A lengthy and engaging letter from John Rae (1813-1893), Arctic explorer and doctor, to Norman Lockyer (1836-1920), the editor of Nature, which was the foremost scientific journal of the day.
Born and raised in Orkney, Rae first travelled to the Arctic as a ship’s surgeon for the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1834. He spent the following decades living and working amongst the indigenous people of the region, and stood apart from many of his fellow explorers of the nineteenth century for his understanding of traditional hunting and survival practices. Of all of the expeditions sent to search for the lost Sir John Franklin and his men, Rae made the most significant discoveries towards an understanding of their fate. These findings, including evidence of cannibalism, had Rae pilloried by the outraged British press, most notably Charles Dickens in Household Words, and it was not until McClintock verified his claims several years later that his reputation was to some degree cleared.
The present letter shows Rae near the end of his life, contributing zoological observations from his time in the Arctic to a discussion in Nature:
“When in Northern Canada I have often known fish - the grey “sucker” or carp especially - frozen solid throughout. By exposure of some hours to a temperature of 20° to 30° below Zero, but after being placed for some time in water, came to life again and swam about in apparent comfort as if nothing unusual had happened.” He then goes on to quote a letter from an unnamed friend which recounts an anecdote from “Stuarts Lake (Lat’de 55°30’N. in British Columbia)” where after catching “20 to 50 bushels of small fish, something like sardines - these fish after being hard frozen, lying all day on the ice, then hauled (by sledge) home were as hard as rocks. I have time after seen the children take a lot of these fish and put them in cold water to thaw, when a number would come alive”…&c. After signing off, Rae concludes the letter with a lengthy initialled postscript relaying further anecdotes from his time in the Hudson’s Bay and Great Bear Lake, wherein he saw a live frog half frozen in the ice, and reanimated a frozen fly with the warmth of his hand.
From digitised holdings of Nature, we have not been able to locate a published version of this letter. There are other letters on the subject published regularly in February, March and April of 1891.
Amongst the appendices of his 1850 publication Narrative of an expedition to the shores of the Arctic sea in 1846 and 1847, Rae includes a list of fishes collected by J.E. Gray during the expedition. In that list the “Grey Sucker” is classified as “Catastomus Hudsonius. Richardson, Faun. Bor. Amer. iii. 112 River Near York Factory”. This is the freshwater longnose sucker, now known as Catostomus catostomus. The debate over frozen fish continues in the pages of Nature, with the most recent article published on 13 March 2023. That article cites the only fish to be able to survive encasement in solid ice as the Amur sleeper (Perccottus glenii).
