For more than a century, the bones of sailors who joined polar explorer Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated Northwest Passage expedition lay scattered on the rocky shores of an Arctic island. Weatherbeaten and bleached, nearly a quarter of the anonymous remains bore the marks of cannibalism, reflecting a grim coda to the famed expedition.
Now, one of those men has been identified as Capt James Fitzjames from London, a discovery stemming from years of study by researchers at two Canadian universities, who isolated his DNA from a single molar and traced it to living relatives.
Fitzjames, a member of the Royal Navy, had previously sailed to Syria, Egypt, China and the Americas before serving as captain on HMS Erebus which, alongside HMS Terror, departed England in 1845, with the hope of traversing the Northwest Passage. The famed and closely watched expedition ended in disaster, with all 129 crew members succumbing to the hostile elements of the Arctic.
Between 1847 and 1859, at least 36 expeditions set out in search of Franklin’s lost ships, but all ended in failure. It wasn’t until researchers turned to Inuit oral history that they were able to locate the final resting place of the Erebus and the Terror in the past decade.
The remains of the crewmen were located much earlier at two sites on the south-west coast of King William Island, Nunavut. Search teams located boats lashed to large sleds, apparently bound for the Back River.
“What was the plan following the desertion of the ships? Did they travel as a single group? How do we understand the bodies of 20 sailors in this one spot? There are so many questions we still have and we’re trying to get a better understanding of what was happening,” said Douglas Stenton, adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Waterloo and lead author on the research. “It’s challenging and it’s fascinating; no other British polar exploration suffered such a catastrophic loss as the Franklin Expedition.”
It was Fitzjames, captain of the Erebus, who helped author the last known message from the expedition, a note discovered at Victory Point on King William Island that read: “Sir John Franklin died on the 11th of June 1847 and the total loss by deaths in the Expedition has been to this date nine officers and 15 men … [We] start on tomorrow 26th for Backs Fish River.”
The site where Fitzjames and at least a dozen others perished was located by searchers in the 1860s, who heard Inuit stories that the survivors resorted to cannibalism – news that rocked Victorian England. That testimony was given some support in the late 1990s by the late anthropologist Anne Keenleyside, who found marks consistent with human-made cuts on nearly a quarter of the bones.
But until recently, there was no idea who these individuals were, apart from the fact that they were members of the expedition. In 2013, Stenton and the team received permission to remove remains from the site, including eight mandibles discovered by Keenleyside.
In 2017, following a large exhibition of the Franklin expedition in Greenwich, Stenton and the team asked possible relatives to donate DNA samples for their bio-archaeology project and were inundated with offers.
“You have to be related in a very specific way for the purposes of our study. We have about, I think, 25 descendants so far that we’ve obtained genetic profiles from,” he said.
A molar from one mandible, etched with knife marks, proved a match with one of those 25 and the team soon realized they were holding the remains of Captain James Fitzjames. The results were published on Tuesday in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
Fitzjames is just the second of those 105 to be positively identified: John Gregory, an engineer aboard the Erebus, was identified by the same team in 2021 after they extracted DNA from his skull.
Recent excavations suggest that a combination of scurvy, hypothermia and possibly cannibalism killed the crew after they abandoned the two stranded vessels.
For Stenton, the latest findings provide a deeper human element to a voyage shrouded in mystery and despair.
“It just speaks to the desperate conditions that they faced at that site,” he said. “What exactly was going on at that site that brought them to that point? This was survival cannibalism and it was a very desperate measures that some of the men took – and sadly, it only prolonged their suffering. It’s an incredible level of desperation that they must have endured.”
Stenton says a “diagnostic” approach to the evidence has helped reshape narratives surrounding the end days of the expedition.
Among those discrepancies: Inuit oral history was “indisputable” in locating the site of the two wrecks, achieving success where three dozen search efforts fell short. But other aspects of their testimony have been more challenging to corroborate.
“The Inuit account of the site [where Fitzjames’s remains were found] had a very graphic description of cannibalistic activity: a huge pile of bones that had been broken and boiled for marrow,” said Stenton.
“We’re not the first archaeologists to be at that site. We’re the last ones. And there’s no evidence of that at the site, of breaking of bones for marrow, and no bone fragments – an ‘archeological signature’. These are the kinds of things that can be challenging to try and reconcile. We’re not about trying to prove somebody’s wrong. We’re just trying to understand what happened.”
