DNA sheds new light on victim of doomed Arctic trip

For more than a century, the bones of sailors who joined polar explorer Sir John Franklin's ill-fated Northwest Passage expedition lay scattered on the rocky shores of an Arctic island.

- Leyland Cecco

Weatherbeaten and bleached, nearly a quarter of the anonymous remains bore the marks of cannibalism, reflecting a grim coda to the expedition.

Now, one of those men has been identified as Capt James Fitzjames from London, a discovery stemming from years of study by researchers at two Canadian universities, who isolated his DNA from a single molar and traced it to living relatives.

Fitzjames served as captain on HMS Erebus which, alongside HMS Terror, departed England in 1845, with the hope of traversing the Northwest Passage. The expedition ended in disaster, with all 129 crew members succumbing to the hostile elements of the Arctic.

Between 1847 and 1859, at least 36 expeditions set out in search of Franklin's lost ships, but all ended in failure.

It wasn't until researchers turned to Inuit oral history that they were able to locate the final resting place of the Erebus and the Terror in the past decade.

The remains of the crewmen were located much earlier at two sites on the south-west coast of King William Island, Nunavut. Search teams located boats lashed to large sleds, apparently bound for the Back River.