What did the wrecks and bones of the Franklin expedition show?

In 1845 Sir John Franklin sailed into the Arctic with two ships and 129 men. Whalers saw the ships in Baffin Bay that summer, and the expedition was never seen again by Europeans. Piecing together what happened has taken generations, and the evidence points to several causes whose weight is still argued.

The clearest message from the expedition itself is the Victory Point note. It says the crews had spent two winters off King William Island, that Franklin died on 11 June 1847, and that the survivors planned to set out for the Back River, with Franklin, eight more officers and 15 men already dead. In 1854 Inuit told John Rae that 35 to 40 white men had died of starvation near the Back River, with reports of cannibalism.

Then forensic scientists went to work. Owen Beattie's 1981 expedition found lead in a crewman's bones at about ten times the level in local Inuit skeletons, and the autopsy of John Torrington showed pneumonia as the cause of death with lead poisoning as a contributing factor. Bones excavated later carried cut marks consistent with de-fleshing, and it is now generally accepted that some of the men resorted to cannibalism, as the Inuit had said.

Both the source and the role of the lead are disputed. William Battersby argued that the ships' desalination system was a likelier source of lead than the tinned food; K. T. H. Farrer argued the tins could not have supplied enough. A 2013 study found the lead in the bones had been steady throughout the men's lives, with no spike near the end, and a 2016 study pointed instead to zinc deficiency and malnutrition. The ships were found too: Erebus in 2014, and Terror in 2016, after an Inuk hunter remembered seeing what looked like a mast in the ice.