been sitting in the community the whole time. The evidence was never the hard part. The hard part was who counted as a witness.
In September 2024, a jawbone pulled from the cannibalism site years earlier got matched by DNA to a living descendant and named: Captain James Fitzjames, the officer the Navy had called just about perfect. The bone has cut marks on it. The archaeologist who ran the identification said it plain: “neither rank nor status was the governing principle in the final desperate days.”
The man at Pelly Bay had put his mouth to his own arm to show what the starving had done. He was telling them, as plain as a person can, exactly what the bones say now. That gesture never needed an interpreter. It needed a witness the world would admit, and there was not one for a hundred and sixty years. John Rae had put his name on the word of people nobody would credit, and gotten quietly retired from history for it. The jawbone in the lab was his acquittal, filed a hundred and seventy years after he brought the charge.
The Fourth Instrument
Bone science, then sonar, then DNA. Three tools that did not exist in 1854, each one shrinking the gap between what the witnesses said and what could be proven. There is a fourth tool, and it works on a harder question, one that was never really about what happened to Franklin’s men. It is about Dickens: how the man who taught England to feel for strangers could look right at the best evidence in the Arctic and not take it in.
In 1944, American researchers signed up thirty-six young men for a starvation experiment, trying to figure out how to safely feed a starving Europe once the war ended. The recruiting pamphlet asked, “Will you starve that they be better fed?” The volunteers were conscientious objectors, most from the peace churches, Mennonites and Brethren and Quakers, men who had chosen to go hungry for strangers on principle. Line them up against Dickens’s rule: the better disciplined the habits, the more reflective and religious the tone of thought. These were about the most reflective, religious young men in the country. Dickens’s hypothesis, hand-picked to his exact specs, put on sixteen hundred calories a day.
Twenty-four weeks later they had apathy, obsession, hoarding, flashes of rage, men licking their plates clean, men collecting cookbooks they could not stop reading, minds that could not hold a thought that was not food. Conscience runs on the same fuel as everything else. The thing Dickens chalked up to breeding and Christianity runs on calories, and when the calories stop it stops, in a Mennonite the same as in a naval officer. That’s not to say starvation always leads someone to the last resort. Men have died in open boats with their dead lying untouched beside them, and Dickens knew those stories too. What starvation takes from everybody is the exemption. That line the English drew between civilized and savage was, a lot of the time, just the line between a man who had eaten and a man who had not.
Dickens could not have known that. The physiology was ninety years off, and his century believed character was something you carried, not something you could be fed into or starved out of. He judged the Inuit by the instruments of his day, and judging him by ours is the same mistake with better lighting. But his own pages let us say something smaller and stranger. His whole method, the one the ghosts run on Scrooge, was to go and see the conditions before you judge the conduct. Put in front of the worst conditions on the planet, he did not go and see. He checked the character references. His sympathy had a border, and it ran along the water’s edge, and he had printed it himself the year before, in the same magazine: a savage is “something highly desirable to be civilised off the face of the earth.”
Dickens has been on my shelf my whole life, and he is staying there. Knowing this about him does not make him smaller. It makes him more complete, and more complete is the honest way to keep anyone you admire.
The Stones
Rae got his monument in the end. Three weeks after the Erebus announcement, on what would have been his 201st birthday, Westminster Abbey set a stone of red Orkney sandstone near the Franklin memorial. Franklin’s marble still gives him the discovery of the Northwest Passage. Rae’s stone just says: John Rae, Arctic Explorer. The overclaim and the plain fact, a few feet apart in the same nave.
The wrecks are protected sites now, co-managed by Canada and the Inuit of the region, who own the artifacts together. David Woodman, the historian who spent his whole career arguing the testimony deserved belief, put it in one sentence: “it took 200 years for our technology to get good enough to tell us that Inuit were telling us the truth.”
The file still is not closed. Franklin’s grave has never been found, and people still argue about the order the last men died in.
Two witnesses told the truth here and got filed under the wrong heading. In-nook-poo-zhe-jook saw it and said so, and got taken for a savage repeating a rumor. John Rae believed him and said so, and got taken for a Company man who would swallow anything. The tools finally admitted them both, together, too late to do either one any good.
Every verdict we walk around with got built the same way this one did, out of the witnesses who happened to be admissible at the time. Respectable and reliable are not the same thing, and the file hardly ever writes down which one it ran on. The Inuit account never changed, not once in a hundred and sixty years. What changed was how much proof the respectable world wanted before it would believe people it had already made up its mind about. What finally won was not louder doubt. It was better evidence, and every piece of it came down on the side of the witnesses the respectable world had thrown out. In 1854 the answer would have cost England a story about itself. The bill went to the men on the ice, and to the witnesses, and it took a hundred and sixty years to come off the books. So when a verdict really matters, ask what it would have cost the first jury to believe the witnesses they threw out. Ask it of the old files. Ask it of the ones we are closing this week.
Paying my debts
The scholarly case for the Inuit testimony was made by David C. Woodman in Unravelling the Franklin Mystery (1991), decades before the sonar caught up; Ken McGoogan’s Fatal Passage carried John Rae’s rehabilitation; Louie Kamookak carried the testimony itself. The forensic record belongs to Owen Beattie, Anne Keenleyside, Simon Mays, and Douglas Stenton’s team, and the primary documents are gathered in the Canadian Mysteries archive and Russell Potter’s Visions of the North. The argument about respectable witnesses and reliable ones, along with any errors, are mine.