Tearing the city at the seams #24 - The story of John Rae reimagined as a charting of London's Northwest Passage

The sky was an aquarium blue as I disembarked from base camp at Elephant and Castle and made my way to the starting point of my London expedition, a homage-of-sorts to the great Arctic explorer John Rae.

Born in the Orkneys in 1813, Rae trained as a doctor, joined the Hudson’s Bay Company and proceeded to undertake several major Arctic expeditions, charting incalculable stretches of coastline and having strong claim to the prestigious title of being the first man to discover the final link in the mysterious and elusive Northwest Passage.

But it was his discovery and reportage of the shocking fate that befell the doomed Franklin expedition that would transform him from a lauded ‘hero of the age’ to a vilified outsider who found high society, including even the likes of Charles Dickens, sworn to shun and discredit him of his phenomenal accomplishments.

In honour of John Rae then, my own expedition would be to chart a course north from the City and attempt to navigate a Northwest Passage across the top of London, reaching the promontory of Hampstead Heath.  From there I would proceed southwest to Holland Park and the house in which Rae died in 1893 in relative obscurity; and from there east to Westminster Abbey where last year a memorial plaque was installed, bestowing to him at last the commemoration that was withheld throughout his life.  

My journey began on Fenchurch Street in the navel of London’s bloated belly, the street on which the Hudson’s Bay Company offices were situated.  I gazed up at the swollen thumb of the 20 Fenchurch Street (or ‘Walkie-Talkie’) building, and down at the deserted foyer with its escalators continuing their vacant rotation, marvelling at the elephantine hubris of such a development.  A lone man sat islanded at the reception desk, recalling to my mind the security guard of the empty office building in Mike Leigh's 'Naked' - the man with the most boring job in London.

In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, the HBC was a pioneering fur-trading enterprise with outposts scattered across Canada and the Northwest Territories, with intrepid explorers like Rae on their payroll. The discovery of a Northwest Passage that would provide a link between Pacific and Atlantic oceans was a highly lucrative commercial proposition, allowing easier trading routes to China and the East.  

It is impossible to comprehend today, in a world of GPS, Google Streetview and satellite technology that can plot coordinates with keyhole precision, that not so long ago vast expanses of the world map were blank unknown spaces, annexed off by our own physical limitations hindering our ability to conquer them. That being said, heightened knowledge is not necessarily conducive with better understanding, often merely shifting new straits of ignorance.  I would contend that the majority of Londoners today are increasingly disconnected from their actual physical surroundings, the distances between places, the ways in which sections of the city stitch together as one complete whole, and are more au fait with transport routes and mapped directions that they obediently follow with little more cognisance than an orange avatar being lifted and dropped onto a new street.

My interest in John Rae stems as well from the fact that I plan on using his character and experience as a loose inspiration for a central character in a new novel I hope to begin writing soon. In terms of discovering a narrative territory, I am still faced with large amounts of 'blank space' that I continue to stumble forwards hoping to uncover and reveal to myself.

I had been hoping, perhaps rather perversely, for a flurry of snow to descend in time for my walk, for Arctic conditions to imbue my efforts with a little more verity, but alas I was deprived. Nevermind though, for it being January, my breath was still mushroom-clouding before my face. I had also, in the week prior, been racing through Ken McGoogan's excellent book 'Fatal Passage', a thoroughly persuasive encomium to John Rae, and as a result, my imagination was enough to cast a blizzard before my footsteps, animating each surface with frost and each building a different berg of ice sculpted by the elements.

'Fatal Passage' paints a vivid impression of Rae as a consummate adventurer in a very classic sense;  an unrivaled 'snowshoer', huntsman, navigator, capable of traversing incredible distances in the most frigidly harsh conditions. Not only this, but he was almost a post-colonial figure, considering the Victorian-era attitudes of the day. He maintained that the best, perhaps the only, way to survive in those Arctic climes was to respect and learn from the native tribes of Inuits encountered there, ingratiating within their way of life, befriending them and treating them as equals instead of uncultivated inferiorities as the received wisdom of the time decreed.

From Fenchurch Street I plotted a course towards Liverpool Street, keen to get clear of the abundant collossi of commerce with the glassine fronts and glacial steel forms. My head was humming with the evidence of a mild hangover, which gave me cause to reflect on how already I was trailing so far behind John Rae's good character. He seldom touched alcohol, already having discerned through his medical training the implications of over-indulgence. Likewise he refrained from smoking, as I recalled on passing a shiver of young girls huddled in the doorway of a clothes store, their breath exaggerated by the plumes of cigarette smoke. One rather charming anecdote in McGoogan's book tells how on one expedition he was relegated to a separate igloo from those of his companions as they puffed away on their pipes as a barrier against the intense cold.

My route took me through the Bunhill Fields cemetery and onwards up Goswell Road to Angel. By this time, the nomadic herds of Islington were beginning to migrate up and down the peninsula of shops but, refusing to be diverted, I forged on up Liverpool Road before darting inwards to the quieter Barnsbury estates. With its cul-de-sacs and avenues, I could detect the inhabitants were snowbound by their Saturday morning lethargy, with not even the promise of Upper Street's bustle to rouse them.

