What Fitzjames left is the note. His handwriting in the margins of the standard Admiralty form, crowding around Gore’s optimistic first entry from the previous year, records the disaster in laconic naval prose. The ships were beset. Franklin was dead. Twenty-four men had died. The survivors were leaving.
He signed it as “Captain, H.M.S. Erebus.”
That signature, combined with the DNA identification from his mandible, establishes a connection across 176 years between the living man who held a pen in an Arctic cairn in April 1848 and the bone that preserved his genetic material through 175 years of Arctic cold.
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## King William Island Today
King William Island sits in the Qikiqtaaluk Region of Nunavut, Canada’s northernmost territory. It is a large island — approximately 150 kilometers long — with a small permanent population concentrated at the community of Gjoa Haven on its southeastern coast. The island is named for King William IV of Britain; the naming occurred after European explorers encountered it in the mid-nineteenth century. The Inuit communities who have lived in and around the island for millennia know it differently, and their knowledge of the island and its environment was foundational to the accounts that told the outside world what happened to the Franklin expedition.
The archaeological sites related to the Franklin expedition are managed as cultural and historical resources under Canadian federal and Nunavut territorial jurisdiction. The ngLj-2 site at Erebus Bay is one of multiple sites on and around the island where expedition remains have been found. The collaborative framework that now governs expedition-related research — involving the Government of Nunavut, federal agencies, Inuit organizations, and academic researchers — reflects the evolution of how archaeological work in Indigenous territories is conducted in Canada and the recognition of the specific relationship between Inuit communities and the history that happened on their land.