Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition

11 Across the Precipice

It is clear that all went exceedingly well for Sir John Franklin during the first months of his expedition. The Erebus and the Terror dodged through the ice of Baffin Bay in 1845 and quickly passed through Lancaster Sound, the eastern entrance to the Northwest Passage. Finding their westward progress impeded by a wall of ice in Barrow Strait, Franklin turned his ships north into the unexplored Wellington Channel for some 150 miles (240 km), penetrating to 77°N latitude. A second barrier of ice probably forced the expedition to retreat along the west and south coasts of Cornwallis Island (thus making clear that the land mass was an island) before finding a winter harbour at Beechey Island. Here, they settled into their first winter campsite, doubtless filled with a sense of purpose. They had not yet found a passage, but the coming summer held every hope of success.

But first, Franklin and his 128 men—most of whom were without previous polar experience—had to contend with the approaching twenty-four-hour darkness and bitter cold of the Arctic winter. They would be completely isolated from all other human beings and beyond hope of rescue for many months should something go wrong; then came the deaths of John Torrington, John Hartnell and William Braine.

Speculation as to the cause of death of those three men dominated Owen Beattie’s thoughts, when, on 10 August 1984, he and a scientific team consisting of pathologist Dr. Roger Amy and research assistants Walt Kowal, Joelee Nungaq and Geraldine Ruszala lifted off in their Twin Otter from Resolute and turned eastward for the flight across the choppy waters of Wellington Channel to Beechey Island. As the aircraft approached the distant cliffs of their destination and nearby Devon Island, there was little to provide a sense of scale. But as the plane descended, rounding the northern spit of Beechey Island, then closed in on the sloping area of Franklin’s winter camp, Beattie was astonished at how insignificant the islet looked alongside massive Devon Island.

Beattie had never visited the historic site before and, peering out of the window as the plane passed by the graves about 100 feet (30 metres) above the ground, he was deeply moved by the site’s vulnerability. Along the whole eastern slope of the island, the headboards of John Torrington, John Hartnell and William Braine were the tallest features visible, framed by towering, vertical cliffs to the west and the shore of Erebus Bay to the east.

Adjacent to the graves was a landing area, scored by long parallel wheel marks in the gravel where other planes had landed, some perhaps earlier that summer, others many years before. The pilot, flying by the graves, checked out the makeshift landing strip and the wind direction. He then powered the Twin Otter up and out over Erebus Bay, turned sharply towards the cliffs and, pulling out of the turn, lined up with the landing area. Skimming only a foot or two over mounds of gravel, the plane, flaps now fully extended, was committed to a short field-landing. With the graves directly off the left wing, the main wheels touched down into the gravel. Immediately the pilot brought the nose wheel down, applied the brakes and reversed thrust on the propellers. The plane came abruptly to a full stop.

After half an hour spent unloading a huge pile of supplies, the team stood back and watched the plane lift off and fly out over Union Bay, then into the distance, the droning of the engine gradually replaced by quiet. For the first few minutes, the crew strolled around the site. They were struck by the absolute isolation. Apart from the Antarctic and perhaps a handful of other places, there is nowhere in the world where a person can face solitude as in the Canadian Arctic. Even the presence of a few workmates does not compensate for the emptiness and loneliness of the far north.

The first task was to construct a temporary home, much as Franklin’s men had done here many years earlier. Everyone helped to pitch two large communal tents, and, as soon as these were ready, five sleeping tents were set up. Two large long-house tents, measuring 12 by 18 feet (3.7 by 5.5 metres), would provide much-needed living space for a crew whose sleeping tents were large enough only for a sleeping bag and backpack. Each long-house tent had a strong tubular aluminium skeleton, covered by a canvas outer skin; another canvas cover was tied on the inside. These two layers would provide excellent protection from the wind, rain and snow. A heavy canvas floor covered the sharp gravel. The door consisted of a double flap that could be tied tightly shut. When the tents were in position, the radio aerial and a weather station were assembled and raised.

Beattie spent time that first day on Beechey Island studying the tiny Franklin graveyard where he hoped some answers lay buried. The three graves lay side by side, about 26 feet (8 metres) above sea level. He planned to begin by exhuming Petty Officer John Torrington, who was probably the first on the expedition to die. Interred alongside Torrington were Able-bodied Seaman John Hartnell and Private William Braine.

Torrington’s headboard was simple, but both Hartnell and Braine had inscriptions taken from the Bible carved on theirs. Hartnell’s included the following passage: “Thus saith the Lord of Hosts, consider your ways.” Haggai, i,7.’, while Braine’s read, “Choose ye this day whom ye will serve” Joshua, xxiv, 15.’ These unusual inscriptions have prompted some searchers and historians to suggest that foul play or mishap marred that first winter. One of the jobs of a forensic anthropologist is to interpret whether foul play could have caused or contributed to the death of an individual. Before the work started on Torrington’s grave, Beattie wondered what he might find.

Two days after the first members of Beattie’s scientific team arrived, a second Twin Otter flew in carrying project archaeologist Eric Damkjar and research assistant Arne Carlson. Damkjar brought news of a family emergency to Nungaq, and the young assistant left on the same aircraft.

Torrington’s grave was carefully staked out, mapped, sketched and photographed so it could be restored to its original state upon completion of the exhumation. Each stone covering the grave, from the tiny 2–4-inch-high (5–10-cm-high) stone fence made of limestone shingle that surrounded it to the stones that covered the burial mound itself, were numbered with water-soluble ink to assist the scientists in reconstruction.

