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Another sad chapter in the enduring tragedy of the John Franklin expedition has come to an end with the discovery of a prominent crew member through DNA analysis. Scientists have also confirmed that the officer was cannibalised.
Scientists Douglas R Stenton, Stephen Fratpietro and Robert W Park from the University of Waterloo and Lakehead University, both in Canada, identified the remains of James Fitzjames with the help of DNA from a living relative, a statement by the University of Waterloo.
Fitzjames was a senior officer on the HMS Erebus. It, and the HMS Terror, were two ships that had left Britain in 1845 to search for the fabled Northwest Passage. They never made it back.
The ships, with 129 officers and men, were led by Captain Sir John Franklin. An experienced explorer of the poles, he had already led two previous expeditions to find the Passage.
The Pacific and Atlantic Oceans are connected through the Strait of Magellan and the Drake Passage at the southern end of South America. The human-constructed Panama Canal also connects the two bodies of water. But there is a third route between the two: the fabled Northwest Passage in the far north.
“The Northwest Passage, which connects the Atlantic and Pacific through the Arctic Ocean in Canada, has regularly been ice-free in the summertime in recent years, partly due to rising global temperatures,” a recent statement by the New England Aquarium in Boston, Massachusetts notes.
The Franklin Expedition sailed up to what is now the Arctic coast of Canada. There, the ships were trapped by the ice flow down the McClintock Channel, according to the Royal Museums Greenwich (RMG).
The ships tried to find a way out of the ice, but all in vain. A number of the men died. John Franklin himself died in June 1847. “Still trapped in the ice, Erebus and Terror drifted south until Captain Crozier ordered their abandonment in April 1848,” the RMG notes. Francis Crozier was second in command to John Franklin.
The 105 surviving shipmen now embarked on a ‘death march’ south, towards the Great Fish River. “Weakened by starvation and scurvy, most of them died on the march along the west coast of King William Island,” according to the RMG.
“In April of 1848 James Fitzjames of HMS Erebus helped lead 105 survivors from their ice-trapped ships in an attempt to escape the Arctic. None would survive. Since the mid-19th century, remains of dozens of them have been found around King William Island, Nunavut,” the Waterloo statement noted.
Fitzjames was identified after DNA discovered at the King William Island site matched a DNA sample from a living descendant. The site contains 451 bones from at least 13 Franklin Expedition sailors.
“We worked with a good quality sample that allowed us to generate a Y-chromosome profile, and we were lucky enough to obtain a match,” said Stephen Fratpietro of Lakehead’s Paleo-DNA lab was quoted as saying in the statement.
Fitzjames is just the second of those 105 to be positively identified, as per the statement. John Gregory, engineer aboard HMS Erebus, was identified in 2021.
But a gorier discovery was also made. Fitzjames’ mandible bore multiple cut marks. This demonstrated that after his death, his body was subject to cannibalism.
“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,” said Stenton.
A number of search and rescue expeditions, which had been sent to find out what happened to the Franklin Expedition, had been told by local Inuit that they had found evidence that the survivors had resorted to cannibalism.
In an example of the racism of the times, the Inuit were not believed as Western society could not accept that Europeans could resort to cannibalism since it was considered morally reprehensible in 19th century Europe.
“It demonstrates the level of desperation that the Franklin sailors must have felt to do something they would have considered abhorrent,” said Dr. Robert Park, Waterloo anthropology professor.
Identification of a Senior Officer from Sir John Franklin's Northwest Passage Expedition by Stenton, Fratpietro and Park was published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.