[Regnum] Scientists have established the identity of the sailor eaten by members of the lost Franklin expedition, which set off from Greenhithe, England, in 1845. The remains belong to officer James Fitzjames, writes the Daily Mail.
Royal Navy officer John Franklin set out on his fourth expedition on the steam-powered sailing ships Terror and Erebus to find the Northwest Passage, a navigable sea route between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans through the Arctic.
The expedition perished - both ships were stuck in the Canadian Arctic ice. Of the 105 sailors who abandoned their ships two years later and tried to walk to a trading post on the mainland, none survived. The details of this tragedy are still being established.
In 2013, a burial site containing the remains of at least 13 members of the expedition was found on King William Island. The bones contained cut marks indicating that the remaining members had eaten the flesh of the deceased. In particular, such marks were found on a jawbone with the remains of teeth, from which DNA samples were taken.
It has now been established that it belonged to Officer James Fitzjames, who replaced Captain Franklin on the Erebus, who died in June 1847 during his third winter in the ice.
According to study participant Dr Douglas Stanton from the University of Waterloo, in the last desperate days of the expedition, people were guided by neither rank nor status in their efforts to save themselves.
"It demonstrates the level of desperation Franklin's sailors must have felt in committing what they would have considered disgusting," added Dr Robert Park of the University of Waterloo, speaking about cannibalism.
The Inuit, the indigenous people of the Canadian Arctic, reported cannibalism among sailors as early as the 1850s, when the British learned of the expedition's fate. Scientists only proved the facts of cannibalism in 1997. Divers found the wrecks of the sunken ships even later: the Erebus in 2014, and the Terror in 2016.
In 2021, the first remains belonging to an expedition member were identified. DNA samples taken from a descendant helped confirm the identity of Erebus engineer John Gregory, who died in 1848 on King William Island, 45 miles south of his ship.