Explorer Sir John Franklin and his crew of 128 sailed from England in 1845 in search of the Northwest Passage and entered the icy fray. And they perished in the unrelenting expanse of Canada's Arctic. No one knows exactly what happened.
Now, with the help of sophisticated DNA matching, researchers have identified the remains of Captain James Fitzjames, the expedition's third-highest ranking officer. He died sometime in 1848 while trying to break out of the ice with the rest of his crew.
Fitzjames is the second member of the expedition to be identified. And he is the first member of the crew explicitly known to be the victim of cannibalism.
King William Island and the Adelaide Peninsula are dotted with wreckage and artifacts from that fateful voyage. Each clue unearthed leads to a new fascination with the disaster that captured the imagination of the 19th century.
“A new discovery is kind of closing a chapter and opening a new page,” said Douglas Stenton, an archaeologist at the University of Waterloo who published the findings in the Journal of Archaeological Science last month.
Dr. Stenton and his team recovered the tooth and one of his lineal descendants left behind on King William Island, where Fitzjames and a dozen others were huddled after escaping from two ice-bound ships. Fitzjames was identified through DNA matching.
In 2021, researchers used the same method to identify Warrant Officer John Gregory. “The sites we studied from archaeological sites had been exposed for more than a century, but had enough DNA preserved to establish baseline information for comparison,” Dr. Stenton said. Ta.
Fitzjames was lucky to have a jawbone with teeth. This is because the DNA in tooth roots tends to be particularly well preserved.
Fitzjames left the Victory Point Note, the last known written message from the Franklin Expedition. In it, it was announced that 24 people died and the surviving crew would abandon ship after spending 19 months in the ice.
What happened in the dangerous months that followed remains a matter of speculation. However, the consumption of human flesh appears to have been part of the crew's harsh reality. Local Inuit people told explorer John Ray that they had seen evidence of desecration. When news of the cannibalism reached the British public in 1854, Ray was denounced by novelist Charles Dickens at the urging of Franklin's widow.
Dr Stenton said cuts in Fitzjames' jawbone indicated that he had been cut postmortem, possibly with a knife. Of the 13 distinct remains found at the King William Island site, four showed signs of cannibalism.
“The theme of cannibalism has overwhelmed some people's ideas about what happened,” Dr. Stenton said. Like the Donner Party, which perished in California's Sierra Nevada around the same time, the Franklin Expedition became known primarily for its macabre ending rather than the noble purpose that animated it.
Franklin's ships, HMS Erebus and Terror, were discovered in 2014 and 2016, but it remains unclear what caused them to die, especially despite their extensive experience and preparation. There are many.
“There's nothing to compare it to,” Dr. Stenton says. In an earlier paper, he and his colleagues calculated that the second-deadliest Arctic expedition after Britain, led by Sir Richard Collinson and lasting more than five years, had a mortality rate of only about 11 percent.
“It was an extraordinary situation. What happened to this expedition,” said explorer Ken McGoogan, who has written six books about the Arctic. “It was the worst exploration disaster in Arctic history.”
McGoogan believes the men died of trichinosis, a parasitic infection, after eating undercooked polar bear meat. Dr. Stenton is not convinced by that explanation. Some suggest lead poisoning. “There are many things that could have contributed to this,” Dr. Stenton said.
The fate of the Franklin Expedition was made famous by Dan Simmons' 2007 novel The Terror, in which the crew is chased by a bloodthirsty beast. In the opening pages, Fitzjames is referred to by a rival as Franklin's “rosy-cheeked, lisping pet poodle.” In 2018, AMC turned “The Terror” into a hit miniseries.
Dutch woman Fabienne Tetterau was fascinated by Fitzjames after watching the show. Determined to restore her reputation as an explorer, she begins graduate school in naval history and is writing a biography of Fitzjames. She used her 1924 book, The Gambier Family Story, to track down Fitzjames' living descendants. A British furniture merchant named Nigel Gambier has an unbroken lineage going back to his father's Fitzjames (he and the Captain are also cousins five times). (deleted).
Last year, Ms Tetterow shared her findings with Dr Stenton, who took a DNA swab from Mr Gambier and matched it with genetic material from Fitzjames' tooth.
“I'm sorry he met such a harsh end,” Gambhir told the Canadian Press, referring to his long-lost cousin. Dr Stenton said he was pleased to be able to bring “some closure” to Fitzjames' descendants. But, he added, “the Franklin expedition is never really over.”