His appointment to Erebus represented the culmination of that career. He had been recommended for overall command by one of the most powerful men in British naval administration. He had been judged too young for the top position but given the second ship in one of the most ambitious expeditions the navy was likely to mount. The promotion to captain on December 31, 1845 — which he never knew about — reflected the Admiralty’s continuing regard for him even as the expedition lost contact with Britain.
The two years between the ships becoming beset in September 1846 and his death sometime in 1848 are undocumented. He was present when Franklin died in June 1847. He was present when Crozier decided to abandon the ships in April 1848. He wrote the second entry of the Victory Point note — the document that confirmed the disaster’s magnitude and outlined the survivors’ plan. And then, sometime in the weeks or months that followed, he died on or near the shore of Erebus Bay on King William Island.
His remains were processed after his death in ways that the cut marks on his jaw document. He died approximately 80 kilometers from the ships he had captained for three years. He was thirty-four or thirty-five years old.
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## The Significance of the Identification
The DNA identification of Fitzjames in September 2024 matters for several reasons that extend beyond the specifics of one expedition and one man.
For the history of the Franklin expedition, it adds the first confirmed identification of a commissioned officer to the physical record of the disaster. The asymmetry between what is known about Fitzjames from his letters and from the Victory Point note — a vivid individual with a documented personality and a clear narrative role in the final months — and what had previously been known about his remains — nothing — is now partially resolved. The jawbone is his.