They worked surrounded by the permanence of the stark and seemingly ancient land. But for the lonesome graves, a few remaining Franklin relics and their own small cluster of tents, there was nothing human in the place. The hard, angular coastline of Devon Island juts out in the distance east of Beechey Island, with cliffs rising some 660 or more feet (200-plus metres) out of Lancaster Sound and Barrow Strait. When the land is covered with snow, the stratigraphy of the cliffs produces marked horizontal stripes of white and grey that appear like a chart of the ages. Beechey Island itself is actually a very small appendage to the southwest corner of Devon Island, to which it is connected by a narrow filament of gravel barely 13 feet (4 metres) across in parts and within the reach of windblown ice. It was first seen by Europeans on a cold August day in 1819. Captain William Edward Parry briefly described landing on Devon Island:

(It was on that point of land, Cape Riley, that searchers would find the first traces of the Franklin expedition thirty-one years later.) Then Parry looked to the west, across a bay that now bears the name of Franklin’s ship, Erebus, at what would eventually become one of the most important and recognized sites in Arctic exploration:

Parry never set foot on the tiny island he named.

The northeast corner of Beechey Island slopes first gently upwards from the shore of Erebus Bay through a series of level beach ridges ideal for the construction of small buildings, or a graveyard. Upslope from the area used by Franklin and his crews, the land rises more steeply, culminating in high cliffs that overlook the campsite and the bay where the two ships would have been locked in the ice. The top of the island is remarkably flat, and in the southwest corner of the plateau, overlooking Barrow Strait, Franklin had the large rock cairn built. From this vantage point, 590 feet (180 metres) above sea level, it is possible to see Somerset Island 40 miles (70 km) to the south; Cornwallis Island is easily visible 30 miles (50 km) west across the entrance to Wellington Channel.

A small stream cuts down to the south of Franklin’s camp area, past the grey gravel covering the three graves, before emptying into Erebus Bay. Only in July and August does the stream come to life, providing a source of water for visitors to the site. In July, when the sun has warmed the rocky ground, hardy flowers bloom, filling the landscape with tiny random pockets of bright colour. But in August, as the team worked, the blooms had already fallen away.

On 12 August 1984, having erected a tent shell over the grave to protect it from the elements, the University of Alberta researchers began to dig through the ground of Torrington’s grave. It took them less than an hour to remove the top layer of gravel using shovels and trowels, but when the excavation reached 4 inches (10 cm) into the ground, the men encountered cement-like permafrost. After a short, unsuccessful experiment in melting the permafrost with hot air, they resorted to pick and shovel to attack the frozen ground.

Soon after the uppermost levels of the permafrost had been chipped, broken and shovelled away, a strange smell was detected in the otherwise crisp, clean air. At first it wafted upwards intermittently, mingling with the smell from the smashing, sparking contact of pick with gravel, but as the excavation deepened the smell gained in strength and persistence and soon dominated the work. Although not totally the smell of decay, it served to remind Beattie of what he might encounter. But not until much later, when the coffin was fully exposed, would the true origin of the smell be determined.

Two long days were spent struggling through almost 5 feet (1.5 metres) of permafrost before the researchers got their first glimpse of the coffin. At the deepest part of the excavation, field assistant Walt Kowal, carefully clearing off a thin layer of snow at the foot-end of the grave, exposed a small area of clear ice. Beneath the ice casing he could see dark blue material. Until this discovery, there was speculation as to whether anyone was actually buried in the grave. Torrington’s body might have plunged through the ice into the freezing waters and been lost; other expeditions of the period had constructed dummy graves as a form of memorial. Or maybe the body would be simply missing, removed sometime during the past 138 years—a possibility that first occured to the exasperated team when they had dug about 1½ feet (.5 metre) below the top of the permafrost. As the researchers struggled deeper and deeper into the ground and still found no sign of a coffin, the thought that the grave really might be empty began to seriously trouble them. So when Kowal saw the blue material, he shouted, “That’s it! We’ve got it!” and stood back with a sense of accomplishment and relief.

Beattie and the others quickly gathered and knelt in a close circle around the discovery. With such a small area exposed it was impossible to determine what the fabric represented. Beattie thought it might be a section of the Union Jack. Others speculated it might be part of a uniform, a shroud or the coffin itself. But for a time the material was left under the thin cover of ice. Although the researchers had obviously discovered something in the grave and were anxious to continue, Beattie was still awaiting the exhumation and reburial permits from the government of the Northwest Territories, notification of permission from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and clearance from the chief medical officer. What had been done up to that point was considered archaeological work and was covered by a separate permit. Having established the exact location of the body, Beattie was now forced to call an end to the excavation until the required permissions arrived.

Abundantly clear to Beattie after removing more than 3 feet (1 metre) of permafrost, was that Torrington’s preservation would probably be excellent because of the ice. Originally there had been some doubt, as 138 Arctic springs and summers had passed. But even at the height of summer the season’s heat had had little or no effect on the upper reach of the permafrost—and Franklin’s men had gone to a good deal of trouble interring Torrington deep in the frozen ground. Then, as the researchers waited for the permits, they were confronted with a problem that could have ruined the whole project. Water began to flood the grave.

The water was subsurface run-off from the melting snow and permafrost of the slope and cliffs inland from the excavation, further fed by periods of rain and sleet. Everything was at stake. What had lain undisturbed for more than a century could be severely damaged or destroyed by water within hours if they didn’t act quickly.

