Researchers find cannibalized victim of 19th-century Arctic voyage

Into the frozen fray they went, explorer Sir John Franklin and his crew of 128 men, sailing from England in 1845 in search of the Northwest Passage. And there, in the unforgiving expanse of the Canadian Arctic, they perished. No one knows exactly what happened.

Now, with the help of a sophisticated DNA-matching method, researchers have identified the remains of Capt. James Fitzjames, the expedition's third-highest-ranking officer, who died sometime in 1848 as he and other crew members tried to escape the ice.

Fitzjames is the second person to be identified from the expedition. And he is the first member of the crew definitively known to have been the victim of cannibalism.

Remains and artifacts from the doomed voyage are scattered around King William Island and the Adelaide Peninsula. Each unearthed clue leads to renewed fascination with a disaster that captured the 19th-century imagination.

"Every new discovery sort of closes a chapter and then opens a new page," said Douglas Stenton, an archaeologist at the University of Waterloo who published his findings last month in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

Stenton and his team identified Fitzjames by matching the DNA of one of his direct descendants to a tooth left behind on King William Island, where Fitzjames and a dozen others huddled after fleeing two icebound ships.

In 2021, the researchers identified Warrant Officer John Gregory with the same method. "Although the remains that we studied from the archaeological sites were exposed for more than a century, there was sufficient DNA preserved to allow us to establish baseline information for comparison," Stenton said.

In Fitzjames' case, the researchers were fortunate to have a jawbone with teeth, because DNA in dental roots tends be especially well preserved.

Fitzjames left the last known written message from the Franklin expedition, the Victory Point Note, which announced that 24 people had died and the surviving crew were abandoning the ships after spending 19 months stuck in ice.

Just what happened in the treacherous months that followed remains a matter of speculation. But the consumption of human flesh appears to have been part of the crew's grim reality. Local Inuit people told explorer John Rae that they had seen evidence of desecration. When news of the cannibalism reached the English public in 1854, Rae was denounced by novelist Charles Dickens at the urging of Franklin's widow.

Cut marks in Fitzjames' jawbone indicate a posthumous dismemberment, probably with a knife, Stenton said. Of the 13 distinct remains found at the King William Island site, four showed signs of cannibalism.

"The subject of cannibalism overwhelmed some people's thinking about what went on," Stenton said. Like the Donner Party that perished in the Sierra Nevada in California at almost exactly the same time, the Franklin expedition became known chiefly for its macabre ending rather than for any of the noble aims that may have animated it.

Franklin's ships, the HMS Erebus and Terror, were discovered in 2014 and 2016, but much remains unknown, especially about what caused the men to perish despite their extensive experience and preparation.

"There's nothing to compare it with," Stenton said. In an earlier paper, he and a colleague calculated that the mortality rate for the next-deadliest British expedition to the Arctic, led by Sir Richard Collinson and lasting more than five years, was only about 11%.

"It was an anomaly, what happened to this expedition," said Ken McGoogan, an explorer who has written six books about the Arctic. "It was the worst exploration disaster in Arctic history."

McGoogan believes that the men succumbed to trichinosis, a parasitic infection, after eating insufficiently cooked polar bear meat. Stenton is not convinced by that explanation. Others have suggested lead poisoning. "There's so many things that could have contributed to this," Stenton said.

The fate of the Franklin expedition was popularized by Dan Simmons' 2007 novel, "The Terror," in which the crew is hounded by a bloodthirsty beast. In its 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.

A Dutch woman, Fabienne Tetteroo, became fascinated by Fitzjames after watching the show. Deciding to rehabilitate the explorer's reputation, she began graduate work in naval history and is writing her own biography of Fitzjames. She used a 1924 book, "The Story of the Gambiers" to track down a living Fitzjames descendant: a British furniture dealer named Nigel Gambier who has an uninterrupted lineage back to Fitzjames on his father's side (he and the captain are second cousins five times removed).

Last year, Tetteroo shared the discovery with Stenton, who took a DNA swab from Gambier and matched it to the genetic material from the Fitzjames tooth.

"I'm sorry he met such a tough ending," Gambier told a Canadian news agency, referring to his long lost cousin. Stenton said he was glad to bring a "measure of closure" to Fitzjames' descendants. But, he added, "there really isn't any closure for the Franklin expedition."