By John Mowat

Famous Orkney explorer John Rae was born at Hall of Clestrain on 30/09/1813.

A Group of John Rae Society Members, Friends & Visitors met at 12.00 beside his gravestone in the south east of the St Magnus Cathedral Cemetery to mark his birth. 

Piper Eric Plowman led the procession from the Memorial Arch.

Harvey Johnson gave a short appreciation on John Rae’s lifetime achievements & recited a short poem he had written.

Andrew Appleby thanked all those for attending. A number of people travelled to Orkney from the south to attend & remember John Rae.

John Rae trained as a surgeon at Edinburgh University, later spending much of his life in Canada, working for the Hudson’s Bay Trading Company.  

He travelled over 22,000 miles making many of the original maps in northern & north western Canada.

Apart from discovering the North West Passage’s final link between the Atlantic, northwards & westwards to the Pacific he also established the loss of the 120 men & two ships of the Franklin Expedition in the area.

John Rae learned this from local Innuit inhabitants. The 120 men all died in the harsh Canadian winter, after their ships were crushed by the ice in the far north of Canada.

The John Rae Society has active plans to renovate the Hall of Clestrain, John Rae’s birth place in the years ahead.

John Rae was one of Orkney’s, Scotland’s & Europe’s most famous & successful Explorers in the 1800s.

Using John Rae’s maps & information, the famous Norwegian Explorer, Roald Amundsen, was the first person to sail the North West Passage shipping route in the early 1900s, some 50 years later.

Identifying The Men of the Franklin Expedition