After the remarkable achievements of John Rae in the harsh Arctic terrain, his return to the world of Victorian Britain was unsettled. He had tackled the two great Arctic challenges of the time – the fate of the Franklin expedition and the final link for a Northwest Passage – but his information about the fate of Franklin had led to Lady Franklin destroying his reputation, helped by Charles Dickens. The British Admiralty turned against him, and then Iceberg, the ship he built with a plan to return to the Arctic, foundered in a storm and sank with the loss of all hands.

Alice Jane Hamilton is the great-great-granddaughter of John Rae’s sister, Marion Sibbald (Rae) Hamilton, who moved with her family in 1856 from Orkney to Hamilton, Ontario. She wrote a novel about this time in John Rae’s life, based on the actual events, reconstructing some of the family conversations, and this evening she tells the story, with readings by Dave and Laura Grieve, and fiddle music by Owen Griffith.

That year of 1856 was a dark time in his life, she says, when his brother Tom was trying to bring him out of a shattered state, back to his confident, adventurous self. She tells of the chain of events that caused his life to fall apart, and then how the pieces eventually came back together.

The story of the events of four years later, and a new northern journey of surveying for John Rae, will be told tomorrow afternoon by Fleur Ward in her talk ‘Where Might the Cable Have Run?’ followed by a performance of ‘John Rae and the Northern Telegraph Route’, with the musicians of Nordic Viola and Aldubáran and the poet Lesley Harrison.

Organised by the John Rae Society