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The 1845 British polar expedition in search of a northwest passage through the Canadian Arctic under the command of Sir John Franklin resulted in the greatest loss of life event in the history of polar exploration. The names of the 129 officers and crew who sailed and died on the catastrophic voyage are known, but the identification of their skeletons found scattered along the route of their attempted escape is problematic. Here, we report DNA analyses from skeletal remains from King William Island, where the majority of the expedition fatalities occurred, and from a paternal descendant of a member of the expedition. A match was found between an archaeological sample and a presumed descendant sample using Y-chromosome haplotyping. We conclude that DNA and genealogical evidence confirm the identity of the remains as those of Warrant Officer John Gregory, Engineer, HMS Erebus. This is the first member of the 1845 Franklin expedition whose identity has been confirmed through DNA and genealogical analyses.

The southern Baffin Island chert provenance project was initiated in 2007 to investigate the effects on Palaeo-Eskimo mobility and technological organization of the differential distribution of chert sources in this area of the eastern Arctic. Initial characterization of chert artifacts and sources by secondary ion mass spectrometry and inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) indicated exploitation of both local inland and exotic chert sources by Palaeo-Eskimo toolmakers. Subsequent reanalysis of chert artifacts by ICP-MS demonstrates that data acquired using these techniques cannot be directly compared. ICP-MS trace element data collected from two primary chert sources documented in 2013 showed promise for characterizing these sources. Subsequent reanalysis of source samples demonstrates that initial results were affected by contamination during sample preparation at an external laboratory and should not be used in future studies.

On 22 April 1848, after three years in the Arctic, and 19 months spent ice-bound in northern Victoria Strait, the 105 surviving officers and crew of the Franklin Northwest Passage expedition deserted HMSErebusand HMSTerroras the first step of their escape plan. They assembled at a camp south of Victory Point on the northwest coast of King William Island and made the final preparations for the next step, a 400 km trek along the frozen seashores of King William Island and Adelaide Peninsula to the Back River. All of the men died before reaching their destination, and their remains have been found at 35 locations along the route of the retreat. These discoveries have played a central role in reenactments of events thought to have occurred during the failed attempt to reach the Back River and to the disastrous outcome of the expedition. This paper presents a summary of these findings and examines the criteria used to attribute them to the Franklin expedition. It is suggested that approximately one-third of the identifications have been based on information that is inadequate to confidently assign the human remains as those of Franklin expedition personnel.

Since the late nineteenth century, skeletal remains from members of the 1845 John Franklin Northwest Passage expedition have been the subject of osteological, biometric and, in modern times, isotopic analyses. These studies have been conducted to assess ancestry of the remains, evaluate morbidity and mortality on the expedition, and to weigh the relative importance of specific ailments, such as lead poisoning and scurvy, which some investigators have contended were significant factors in the deaths of all 129 men and, ultimately, in the disastrous failure of the expedition. The present study builds on, and adds a new dimension to past research by presenting the results of the first genetic analyses of skeletal remains from members of the expedition who perished following the desertion of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror in April 1848. A total of 39 tooth and bone samples were tested: 32 from four Erebus Bay archaeological sites, four from a site near Booth Point on the south coast of King William Island, two from Todd Island, south of Booth Point, and one from a site in Wilmot and Crampton Bay. DNA was successfully extracted and sequenced for 37 of the samples. The results for Erebus Bay increase the minimum number of individuals represented by the skeletal assemblages to 21, and allowed the identification of multiple skeletal elements from six individuals. Spatial distribution of bones sharing common maternal lineages provide insights concerning site formation processes, including the degree of bone dispersion at one site, and the movement of skeletal remains between two sites. DNA results for the Booth Point site sample provide independent confirmation for a previous assessment that the remains are Caucasoid, while those for the Wilmot and Crampton Bay site indicate Inuit ancestry. The results from Todd Island are consistent with 19th century Inuit accounts describing the discovery there of the remains of five members of the Franklin expedition. The Franklin expedition DNA database resulting from this study represents 24 individuals and provides a foundation for future research, including the possible identification of some of the individuals through comparison with modern DNA from living descendants of members of the expedition.

We combine chert provenance and least cost path analyses to investigate Palaeo-Eskimo mobility on southern Baffin Island, in the eastern Canadian Arctic. ICP-AES trace element analysis links chert artifacts from coastal and inland sites to quarries in the interior of the study area. Using a multi-criteria cost surface, we model least cost paths between quarry and occupation sites linked by the results of provenance analysis. These pathways will be used to structure a future program of pedestrian survey in the area between the coast and interior of southern Baffin Island.

