Around 180 years ago, a British expedition to the Arctic met a grisly end. Only recently have scientific investigations been able to identify the long-dead seamen. Now, thanks to DNA donations from distant relatives, researchers have identified four more sailors from the failed mission.
Researchers have identified four more members of the 1845 expedition, including an enigmatic sailor whose identity confused scientists for more than a century. Three of the sailors served aboard HMS Erebus, one of the expedition’s two ships, while the fourth—Harry Peglar, captain of the foretop—served aboard HMS Terror. The team, including anthropologist Douglas Stenton of the University of Waterloo in Canada, published its results in two papers in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports and Polar Record.
A failed mission
Under the command of Sir John Franklin, 134 officers and crew on two ships—HMS Erebus and HMS Terror—set out for the Arctic on May 19, 1845, according to Parks Canada. The goal of the mission was to chart unnavigated sections of the Northwest Passage near the Arctic. During the first leg of the voyage, five crew members left the expedition, presumably due to health or disciplinary issues.
Then the journey went south—figuratively speaking. In September of 1846, the ships became ice-locked off King William Island. Franklin died in 1847. By 1848, the remaining crew of 105 men decided to abandon ship and walk across the sea ice to mainland Canada. None survived.
“It must have been horrible,” Stenton told Scientific American. “It was probably –30 [degrees] Celsius [–22 degrees Fahrenheit], and these men were not healthy after three years in the Arctic.”
Finding a wreck
Several years later, Franklin’s wife, Jane, and British officials deployed search missions between 1848 and 1854. But it was only in 2014 and 2016 that the wreck sites of Erebus and Terror, respectively, were discovered with the help of better technology and Inuit testimony from people with firsthand knowledge of the doomed Franklin expedition. In 2019, Parks Canada released footage showing the interiors of the ill-fated ships.
But search parties and archaeological missions have found crew remains since 1859. Over the years, scientists have uncovered hundreds of skeletal remains presumed to belong to lost crew. But only more recent technological advances have allowed researchers to investigate them in greater detail, according to both papers.
Stenton and his colleagues have been at the forefront of these DNA-based studies. In 2021, the team identified John Gregory, an engineer aboard Erebus. Subsequent tests comparing remains with DNA samples from living relatives landed on the grisly conclusion that Captain Fitzjames—the man who wrote the report declaring Franklin’s death—became food for his crew.
Four more names
The newly identified sailors on Erebus, who died at Erebus Bay, are William Orren, an able seaman, David Young, a first-class boy, and John Bridgens, a subordinate officers’ steward. The fourth, the “only sailor from HMS Terror to be definitively identified by DNA analysis,” is Harry Peglar, Stenton said in a university statement.
“It was interesting to conclusively identify this sailor because the body was found with almost the only written documents from the expedition ever found,” added Robert Park, a co-author on both studies and an anthropologist at the University of Waterloo. Peglar’s identity had been a subject of debate among scholars, as the body carried Peglar’s documents but wore clothing that didn’t match his rank.
For the analysis, the team compared the mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA from the archaeological samples and descendant DNA. In doing so, the team also uncovered some unexpected connections. For instance, Rich Preston, a journalist with the BBC, is related to John Bridgens. Incidentally, Preston used to work on a BBC show about genealogy; as he said in the statement, “It was such a huge surprise to hear from the team that my DNA was a match with one of the sailors on the doomed Franklin expedition…to discover that there’s such an interesting tale in my own family’s past feels very exciting.”
More work to do
The latest findings bring the total number of identified sailors to six. That’s admittedly a small number compared to the 100-plus deaths associated with the expedition. So, as always, the team is on the lookout for more samples. If you are or know someone who might be descended from the Franklin expedition crew, they’d love to get your DNA (for science, of course).
“For the living descendants, these findings provide previously unavailable details regarding the circumstances and locations of their relatives’ deaths, as well as the identities of some of the shipmates who died with them,” Stenton said.
