Richard King (1810-1876)

Dr. Richard King was an explorer, geographer, and ethnologist who commented discerningly upon much that happened in arctic exploration in the period 1833-1869. The Cassandra of this period, he prophesied accurately a good deal of the arctic map and of arctic happenings without, however, gaining public acceptance for his predictions. . He also showed an interest in Amerindians and the Inuit and contributed in this regard to the Ethnological Journal. . Using a combination of geographical data (some of his own discernment) and anthropological and other reasoning, King produced a remarkable sketch map of the Arctic as he saw it, which had a number of correct and newly visualized features, and which contrasted sharply with the Navy's current view of the Arctic. For example, just as he had once trusted direct information from the Inuit cultures and their distribution in order to recognize a more northerly passage. In our own day, some of King's views have been borne out by archaeological findings on Greenland and Ellesmere Island. . It is typical of Richard King's role in the arctic story that there is no known portrait of him. Faceless himself in the extant records so far as we know them, he had delineated or anticipated much of the topography of the Canadian Arctic. He had gone to that region only once, and yet had perceived and forecast much that was accurate in regard to its map and to events in the unrolling of it. His work on the Arctic still helps us to understand what other explorers had done - and failed to do - in discovery of the region. Indeed, had King not existed, perhaps "someone would have had to invent him," so as to shed light upon certain arctic realities of which King had been very aware and of which most of his contemporaries had not been. He had predicted the existence of Queen Maud Gulf, the peninsularity of Boothia, the insularity of King William Island, both a coastal and a more northern Northwest Passage, and a superiority of the latter over the former as a navigable channel. He had warned ...