A lower jawbone with a single preserved molar had been sitting in an archaeological collection for years. It had been recovered from a site on King William Island in the Canadian Arctic — a site that had given up 451 bones from at least thirteen men who died there in the late 1840s. The jaw, like dozens of other specimens from the same site, bore cut marks. Someone had worked on the bone after death. The marks were consistent with the removal of flesh. For years, the jaw had no name attached to it. It was specimen evidence from one of the most famous disasters in the history of exploration, but it was anonymous — one bone among hundreds, one of at least thirteen people whose identities the scientific record had not established.
Then researchers extracted DNA from the tooth.
In September 2024, the University of Waterloo announced that DNA analysis had matched the jawbone to a living descendant of a specific person: James Fitzjames, the captain of HMS Erebus, the second-in-command of the 1845 Franklin expedition after Sir John Franklin died. Fitzjames was the highest-ranking member of the expedition to be positively identified to that point. He was also, based on the cut marks on his jaw, the first confirmed officer among those whose remains showed evidence of cannibalism. The identification was published in the *Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports* in September 2024.
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## The Expedition That Left and Never Came Back
The story behind that jawbone begins on May 19, 1845, when two ships sailed out of the Thames and headed northwest. HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were bomb ships — reinforced, heavily built, and by the mid-1840s equipped with steam engines and screw propellers to supplement their sails. Their intended route was through the Northwest Passage, the sea corridor through the Canadian Arctic that connected the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and that European navigators had been trying to navigate for centuries.