Lesley Riddoch: Exploration should begin at home

Scotland is living through a decade of significant anniversaries – some more fulsomely celebrated than others.

THE year 2007 marked the 300th anniversary of the Act of Union. 2009 was the 250th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns. 2010 was the 450th anniversary of the Scottish Reformation and 2014 will mark the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn.

There is at least one more date to slot into that list. 2013, the 200th anniversary of the birth of Orcadian John Rae, the only Victorian arctic explorer not to receive a knighthood, despite discovering the final link in the Northwest Passage.

This event may not seem to be on a par with the others. How can the birth of any individual, except perhaps the Bard, qualify as an event of “national” consequence?

Rae’s ignominious fate, however, contrasts with the massive star-studded celebrations in Oslo last week to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, and raises questions about the absence of “nation-building” heroes in the run up to Scotland’s independence referendum in 2014.

How capable are we? How resourceful? How distinctive? If Scots helped invent the modern world, Scots also helped exploit it – trading slaves, abusing fellow countrymen and staffing the colonial outposts of Empire. Scots led but Scots also followed, falling in disproportionate numbers on front lines across Europe. Scots often wonder, in this mixter-maxter, if there really is a distinctive and consistently Scottish contribution to the modern world.

In the field of exploration, it seems there is – but Scots must set the record straight before time closes another significant chapter in the story of John Rae.

In the Victorian era, the Northwest Passage was a “mythical” holy grail: an elusive, strategic navigable route across the ice floes of the Arctic, linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. After Sir John Franklin’s party left England in 1845 to find it, his failure to return resulted in 55 search expeditions, costing the Admiralty £600,000.

Dr John Rae was an Orcadian ship’s surgeon turned explorer who worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company and had charted more than a thousand miles of unknown arctic Canada in two months during 1844, earning the nickname “Aglooka” – “he who takes long strides” – from the Inuit.

During two search missions he discovered the fate of the Franklin mission and found the final channel of the Northwest Passage.

Rae succeeded where Franklin failed, largely because the Scot adopted the survival techniques of the native people, dressing in animal skins, tracking caribou and making igloos and sleds.

His exploration style was low-key, small-scale, co-operative and ultimately successful. He walked overland with a handful of men, lived off the land, and lost one colleague in 30 years.

Sir John Franklin was his polar opposite – his world was full of hierarchy, class and racial distinction. He sailed with scores of boats, laden with tinned food, determined to have no truck with “the natives”. A total of 129 men died with Sir John Franklin.

Rae’s respect for the Inuit guaranteed his survival on the polar ice but also sealed his fate back home. During his search for Franklin, a party of Inuit hunters showed Rae watches, cutlery and a medal they found at the lost Britons’ final camp. The Inuit described the mutilated state of the bodies, suggesting some men had resorted to cannibalism to survive. Bad weather made the Inuit reluctant to return to the site so that Rae could verify their reports.

Back in England, the shocking suggestion of cannibalism proved too much for the delicate stomachs of the Victorian establishment. Franklin’s widow Lady Jane enlisted the help of novelist Charles Dickens to vilify Rae, who was universally condemned for failing to gather evidence and trusting “lying natives” who were then accused of Franklin’s murder. Rae’s discovery of the Northwest Passage was airbrushed from history and he died in 1893, robbed of his place in the history books. Several monuments were erected to Sir John.

In 1997, Rae’s report was finally vindicated; blade cut marks on the bones of some of the crew found on King William Island strongly suggested cannibalism. Bad weather, years locked in ice, scurvy, lead poisoning from the tin cans, botulism and starvation had killed everyone in Franklin’s party.

Since then Alistair Carmichael – the MP for Orkney and Shetland – has campaigned for a plaque at Westminster Abbey to set the record straight. Despite support from TV explorer Ray Mears and Billy Connolly, that plaque has yet to appear. In all probability it never will. What of it?

Pioneers help build the self-esteem of any nation – the best example was the Norweigan Nansen.

Like Rae, Nansen was a brilliant explorer. Unlike Rae he was recognised, feted and transformed into an international celebrity by the newly-independent nation of his birth.

Nansen skied closer to the North Pole than anyone else, while testing his theories about ocean currents aboard the Fram. His dramatic reappearance after being lost, presumed dead, in the Arctic for 1,000 days – and the Fram’s safe return proving the existence of trans-polar currents – contributed directly to the rise in self-confidence which prompted Norway’s final, peaceful separation from Sweden in 1905.

Nansen’s fame, tenacity and doggedness was then deployed to resolve the biggest humanitarian crisis in post-war Europe – “Nansen passports” saved 450,000 displaced people from certain death after the First World War and he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922.

Nansen was the first foreigner to be elected Rector of St Andrews University in 1926. The message of his “life-changing” inaugural lecture resonates still: “Rooted deep in the nature of every one of us is the spirit of adventure, the call of the wild—vibrating under all our actions, making life deeper and higher and nobler.”

Scottish and Norwegian explorers rejected the vainglorious, status-conscious, quasi-colonial attitudes of imperial Britain. “Low-impact” explorers like Nansen, Rae and indeed Alexander MacKenzie, James Bruce and even David Livingstone travelled lightly, opened up navigation channels, proved scientific theories, mapped the unknown, added to knowledge and learned from local people. Does that place Scots within a distinctive Nordic tradition?

If we don’t make the effort to find out and better understand our own Scottish nature, who will?