Scurvy, hypothermia and cannibalism: DNA sheds light on Northwest Passage expedition victim | Canada

FFor more than a century, the bones of sailors who joined polar explorer Sir John Franklin’s Northwest Passage expedition have lain scattered across the rocky shores of an Arctic island. Weathered and bleached, nearly a quarter of the anonymous remains bore the marks of cannibalism, reflecting a grim end to the famous expedition.

Today, one of those men has been identified as Captain James Fitzjames of London, a discovery that came after years of study by researchers at two Canadian universities who isolated his DNA from a single molar and traced it back to living relatives.

Fitzjames, a member of the Royal Navy, had already sailed to Syria, Egypt, China and the Americas before serving as captain of HMS Erebus, which, alongside HMS Terror, set sail from England in 1845, hoping to sail the Northwest Passage. This famous, closely monitored expedition ended in disaster, with all 129 crew members succumbing to the harsh Arctic elements.

Between 1847 and 1859, at least 36 expeditions were launched to search for Franklin’s lost ships, but all ended in failure. It was only when researchers turned to Inuit oral history that they were able to locate the final resting place of the Erebus and Terror in the last decade.

The remains of the crew members were found much earlier at two locations on the southwest coast of King William Island, Nunavut. Search teams found boats attached to large sleds, apparently heading toward the Back River.

“What was the plan after the ships deserted? Did they travel as a single group? How do we make sense of the bodies of 20 sailors in this particular location? There are still so many questions and we are trying to better understand what happened,” said Douglas Stenton, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Waterloo and lead author of the study. “It’s challenging and it’s fascinating; no other British polar exploration has suffered such a catastrophic loss as the Franklin expedition.”

It was Fitzjames, captain of the Erebus, who helped write the expedition’s last known message, a note discovered at Victory Point on King William Island that read: “Sir John Franklin died June 11, 1847, and the total loss by death on the expedition to date has been nine officers and 15 men… (We) sail tomorrow the 26th for Backs Fish River.”

The site where Fitzjames and at least a dozen others perished was located by researchers in the 1860s after hearing Inuit accounts that survivors had resorted to cannibalism – news that rocked Victorian England. That account was corroborated in the late 1990s by the late anthropologist Anne Keenleyside, who discovered human cut marks on nearly a quarter of the bones.

But until recently, no one knew who these individuals were, other than that they were members of the expedition. In 2013, Stenton and his team were given permission to collect remains from the site, including eight mandibles discovered by Keenleyside.

In 2017, following a major exhibition of the Franklin expedition in Greenwich, Stenton and his team asked potential relatives to donate DNA samples for their bioarchaeology project and were inundated with offers.

“For the purposes of our study, you have to have a very specific relationship. I think we have about 25 descendants so far whose genetic profiles we have obtained,” he said.

A molar from a mandible, marked with knife marks, matched one of those 25 bones, and the team quickly realized they held the remains of Captain James Fitzjames. The findings were published Tuesday in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

Fitzjames is only the second of these 105 to be positively identified: John Gregory, an engineer aboard the Erebus, was identified by the same team in 2021 after extracting 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 ships.

For Stenton, the latest discoveries bring a deeper human element to a journey shrouded in mystery and despair.

“It really shows the desperate conditions that they faced there,” he said. “What exactly happened there to bring them to that point? It was survival cannibalism and it was very desperate measures that some of the men took – and unfortunately it just prolonged their suffering. It’s an incredible level of desperation that they had to endure.”

Stenton says a “diagnostic” approach to the evidence has helped reshape the narratives surrounding the final days of the expedition.

Among these discrepancies, the Inuit oral tradition has proven “indisputable” in locating the two wrecks, and has succeeded where three dozen searches have failed. But other aspects of their testimony have been harder to corroborate.

“The Inuit account of the site (where Fitzjames’ remains were found) contained a very graphic description of cannibalistic activity: a huge pile of bones that had been broken up and boiled to extract the marrow,” Stenton said.

“We’re not the first archaeologists to be at this site. We’re the last. And there’s no evidence of that at the site, of bone fractures to extract marrow, or bone fragments – an ‘archaeological signature.’ These are things that can be difficult to try to reconcile. We’re not trying to prove anyone wrong. We’re just trying to understand what happened.”