It was decided that a shallow V-shaped ditch 130 feet (40 metres) long would be dug directly upslope of the graves (the three crewmen were buried alongside one another, with Torrington closest to the sea). This ditch, shovelled and scraped only a few inches into the permafrost, would act as a collecting canal, effectively diverting the water away from the graves. Within a matter of hours, the water seeping into Torrington’s grave had slowed to a trickle; eventually it stopped.

With still no news about the required permits, Roger Amy and Geraldine Ruszala made use of the down time to explore the spit of land connecting Beechey Island to Devon Island. Well into their hike, Amy, casting his eye along the spit, noticed a dirty-coloured snowbank about ⅛ of a mile (.2 km) away. His eyes were drawn by its unusual colour, but, as he looked more closely, he saw it move. Amy stopped dead in his tracks as the realization hit him: they were walking directly into the path of a polar bear. These huge and powerful animals, which can weigh 1,985 pounds (900 kg) and stand 11½ feet (3.5 metres) on their hind legs, often avoid human contact. However, periodic polar bear attacks do take place in the Canadian Arctic.

Amy whispered to Ruszala to start slowly backing up as the bear began sauntering towards them. They were at least ⅓ of a mile (.5 km) from camp, but they continued this cautious retreat almost the whole distance, with the bear following along at the same speed. Finally, with the camp within earshot, they turned and ran. “A bear, a bear,” Ruszala shouted, wildly pointing back towards the spit. The bear was still about one eighth of a mile away when Kowal and Damkjar fired several shots into the air to frighten the animal. These first blasts simply increased the bear’s curiosity, but the two men continued firing and, after ambling a few feet closer, the bear wisely decided it might be better—if not simply quieter—to alter its course and move on to other business. The crew followed the majestic animal’s retreat until it was last seen swimming speedily across Union Bay towards Cape Spencer. Amy and Ruszala, however, were badly shaken by the experience of being stalked.

As the wait for the final permits continued, Beattie and Damkjar decided to explore the remains of Franklin’s winter camp, then the historic sites along the east coast of the island.

Most of the relics left behind by Franklin’s expedition had already been collected and taken away by the search expeditions that followed. Those that remained were subjected to continual disturbance right up to 1984. Despite this, a number of important artefacts could be seen in the areas adjacent to the graveyard. Most prominent among them was a large gravel-walled outline, believed to have been a storehouse. Also nearby the graves were the remains of a smithy, a carpenter’s shop and, further away, depressions where tent structures or observation platforms once stood. (Between 1976 and 1982, Parks Canada had conducted detailed archaeological investigations of a number of important historical sites in the Arctic. Beechey Island was one of the sites studied. The only artefacts from Franklin’s expedition remaining at that time—besides the structure outlines—were clay pipe fragments, nails, forge waste, a stove door fragment, wood shavings and tin cans.)

Beattie also looked over two graves dating from the searches of the 1850s that had been dug alongside Torrington, Hartnell and Braine. One of the graves was that of Thomas Morgan, a seaman from Robert McClure’s ship, the HMS Investigator. The owner of the other grave is unknown, though one journal from the 1850s indicates that it may be a dummy grave serving as a memorial to French Navy Lieutenant Joseph René Bellot. Both of these men had died heroic and tragic deaths. Morgan had been among the scurvy-wracked from the Investigator who—before the Franklin expedition achievements were discovered—had been credited with being the first to cross the Northwest Passage. Having abandoned the ice-locked Investigator with the rest of McClure’s crew at Mercy Bay on the north coast of Banks Island, Morgan had made the difficult trek by foot over the ice first to Dealy Island, then later reached Beechey Island, only to die aged thirty-six in May 1854 on board the HMS North Star. Bellot, who had served in the French Navy with distinction, later volunteered to join in the Franklin search. Bellot visited the Arctic first under Captain William Kennedy aboard the Prince Albert, then later aboard the HMS Phoenix. On 18 August 1853, while carrying dispatches to searcher Sir Edward Belcher up icy Wellington Channel, Bellot was caught by a gust of wind and swept into the frigid water. His body was never recovered.

Beattie and Damkjar, leaving the graves and adjacent Franklin campsite behind them, walked south along the beach ridge above the waterline. The first artefacts found along their route were tins, scattered individually or in small clusters. Close inspection of the cans identified them as being from the supplies of the search expeditions. Not only had Captain Horatio Thomas Austin and Captain William Penny—the searchers who had first discovered Franklin expedition relics on Beechey Island—spent time here, but others later used the island as a base for their searches. Walking along, the number of tins increased and wood fragments also became evident. Visible around a curve in the coastline was the mast of one of several vessels left at King William Island during the 1850s—jutting at a steep angle out of a gravel beach ridge. The vessel, which was probably left on the island to serve as a depot, was still largely intact in 1927 when Sir Frederick Banting, codiscoverer of insulin, and Canadian painter A.Y. Jackson visited the island on a sketching trip. The mast, and a small section from the hull of the vessel, which lay flat on one of the lower beach ridges, were all that remained for Beattie and Damkjar to inspect.

Along one of the highest beach ridges was a series of recent markers and cairns dating from the 1950s to the 1970s. Also at the site: a memorial combining the monument left by Leopold M’Clintock in 1858 and a cenotaph erected by Belcher as a memorial to all those who died during the Franklin search.

