Subsequent research has qualified this hypothesis substantially. Studies comparing the lead levels in the Beechey Island bodies with those in contemporaneous comparison populations found that the levels, while elevated, were not dramatically higher than what might be expected in a nineteenth-century population with significant exposure to lead from multiple environmental sources — paint, pipes, tableware. The specific contribution of food-can solder to total lead exposure remains uncertain. Some researchers have argued that lead poisoning, even if present, was not the primary driver of the expedition’s outcome, and that the simpler explanation — starvation, cold exposure, scurvy, and the cumulative physical toll of two or three Arctic winters without adequate nutrition — is more consistent with the timeline and the distribution of deaths.
The cut marks on the NgLj-2 bones, including those on Fitzjames’s mandible, add a specific dimension to the question of what happened during the march’s final stages. Cannibalism in extremis — consuming the bodies of the dead as a survival strategy when no other food source is available — is a behavior documented from multiple historical disaster contexts. It does not require attributing to the expedition’s survivors any motivation beyond the most basic: survival when starvation is otherwise immediate.
The specific question of when cannibalism began during the march — whether at the Erebus Bay site, earlier along the route, or elsewhere — cannot be established from the NgLj-2 evidence alone. The site preserves evidence of what happened there; it does not contain a comprehensive record of everything that happened elsewhere along the march’s route.