The 1997 paper was important not because it was the first suggestion that cannibalism had occurred among the expedition’s survivors — the Inuit accounts and the John Rae evidence from 1854 had established that decades earlier — but because it provided systematic scientific documentation of physical evidence consistent with those accounts. The pattern of cut marks, their locations on specific bones, and their comparison with experimental and reference collections of deliberately processed bones provided a scientific framework for the conclusion that the Inuit accounts had described accurately.
Fitzjames’s mandible was among the NgLj-2 specimens analyzed. The cut marks on the mandible are consistent with the broader pattern at the site. The jaw’s location — on the face — and the specific placement of marks on it are consistent with the removal of the muscles of mastication and the skin and soft tissue of the face, in the same systematic way that marks on limb bones document the removal of the larger muscle masses.
The site NgLj-2 is distinct from the underwater site of HMS Erebus — the ship itself, found in 2014 in Wilmot and Crampton Bay. This is worth emphasizing because the ship and the land site share part of their names through the bay’s designation. The bones at NgLj-2 are from men who died on land, during or after the march that began on April 22, 1848. The ship sank in a different location, years later, after drifting or being navigated south from its position in the Victoria Strait ice.
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## The Ships Found: What the Wrecks Tell and Don’t Tell