Will science ID the remains of the lost Franklin Expedition of the 19th Century

[LongTomH]

Frozen in Time: DNA May ID Sailors Looking for Northwest Passage in 1845:

Scientists have extracted DNA from the skeletal remains of several 19th-century sailors who died during the ill-fated Franklin Expedition, whose goal was to navigate the fabled Northwest Passage.

With a new genetic database of 24 expedition members, researchers hope they'll be able to identify some of the bodies scattered in the Canadian Arctic, 170 years after one of the worst disasters in the history of polar exploration.

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A doomed voyage

Led by Sir John Franklin, a British Royal Navy captain, the 129-member crew embarked in 1845 in search of a sea route that would link the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The sailors were doomed after their ships became trapped in thick sea ice in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago in 1846.

The last communication, a short note from April 25, 1848, indicated that the surviving men were abandoning their ships — the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror — just off King William Island and embarking on a harsh journey south toward a trading post on the mainland. None of them seems to have made it even a fifth of the way there.

Over more than a century, search parties and scientists have discovered the remains of several Franklin sailors in boats and makeshift campsites scattered along this route. The bones bear scars of diseases like scurvy. Some even have the signatures of cannibalism, according to one recent study that confirmed the 19th-century reports of Inuit witnesses who had described piles of fractured human bones. Several artifacts from the HMS Erebus, including a medicine bottle and tunic buttons, as well as the ship's bronze bell, have also been uncovered.

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Stenton and his colleagues were able to get DNA from 37 bone and tooth samples found at eight different sites around King William Island, and they established the presence of at least 24 different members of the expedition. Twenty-one of these individuals had been found at locations around Canada's Erebus Bay, "confirming it as a location of some importance following the desertion of Erebus and Terror," Stenton told Live Science.

[PJMcK]

1. What a terrible tale

Thanks for posting the link, LongTomH. It's a good article. The Franklin Expedition was a tragic failure of great adventure. Ernest Shackleton's misadventure to Antarctica is another fascinating history from the age of exploration. There are many others, of course.

Today, we seem to have lost these grand scale adventures of discovery. Discovery has been in our collective soul for our entire history; it's why we came out of the caves and looked around.

While we've continued our study of the solar system and the cosmos, it's mostly by proxy with the wonderful machines scientists and engineers build to send afar. The last time we sent men on a real venture of discovery was nearly a half century ago. What happened?

I'm a bit tired tonight and I'm not certain those thoughts are cohesive but they're my 2-cents worth.