Belcher, commanding a British naval fleet of five ships from 1852 to 1854, ordered that one of these ships, the North Star, under the command of William John Samuel Pullen, remain off Beechey Island as a base for the other vessels. Directly in front of the cenotaph, on a much lower ridge, is the skeleton of Northumberland House, the supply depot built by the crew of the North Star in 1854. It had been in a reasonable and useful state of repair even into the early 1900s, but no longer. Only parts of the wood walls were still visible, though a stone wall had held up quite well. Scattered in and around the structure were hundreds, possibly thousands, of artefacts from the structure itself and the food containers (primarily wooden barrel staves and metal barrel hoops) once housed inside. On 6 August 1927, when Banting and Jackson visited Northumberland House, significant damage had already been done to the structure, though Jackson noted in his journal that “there are a lot of water barrels, thirty or forty of them, that could be used today.” Banting, however, also noted that “Bears had chewed holes in the side of some of the barrels, large enough to admit the head and neck so that they could get the last drop of the contents.” Still, the scattered relics on Beechey Island do not attest to the hundreds of men, from various expeditions, who spent time at the site over the course of the searches of the early 1850s. Even on such a small island, their artefacts are lost among the forbidding landscape.

Peering off the south shore of the island during his survey, Beattie thought of the wreck of the Breadalbane, sent from England with fresh supplies for the ships under Belcher. Crushed in the ice, the Breadalbane sank off the island on 21 August 1853. In 1980, Canadian underwater explorer Dr. Joe Maclnnis located the remains of the remarkably preserved ship under 330 feet (100 metres) of water and, in 1983, led a diving team to visit the wreck.

Returning to camp from his hike, Beattie saw that the wait for permissions was taking its toll on everyone’s nerves. Feeling that the permissions would not be granted in time to complete the project that summer, Amy finally decided to return to Edmonton, where he had a number of pressing professional obligations. He left Beechey Island on 15 August.

At last, on 17 August, Beattie received a radio transmission from the Polar Shelf offices in Resolute giving permission to proceed with the exhumation, autopsy and reburial of John Torrington. Hearing the letters of permission read over the radio caused a great sense of relief and fuelled a new surge of energy and enthusiasm. The last letter also detailed the procedures to follow should contagious disease be detected in the Franklin crewmen. Everyone in the Arctic could have picked up the transmission and heard the Polar Shelf radio operator read in part: “If, in the course of the excavations, Dr. Beattie discovers any evidence of infectious disease in the artefacts or corpses exhumed, further digging should be discontinued.”

Work on clearing off the last layer of ice and gravel began almost immediately, and the source of the noxious odour soon became apparent. It was not partly decomposed tissue, as had been expected, but rather the rotting blue wool fabric that covered the coffin.

As they reached the coffin lid, the wind picked up dramatically and a massive black thunder cloud moved over the site. The walls of the tent covering the excavation began to snap loudly, and, as the weather continued to worsen, the five researchers finally stopped their work and looked at one another. The conditions had suddenly become so strange that Kowal observed, “This is like something out of a horror film.” Some of the crew were visibly nervous and Beattie decided to call a halt to work for the day. That night the wind howled continuously, rattling the sides of Beattie’s tent all night and sometimes smacking its folds against his face, making sleep difficult. Ruszala, unable to sleep, stayed in one of the long-house tents. All were concerned about the stability of the tent that had been erected over Torrington’s grave and, through the night, anxious heads would peer out of their tents to check on it. Towards morning, a violent gust slashed its way under the floorless tent, lifting it up and over the headboard before slamming it down on the adjacent beach ridge. Only a single rope held to its metal stake, preventing the tent from blowing into Erebus Bay. In the morning, the weather finally calmed and they dismantled the tent, remarkably only slightly damaged, and continued their excavation in the open.

Time was not a major consideration during the work, and, with continuous daylight, all soon lost track of the actual time of day. Eating when hungry, sleeping when tired, a natural rhythm developed, resulting in a work “day” stretching up to twenty-eight hours in length. The only reminders of the regimented, time-oriented outside world were the daily 7 AM and 7 PM radio schedules with the Polar Shelf operators. During these broadcasts they would pass along weather information and messages and listen to the messages and weather reported in turn from the other Polar Shelf-supported camps strewn across the Arctic.

As the last layer of ice and gravel cemented to the top of the coffin was removed, Damkjar thought he could see something different in the texture of the fabric on the upper central portion of the lid. “Look at this,” he said, while continuing the thawing and cleaning. “It looks like something is attached to the lid or maybe carved into it.” Damkjar’s slow and meticulous work eventually revealed a beautiful hand-painted plaque that had been securely nailed to the coffin lid. Roughly heart-shaped, with short, pointed extensions along its top and bottom edges, it was made of tinned wrought iron, perhaps part of a tin can, and looked as though it was hand-cut. It was painted dark blue-green and on it in white was a hand-painted inscription: “JOHN TORRINGTON DIED JANUARY 1ST 1846 AGED 20 YEARS.”

The plaque was a touching last gesture made by Torrington’s shipmates, and Damkjar spent a lot of time studying and sketching the discovery. Frozen for 138 years, the paint was showing signs of peeling, and rust had accumulated around its outer edges. The rust was carefully cleaned away and the plaque’s surface lightly brushed with water to remove the accumulated crust of silt.

The coffin itself was also impressive. It was obviously well made and its mahogany lid and box had been individually covered by wool fabric dyed dark blue. White linen tape had been tacked to the lid and box in a geometric, military, yet decorative manner that contrasted with the personal nature of the plaque. Bolted to the sides of the coffin were brass handles, the one on the right still in the “up” position, and bolted to the foot- and head-ends were brass rings. But what was most remarkable was the size of the coffin—it appeared almost too small to contain an adult, though this may have been an optical illusion created by the box being in a narrow hole.

