Cannibalized captain of doomed Arctic expedition identified through DNA analysis

By Soumya Sagar & LiveScience

New DNA analysis has identified the remains of Captain James Fitzjames, a Royal Navy officer who disappeared more than 175 years ago during a doomed expedition through the Northwest Passage in Canada.

Fitzjames was part of an expedition led by Sir John Franklin that set out from England in 1845 with 129 men on two ships: HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. The aim of the expedition was to sail the Northwest Passage, an Arctic shipping route that connects the Atlantic with the Pacific. But both ships got stuck in the ice and the entire crew died.

Fitzjames became the commander of HMS Erebus When Franklin died, his ship got stuck on King William Island. In the 19th century, skeletal remains of many sailors were discovered at various locations on the island, but Fitzjames is only the second individual from there to be identified. In a new study, a team of Canadian scientists isolated the DNA of a tooth attached to a jawbone found in a pile of about 400 human bones and teeth and matched it to a living relative.

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The study's lead author, Douglas Stenton, an archaeologist at the University of Waterloo in Canada, and his colleagues extracted DNA from a molar found in 1993. They also collected DNA samples from 25 living descendants of the Franklin Expedition crew. The tooth's Y chromosome profiles matched one of the living relatives, who was Fitzjames' second cousin, removed five times. Both “cousins” shared a common paternal ancestor – Fitzjames’ great-grandfather.

Researchers already knew that this person, now identified as Fitzjames, was likely cannibalized. In an earlier analysis, bioarchaeologist Anne Keenleyside (who died in 2022) found cut marks on many of the recovered remains, including the newly analyzed jawbone. This suggests that the survivors ate Fitzjames' body parts (and those of other sailors) to avoid starvation, the authors of the new study said.

Related: Researchers trace the 1845 Arctic expedition that ended in death and cannibalism

The discovery also makes Fitzjames the first identified cannibalism victim among the expedition members. “It is possible that he was one of the first to die on King William Island,” the authors wrote in the study, published Sept. 24 in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

Part of the expedition's history is known thanks to Fitzjames, who left an ominous note in a pile of stones at Victory Point on King William Island. The note documented the deaths of several crew members, including Franklin, and the survivors' decision to abandon ship and travel on foot to Back River in Nunavut, the northernmost Canadian territory.

But everyone died before they reached it. Later, search parties led by Inuit discovered skeletal remains of the sailors at various locations on King William Island. The AMC TV series The Terror was a horror dramatization of this expedition.

This is only the second member of the Franklin expedition to be identified. In 2021, Stenton and his team identified the remains of John Gregory, the chief engineer of HMS Erebus, using DNA extracted from his skull.

The findings of the expedition's cannibalism support the Inuit oral accounts that led researchers to the skeletal remains of the expedition members. The Inuit had seen 40 men pulling a ship's boat on a sleigh and the following year discovered many bodies near the mouth of the Back River, some of which showed signs of cannibalism.

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