William Barr's article on John Rae presents quite the spectacle (Barr 2014). Barr paints a picture of eminent British historians, staunch defenders of Arctic orthodoxy, scurrying around to deny Rae his rightful recognition and stumbling into an abyss of self-contradiction. In their anxiety to keep Rae in his ‘proper place’ at Westminster Abbey, Barr and his friends have repudiated Sir John Franklin's claim to being the discoverer of the northwest passage – the claim they sallied forth to defend.

The thrust of my note (Barr 2014), to which Ken McGoogan was responding (McGoogan 2014), 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 2007, I: xxiii). Neither Franklin nor any of his officers and men returned.

We regret that there were a number of minor errors in the second paragraph of the recent publication (Barr 2014)

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