During the hours spent removing the permafrost adhering to the coffin, the researchers would occasionally tap on the lid, expecting to hear a hollow sound each time, but this was never the case. Rather, it was like striking a large block of marble, a strange sound given the circumstances. This result obviously meant a heavy mass was enclosed. It couldn’t be just a body.

The removal of the lid was surprisingly difficult. It was very strongly secured to the box by a series of square shafted nails, and, as the researchers were soon to find out, it was “glued” down by ice within the coffin. The options for removing the lid were to pry it up, pull the nails or shear the nails at the junction of the lid with the box. Prying the lid would almost certainly destroy it: the wood was soft and delicate. For a similar reason, the team decided not to attempt to pull the nails out of the coffin. The best method, in Beattie’s mind, was to shear the nails. He placed the chisel edge of a rock hammer against the lid/box junction at each nail location and struck the rock hammer inward with another hammer. The chisel head drove into and through the nail without damage to the coffin.

Finally, after all the nails had been sheared and the ice holding down the lid had thawed, Beattie took the foot-end and slowly lifted it up, revealing the shadowy contents of the coffin. A partially transparent block of ice lay within, and, through the frozen bubbles, cracks and planes in the ice, something—some form—could be seen. But the more closely they looked, the more elusive the contents became.

This block of ice was the most serious obstacle yet. They had come to within inches of the body, only to be confronted with an apparently insurmountable obstacle. Work stopped while Beattie brooded over the next step. The options were few.

An aircraft engine preheater on the site, a noisy, temperamental and dangerous machine, could not be used to thaw the ice because hot air would put the biological matter and any artefacts enclosed at considerable risk. The outside air temperature was always at or slightly below freezing and in the grave lower still, so natural thawing was not a possibility. Chipping away the ice was not practical and probably impossible.

Ruszala suggested pouring water, some heated, some cold, onto the ice block. It worked better and faster than could have been hoped for. The researchers heated buckets of stream water on the camp stoves, lugged them bucket-brigade-style to the grave, then poured the water over the ice, from where it eventually ran out of the bottom join of the coffin onto the floor of the grave. The runoff was then scooped into a pail and dumped away from the gravesite. The team worked hard, spurred on by the knowledge that they would soon come face to face with a man from the Franklin expedition, and progress was swift.

The first part of Torrington to come into view was the front of his shirt, complete with mother-of-pearl buttons. Soon, his perfectly preserved toes gradually poked through the receding ice.

Most of the day was spent at this initial stage of exposure. All the while, the face remained shielded, covered by a fold of the same blue wool lain over the outside of the coffin. This created an eerie feeling among the researchers; it was almost as if Torrington was somehow aware of what was happening around him. But for artists’ portraits and a few primitive photographs, who living today has ever seen the face of a person from the earlier part of the Victorian era, a person who took part in one of history’s major expeditions of discovery? It would not be long before they were to gaze upon the face of this man from history.

Beattie was fascinated by the almost perfect preservation of the toes. The realization that a completely preserved human was attached to them had not yet sunk in. This was a strange period during their work: they were extremely close to a frozen sailor from 1846, and yet, they were concentrating so much on small details of thawing that the eventual exposure of the complete person was totally unexpected.

Arne Carlson was painstakingly thawing the section of coffin fabric covering the face area. Using a pair of large surgical tweezers, he pulled the material up carefully as it was freed by the melting ice. It was a difficult and meticulous task; as Carlson wanted to prevent any tearing of the material, he had to work hunched closely to it. Then suddenly, as he pulled gently upwards on the right edge of the material, the last curtain of ice gave way, freeing the material and revealing the face of Petty Officer John Torrington. Carlson gasped and sprang to his feet, allowing the fabric to fall back on Torrington’s face. Pointing with the tweezers, Carlson said in a strangely calm voice: “He’s there, he’s right there!” The others quickly gathered at the graveside, and, while everyone peered at the fabric covering, Beattie pulled it back.

All stood, numb and silent. Nothing could have prepared them for the face of John Torrington, framed and cradled in his ice-coffin. Despite all the intervening years, the young man’s life did not seem far away; in many ways it was as if Torrington had just died.

It was a shattering moment for Beattie, who felt an empathy for this man and a sadness for his passing—and as if he were standing at a precipice looking across a terrifying gulf into a very different world from our own. He was a witness to a tragedy, yet he had to remind himself that the tragedy belonged to another time.

The sky on the day of the autopsy was overcast, the grey clouds merging with the grey waters of Erebus Bay. The temperature was 30°F (-1°C), the wind a steady 12 miles per hour (20 km/h) from the south. Standing at the graveside and looking into the coffin, the gloom seemed to be reflected in Torrington’s simple grey linen trousers and his white shirt with closely spaced thin blue stripes. The shirt had a high collar and was pleated from the waist downwards, where it was tucked into the trousers. Under Torrington’s chin and over the top of his medium-brown hair was tied his kerchief, made of white cotton and covered in large blue polka dots.

John Torrington looked anything but grotesque. The expression on his thin face, with its pouting mouth and half-closed eyes gazing through delicate, light-brown eyelashes, was peaceful. His nose and forehead, in contrast to the natural skin colour of the rest of his face, were darkened by contact with the blue-wool coffin covering. This shadowed the face, accentuating the softness of its appearance. The tragedy of Torrington’s young death was as apparent to the researchers as it must have been to his shipmates 138 years before.