Southern Baffin Island has been occupied for several millennia, but its enormous size, coupled with scarcity of identified inland archaeological sites that can be confidently linked to coastal occupations, makes modeling ancient seasonal mobility across the region through traditional cost-surface least-cost pathway approaches impractical. We present a method that combines weighted multi-criteria cost surface analysis with a watershed function to create a “mobility-shed” of non-winter travel pathways covering the study area. We evaluate the predictive utility of the resulting pathways for future archaeological survey by assessing their spatial relationships to known archaeological sites. The results of this comparison suggest that elevation and land cover criteria should be augmented with ethnographic and resource availability data to model mobility in this region.

In 2013, partial skeletal remains from three members of the 1845 John Franklin expedition were recovered from an archaeological site at Erebus Bay, King William Island, Nunavut. The remains included three crania, two of which were sufficiently intact to allow craniofacial reconstructions. Identifications are not proposed for either reconstruction; however, tentative identifications are being explored through DNA analyses currently underway that include samples obtained from both crania.

In the summer of 1845, under the command of Sir John Franklin, 128 officers and men aboard Royal Navy ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror sailed into Lancaster Sound and entered the waters of Arctic North America. The goal of this expedition was to complete the discovery of a northwest passage by navigating the uncharted area between Barrow Strait and Simpson Strait. Franklin and his crew spent the first winter at Beechey Island, where three crewmen died and were buried. In September 1846, the ships became stranded in ice off the northwest coast of King William Island, where they remained until April 1848. At that time, the crew, reduced to 105, deserted the ships and retreated south along the island’s western and southern shores in a desperate attempt to reach the mainland and via the Back River, to obtain aid at a Hudson’s Bay Company Post. Sadly, not one individual survived. Previous analyses of bone, hair, and soft tissue samples from expedition remains found that crewmembers’ tissues contained elevated lead (Pb) levels, suggesting that Pb poisoning may have contributed to their demise; however, questions remain regarding the timing and degree of exposure and, ultimately, the extent to which the crewmembers may have been impacted. To address this historical question, we investigated three hypotheses. First, if elevated Pb exposure was experienced by the crew during the expedition, we hypothesized that those sailors who survived longer (King William Island vs. Beechey Island) would exhibit more extensive uptake of Pb in their bones and vice versa. Second, we hypothesized that Pb would be elevated in bone microstructural features forming at or near the time of death compared with older tissue. Finally, if Pb exposure played a significant role in the failure of the expedition we hypothesized that bone samples would exhibit evidence of higher and more sustained uptake of Pb than that of a contemporary comparator naval population from the 19th century. To test these hypotheses, we analyzed bone and dental remains of crew members and compared them against samples derived from the Royal Navy cemetery in Antigua. Synchrotron-based high resolution confocal X-ray fluorescence imaging was employed to visualize Pb distribution within bone and tooth microstructures at the micro scale. The data did not support our first hypothesis as Pb distribution within the samples from the two different sites was similar. Evidence of Pb within skeletal microstructural features formed near the time of death lent support to our second hypothesis but consistent evidence of a marked elevation in Pb levels was lacking. Finally, the comparative analysis with the Antigua samples did not support the hypothesis that the Franklin sailors were exposed to an unusually high level of Pb for the time period. Taken all together our skeletal microstructural results do not support the conclusion that Pb played a pivotal role in the loss of Franklin and his crew.

Historical and archaeological records are examined for three archaeological sites at Erebus Bay, King William Island, associated with the 1845 John Franklin expedition. Comparison of 19th century historical descriptions with archaeological data from sites NgLj-1 and NgLj-3 establishes that the identification of NgLj-1 as the site of the 1859 McClintock “boat place” is incorrect and that NgLj-3 is the actual site. An assessment of 19th century oral historical information and contemporary archaeological data from NgLj-2 supports the conclusion that a ship’s boat from the Franklin expedition was once located at the site, but its identification as the second “boat place” discovered by Inuit in 1861 is problematic. The study underscores interpretive risks associated with uncritical acceptance of historical and oral historical accounts and the importance of archaeological research in the reconstruction of events surrounding the fate of the Franklin expedition.