'It went horribly wrong': DNA analysis sheds light on lost Arctic expedition's grisly end

An engraving shows the end of Sir John Franklin's ill-fated Arctic expedition based on a painting by British artist W. Thomas Smith exhibited in the Royal Academy in 1896. (Historia / Shutterstock via CNN Newsource)

Archaeologists have identified the cannibalized remains of a senior officer who perished during an ill-fated 19th-century Arctic expedition, offering insight into its lost crew’s tragic and grisly final days.

By comparing DNA from the bones with a sample from a living relative, the new research revealed the skeletal remains belonged to James Fitzjames, captain of the HMS Erebus. The Royal Navy vessel and its sister ship, the HMS Terror, had been under the command of Sir John Franklin, who led the voyage to explore unnavigated areas of the Northwest Passage. The treacherous shortcut across the top of North America meanders through the islands of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.

In April 1848, exactly three years after the vessels departed England, the expedition crew abandoned the ice-trapped ships following the death of Franklin and 23 other men. Fitzjames helped lead 105 survivors on a long retreat; the men pulled boats on sledges over land in the hope of finding safety. However, the men all lost their lives during the arduous journey although the exact circumstances of their deaths remain a mystery.

“It went horribly wrong, horribly quickly,” said archaeologist Doug Stenton, an adjunct professor of anthropology at University of Waterloo in Canada, who led the research.

A different team of researchers in 1993 found 451 bones thought to belong to at least 13 of Franklin’s sailors at a site on King William Island in Canada’s Nunavut territory. The remains identified as Fitzjames’ in the new study, published September 24 in the Journal of Archaeological Science, were among them.

Accounts gathered from local Inuit people in the 1850s suggested that some of the crew members resorted to cannibalism. While these reports were initially met with disbelief in England, subsequent investigations conducted over the past four decades found a significant number of bones had cut marks that offered silent evidence of the expedition’s catastrophic end.

Identifying Fitzjames’ remains makes a tragedy that has long gripped the collective British and Canadian psyche more personal and gave some closure to the families involved, said anthropologist and historian Claire Warrior, a senior content curator at the National Maritime Museum in London, which houses many items from the expedition. “This is a person who had a life and family and whose words we have, … (and he was) vivacious, enthusiastic and a joker,” said Warrior, who was not involved in the new study.

DNA analysis and a direct descendant

Researchers unearthed Fitzjames’ remains in an area now known as Erebus Bay, located 80 kilometres (50 miles) south of Victory Point, where the crew came ashore seeking refuge and escape. The circumstances suggest Fitzjames died a matter of weeks after his departure from Victory Point and he was possibly already in poor health, according to the study.

The bones excavated at the site were returned to King William Island in 1994 and interred in a memorial cairn. However, in 2013, Stenton was part of a team that went to the island to take samples of the remains for DNA analysis. The researchers focused primarily on teeth, which is where fragile DNA is most likely to be preserved.

“We have about 42 or so archaeological DNA profiles,” said Stenton, who is a retired director of heritage for the Nunavut Department of Culture and Heritage. “As new descendant DNA becomes available, we compare it with the archaeological DNA profiles.”

In early 2024, Stenton’s team reached out to Nigel Gambier, who had been identified by a biographer of Fitzjames as a direct descendant.

“I was delighted to help. The effort that has gone in by so many different people to try and uncover what happened. I find it really intriguing, and I have a personal stake in what happened,” Gambier, who lives in eastern England, told CNN.

Gambier had long been aware of his distant cousin Fitzjames, who was an accomplished Royal Navy officer before joining Franklin’s expedition. After Gambier sent a swab to Stenton’s coauthor Stephen Fratpietro, who is technical manager at the Paleo-DNA Laboratory at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, the team analyzed DNA from Gambier’s Y chromosome, which tracks the male line. The scientists found the genetic information matched that of the archaeological sample.

Fitzjames is the second expedition member to be identified from descendant DNA. The first was Erebus’ chief engineer John Gregory, whose remains were found at the same site. Stenton and his team linked Gregory’s DNA to a living relative in 2021, the study noted. However, unlike Fitzjames’ remains, Gregory’s bones did not display any cut marks suggestive of cannibalism.

At Erebus Bay, in addition to Fitzjames, at least three other men of the 13 dead crew members documented at the site showed telltale signs of having been cannibalized.

“It makes me realize just how desperate those poor people must have been to have to go and eat one of their own,” Gambier said. “How would you know how you’d behave yourself? If you’re faced with starvation, then you might be driven to it.”

More clues left to unravel

The discovery of Fitzjames, a high-ranking officer, as the first identified expedition member who had been cannibalized showed how status fell away in the struggle for survival during the expedition’s end days, Stenton said.

Warrior of the National Maritime Museum agreed: “So we now know that it was an officer because of cut marks on his jawbone. I think that bears testimony to the fact that these were desperate circumstances because the Navy’s a really hierarchical beast.”

Further identification of remains via DNA could shed some light on the mystery of exactly what unfolded, according to Warrior. For example, she said, it would be interesting to know whether the remains found belonged to older or younger men or came from HMS Erebus rather than HMS Terror.

“Can we surmise anything that tells us how they might have died?” she said.

Canada’s national parks service and the Inuit communities found the final resting place of the HMS Erebus in 2014 and the HMS Terror in 2016. The fate of Franklin’s lost expedition is likely to remain a source of fascination, but piecing together the details of what happened will require a lot more information, including from the two shipwrecks.

The doomed expedition has inspired books and dramas such as “The Terror,” a 2018 television series based on Dan Simmons’ 2007 novel of the same name.

“It lives in the imagination, as much as it does in reality,” Warrior said. “Polar regions are extreme and dangerous places to be, where nature can still make us feel small.”