T


HE search for the fabled North West Passage, a navigable channel in the Arctic regions of North America which was believed to connect the Atlantic and Pacifi c oceans, was an obsession that dominated the dreams of explorers for centuries.


Mariners from many nations sought its existence for more than 400 years, enduring in those pitiless, frozen wastes all sorts of calamities, failures and tragedies. Their eff orts proved fruitless.


On the Orkney mainland, some eight miles from Stromness, stands the Hall of Clestrain, birth place of John Rae, the man who actually found the North West Passage.


Or more accurately, he identifi ed the last piece in the


jigsaw puzzle. He found the fi nal navigable channel that proved it was possible to sail from the Atlantic to the Pacifi c. The strait he identifi ed as the missing link ran between the Gulf of Boothia and King William Island in the Canadian Arctic Circle.


Such were the rigours of the Arctic it was to be another 50 years before the Norwegian explorer Amundsen actually traversed the North West Passage by sea in 1903. But he credited Rae as its true discoverer.


Yet Rae remains the forgot en man.


May 2015


25


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