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An Ontario researcher has used modern technology to clearly identify the resting place of an Franklin expedition officer, adding new information to the ongoing quest for details about the unfortunate quest for the Northwest Pbadage .
Douglas Stenton, a faculty member at the University of Waterloo, has also uncovered a collection of artifacts likely belonging to the most experienced members of the expedition team, having used a combination of past and present maps, as well as metal detectors for his work in Nunavut.
His findings support and validate the efforts of nineteenth century archaeologists who traveled to the same strip of land on the west coast of King William Island in 1879 and named the area Two Grave Bay after reporting two funeral sites.
Stenton, the former heritage director for the Nunavut Territory, said the discrepancies between the current maps and those produced during this expedition had prevented modern explorers from replicating these earlier discoveries.
"I wanted to go take another look at this place to see if we could locate one or two of these graves," he said during a phone interview. "We managed to do it."
The mysteries surrounding Sir John Franklin's quest for the Northwest Pbadage have captivated many people for decades. The researchers began to examine the circumstances of the doomed mission shortly after it became apparent that something was wrong.
Franklin left England in 1845 with 129 men on board two ships to search for a northern sea route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. No one came back and the search missions determined that HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were ice-bound and abandoned.
Questions about the fate of the captain and the crew prompted various subsequent expeditions to find out what happened, including a sled trip in 1878 by the American scientist Frederick Schwatka.
In 1879, Schwatka declared that he had found the burial grounds that gave his name to Two Grave Bay. His archives detailed skeletal human remains, pieces of navy blue cloth and buttons likely belonging to members of Franklin's crew, Stenton said.
Stenton, a long-time participant in the Franklin expedition research, felt that the Schwatka archive was a good starting point for further exploration.
"I looked at the historical map, looked at the contemporary map, and thought, well, it's a map that could probably be more accurate," he said. he declared. "On this basis, I made it a research priority."
In late August, Stenton and two members of the Canadian Coast Guard began combing the area around Two Grave Bay.
They focused on a group of rocks that appeared to have been deliberately arranged and used metal detectors to search for the gold buttons that Schwatka had documented nearly 140 years ago.
Stenton said that they soon found one, which led to other discoveries.
In total, Stenton and his team have recovered three metal loops, 10 golden buttons and the remains of an eleventh mother-of-pearl. Stenton stated that such props were probably only worn by officers or senior members of Franklin's crew.
Stenton said his team then found human bones at a distance, including an intact skull and jaw, as well as a partial calf bone.
He said his research partner hoped to perform DNA tests on these remains. The researchers, he said, have already extracted the DNA profiles of 24 crew members from the expedition and are actively trying to connect them to current descendants in order to identify specific sets of remains. .
The Stenton Discovery is the latest in a recent series of important discoveries related to the expedition.
In September 2014, Inuit guides helped Parks Canada archaeologists locate HMS Erebus in relatively shallow waters off the coast of King William Island. The HMS Terror was found two years later about 100 kilometers away, which ended more than a century of efforts to locate the ships.
Although international law badigns ownership of vessels to the United Kingdom, the United Kingdom agreed more than 20 years ago that Canada would eventually obtain possession of the ships if they were found. The transfer of ownership was completed in April and Canada jointly holds the title of the vessels and their contents with the Inuit Heritage Trust.
Stenton said the latest contribution to Franklin's story underscored the need for more archaeological research, claiming that each new discovery could potentially help discover exactly what had happened during the expedition. .
"In itself, no particular site will change the story or the story," he said. "But they allow us to fill information gaps and allow us to apply new badytical techniques to better understand events and what has happened."
Michelle McQuigge and Liam Casey, Canadian Press
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