Local History:
John Rae
John Rae was born in Scotland on September 30, 1813.
In 1833 he took up the post of surgeon on the Hudson's Bay Company ship Prince of Wales and sailed for Moose Factory. In 1846, after studying surveying he took up the survey of the Arctic mainland begun by Thomas Simpson.
In 1847 Rae went to England where he and Sir John Richardson were appointed by the British Admiralty to try to learn the fate of Sir John Franklin. The Franklin expedition had disappeared in 1845 during an attempt to find the northwest passage. Rae found fragments from the ship and in 1852 he was awarded the Founders Gold Medal by the Royal Geographical Society. Resuming the search in 1853 he obtained proof of the fate of the Franklin expedition from some Inuit and upon his return to England he was awarded 10,000 pounds for his findings.
Rae lived in Hamilton from 1856 to 1859. While in the city he acted as the first Vice President of the Hamilton Association for the Advancement of Literature, Science and Art when it was founded in 1857 and served as President the following year. Julian Arnold, who knew him well, described him: "He has a curious way of mingling in his conversation memories, abrupt and epigrammatical, of the adventures which he had survived among the snows and blizzards of the Arctic circle. Often he would ejaculate strange words of Eskimo origin or suddenly cry commands to a leash of huskies, the reins of which he imagined were in his hands."
On one occasion, in the winter of 1858, he walked from Hamilton to Toronto in seven hours. Rae's last years were spent in England where he became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1880. Rae died in 1893.
(Dictionary of Hamilton Biography, Volume I, pg. 167-168)
There is a plaque commemorating Dr. Rae at the north-west corner of Hunter Street West and Bay Street South.
