WATERLOO, ONTARIO—BBC News reports that the remains of a second member of Sir John Franklin’s 1845 expedition to the Canadian Arctic to search for a Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean have been identified by Douglas Stenton of the University of Waterloo, Stephen Fratpietro of Lakehead University, and their colleagues. All members of the 129-man expedition, and the expedition’s two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, were lost. James Fitzjames was one of two men who stepped in to lead the expedition in an attempt to escape the Arctic after Franklin perished. He also signed the last known message from the doomed endeavor: “Sir John Franklin died on the 11th of June 1847 and the total loss by deaths in the Expedition has been to this date nine officers and 15 men,” he wrote in part. The sample of DNA, taken from the remains of at least 13 crew members recovered from a cairn on King William Island, was compared with that of a living descendant to make the identification. “We worked with a good quality sample that allowed us to generate a Y-chromosome profile, and we were lucky enough to obtain a match,” Fratpietro said. The researchers will continue to attempt to identify the crew members’ remains. For more, go to “The Wrecks of Erebus and Terror,” one of ARCHAEOLOGY’s Top 10 Discoveries of the Decade.
