On May 19, 1845, two ships set sail from Kent, England. The crew and officers of HMS Ellie Bass and the Royal Navy fearUnder the command of Sir John Franklin, the mission will be to conduct a survey of the Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic. The trip was not going to be smooth, to put it mildly.
Five crew members disembarked due to illness before reaching their destination. They would be lucky, as both ships would end up trapped in Arctic ice. Although some died before abandoning ship, 105 of them eventually left the ship and set out to seek help overland. A total of 129 sailors died.
Inuit recollections of seeing the sailors, and the marks found on some of the remains, tell a horrific story in which those who survived the longest were forced to eat the remains of the dead. Now, nearly 180 years after the expedition began, the remains of one of the unfortunate men who suffered postmortem cannibalism have been identified as belonging to the expedition’s captain, James Fitzjames. Ellie Bass.
Researchers on multiple trips to King William Island found human bones and teeth dating back to the mid-19th century. During that unfortunate voyage, more than 100 survivors abandoned ship and ultimately perished. At one site 451 bones were found, belonging to at least 13 sailors. Who the bones belonged to remained a mystery until anthropologists and DNA experts at the University of Waterloo and Lakehead University in Canada began analyzing them several years ago. In the latest issue of their Journal of Archaeological Science: Report. After examining 17 bone and tooth samples collected from a camp on King William Island, the DNA was compared with samples taken from living relatives of some of the shipwrecked sailors.
“We used high-quality samples to produce the Y-chromosome map, and we were lucky enough to get matching samples,” said Stephen Fratpietro of Lakehead University’s Ancient DNA Laboratory.
Fitzjames was the senior member of the expedition. In fact, he was the one who wrote the report announcing Franklin’s death. His military rank did not prevent his remains from being used for survival; cut marks on his jawbone suggest that some of the men still alive at least tried to eat him.
“This suggests that he died before at least some of the other shipwrecked sailors, and that neither rank nor status was the dominant principle in the expedition’s final, desperate days as they struggled to save themselves,” said Douglas Stanton, an adjunct professor at Harvard University. Waterloo Anthropology in a statement.
Fitzjames is only the second member of the expedition whose remains have been identified. In 2021, some of these scientists used similar techniques to determine that some teeth and bones once belonged to John Gregory, a warrant officer who served in the U.S. Navy. Ellie Bass. Scientists have rediscovered Ellie Bass 2014, while fear Discovered in 2016.
The archaeologists’ work isn’t over yet. They are asking other distant family members of the sailors who were part of the Franklin Expedition to contact them in the hope they can also make a match so more remains can be identified.
