In May 1845, Captain John Franklin led 134 crew members aboard the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror on a mission from Britain. Equipped with ample provisions and advanced technology, their goal was to chart the elusive Northwest Passage, a sea route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific across the northern edge of North America that had captivated European explorers for over three centuries. However, Franklin’s expedition fell far short of its ambitious objective and became one of the most tragic Arctic explorations in history, with no survivors among the crew. Nearly two centuries later, researchers continue to piece together the grim final moments of the ill-fated expedition.
On April 25, 1848, HMS Erebus captain James Fitzjames recorded the expedition’s last known written account near Victory Point on King William Island in Canada’s Arctic. Fitzjames reported that both ships had become icebound and abandoned. Franklin himself had died the previous year, along with 8 officers and 15 crew members. The remaining survivors planned to march southward the next day under the leadership of HMS Terror captain Francis Crozier. Many did not make it far.
In the early 1990s, archaeologists uncovered the remains of 13 expedition members at a site about 50 miles south of Victory Point on King William Island. Four of these skeletons bore knife marks, indicating that their bodies had been cannibalized by fellow crew members in a desperate bid for survival.
Breakthrough Identification in 2024
In 2024, a research team led by Douglas Stenton, an archaeologist at the University of Waterloo, made a groundbreaking discovery: the identification of Captain James Fitzjames. By comparing Y-chromosome markers from a direct paternal descendant of Fitzjames’ great-grandfather with those extracted from a jawbone bearing knife marks found on King William Island, Stenton’s team confirmed the identity of one of the victims.
Stenton remarked that Fitzjames’ rank and status had not shielded him from the horrors of the expedition’s collapse. “It’s difficult to imagine what these men endured,” Stenton said. “I believe primal survival instincts overrode their inhibitions, but tragically, it did not save them. It only prolonged their suffering.”
Research Article Details
The findings were published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports:
Douglas R. Stenton, Stephen Fratpietro, Robert W. Park, Identification of a senior officer from Sir John Franklin’s Northwest Passage expedition, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, Volume 59, 2024, Article 104748, ISSN 2352-409X,
