To celebrate the launch of the Democratic Green Socialist as a monthly online magazine we’re proud to publish Saltire prize winning author John Aberdein’s epic socialist poem celebrating the life and work of Orcadian arctic explorer John Rae. Rae’s outlook and methods are contrasted with the tragedy, vanity and imperialism of Sir John Franklin’s 1845 expedition to find the fabled North West passage - which was lost with all hands - and the upper class outrage at Rae’s conclusions on the expedition, based on local Inuit testimony, that at the end, encased in ice, Her Majesty’s Royal Navy had turned to cannibalism.

Praise of John Rae

 

Sir John’s prop was misshapen,

bitten and cased in ice;

he had a loco aboard

plumb in the hold

of Terror, attending good result.

 

He was God-fearing and mast-upright:

he buried his dead crew

deep in the permafrost,

the sharp scent of flintspark

in the pickmen’s nostrils

that leaden Hogmanay.

 

O they went wandering then,

lugging a longboat stuffed with Bibles

and soap, they dragged the ark

to scour the sand and scarify the shingle,

puffing a cherrywood pipe.

 

They boiled their tea with glacier mince

and sucked a little chocolate,

then scraped round, like a points race

at Stromness, their last warm dance-place,

and laboured their boat back.

 

They let go and sprang forward and died

amongst their fellows gnawed by scurvy,

wolves and bears and by each other:

for a while each survivor shouldered

a serving of severed limb,

which became him.

 

It did not become John Rae to say so,

the Admiralty found no poetry in his

chopped-up prose, on the sayso

of Inuit trappers: the Empire’s men might swallow

cannonball at Sebastopol but were not

cannibals.

 

Parochial taboo of the wet Lords,

like the piano-leg attitude to sex:

does the soul really inhabit

buttock and slice of thigh?

Surely it is sepulchred in the empty belly:

Grub first then ethics

was Brecht’s chew.

 

But Rae knew the score, he had shot

grey heron through the Clestrain dyke

and ridden Brenda up the Hoy Sound tide,

listened to Knox lecture over Burked bodies,

gathered cranberries in his snowshoes

to stave off scurvy at Moose Factory,

years he was surgeon there.

 

The opposite of a romantic,

soaked to the moleskinned skin,

he tramped a hundred miles easy

in two days, he didn’t piddle at the side

with his paddle, but propelled it sculling

at the rear, he took his pocket Bard

into his best fur bed to thaw the pages out.

 

He surveyed all he surveyed

and that was plenty, the wastes

of Boothia, Pelly and Repulse Bay,

the worst was Melville, walking at night

under 70 pound packs in the waist-deep snow,

the knee-deep water, coming out of holes

on the slippery ice like quadrupeds,

supping soup from the stomachs of deer.

 

There was no lead in his tins

to derange the brain, and colic the gut

and make the limbs erratic:

he wintered off the river, sea and earth,

salmon and curlew fried over seal-fat,

no tins at all, no suicide solder running down

the sides of his hunter’s meat.

 

But the Admiralty had done for Franklin

and his 128 alright, the lowest tender

taken from Stephan Goldner on All Fool’s Day ’45,

and the bulk of 8,000 tins of beefs and soup

rush-packed inside one week.  The solder cheap as hell,

90% lead, hardly flowing into the roll-round seam at all,

but sticking like a poisoned comb into the men’s meat.

 

All the fancy rewards for the finding of Franklin,

twenties of thousands of pounds,

all the real love and amazing devotion of Lady Jane

to get to the bottom of mystery,

the mystery of capitalism, why we let it so easily persist

with its money-saving on safety, Piper Alpha,

King’s Cross, and all the Heralds of Free Enterprise

with their enormous price.

 

A far cry from Hudson Bay

demands to be heard: we are cannibals, Rae said,

so readily, who was himself lectured for being

Over-liberal in all payments to Indians on his private account,

Rae who disciplined the dirty cook at Moose

for paying no heed to the men’s representations,

we are cannibals when market forces become supreme,

a message the Navy Lords found a bit too close to the bone.

 

Dickens also complaining, finding Rae’s report flawed

by its essential basis on the word of a savage,

who is always a liar and boaster in Dickens’ book,

Dickens with his fecund gallery of white character types

from Heep to Micawber, Pickwick to Havisham,

prepared, with a racialism rooted to this day,

to caricature not just all Eskimoes, but all the victims of Empire

with the vices of that Empire, particularly boasting

and endemically of course lying, a dog-collar Empire,

a dog in God’s clothing, that gnawed at the vitals of all native culture.

 

Rae responded with overwhelming modesty,

contrasting his own small wandering experience

with Dickens' very great ability and practice,

but despite the salvos, the salivations of Times readers

and the attempt by Dickens to crack his marrow,

he stuck to his guns on all the issues and Rae’s opinions

on Franklin’s end remained exactly the same.

 

His not the drawing-room or coffee-house horror

at the thought of men in extremis eating chunks of their species:

what devoured Rae was the lofty way

that naval brass swanning to the Arctic

would task the Hudson Bay traders with poor treatment of natives,

forgetting that ten times as much famine and misery

looked at them from their own doorsteps in Ireland.

Rae who had the wit to be civilised by his journeys,

learning the craft of snow-houses and honing his hunting,

noting that it was often an Eskimo woman who brought down

the first spring goose, who had lived off a thin bone of ptarmigan

the long winter, and with powerful pun

asked us to observe those who had never been 24 hours without food

enlarging indignantly on the subject of cannibalism.

 

Rae, who lost only one man on all his 13 thousand miles

of open boat and snowshoe journeys,

and that thought heavy to him,

would he have given countenance to a Pentland Firth crossing

at its tightest choke-point ten times daily

through the smash of winter? 

That would be to mistake his lesson,

knowledge and courage of judgement,

not a reckless throwing of oneself on the elements

as though being a modern white man conferred some immunity.

 

Rae, like the best Scots, was a perfectionist not an exploiter:

sewing his own breek-buttons and splicing rigging

others might find infra dig, but he wrote  I care nothing about that

as long as the work is done to my mind.

Coming back to Orkney one rain-thrashed Christmas Eve,

he refused his ordered gig on account of lateness,

walking 14 miles to Orphir over villainous roads,

that was his measure.  Yes he kept his own quarters

apart from the men, his ink frozen on the mantelpiece,

but was never divided from his fellows by labour.

 

Alone of the great Arctic explorers never made Sir,

his report often doubted, reward grudged,

discoveries he trudged first were labelled naval,

Collinson or McLintock given hydrographer’s honour:

bitter to him that, even in late life,

his views, from scurvy to sledging, hard-won, discounted,

a mere trader, a toiler from remote strata,

not part of the coterie of truth.

 

But his trips and his treatise

were treasure elsewhere:

for Nansen and Amundsen and Rasmussen

he showed how to live in the Arctic,

less-laden on the small sledge,

with no tight forces discipline

but a good morale that is mutual,

where, as in any true democratic advance,

the speed of the party is the speed of the slowest,

though the strength of the party is not the strength of the weakest,

and all are equal before death.

 

               John Aberdein