Colby Cosh: New answers about the doomed Franklin Expedition

Detail from Man Proposes, God Disposes, an 1864 painting depicting the imagined fate of the Franklin Expedition, which was lost in what is now Arctic Canada. The painting, which now hangs at the University of London, is rumoured to be haunted and is thus covered up during student examinations. Photo by Wikimedia Commons

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A quartet of Canadian anthropologists published two papers this week that provide remarkable new detective insights into the fate of the 1845 Franklin Expedition, 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 — the equivalent of solving cold cases by matching DNA recovered from old human remains with samples from living descendants.

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In one of the new reports, human bones from Erebus Bay on King William Island, at a site within walking distance of the twin wrecks of the expedition’s icebound ships, have been positively identified as belonging to three crewmen from the doomed HMS Erebus. One of the matching bones is a humerus attributed to an officers’ steward named John Bridgens, whose half-sister turns out to have been an ancestor of a well-known BBC news presenter. Another DNA-matching effort has put a name, David Young, to a skull and mandible that were already used almost a decade ago to produce a (perhaps somewhat fanciful) facial reconstruction. Young had joined the expedition at age 17 with the rank of “Boy, 1st class.”

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The same anthropological team, in a second paper, 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’s uniform, but was found to be carrying personal papers belonging to Harry Peglar, the Captain of the Foretop aboard Erebus’s sister ship Terror. The skeleton was originally left behind under a heap of rocks, but was relocated in 1973 and retrieved for the collection of Canada’s 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?

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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 — a metatarsal, along with two phalanges from the late sailor’s 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.

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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’s would be.

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There was no shortage of clothing even in the most desperate moments of the expedition — the doomed men left mountains of it behind — so the anthropologists suggest that Peglar must have gotten in trouble and been disrated after Terror left England. His previous service 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 “drunkenness and mutinous conduct.”

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Perhaps it was 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. The half-legible “Peglar Papers” he was carrying on his person contain apparent references to Captain Franklin’s 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’s handwriting, of a famous sea poem of the time.)

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National Post

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