Rae bought a collection of artifacts from the Inuit he encountered — objects including silver forks and spoons, a medal, pieces of uniform — that had clearly come from the Franklin expedition. He sent these artifacts and his report to the Admiralty in 1854, along with his conclusion that the expedition had come to a catastrophic end and that some of the survivors had resorted to eating their dead.
The British public’s response to Rae’s report was complicated. The image of Royal Navy officers eating one another was deeply disturbing to Victorian sensibilities, and Lady Franklin was among those who disputed Rae’s conclusion. Charles Dickens wrote in Household Words arguing that the evidence was more consistent with the bodies having been mutilated by the Inuit themselves than by the expedition’s survivors — a racist argument that subsequent archaeological evidence has thoroughly refuted.
Francis Leopold McClintock, commanding an expedition sponsored by Lady Franklin, reached King William Island in 1859 and found the Victory Point note in a cairn. McClintock also found a boat, dragged onto the island’s shore, containing two skeletons, a quantity of artifacts and supplies, and evidence consistent with the survival behaviors that Rae’s informants had described. His published account of the expedition’s final months, based on the note and on the physical evidence he collected, became the foundational narrative of the Franklin expedition’s end.
The Inuit accounts gathered over the following decades — by Charles Francis Hall in the 1860s, by Frederick Schwatka in 1879, and by subsequent researchers — added substantial detail to the picture. Hall spent years in the Canadian Arctic collecting Inuit oral traditions about the Franklin expedition, recording accounts from people whose parents and grandparents had encountered the expedition’s survivors and its remains. The accounts described the state of the men — exhausted, sick, dragging their sledges — and the physical evidence the Inuit had observed. The consistency of these accounts with the later archaeological findings provided confirmation of Inuit oral knowledge that the British establishment had been slow to credit.