Highlights

• Remains of Franklin expedition sailor discovered in 1993 identified via DNA.

• Genetic study reveals place of death of Captain James Fitzjames, HMS Erebus.

• Captain James Fitzjames died less than 80 km from where the ships were deserted.

• New insights into cannibalism on the 1845 Franklin Northwest Passage Expedition.

James Fitzjames’ death at Erebus Bay contributes to understanding of an additional and tragic aspect symbolic of the catastrophe of the 1845 Northwest Passage expedition − that during the attempted escape in the spring of 1848 conditions necessary for survival had deteriorated to the point that some of the men resorted to cannibalism.

Nineteenth-century Inuit descriptions of bodies mutilated in a manner interpreted by them to be evidence of cannibalism (Rae, 1855) were challenged or dismissed out of hand , but archaeological investigations conducted over the past forty years have confirmed the behaviour, most definitively at site NgLj-2.

Keenleyside’s analyses of the NgLj-2 skeletal assemblage revealed that nearly one-quarter of the individual bones bore cut marks and, of them, more than half had multiple cut marks. In total, the bodies of at least four of the thirteen men known to have died there had been cannibalized