CHANNEL 4’s Hunt for the Arctic Ghost Ship – broadcast on Tuesday – was a beautifully bleak documentary set in the frozen territories of Arctic Canada. The relevance to British viewers was explained in the opening sequence. The British ship Erebus was one of two vessels to disappear after setting out from England in 1845 to discover the missing link in the Northwest Passage. At the helm was Sir John Franklin – a heroic, knighted, experienced and celebrated member of the British establishment. Under his command was “the best-equipped, best-trained expedition ever sent to Arctic waters.”

Except that’s not the whole story.

128 experienced sailors certainly did crew the boats with enough tinned food to last three years. They planned on getting frozen into the ice over winter and continuing the search for that elusive sea passage during the short Arctic summers. Unfortunately, the weather was exceptionally bad, the ships remained marooned and some of the crew died within months after lead poisoning, perhaps caused by the tinned food.

Sir John Franklin also died while the Erebus was wedged in the ice. That winter his second-in-command gave the order to abandon ship and walk hundreds of miles south in the hope of reaching a trappers’ camp. None of the crew survived – hence the enigma.

Last year documentary makers set out to find the sunken wreck. They filmed a multi-million-pound expedition acting on information offered by native Inuit people in 1848, ignored at the time because they also reported evidence of cannibalism at the crewmen’s final campsite – an act considered unthinkable by Victorian society. Using this information, Park Canada staff with sonar kit finally located the wreckage of the Erebus, 11 metres below the surface and a hundred miles further south than previously thought possible.

Fascinating stuff, but why bother National readers with the tale?

Because of what was left out.

It was the Scots explorer John Rae, also an Orcadian ship’s surgeon with the Hudson Bay Company, who met those Inuit folk in the frozen wastes and dutifully relayed their grim findings back to the Admiralty in England. In a classic case of shooting the messenger, Lady Franklin turned on the straight-talking Scot, enlisted the help of Charles Dickens and ensured Rae was black-balled by the London establishment. Even though he actually found the missing link in the North West Passage during his attempts to find Franklin, the discovery was credited posthumously to Sir John. Rae became the only great British explorer not to receive a knighthood, fell from public view and was forgotten.

All of this was simply cut from the script – and that matters. Not just because of injured Scots sensibilities or even accuracy but because Rae’s methods of Arctic exploration were entirely different to Franklin’s – and more successful.

Rae spoke to the Inuit in the frozen wastes because he knew them. He understood their language and survival techniques, had an Inuit wife and after covering 1,200 miles on foot in two months was nicknamed “Aglooka” – “he who takes long strides” – by admiring Inuit companions. In fact John Rae was a modest man and a survivor – everything John Franklin was not. More than 100 men died under 30 years of Franklin’s command. He travelled by sea and took all supplies with him – Royal Navy traditions that became tragic errors during that final, fatal voyage. John Rae, by contrast, travelled by foot and lived off the land. He was regarded in Victorian England as an “eccentric” who made moccasins, wore animal skins, tracked caribou and made igloos and sleds – lifesaving skills acquired from “savage locals”. John Rae – in the eyes of the British establishment – had gone native. But by listening to locals and learning their ways, he managed to survive and aged 71, returned to Canada to map a considerable stretch of the Fraser River in a dugout canoe, without a guide.

I understand stories have to be simplified to fit TV time slots. I realise the great coup of this documentary was finding the Erebus at all – an amazing achievement. And yet, the wreck was only located using evidence from Inuit people ignored 160 years ago by the British establishment – people taken seriously by John Rae. Indeed, the documentary concludes by stating that Franklin’s men actually found the missing link to the North West Passage, though they perished in the process. In the great scheme of things, that hardly matters now. Except that a decade-long campaign to belatedly credit John Rae with the discovery finally succeeded last October when a plaque honouring the Orcadian was unveiled in Westminster Abbey.

Is this all irrelevant?

This week Culture Minister Fiona Hyslop observed that; “More than half of [the Scottish] population don’t believe the BBC properly reflects their lives.” Evidently that problem extends to other broadcasters.

Yet again documentary-makers have air-brushed an important Scottish, non-Establishment figure from history and failed to test or critique claims made for the “Great British Adventurers” like Sir John Franklin.

In fact, John Rae was our most successful Arctic explorer.

Scots, at least, should remember his name.