The lost expedition of John Franklin is a classic tale of traveling gone wrong. When the British Royal Navy officer set out from England with two ships in 1845, their goal was to forge a way through the Arctic Ocean to open up the Northwest Passage. Unfortunately, none of the 129 men who sailed out with the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror ever returned.
Reports from rescue missions, Inuit in the area and subsequent forensic and archaeological work on human and nonhuman remains have since pieced together part of the story, which includes ships stuck in winter ice, food gone bad, a desperate trip overland, and the likelihood of cannibalism.
Now, recent genetic work in a study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, has identified some of the bones discovered on King William Island in Nunavut as those of James Fitzjames, a commanding officer on the expedition, who had apparently been cannibalized.
“I can’t possibly put myself in that situation where I could imagine what they were going through,” says Douglas Stenton, an archaeologist with the University of Waterloo in Canada.
