The Franklin Expedition. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Almost 170 years after the ill-fated Franklin Expedition attempted to find the Northwest Passage through the Canadian Arctic, researchers want to test the DNA of living descendants of crew members to compare it to skeletal remains.
The Franklin Expedition left England in 1845 and headed north to the Arctic. By 1846, Franklin and his 129 crew members were iced in. Though the expedition was stocked with enough food to last for several years, a note discovered more than a decade later indicated that Franklin and 23 crew members died of unknown causes by 1847. The other 105 sailors abandoned the ships in 1848. None of them survived.
The expedition’s two ships, the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, were found within the past three years by underwater archaeologists.
Of the 129 crew members, the remains of less than 30 have been recovered.
Anne Keenlyside, an anthropologist at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario and co-author of a study on the remains, performed DNA analysis of tooth and bone samples recovered from eight sites where sailors died after they deserted their ships in April 1848.
Ms. Kennlyside told the Canadian Press, “If we can find those living descendants – if they’re directly descended from those crew members – and if they’re willing to submit a DNA sample in the form of a … cheek swab, then we can analyze their DNA, compare it to the DNA extracted from these skeletal remains and see if there is a match.”
Researchers hope the DNA will allow them to positively identify some of the remains. “We have been in touch with several descendants who have expressed interest in participating in further research,” Douglas Stenton, lead author of the study, told Live Science. “We hope that the publication of our initial study will encourage other descendants to also consider participating.”
More about the remains and DNA tests is in this Canadian Press article, published in the Globe and Mail and other newspapers.
