The chain of coincidences and decisions and scientific advances that led to September 24, 2024 is long and strange. James Fitzjames’s illegitimacy, which was managed with such careful discretion by the Gambier family in 1813, became the specific genealogical challenge that required Fabiënne Tetteroo’s particular expertise to resolve. His role as captain of HMS Erebus, which made him second-in-command after Franklin’s death and the author of the expedition’s last written document, made the identification of his remains specifically significant. His death at Erebus Bay, whatever its specific circumstances, left his jaw in a condition that preserved his tooth for 175 years without destroying the DNA inside it.
The result is an identification that is, in the strict scientific sense, well-established by the evidence. The Y-chromosome profile from the tooth matches the Y-chromosome profile from the living descendant of the man’s biological father’s line. The geographical and historical context places the remains precisely where the records predict they would be. The researchers have presented the evidence clearly and without overclaiming; they have attributed the cut marks to published interpretation rather than inventing a narrative; they have noted that the DNA does not establish how or when Fitzjames died.
What it establishes is that he was there. That the jaw with the preserved tooth is his. That the last document from the Franklin expedition was written by the same person whose DNA the laboratory found in the molar. That the man who signed as “Captain, H.M.S. Erebus” on April 25, 1848, died at Erebus Bay, King William Island, Nunavut, sometime around May 1848, and that his remains were processed there before whatever remained was left to the Arctic for the next 175 years.