John McLean (c. 1799–1890) was a Scotsman who emigrated to British North America, where he became a fur-trapper, trader, explorer, grocer, banker, newspaperman, clerk, and author.

Under the pen name Viator (Latin for "Traveller"), his letters to newspapers around Canada also helped shift public opinion away from yielding the western territories to the United States during the Alabama Claims dispute over damages for British involvement in the American Civil War.

[2] Before leaving for his three-year apprenticeship[2] in May,[7] he studied French for several months with two other trappers under the anglophile curate[8] of St Michel d'Yamaska, Pierre Gibert.

The rumbling noise created by the ice, when driven to and fro by the force of the tide, continually stuns the ear; while the light of heaven is hidden by the fog that hangs in the air, shrouding everything in the gloom of a dark twilight.

He spent nine years fending off company rivals, cultivating relations with indigenous trappers, and improving the post's profitability only to be removed to a new territory once things had become easy.

[2] He lamented that he "had now served the Hudson's Bay Company faithfully and zealously for a period of twelve years, leading a life of hardship and toil, of which no idea can be formed except by those whose hard lot it may be to know it by experience... what was my reward?

[19] Reaching Fort St James on Stuart Lake on 28 October 1833,[20] however, he had nothing but praise—"I do not know that I have seen anything to compare with this charming prospect in any other part of the country; its beauties struck me even at this season of the year, when nature having partially assumed her hybernal dress, everything appeared to so much greater advantage.

[22] He reached the company headquarters at York Factory in July,[20] eventually receiving instructions to replace Erland Erlandson[1] as the factor of the Ungava District, recently established[20] based on the praise of the area[23] by the Moravian missionaries Kohlmeister and Kmoch following their 1811 visit.

"Surrounded by a country that presents as complete a picture of desolation as can be imagined",[27] he avoided lingering there and instead personally led expeditions southeast across the Labrador Peninsula in an attempt to establish overland contact with Fort Smith (present-day North West River, Labrador) at the mouth of the Naskaupi River on Lake Melville, the furthest extent of Esquimaux Bay (now Hamilton Inlet).

He expected discovering such a route would lead to his promotion within the company,[1] and his predecessor Erlandson had already accidentally demonstrated its feasibility in 1834 when his attempt to reach Mingan on the St Lawrence had been redirected to Lake Melville by his five Innu guides.

[28][29][c] On 2 January 1838, he and his men headed out on dogsleds[33] to take a route up the Koksoak[1] from Erlandson's maps and reports,[28] following the Caniapiscau and Swampy Bay Rivers to Lake Michikamau and the Naskaupi,[29] reaching Fort Smith on 16 February,[33] having taken 46 days to cover 858 km (533 mi).

Meeting no food on the way, one sled dog starved to death and the two were obliged to eat the other—"what we considered, in present circumstances, 'food for the gods'"[34]—to make it back to Fort Chimo.

[1] He attempted a different route the next year, while William Henry Allen Davies of the company's Esquimaux Bay District led an expedition up the Churchill from Fort Smith.

[36] The entire Ungava District was eliminated in 1843, while from May to June McLean led a team including a royal magnetic survey under John Henry Lefroy from Lachine (in present-day Quebec) to Norway House.

Lefroy reported him "a person of intelligence and information beyond what one might expect from a man who has all his life been scraping beaver skins together at remote stations" and complimented his flute playing.

With the company refusing to buy back his stock, however, he was forced to remain working and was sent to Fort Simpson (in the present-day Northwest Territories) on the Mackenzie above the Great Slave Lake.

Simpson informed him that he had been only an acting director, that the more senior agent Murdoch McPherson would be assuming permanent command of the district, and that McLean would be obliged to serve under him as a deputy.

[4] He was well-read in English, French, and Gaelic and could speak several of the major languages of Canada's indigenous peoples, such that the native traders who visited the town "invariably" called upon him.

It was largely unpopulated and the Hudson's Bay Company had long portrayed it as frozen wastes useless for settlement, mostly to dissuade competitors and the encroachment of farmers and civilization into its trapping grounds.

[6] Alarmed by this possibility and unwilling to accept the territories' loss to the Americans[1] (inter alia, he considered the War of 1812 to have been an act of unprovoked aggression),[55][f] he wrote to newspapers across Canada under the name "Viator", vividly detailing the beauty and resources of the Canadian west[6] and advocating the purchase of Rupert's Land from the Hudson's Bay Company.

[59] His accounts have been credited with shifting Canadian public opinion against the land transfer, increasing political pressure to find a separate resolution to the dispute.