DNA Identifies Four More Crew Members From 1845 Franklin Expedition

Archaeologists continue to use DNA analysis to identify the recovered remains of the crew members from Captain Sir John S. Franklin’s 1845 Arctic expedition to cross the Northwest Passage. They can now add four more names to the list of previously identified crew members.

Three of the newly identified individuals served on the HMS Erebus while the fourth served on the HMS Terror. The findings were reported in two papers, one published in the Journal of Archaeological Science and the other in the Polar Record. Franklin’s two ships, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, became icebound in the Victoria Strait.

All 129 crew members ultimately died. The expedition set sail on May 19, 1845, and was last seen in July 1845 in Baffin Bay by the captains of two whaling ships. The crew spent the winter of 1845–1846 on Beechey Island, where the graves of three crew members were found.

When the weather cleared, the expedition sailed into the Victoria Strait before getting trapped in the ice off King William Island in September 1846. Franklin died on June 11, 1847, according to a surviving note signed by the captain of the Erebus dated the following April.

The captain of the Erebus assumed overall command after Franklin’s death. He led 105 survivors from their ice-trapped ships. It is believed that everyone else died while encamped for the winter or while attempting to walk south toward civilization. There was no concrete news about the expedition’s fate until 1854, when local Inuits told a 19th-century Scottish explorer that they had seen about 40 people dragging a ship’s boat on a sledge along the south coast.

The following year, several bodies were found near the mouth of the Back River. A second search in 1859 led to the discovery of a location some 80 kilometers to the south of that site, dubbed Erebus Bay, as well as several more bodies and one of the ships’ boats still mounted on a sledge.

In 1861, yet another site was found just two kilometers away with even more bodies. When those two sites were rediscovered in the 1990s, archaeologists designated them NgLj-3 and NgLj-2, respectively.

DNA analysis has allowed researchers to match genetic material from recovered remains to known descendants or reference samples. The process has gradually increased the number of identified individuals from the expedition over time. Officials have not released further details on the specific identities in the latest reports.