What the ship wrecks have not provided, as of the research informing this article, are human remains. The crew members identified — Gregory in 2021, Fitzjames in 2024, and the four additional sailors in 2026 — all died on land, at the King William Island sites that have been the focus of archaeological investigation since the nineteenth century. The ships themselves, their interiors preserved under Arctic water, have not yielded bones. If remains are present on the wrecks, they have not been found in the excavations conducted to date.
This absence shapes the archaeological picture in an important way. The identification program — which has now named six of the 129 expedition members — is working entirely from land-based remains. The ships, which carried the expedition’s physical record, the books and journals and navigational instruments that might contain contemporaneous accounts of what happened, have been extensively surveyed but have not provided the written record that historians have hoped might be found in their preserved interiors.
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## The Four Additional Identifications: May 2026
The September 2024 announcement of Fitzjames’s identification was followed, in May 2026, by the announcement of four additional identifications. These were published simultaneously in the *Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports* and in *Polar Record*, the journal of the Scott Polar Research Institute.
The four men identified in May 2026 were:
**William Orren**, an Able Seaman who served on HMS Erebus. His identification added a rank-and-file sailor to the confirmed identifications.
**David Young**, listed as Boy 1st Class on HMS Erebus. His identification was notable for his rank: a boy seaman, the youngest category of Royal Navy crew member. The presence of a boy among the crew at a site where the evidence shows what happened during the final stages of the expedition’s disintegration adds a dimension to the human reality of the disaster.