This was far from shocking, given that given that the glorious morning sky had now curdled to a milky grey, and maybe even warning of rain, a part of me still hoped, an avalanche of extreme weather to be lain like a gauntlet before my steely resolve.

I veered westwards along the dreary stretch of Tufnell Park Road, starting to decipher the aching whimpers from my legs and my enthusiasm for the first time beginning to thaw.  Once I began the slow ascent of Dartmouth Park Hill though, and began to glimpse the fenestrated canopy of the Heath between the terraced rooftops, I was sufficiently fueled by the promise of having successfully charted a course across the northwest climes of sleepy suburbia to continue apace.  I wasn’t to be fazed by the Highgate locals in their assorted knitwear, brunching languorously in fancy delicatessens, and I marched upwards and onto the Heath itself, swinging around to see the Shard in the distance like a shining stalagmite.

 

Considering that I could procure a band of huskies to whisk me south, I approached several of those out walking dogs to try and trade some of the whale blubber that I had brought as my sole provisions. Exuding, as the majority did, an air of aloof diffidence, I decided against such bartering and endeavoured on to the peak of Parliament Hill.

There I marveled at the cityscape stretched out before me and the distance I had traveled over the course of a single morning.  Framed by the blue sky, the buildings appeared like an armada of ships landlocked in a vast ice-field, waiting patiently for the sun to heat up enough and allow them to drift free once more.

I sat for a while to survey the scene and recalled to mind the legacy of John Rae.  In 1854, he was tasked with journeying again to the Arctic to try and discover what had happened to the expedition of Sir John Franklin, another renowned British explorer, who had set sail in 1845 with 128 men, to try and claim the missing piece of the Northwest Passage puzzle.  Having made camp for the winter in the punishing environment in which he seemed to thrive, Rae came across numerous Inuit natives who, after much questioning and the corroboration of several Franklin artefacts found in their possession, enabled him to ascertain the horror of their fate.

Landlocked by ice around King William Island, and blighted by lead poisoning from the tin cans they had taken with them for food, Franklin and his men apparently began trying to make their way southwards, before eventually resorting to cannibalism in a desperate yet vain effort to stay alive.

Luckily I was in little danger of succumbing to the same eventuality, fuelled as I was by my cache of whale blubber and Toblerone; but nonetheless, I certainly wasn’t ruling it out definitively.  I left Hampstead Heath via a muddy isthmus, and began to plod along the plush townhouses of Canfield Gardens.  From there I darted across the Kilburn High Road and on in the direction of Maida Hill.

I thought on about the scornful opprobrium unleashed upon Rae after his return to England and the publication of his findings. The very notion that such noble and Christian exemplars of Western civilisation could resort to such depravities was a hand grenade tossed into the haughty mores of the time; a ‘naked lunch’ if ever there was one. Giving way to the barely suppressed racism of the time, many expounded the theories that the Inuits – as a savage race – could hardly be trusted to impart an accurate account of the truth, and even could be to blame for having attacked the weakened party.  Rae himself, not prone to these superior tendencies of Victorian England, and knowing first-hand the horrendous conditions faced in such terrain, was ambivalent about the acts themselves, and so was unprepared for the vitriolic tirade that sought to destroy his good name.

Lady Jane Franklin, the widow of the dead explorer, set about a prolonged campaign to, not only besmirch John Rae’s reputation (even convincing Charles Dickens to publish essays refuting the cannibalistic charges), but to appropriate his achievements with regard to the Passage and attribute them to her late husband.  As a lady of high society, a prominent hostess of the ‘Upper 10,000’, she was tenacious in her aim of hoisting aloft the pennant of her own name, reaping the rewards vicariously, managing to manipulate funds time and again for more expeditions to search the truth that she had in mind.

My pace now slowing, my feet beginning to drag, I passed beneath the Westway and through Notting Hill, skirted round the crowds billowing along Portobello Road.  From there it was a mere trot to Lower Addison Gardens, where I reach Rae's corner house in which he lived for the last years of his life until 1893 in relative anonymity with his beloved wife Kate.

I decided to pause and recuperate for a while in Holland Park.  Posh women sauntered past with their dogs, all appearing to cheerfully carry a little bag of shit as though it were a dainty purse.  It's funny how exhaustion seems to refract certain things into a new and absurdist light.

Rousing myself at last, I trudged through the bottom of Hyde Park and finally arrived at Westminster Abbey where last year John Rae was memorialised with a plaque.

I felt the circle had been completed quite aptly; meanwhile the blisters on my feet after my 20-mile slog served as a sharp reminder of my abject inadequacy next to Rae and others like him. It's easy to despair, surveying our habitual slump into technologically-mandated lethargy, office-bound sedentary, and prescribed allocations of gym-bound exertion, that the days of such explorers have long since past, and in many ways they have, together - for the most part - with the misguided conviction that with our Enlightened superiority we ascend beyond all other races and nations.

Once I'd limped home though, I scanned through the news, my attention instantly ensnared by the two men who had successfully scaled the perilous Dawn Wall in Yosemite; proof for the sceptics that there are still boundaries to push and challenges to transcend.