Dr. Douglas Stenton, anthropologist and adjunct assistant professor at the University of Waterloo, excavating the bones of Franklin Expedition sailors at Erebus Bay. The findings are part of a long-running effort by Dr. Stenton and Dr. Robert Park to learn the fates of the sailors. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO - University of Waterloo
The ghosts of the Franklin expedition are coming in from the cold.
Researchers say they have identified the remains of four members of the doomed expedition that set out from England in May, 1845, in search of the Northwest Passage and later perished in the Canadian Arctic.
Genetic material extracted from bones and teeth of close to two dozen individuals found at various sites in Nunavut that are associated with the expedition have yielded four positive matches when compared to DNA provided by their living relatives.
The results represent the most significant step to date in putting names to the remains of former expedition members. Researchers who conducted the work said they hope to improve their understanding of the expedition’s tragic end.
“We didn’t know exactly what we were going to find,” said Douglas Stenton, an adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Waterloo and former heritage director for the Government of Nunavut. “We thought pinpointing where some of these men died might shed light on events that took place on the expedition.”
Dr. Stenton and collaborator Robert Park, a fellow anthropologist at Waterloo, were previously involved in the identifications of two other expedition members through genetic means. Their latest finds, announced on Wednesday, now bring the total to six.
The results are documented in two separate studies published by the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports and The Polar Record.
The work is part of a long-running effort by Dr. Stenton and Dr. Park to learn the fates of Franklin expedition members.
It has long been known that 129 officers and crewmen left Disko Bay, Greenland in July, 1845, where the expedition commanded by British explorer Sir John Franklin stopped for supplies. They were travelling on two ships, the HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus.
The expedition spent its first winter on Beechy Island, where three crew members died and were buried. By September, 1846, the ships were locked in ice in Victoria Strait and never managed to escape. Franklin was among those who died over the next year and a half.
By April, 1848, the expedition’s remaining 105 survivors abandoned the two ships in a desperate attempt to trek southward over land.
Since then, human remains thought to belong to expedition members have turned up on King William Island and the Adelaide Peninsula in Nunavut.
A painting depicts the HMS Erebus.Supplied
Starting in 2013, Dr. Stenton and Dr. Park obtained permission to relocate and gather previously reported human remains associated with the expedition and obtain samples for DNA testing. The remains were later reburied in the locations where they were found.
In total, some 50 samples were obtained from at least 23 individuals.
“We had to create an archaeological database of DNA,” Dr. Stenton said.
Researchers then sought to match the DNA with people who share common ancestors with those who were on the expedition.
The pool of such people is limited, because genetic relationships are typically established using mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited maternally, or using Y-chromosome DNA, which is passed from father to son. That meant researchers needed to find individuals who were descended from close relatives of Franklin expedition members in one of two ways: through a series of all-male or all-female descendants.
The staring point was often family members who were named recipients of any money owed to the expedition members once they were officially declared dead in 1854.
The new discoveries were initiated by Kaitlyn Gorsalitz, a Saskatoon-based software developer-turned amateur genealogist who began her quest to find relatives of Franklin expedition members in 2024.
A forensic facial reconstruction drawing of David Young by forensic artist Diana Trepkov.Diana Trepkov/Supplied
Because a boy’s jawbone was among the recovered remains, Ms. Gorsalitz said she decided first to try to locate relatives of the four ship’s boys that were known to be on the expedition. This ultimately yielded a connection to an individual with a Y-chromosome match to David Young, a ship’s boy on the Erebus.
Ms. Gorsalitz also tried her hand at solving an outstanding mystery related to the expedition. In 1859, an expedition found the remains of a sailor with papers belonging to Harry Peglar, a petty officer on the Terror. However, the body was dressed as a ship’s steward, which was not Peglar’s job when the expedition set sail.
This fact sparked a long debate about whether the body actually belonged to Peglar, or if someone else died while carrying his papers, possibly to give to a family member if rescued. However, a DNA match to those remains now show unequivocally that they belong to Peglar.
Dr. Stenton speculated that at some point during the voyage it’s possible Peglar had been demoted, a disciplinary measure that was not uncommon in the Royal Navy at the time.
As part of the process of identifying Peglar, Ms. Gorsalitz also looked for relatives of other stewards on the expedition. This led to another match, this time helping to identify John Bridgens of the Erebus.
In this case, the match came through the maternal line via a half-sister of Bridgens down to the mother of Rich Preston, a BBC journalist who provided his DNA to the project in the form of cheek swab.
Mr. Preston said that until the project contacted him he had no idea his family had a connection to the Franklin expedition. Even after he agreed to participate, he said he had no expectations that it would lead to anything.
“To be honest, I kind of forgot about it until I heard back from the team saying we’ve got a match,” Mr. Preston said.
Another sailor, Willian Orren of the Erebus, was also among the newly identified sailors.
None of the bones identified in Wednesday’s announcement show signs of cannibalism – something that was found to be the case with some other Franklin expedition remains.
Mr. Preston said that before the team briefed him on their findings the possibility that his ancestor may have been cannibalized was high on his mind.
When that proved not to be the case, he said, he was left with another question.
“If he wasn’t one of the ones who was eaten, was he one of the ones doing the eating?”
Apart from Peglar, whose remains were found in a different location from the others, all those identified by genetic methods so far were from the Erebus. This has raised questions about whether the two crews split up after the abandonment of the ships.
John Geiger, chief executive officer of The Royal Canadian Geographical Society and an author who has written about the expedition, said it would be hard to overstate the value of the new findings.
“It not only helps to reconstruct details of the Franklin mass disaster, which has long been enveloped in mystery, but in the process it restores a degree of humanity to those lost,” he said.
For his part, Mr. Preston said the experience has fuelled his own passion as a self-described history nerd and made him want to learn more about the fate of the Franklin expedition.
“Often we don’t feel a physical connection to these stories of the past,” he said. “And now I have one.”