On May 19, 1845, two ships left Kent, England. Crew and officers of HMS Erebus and HMS Fearunder the command of Sir John Franklin, it was to carry out an expedition to map the Canadian Arctic’s Northwest Passage. The trip, to put it mildly, could not have gone well.
Before reaching their destination, five crew members abandoned the ship due to illness. They would be the lucky ones, as both ships would end up trapped in the Arctic ice. Although some died before leaving the ship, 105 of them eventually left the ships and went to get help on land. In all, 129 sailors lost their lives.
Memoirs from the Inuit who saw the sailors, and the marks found on some of the remains, tell a sad story, where those who lived too long were forced to eat the remains of the dead. Now, nearly 180 years after the voyage began, the remains of one of those unfortunate men killed by cannibals have been identified as James Fitzjames, the captain of the crew. Erebus.
Researchers have found human bones and teeth on some expeditions to King William Island, dating back to the mid-19th century. This is where more than 100 survivors of the ill-fated voyage fled after abandoning their stranded ships, and ultimately, where they died. Elsewhere, 451 bones were found, belonging to at least 13 sailors. Who those bones were remained a mystery, until anthropologists and DNA experts at the University of Waterloo and Lakehead University in Canada began analyzing them a few years ago. They published some of their findings in a recent issue of Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. After examining 17 bone and tooth samples, collected from one of the camps on King William Island, the DNA was compared to samples taken from living relatives of the other doomed sailors.
“We worked with a good quality sample that allowed us to generate a Y-chromosome profile, and we were lucky to find a match,” said Stephen Fratpietro of Lakehead University’s Paleo-DNA lab.
Fitzjames was the senior member of the expedition. In fact, he was the one who wrote the report announcing Franklin’s death. His rank did not prevent his remains from being used for life; the cuts on his jawbone show that some of these survivors tried to eat him.
“This shows that at least some of the sailors perished, and that rank or rank was not the governing principle in the last days of the voyage as they fought to save themselves,” said Douglas Stenton, a professor of intelligence. anthropology at Waterloo, in a statement.
Fitzjames is only the second member of this expedition whose remains have been identified. In 2021, some of the same scientists used the same method to find a tooth and bone that once belonged to John Gregory, a warrant officer who worked in the office. Erebus. Scientists have rediscovered the Erebus in 2014, when the Fear it was discovered in 2016.
Archaeologists are not finished. They have asked other distant family members of the sailors who were on the Franklin expedition to contact them, in the hope that they too will produce similar results that will allow more fossils to be found.
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