Beattie’s work at Beechey Island established that the three men buried there had elevated lead levels. What it did not establish, and what subsequent research has debated, is whether those elevated levels were causally significant for their deaths or for the expedition’s outcome. Lead poisoning at chronic low-to-moderate levels can impair cognitive function and physical stamina without causing acute illness — the kind of subtle impairment that would be difficult to attribute specifically to lead in a situation where many other factors were also affecting the crew’s functioning.
The current scientific consensus, to the extent there is one, is that lead exposure was likely one factor among many contributing to the expedition’s outcome, rather than the primary cause. The deaths were too numerous, too fast, and too consistent with straightforward starvation, cold exposure, and scurvy to require a lead poisoning explanation as a primary mechanism.
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## The Inuit Who Knew: A History of Overlooked Knowledge
The story of how the Franklin expedition’s fate became known outside the Arctic is in significant part a story about whose knowledge was credited and whose was dismissed.
John Rae’s 1854 report to the Admiralty was based primarily on information gathered from Inuit communities who had encountered the expedition’s survivors and seen the evidence of its end. Rae bought artifacts — silver forks, spoons, a medal, pieces of uniform — that the Inuit had recovered from the expedition’s debris field. He transmitted their accounts of approximately thirty to forty men marching south, of bodies found near a great river, and of physical evidence that some of the dead had been cannibalized.