Evidence for End‐stage Cannibalism on Sir John Franklin's Last Expedition to the Arctic, 1845

Abstract

Abstract The 1845 British naval expedition commanded by Sir John Franklin to map the Northwest Passage ended in disaster, with none returning alive from the Canadian Arctic. The 19th century Inuit testimony described cannibalism among Franklin's men in the final throes of the expedition. Such claims were controversial at the time, but were supported in the 1980s and 1990s when knife marks were identified on human remains recovered from expedition sites on King William Island. Survival cannibalism generally follows a sequence in which meat is initially cut from an intact corpse, but if further calories are required, successively greater effort is put into corpse processing. End‐stage cannibalism is characterised by breakage and boiling of bones to extract marrow fat from medullary cavities and cancellous bone. The current work involves re‐examination, using macroscopic and microscopic study, of human remains (representing a minimum of 35 bones) from the Franklin expedition. It describes evidence for breakage and polishing of broken edges of parts of some long bones. These alterations are tentatively interpreted as breakage and heating of bones in water, to facilitate marrow extraction. If this is correct, then it constitutes the first osteological evidence of end‐stage cannibalism among members of the expedition. Comparison of these osteological findings with 19th century Inuit reports provides further evidence supporting the veracity of Inuit descriptions of cannibalistic practices by expedition members. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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