John Rae (explorer)

John Rae (1813 to 1893) was a Scottish surgeon from Orkney who became one of the great explorers of northern Canada. He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and was licensed by the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in 1833, at the age of nineteen. He then went to sea as ship's surgeon on a Hudson's Bay Company supply ship, and when the vessel was trapped by early ice he used his skill as a hunter and his knowledge of local plants and animals to keep most of the crew alive through a winter of scurvy. He served the company as a surgeon at Moose Factory for ten years, treating European and Indigenous employees alike, and learned to live off the land and travel on snowshoes. Between 1846 and 1851 he surveyed the Gulf of Boothia and the Arctic coast near Victoria Island, and in 1854 he obtained credible information from local Inuit about the fate of the lost Franklin expedition. He died in London in 1893 and was buried in Kirkwall, Orkney.