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Sir John Franklin’s Northwest Passage expedition is a moment of history that piques a great deal of interest and imagination today.
The sailors who died trying to escape the Arctic after their ships Terror and Erebus became frozen and icebound in 1846 are a testament to human endurance – and desperation.
The bones of James Fitzjames, captain of the Erebus, who led that last desperate push for home, have been identified. And they tell a harrowing tale.
In 1848, as the remaining 105 sailors abandoned their ships to the pitiless fangs of the ice, Captain Fitzjames penned a grim report, later found in a cairn on King William Island.
“HMS ships Terror and Erebus were deserted on the 22nd April, 5 leagues NNW of this having been beset since 12th Sept 1846,” he wrote.
“Sir John Franklin died on the 11th of June 1847 and the total loss by deaths in the Expedition has been to this date 9 officers and 15 men.”
Those 105 survivors never made it home, and probably never off the island. Since then, many of the sailors’ bones have been found on that remote patch of land. And now we can lay some of them to rest at last.
The identification of James Fitzjames was made by tracking down known descendants and relatives of the crewmembers, and comparing their DNA to that obtained from the bones found on King William Island.
A sample from a descendant of Fitzjames was a successful match with DNA from a tooth from one of the more than 400 bones recovered to date. The identification is only the second ever made of Franklin remains on King William Island.
The jawbone matched to that tooth is what reveals at least some of the fate of Fitzjames. Notches on the bone are consistent with butchering – suggesting that the captain’s crew members, likely starving and sick, made what use they could of his corpse – they ate him.
“This shows that he predeceased at least some of the other sailors who perished, and that neither rank nor status was the governing principle in the final desperate days of the expedition as they strove to save themselves,” says archaeologist Douglas Stenton of the University of Waterloo in Canada.
This is consistent with reports at the time: British expeditions mounted to find the lost explorers in the 1850s received reports from Inuit residents of King William Island that the survivors’ remains showed signs of cannibalism.
Later research conducted in the 1990s revealed the veracity of the reports: bones from at least four of the individuals recovered from the archaeological had evidence of being butchered.
But this is not a salacious tale of wrongdoing, or scandal, but of men at the very limit of their endurance. They were likely starving, and ill, having been deprived of adequate nutrition for quite some time. Food was scarce. In such circumstances, cannibalism can be a last resort for survival.
“It demonstrates the level of desperation that the Franklin sailors must have felt to do something they would have considered abhorrent,” says anthropologist Robert Park of the University of Waterloo.
“Ever since the expedition disappeared into the Arctic 179 years ago there has been widespread interest in its ultimate fate, generating many speculative books and articles and, most recently, a popular television miniseries which turned it into a horror story with cannibalism as one of its themes. Meticulous archaeological research like this shows that the true story is just as interesting, and that there is still more to learn.”
With this research, Fitzjames becomes the first identified victim of cannibalism from the Franklin expedition. His recovered bones have been placed in a cairn, along with the others, and marked with a memorial plaque at the site of their deaths.
Stenton and his colleagues urge any other descendants of the expedition crew members to contact them to try and identify the rest of the remains.
You can read more about Fitzjames in James Fitzjames: The Mystery Man of the Franklin Expedition by William Battersby. You can read more about HMS Erebus in Erebus: The Story of a Ship by Michael Palin. And you can read more about the Franklin expedition in Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition by Owen Beattie and John Geiger.
The research has been published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.