Torrington would have stood 5 feet 4 inches (163 cm) tall. His arms were straight, with the hands resting palm down on the fronts of his thighs, held in position by strips of cotton binding. These bindings were located at his elbows, hands, ankles and big toes. Their purpose was to hold the limbs together during the preparation of the body for burial. It was discovered later that his body lay on a bed of wood shavings, scattered along the bottom of the coffin, with his head supported by a thicker matting of shavings. He wore no shoes or boots, and there were no other personal belongings beyond his clothing.

Yet by far the strongest and most vivid memory Beattie has of this remarkable event centres not around the final thawing of Torrington’s body in the coffin, but on the lifting of the body out of the grave in preparation for autopsy. It was a remarkable and highly emotional experience, with Carlson holding and supporting Torrington’s legs, Beattie his shoulders and head. He was very light, weighing less than 88 pounds (40 kg), and as they moved him his head lolled onto Beattie’s left shoulder; Beattie looked directly into Torrington’s half-opened eyes, only a few inches from his own. There was no rigidity of his body, and rigor mortis would have disappeared within hours of his death. Although his arms and legs were tightly bound, he was completely limp, causing Beattie to comment, “It’s as if he’s just unconscious.”

The two men carefully lowered Torrington to the ground outside the grave. There he lay, exposed to the Arctic sky for the first time in 138 years. If he had miraculously stirred to consciousness after his long sleep, Torrington would have thought that he had missed just two changes of season—a sleep of but eight months.

The bindings were removed and the body undressed. Away from the reality of the research project, an observer might suggest that the undressing of the body was an indignity to Torrington. But given the situation, both the need for medical evidence as to the fate of Franklin’s expedition and the team’s own feelings, which were very personal and intense, no indignity could exist.

Looking at Torrington lying naked on the autopsy tarpaulin, Beattie saw for the first time the condition of the young sailor and was shocked by the emaciated appearance of the body. All wondered aloud at what could have been the cause. Had he died of starvation? Was he suffering from some serious disease that had robbed him of his physical strength? It was immediately evident that foul play was unlikely; what they saw was a young man who had been extremely ill when he died. Of course, Torrington’s emaciated appearance was to a small extent due to the loss of moisture that occurs over a prolonged period of freezing, and in that sense, the preservation of the body could not be described as perfect. But every rib in the body was visible. And later, during the autopsy, no fat would be found, confirming that the weight loss before death was real and significant.

His hands, which Beattie commented “look like they are still warm,” were extremely long, delicate and smooth, “like you would expect a pianist’s to be.” There were no calluses on the palms or fingers, which would have been expected on an active participant in the expedition. Torrington had been the leading stoker on the Terror, and his hands would normally have shown evidence of his work if he had been recently active. Yet there was none, and for that reason Beattie was convinced he must have been too ill to work for some time before he died. Also, his nails were quite clean and he had recently been given a haircut, either in preparation for his burial or perhaps in the period just before his death.

The first part of the examination was a meticulous search for external signs of the cause or causes of death (wounds, markings, disease) or of medical treatment (signs of medicinal bleeding). None was found except for the deep and discoloured marks on the elbows, hands and ankles made by the cotton bindings. Then Beattie conducted a standard autopsy. Tissue, organ, bone, fingernail and hair samples were taken for analysis by Roger Amy at his laboratory at the University of Alberta.

The autopsy took more than four hours to complete. Beattie and Carlson wore surgical aprons, their hands double gloved with rubber surgical gloves. The procedure involved making a Y-shaped incision in the chest and abdomen, retracting the skin and musculature, the temporary removal of the front portion of the rib cage and exposure of the thoracic and abdominal organs. Yet when the autopsy began, all internal structures were completely frozen. It was necessary to thaw each organ with water before samples could be collected. Using a scalpel, .3–7 ounces (10–20 grams) of tissue were then collected from each organ. Carlson and Damkjar prepared and marked the sample containers with identification information and numbers. A preservative was poured in them and Beattie dropped each collected sample in the appropriate container, which was then sealed. Damkjar also took pictures of the various stages of the autopsy while Kowal took notes dictated to him by Beattie. One of the most difficult aspects of the whole procedure was keeping their hands warm, and one bucket of hot water was kept nearby so that Beattie and Carlson could immerse their hands in it.

From the beginning, Beattie could see features that could be of medical importance. The lungs, when exposed, appeared completely blackened and were attached abnormally in a number of locations to the chest wall by a series of adhesions (scar tissue). Torrington’s heart also appeared abnormal. No food could be found in the stomach or bowel.

Torrington’s right thumbnail was collected, as were samples of his hair, rib bone and radius bone. These would be subjected to various forms of analysis in later months in an attempt to construct a diary of his health during the time he spent on the expedition prior to his death, as well as a short period of time prior to the expedition.

A difficult but necessary procedure during an autopsy is the exposure of the brain. With a surgical hand saw, and with assistance from Carlson and Damkjar, Beattie removed the skull cap and collected samples of brain tissue and made observations of the brain anatomy. All of the samples collected and observations made would be pieced together later after Amy’s analysis of the data and microscopic evidence from the samples.

During the autopsy, Beattie saw that, even though preservation of the body was excellent, post-mortem degenerative changes in the structure of the tissues had taken place. Later, Amy would confirm that the microscopic details showed that virtually all cellular structures were badly or completely damaged. The brain had also shrunk, as had some of the other organs, to about two-thirds’ normal size, and had completely autolyzed (the cells had been destroyed by their own enzymes). Beattie would later be approached a number of times by people with the idea that perhaps one day in the future, Torrington could have been revived by some elixir or as yet unimagined technology, but the evidence of massive cellular damage found in every organ precluded this possibility.

