Dr. John Rae. 485 
fully was this accomplished that he was offered and accepted, in 
1848, the place of second in command of the expedition under Sir 
John Richardson to search for Franklin. This expedition was un- 
successful, but in the spring of 1849 Dr. Rae was appointed to com- 
mand another search party to the Arctic coast. In order to utilize 
the time before navigation opened, he, accompanied by two men, 
made a journey along the shores of Wollaston Land, traversing over 
1,100 miles, he himself dragging his sleigh. The average day’s jour- 
ney was about twenty-five miles, and the whole shore was minutely 
examined, including Victoria Strait, in which, as it afterwards ap- 
peared, Franklin’s ships had been abandoned. Continuing the 
exploration, he and his party, with the aid of snowshoes, marched 
continuously, at the rate of twenty-seven miles a day, to Fort Garry, 
now the city of Winnipeg. In about eight months they travelled 
5,380 miles, 700 miles of which was newly discovered territory. 
For his services in this connection, and for the survey of 1847, Dr. 
Rae was awarded the Founder’s Gold Medal of the Royal Geograph- 
ical Society. There being still a considerable portion of the Arctic 
coast unexplored, Dr. Rae in 1853 took command of an expedition 
organized by the Hudson’s Bay Company to trace the west coast of 
Boothia, and, from information obtained from the Esquimaux, he 
succeeded then in placing beyond all doubt the fact that Franklin 
and his men had perished from exposure and hunger. On this occa- 
sion he purchased from the natives a number of relics of the ill-fated 
party. Returning to London in the latter part of 1855, he found that 
he was entitled to £10,000, which the Government had offered for the 
first news of Franklin, a fact unknown to him while conducting the 
expeditions. In 1860 Dr. Rae took the land part of a survey of a con- 
templated telegraph line to America via the Faroe Islands and Ice- 
land. Greenland was next visited, and in 1864 he took a leading part 
in a telegraph survey from Winnipeg across the prairie and through 
the Rocky Mountains. Subsequently some hundreds of miles of the 
most dangerous parts of Fraser River were run down in small dug- 
out canoes without a guide—a most perilous undertaking, but suc- 
cessiully accomplished. i 
But though Dr. Rae travelled much, and saw much of unknown 
parts, covering in his time some 1,500, if not 1,800 miles of previously 
~ unexplored ground, he wrote little. His reports to the Royal Geo- 
graphical Society are on that account all the more valued, as are his 
short papers on the Hsquimaux and other subjects; and in 1850 he 
published a ‘*‘ Narrative of an Expedition to the Shores of the Arctic 
Sea in 1846 and 1847.” He was a frequent and welcome attendant at 
the meetings of the Royal Geographical Society, where his record of 
travel, his genial manner, and graphic powers of description were 
often in request. During the latter years of his life he maintained a 
keen interest in coloniai matters. He was an active member of the 
Royal Colonial Institute, and with Sir Henry Tyler he represented 
Ontario on the executive of the Imperial Institute. As one of the 
