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Cannibalism on the ice, this is how John Franklin's expedition ended

2024-09-29 17:12:00, Blog CNA

What happened to British captain Sir John Franklin and his 129-man crew, around 1850, when they disappeared into the Arctic ice without a trace? Today, DNA analysis has made it possible to identify those who died as victims of cannibalism.

Sir John Franklin's adventure, one of the most tragic in the history of polar exploration, began in London in 1845. Franklin's mission, now on his third polar expedition, was to brave the icy waters of the North Atlantic, beyond the Arctic Circle, to find a way to Asia, the famous Northwest Passage.

The expedition, aboard the sailing ships Erebus and Terror, had a duration of three years, but at the end of July 1845 (a few months after departure) the ships entered Baffin Bay (Canada) and from that moment disappeared between the Arctic Ice . Over the years, various English expeditions followed each other to search for the missing crew. During one of these missions a letter was found, dated April 1848, in which Captain James Fitzjames, commander of the Erebus, wrote that the ships had been abandoned on April 22. Later, the remains of many crew members were found scattered across various locations in the Canadian Arctic, such as King William Island.

Researchers, analyzing the skeletons of those who participated in the expedition, had already found in the past marks left by the same type of knives supplied to Franklin's men, this proves that the survivors practiced acts of cannibalism out of desperation. But today, thanks to DNA analysis, it was revealed for the first time who the cannibalized remains found by the expedition belonged to: Captain James Fitzjames was identified as the first known victim of cannibalism among members of the expedition.

Douglas Stenton's team from the University of Waterloo in Canada published a study in the Journal of Archaeological Science that explains how Captain Fitzjames was identified.

Analysis by bioarchaeologist Anne Keenleyside also reveals cut marks on the lower jaw in many of the remains found. Further evidence that some of the last survivors, who were trying to escape from land, ended up eating some of the body parts of Fitzjames and the other sailors. This research confirms the importance of the evidence of the indigenous Inuit populations. The natives had reported, in October 1854, to John Rae, one of the most respected explorers of the time, engaged in the search for survivors, that they had seen a group of starving whites near the mouth of the Black River (North Canada) " four winters ago", so it falls in 1850.

According to the Inuit, those men showed signs of cannibalism, so much so that Rae wrote: "The expedition met a fate so terrible that the human mind can hardly imagine. Our countrymen were driven by hunger to choose the last, horrible alternative of staying alive, cannibalism"./ CNA