Exploration
University of Waterloo researchers have identified the remains of Capt James Fitzjames, who died on Franklin’s failed Northwest Passage Expedition, among an archeological site on King William Island, Nunavut
Of all the echoing voices of the men who vanished on Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated 1845 Northwest Passage Expedition to find the Northwest Passage, that of senior officer James Fitzjames has long stood at the center: astutely observing his fellow officers, expressing his boundless optimism (had the expedition succeeded, he’d hoped to walk home across Siberia!) and always remembering himself to his beloved brother and sister-in-law.
That’s why the University of Waterloo’s announcement on Sept. 24, 2024 that his remains had been identified among an archeological site on King William Island, Nunavut, cuts both ways: toward the relief and recognition his relations then and now would share, and also refreshing the agony of his loss.
Added to this, signs of cannibalism on Fitzjames’s identified mandible speak anew of a long-unspeakable reality that Franklin’s men, in their final days, turned to what explorer John Rae (informed by Inuit testimony) called “the last resource.” This discovery brings together every strand of the Franklin story, and as it closes one small chapter, it opens new vistas of possibility.
The credit for this remarkable discovery rightly belongs to two parties. First, to Douglas R. Stenton and his colleagues at the University of Waterloo and Lakehead University, who have undertaken the work of re-examining Franklin sites on King William Island, along with extracting DNA from both new and already-collected remains — and secondly to historian Fabiënne Tetteroo.
Tetteroo, who’s based in The Hague in the Netherlands, has worked tirelessly for the past three years researching Fitzjames and his family tree, and it was she who managed to locate a descendant with the right lineage to make a DNA comparison meaningful.
It turned out to be the descendants of his biological relations, the Gambiers, who ultimately provided the vital clue. As Tetteroo describes it, “I found and contacted a descendant from an unbroken male line of Fitzjames’ second cousin and captain of his first ship Pyramus, Robert Gambier. Fortunately, the descendant was happy to participate.”
The hoped-for result stirred uncommon feelings in both parties, as well as among the family – Stenton describes his excitement when they realized that they had identified another member of the expedition, “heightened by the fact that it was not only an officer, but Captain Fitzjames.”
When Tetteroo got the news one evening after returning home to fix dinner, the meal grew cold upon the plate: “I was thinking about the people who loved Fitzjames, and how they never got to know when and how he died.”
Among this number we may count the many people over the years who have contributed to our understanding of the story, particularly William Battersby — author of the first biography of Fitzjames — who, sadly, did not live to hear this news.
But what does this discovery mean? It’s usually been assumed that after the expedition’s two ships, Erebus and Terror, were abandoned in the unrelenting pack ice in Victoria Strait off the northeastern shore King William Island in April of 1848, the 105 remaining men – many had already perished – marched south as a body, eventually reaching a point where, as Inuit testimony described it, “they fell down as they walked.”
Some, including author and Arctic researcher David C. Woodman, the first to delve into that testimony, have come to feel that perhaps there was more than one wave of walkers – some may have continued south, others at some point returned to the ships, while another group, debilitated by scurvy and exhaustion, remained in Erebus Bay.
It was back in 1992 that amateur Franklin searcher Barry Ranford came to that area and spotted what he first supposed was an old plastic bleach bottle on the stones. It turned out to be a skull, and the following year saw an archaeological study of the site led by the late Anne Keenleyside and her colleague Margaret Bertulli.
The mandible that has now been identified as Fitzjames’s was excavated then, along with another 450 bones from at least 13 Franklin sailors, but rested for a long time in a nearby cache, only to be retrieved by Stenton and his team when it became clear that DNA technology had caught up with the challenge of identifying them.
“I was thinking about the people who loved Fitzjames, and how they never got to know when and how he died.”
In the meantime, Franklin’s ships — Erebus in 2014 and Terror in 2016 — have been found. And, although these discoveries have punctuated the known in powerful ways, we still don’t have a clear sequence of events that led the ships to their final resting places far from where they were beset in ice.
That Fitzjames — who after Franklin’s death in 1847 would have been the Captain of Erebus — would have ended up so far from her final resting place, is a puzzle. One conjecture is that, having realized that the bulk of his men could no longer continue their cold march, he returned to oversee a “hospital camp” of the sick. And if so, it must have been there that, as all the coils of expectant life were loosed, he himself became a kind of final sacrifice to their dwindling hopes of survival. If so, then his death, like his life, was an embodiment of his deep and abiding love for his men.
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