Throughout the autopsy, Beattie kept Torrington’s face covered; somehow, this gave the reassurance that his privacy was maintained, illustrating how strongly the face is perceived as the window of the soul and the reflection of our identity.

After the autopsy, Torrington was re-dressed, lifted back into his grave and into the coffin. After carefully positioning the body, the lid was then replaced. Water would soon begin to fill the grave again and freeze, ensuring Torrington’s lasting preservation. Ruszala placed a note in the grave, giving the names of the seven researchers and a description of their feelings and purpose at the site. It was a private offering to John Torrington that, along with his body, would quite likely outlast all of the team’s own physical remains after their deaths. The group then quietly gathered together at Ruszala’s suggestion, for silent prayers and some individual thoughts, before John Torrington was again assigned to the frozen depths, maybe this time forever. For these moments, Beattie contemplated Torrington’s life and the events of late 1845 and early 1846, then the events of his own life in the summer of 1984, and how the years separating the two had somehow vanished.

After filling in the grave, Beattie stopped to peer down the beach towards Erebus Bay. It was almost possible to see the two ships held in the ice just offshore, Franklin’s men moving ghostlike in small groups on the ice and across the island. The crews would have paused for John Torrington on those bitter January days of 1846, but none could have guessed what horror his death foretold. Their adventure was young and the Northwest Passage, which had long haunted men, beckoned somewhere across the icy waters to the west.

12 The Face of Death

The arctic summer of 1984 was nearing an end. Although the weather had been generally good (except for the occasional light dusting of snow), the warmth of the summer sun was lost towards the close of August and the nights had turned cold. As each day brought winter closer, nightfall gradually crept into the twenty-four-hour light of the Arctic summer, and a generator had to be used to power a photoflood lamp inside the cook tent in the evenings.

The weather became so unpredictable that, if the team had radioed for an airplane from Resolute to come for them, the half-hour required to fly that distance could have seen a complete change in weather. A simple change in wind direction or a quickly dropping cloud ceiling would also have made a landing on Beechey Island impossible.

Beattie had originally hoped to uncover all three of the Franklin expedition graves on the island that summer, but, worried about the weather and drained by the experience of exhuming John Torrington, his thoughts turned instead towards the laboratory work that awaited him in Edmonton. Three days had been spent on Torrington’s final exhumation and autopsy and the scientific team was exhausted, physically and emotionally. Beattie wanted to pack it in for the season, as did the others. Just one radio call to the Polar Shelf and they could be away from the island. But something had bothered Beattie and the others about the appearance of Hartnell’s grave. Before completing the autopsy on John Torrington, Walt Kowal had begun to dig into the permafrost covering John Hartnell.

A close inspection of the graves of John Hartnell and William Braine soon revealed that their construction by the crew of the Erebus had been very similar, if not identical. But they were no longer so: it was clear that Hartnell’s grave had been disturbed at some point in the 138 years since his death. The large limestone slabs, once part of a grave structure like Braine’s, which has an almost crypt-like appearance, had been simply piled on top of the burial place, as if they had been lifted away and later hastily replaced. Inspecting the surface of the grave and looking closely into the nooks and pockets produced by the large rocks, the researchers found small fragments of wood and some tiny scraps of blue material similar to that which covered Torrington’s coffin. Beattie had no idea when the grave had been disturbed. The team discussed the situation, as well as the difficulty of completing an autopsy on Hartnell within the time remaining. If there had been one or more previous openings of the grave, they would have to take great care in gathering evidence—and the time required for this could be considerable. Beattie decided to look for clues that might explain the history of the damage and determine the state of preservation, but to conduct the autopsy another year.

Before the excavation of Hartnell’s grave was complete, Beattie visited a site that would add important insights into his research. Located nearly ⅔ mile (1 km) north of the gravesite, at the narrowest point of the island near the spit, is a large oval mound with a central depression filled with the fragments of hundreds of rusted and disintegrating food tins from Franklin’s expedition. When this location was discovered in August 1850, searchers found a neat arrangement of 700 or more tins piled “like shot” into low pyramids about 1½ feet (.5 metre) high. The tins were empty of food and had been filled with gravel. The reason for the “cairn,” as it was described, is not clear. But not wanting to miss any possible clue left behind by Franklin’s people, the searchers of 1850 thoroughly investigated each of the tins, dumping out the gravel. Literally leaving no stone unturned, they also dug into the ground underneath the tins with the hope of finding a buried document. It is this excavation that produced the oval mound and depression that mark the site today.

There has been much debate about the significance of these tins. It was thought that the “cairn” was evidence of problems with the preserved food. Certainly, by the 1850s, Stephan Goldner, who had supplied the Franklin expedition, was encountering problems with the quality of the tinned foods he delivered to later expeditions. And more than one of the searchers in the 1850s observed that a number of the tins at Beechey Island had bulging ends, evidence that some of the food had putrefied. Still, one searcher, Peter Sutherland, wrote that the tins “were carefully examined without anything being discovered that could lead to the remotest idea that the preserved meat which they contained had been in an unsound state.” And one twentieth-century historian has argued that the number of tins present at the site was not in excess of what was expected to have been used by the expedition during their stay on Beechey Island. In other words, there was no evidence for large quantities of bad food being dumped on the island.

