{"id":39222,"date":"2026-05-10T10:36:05","date_gmt":"2026-05-10T10:36:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/39222\/"},"modified":"2026-05-10T10:36:05","modified_gmt":"2026-05-10T10:36:05","slug":"colby-cosh-new-answers-about-the-doomed-franklin-expedition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/39222\/","title":{"rendered":"Colby Cosh: New answers about the doomed Franklin Expedition"},"content":{"rendered":"

A quartet of Canadian anthropologists published two papers this week that\u00a0provide remarkable new detective insights into the fate of the 1845 Franklin Expedition<\/a>, which saw 134 men set out in search of the fabled Northwest Passage only to vanish in the High Arctic. Both papers are products of the 21st-century genetics revolution\u00a0\u2014\u00a0the equivalent of solving cold cases by matching DNA recovered from old human\u00a0remains\u00a0with samples from living descendants.<\/p>\n

In\u00a0one of the new reports<\/a>, human bones from Erebus Bay on King William Island, at a site within walking distance of the twin wrecks of the expedition\u2019s icebound ships, have been positively identified as belonging to three crewmen from the doomed HMS\u00a0Erebus. One of the matching bones is a humerus attributed to an officers\u2019 steward named John Bridgens, whose half-sister turns out to have been an ancestor of\u00a0a well-known BBC news presenter<\/a>. Another DNA-matching effort has put a name, David Young, to a skull and mandible that were already used\u00a0almost a\u00a0decade ago to produce a (perhaps\u00a0somewhat fanciful) facial reconstruction. Young had joined the expedition at age 17 with the rank of \u201cBoy, 1st\u00a0class.\u201d<\/p>\n

The same anthropological team,\u00a0in a second paper<\/a>, has decisively solved one of the enduring mysteries of Franklin scholarship. In 1859, the skeleton of a dead sailor, unburied, was found alone on the south shore of King William Island. The body was dressed in a torn steward\u2019s uniform, but was found to be carrying personal papers belonging to Harry Peglar, the Captain of the Foretop aboard\u00a0Erebus\u2019s sister ship\u00a0Terror. The skeleton was originally left behind under a heap of\u00a0rocks, but\u00a0was\u00a0relocated\u00a0in 1973 and retrieved for the collection of Canada\u2019s National Museum of Man, which misplaced it (along with all associated records) sometime in the 1980s. This left a total enigma: had the doubly lost dead man been Peglar, or somebody else?<\/p>\n

With further forensic discoveries keeping the expedition in the spotlight, researchers returned to the gravesite of the mysterious sailor between 2019 and 2023 and were able to retrieve a few tiny bones left behind in 1973 \u2014 a metatarsal, along with two phalanges from the late sailor\u2019s right hand. The DNA from these fragments were matched with descendants of several candidates, and they have turned out to belong to Harry Peglar after all.<\/p>\n

Which advances the mystery only one step further. Why did Peglar, who left England bearing the rank of a senior petty officer and serious shipboard responsibilities to go with it, die in the uniform of a servant? His remains were found with a clothes brush, indicating that he must have actually performed the duties of a steward, and he was wearing a neckerchief tied loosely, in the way a steward\u2019s would be.<\/p>\n

There was no shortage of clothing even in the most desperate moments of the expedition \u2014 the doomed men left mountains of it behind \u2014 so the anthropologists suggest that Peglar must have gotten in trouble and been disrated after\u00a0Terror\u00a0left England. His\u00a0previous\u00a0service record survives, the authors note, and it does show a pattern of intermittent offences against naval discipline; at one point, Peglar was sentenced to two dozen lashes for \u201cdrunkenness and mutinous conduct.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps it\u00a0was inevitable that this bad egg, who had served on Royal Navy anti-slavery and anti-piracy missions and survived the First Opium War, is the closest thing that the ill-fated expedition had, in the end, to a voice.\u00a0The half-legible \u201cPeglar Papers\u201d<\/a>\u00a0he was carrying on his person contain apparent references to Captain Franklin\u2019s 1847 funeral and to the cruel sledge journey that the survivors of the shipwrecks eventually made toward the Canadian mainland. (They also provide an obscene parody, in Peglar\u2019s handwriting, of a famous sea poem of the time.)<\/p>\n

National Post<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A quartet of Canadian anthropologists published two papers this week that\u00a0provide remarkable new detective insights into the fate…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":39223,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[17026,17,17024,17022,17025,17023,17027,3169],"class_list":{"0":"post-39222","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-canada","8":"tag-arctic-canada","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-david-young","11":"tag-franklin-expedition","12":"tag-harry-peglar","13":"tag-king-william-island","14":"tag-officers-steward","15":"tag-wikimedia-commons"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39222\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}