The thrust of my note (Barr Reference Barr2014), to which Ken McGoogan was responding (McGoogan Reference McGoogan2014), was that in discovering Rae Strait in the spring of 1854 John Rae did not discover the final link in the northwest passage, since a substantial section of that particular variant of the passage some 240 km in length (namely Franklin Strait and Larsen Sound) lying further north, had not yet been discovered. McGoogan has wrongly concluded that I must therefore support the notion that Sir John Franklin discovered the passage. This is an unwarranted assumption. I do not subscribe to this belief; in this, at least McGoogan and I are in agreement. As David Buisseret, the editor of the The Oxford companion to world exploration has elegantly defined it, geographical discovery is ‘the process by which one or more people leave their society and venture to another part of the world [. . .] then return in order to explain what they have seen’ (Buisseret Reference Buisseret2007, I: xxiii). Neither Franklin nor any of his officers and men returned.

The quotation by Rae, to which McGoogan refers, but the thrust of which he deliberately misinterprets, was to the effect that Franklin Strait and Larsen Sound, the section of the mainland coast from Bellot Strait south to where James Ross had discovered the north magnetic pole in 1831, was unexplored until travelled twice in each direction by Captain Francis Leopold McClintock as he surveyed its east coast in 1859 (McClintock 1859). Clearly, contrary to McGoogan's remarks, a surveyor mapping a coastline by travelling by sledge on the sea ice (as McClintock did) along a previously unexplored strait or channel, must a priori also be the discoverer of that strait or channel, just as if he had taken a vessel through it. Buttressing the fact that McClintock's expedition had discovered this section of the passage is the fact that later in 1859 Sir Allen Young (McClintock's sailing master) had also explored the west side of the strait. Moreover McGoogan appears to have overlooked the fact that Rae's stated objective for his 1853–1854 expedition was a coastal survey, namely ‘the completion of the survey of the northern shores of America’ and not a search for a northwest passage (Rich Reference Rich1953:222). By his own argument, therefore, McGoogan has made the case that Rae cannot even have discovered Rae Strait!

Furthermore McGoogan states that William Kennedy and Joseph René Bellot (among other unidentified explorers) had determined that the section of the passage at issue ‘was at least 30 km wide and free of islands.’ When Kennedy and Bellot had crossed Peel Sound from the west end of Bellot Strait, over the period 8–10 April 1852, Kennedy noted ‘We had not been able, owing to the thickness of the weather, to make any extensive examination of the channel over which we had passed’ (Kennedy Reference Kennedy1853: 135). Clearly, therefore, he could not have elucidated any details of the channel extending some 240 km to the south, and certainly he could not have known that that it was ‘30 km wide and free of islands’. Nor is there any such description in Bellot's account (Bellot Reference Bellot1854: 273–278, 1855 II: 178–180). Indeed it is almost impossible to determine from Bellot's account, replete with references to a reef, inlets and gaps in coastlines, that they were even crossing a strait. Kennedy, however noted that ‘The Western Sea, into which the channel [Bellot Strait] opens, we have ascertained since our return to be the northern extremity of Victoria Strait, partially explored [at its southern end] by Dr. Rae [in the spring of 1851], from another direction’ (Kennedy Reference Kennedy1853: 132). But, since the details of the intervening channel were totally unknown, Kennedy, quite properly shows it on his map by dotted lines. That this representation is entirely speculative is proved by the total absence of McClintock Channel branching off to the northwest. And this is the map which Arrowsmith copied faithfully to produce the map which McGoogan has reproduced, and which he insists is ‘so accurate.’

Later McGoogan argues that Franklin had discovered Franklin Strait, the section of the passage leading south from Bellot Strait, in the summer of 1846, when heading south in Erebus and Terror from Beechey Island, to where his ships became beset in the pack off the northwest coast of King William Island. Almost certainly this was the route followed by Franklin's ships, but this probability was not relayed to the world, whereby it might be conceived to have provided a surrogate for the requirements of the concept of ‘discovery’, until McClintock, or more correctly his second-in-command, Lt. William Hobson, found the only message providing frustratingly meagre details as to the fate of the expedition at Victory Point, King William Island in the spring of 1859, and until McClintock's expedition returned to England in September 1859. Thus the fact of Franklin's ships having passed along Frankin Strait and Larsen Sound, was still unknown at the time of Rae's discovery of Rae Strait in the spring of 1854.

Finally there is the matter of the perception of Rae Strait as being the ‘final link’ in a navigable northwest passage, as McGoogan argues on the basis of what Rae and his Cree companion Thomas Mustegan had seen of the ice in Rae Strait. In his letter to the HBC Committee in London on his findings, Rae reported that Rae Strait was ‘full of rough ice’ (Rich Reference Rich1953: 281). In his Fatal passage McGoogan (Reference McGoogan2001:189) correctly relays this piece of information on one page, but on the next page he quite unwarrantedly interprets this as ‘young ice’. Since the definition of ‘young ice’ is: ‘Ice in the transition stage between nilas and first-year ice, 10 to 30 cm in thickness’ (World Meteorological Organization 1970: 14), that is less than a year old, McGoogan is claiming that Rae believed that Rae Strait had been open water in the summer of 1853, for which conclusion he had absolutely no basis. In fact ‘rough ice’ may be of any age. Considerable areas of the oldest sea-ice, namely the multi-year ice of the Central Arctic Basin, are extremely rough, with a maze of new pressure-ridges. McGoogan then proceeds to attempt to support this claim that Rae Strait had been free of ice in 1853, and hence ‘the final link in a navigable Northwest Passage’ on the basis that Roald Amundsen sailed through it in Gjøa in the summer of 1903 (Amundsen Reference Amundsen1908), that is half a century later, during what may have been a totally different ice-year. This clearly is a seriously flawed argument.

Furthermore McGoogan is not quite correct when he says that ‘In his book The north west passage, Amundsen explicitly credits Rae with having shown him where to sail.’ Amundsen did indeed give Rae credit, but it was to McClintock that he says he owed the direction on ‘where to sail’. The remainder of the paragraph which McGoogan quotes in part reads as follows: ‘The distinguished Arctic explorer, Admiral Sir Leopold M'Clintock, pointed out this passage [Rae Strait] in his report on the Fox Expedition in 1857–59, and proved that if the North West Passage were ever to be accomplished, it would be through this channel. I followed the advice of this experienced sailor and had no reason to regret it’ (Amundsen Reference Amundsen1908, II: 109).

In conclusion it is appropriate to examine the concept of ‘discovering’ a sea passage. The various Acts of Parliament (1745, 1776, 1818) offering a reward for discovering a northwest passage all stipulated that it must be navigable for ships. Although no Act was in force after 1828, the core stipulation that to qualify a ship had to sail right through the passage still applied, and means that Roald Amundsen must be recognised as the first discoverer of the northwest passage on the basis of his voyage in the Gjoa in 1903–1907. Not Franklin, not M’Clure, and certainly not John Rae, for all their merits.