The British public’s response to these accounts, filtered through the journalistic and cultural frameworks of the period, was not to accept them. Dickens’s arguments in Household Words explicitly suggested that the Inuit were unreliable witnesses and that the evidence was more consistent with the bodies having been mutilated by the Inuit than by the expedition’s own survivors. Lady Franklin’s campaign against Rae’s conclusions was effective enough to deny him the full credit — including prize money — that he might otherwise have received.
The irony of this dismissal is that Inuit communities in the region had been living successfully in the same environment that killed the entire Franklin expedition for thousands of years. Their knowledge of the landscape, the ice, the wildlife, and the conditions that made long-distance survival in the high Arctic possible was sophisticated and accumulated over generations. The expedition’s crew members, by contrast, were attempting to survive in conditions they were not culturally or experientially equipped for, using provisioning and equipment strategies that were well-suited to naval voyages in temperate waters but poorly adapted to extended Arctic overland travel.
The accounts gathered by Rae, by Hall in the 1860s, and by Schwatka in 1879 were consistent with one another and with the archaeological record that subsequent excavation would produce. The specific details varied — different witnesses had seen different things, at different times, in different places — but the core picture they presented was accurate: a large group of Europeans had been seen dying along the route from King William Island to the Back River, and the bodies showed evidence of cannibalism.