The news of John Rae’s report that Franklin’s lost Arctic expedition had resorted to cannibalism was shocking to the British public. Rae had been commissioned to discover the fate of Franklin’s voyage and was told the information by local Inuit who had discovered the remains of several of Franklin’s crew and had observed signs of cannibalism. There was much disbelief, it was thought that if Inuit could survive in the ice, surely an Englishman could achieve the same feat, and soon expeditions were being proposed to refute Rae’s account. One such proposal was this by Bedford Pim, who argued that the senior officers, Francis Crozier and James Fitzjames as well as Franklin himself could not have committed such an atrocious act, but were more likely to have started to live among Inuit and were still awaiting rescue by a future explorer.