I’ve just completed reading Ken McGoogan’s “Fatal Passage”. It is about John Rae, both an Hudson’s Bay Company man and from the Orkney Islands in Scotland who discovered the true fate of Sir John Franklin and his expedition, yet he was mocked and criticized in proper British society for doing so.
The Franklin expedition was a very unfortunate episode, with the insistence on using Royal Navy personnel when HBC men and their native guides could possibly more safely and with better knowledge of the area explored and discovered the Northwest Passage route (as John Rae did and was ultimately vindicated as so by Roald Amundsen). Franklin had recently been the governor of Van Diemen’s Land (modern day Tasmania) and clearly was not suitable for this sort of ambitious feat.
John Rae may have been the greatest foot explorer ever.
He could do just about anything with a pair of skis or snowshoes.
But, it was McClure that walked the passage from west to east, thus, showing it was a real passage.
If you read about the hunt for Franklin and the passage, you also can discover that many times in the last couple of hundred years, the passage was clear of ice. At one point, the Brits had some 7 different teams up there, exploring not just the passage, but, all over the archipelago. Not caught in the ice, but, moving around and getting out before the ice came back in the winter.