Beattie had seen photographs of food tins from various British Arctic expeditions and had handled a few, but as he picked through the tins from Franklin’s expedition, he saw that they were different. The lead soldering was thick and sloppily done, and had dripped like melted candle wax down the inside surface of the tins. Beattie wondered if this could be the source of the lead in the Booth Point skeleton and in the human remains collected elsewhere on King William Island. This idea became more credible to him as each piece of tin he picked up demonstrated the same degree of internal contamination from the solder. Samples were collected for further examination and plans made to return for a comprehensive study of the site.

Meanwhile, Kowal was finding the excavation of Hartnell’s grave much more difficult than had been experienced with Torrington. The permafrost was harder and more consolidated than was encountered in the other grave, and he constantly commented on this difference. The increased difficulty in the pick and shovel work hinted that the grave had been disturbed, then refrozen. As digging continued, more fragments of wood and blue material were pulled from the grave fill itself, reinforcing Beattie’s view that the previous disturbance had been considerable and may have involved the exposure of the coffin, and probably Hartnell’s body as well.

Shortly, Kowal announced that he had found the foot-end of the coffin. To everyone’s surprise it was not deeply buried, only 33 inches (85 cm) into the ground. They had expected a burial at least as deep as Torrington’s.

The white tape decoration on it was in poor condition, and, as Kowal continued to clear the permafrost from the top of the lid, he uncovered other areas of damage. “Someone sure did a number on this grave,” he said, as he finished exposing the lid. The right-hand side at the forearm level had been smashed through, leaving a gaping hole. It was possible to identify each blow of the pickaxe that had done the damage. A large rectangular piece of the blue fabric adjacent to the hole was missing. The lid, originally nailed to the coffin, was slightly ajar, the nails having either been removed or broken. There was no doubt that the coffin had been exposed and opened before. The condition of the white fabric tape decoration was in stark contrast to the symmetrical dignity of Torrington’s coffin, and Beattie was shocked by the damage, which at first appeared to have been caused by a wanton act of vandalism. But as work continued it became obvious that, though there had been considerable damage done during the previous excavation, it was not the work of vandals or pot hunters. The lid had been replaced and the nails appeared to have been carefully removed. Vandals would have simply pried the lid off the coffin, causing major structural damage.

Beattie jumped into the grave and bent over the hole in the lid. Pulling some of the gravel out of the hole, he said, “Look at this—Hartnell’s shirt!” A small piece of fabric, nearly identical in design to John Torrington’s shirt, had come free from the ice. The fabric, obviously part of the right shirt sleeve, was torn, and the thought entered Beattie’s mind that, if the clothing had been damaged in the area of the hole in the lid, perhaps there was damage to Hartnell’s body as well.

Unlike Torrington’s, there was no plaque on the lid of Hartnell’s coffin, and Beattie believed the plaque was removed by the people who had exposed the coffin. A close inspection of the wood in the area where a plaque would have been fixed did not reveal any nail holes, though it is possible they could have closed since the time of the plaque’s removal. A less satisfactory interpretation was that, being an able seaman, Hartnell did not warrant a plaque. But considering that his messmates (including his younger brother Thomas) would normally have been responsible for the preparation of a plaque, it seemed likely there had been one. Not only had Hartnell been buried at only a little more than half the depth of John Torrington, the coffin also did not seem to be aligned with the headboard. As the researchers intended to expose no more than the coffin lid, an assessment of the damage to the rest of the coffin would have to wait until their planned return.

When Kowal lifted the coffin lid on 23 August, everyone was crouched round the graveside. Inside Hartnell’s coffin there was again a solid block of ice. “There is no doubt that he will be as well preserved as Torrington,” Beattie said. However, unspoken was a fear that Hartnell’s body, as well as the coffin, had been damaged. There was only one way to confirm these fears.

Exhumed, John Torrington was a frail, innocent-looking young man. He did not fit the image of a sea-toughened sailor and adventurer, but simply of a young man who died too soon. Because of this, not one of the scientists was prepared for what awaited them a few inches below the ice in Hartnell’s coffin.

Kowal poured water over Hartnell’s face area and soon spotted the outline of a nose through the receding ice. While John Torrington’s face had been slightly discoloured by contact with the coffin covering and by exposure to a pocket of air, Hartnell’s nose appeared natural in colour. Gradually, Kowal could see a ghostly image taking shape through the ice—a frightening, shimmering face of death.

“This guy is spooky,” Kowal said while continuing the exposure of Hartnell, “the quintessential pirate. This guy is frightening.”

The others watched in silence as the face was finally completely exposed. Perhaps the emotional drain of their work with Torrington was only now taking its toll. As with Torrington, they were shaken by the second face that was emerging from the rock-hard ground of the island. Shaken, but in a different way.

Whereas Torrington had embodied a youthful, tragic innocence, John Hartnell reflected the harsh realities of death and suffering in the Arctic: his was the face of a sea-hardened nineteenth-century sailor. His right eye socket appeared empty and his lips were rigidly pursed, as if he were shouting his rage at dying so early in his adventure. John Hartnell’s last thoughts and the intensity of the pain he suffered during those final moments of life had been captured—literally frozen—on his face.

His features were tightly framed by a cap, a shroud drawn up under his red-bearded chin and the contours of melting ice on either side. A lock of dark hair could be seen below the rim of the cap; unlike the right, his left eye appeared normal. “I wonder why there is such a difference in the preservation of the eyes,” Beattie mumbled, as each took a turn to examine Hartnell. “Was the eye injured before his death? Was it diseased?” Answers to the countless questions would have to await their planned return to Beechey Island.

Besides the face, only the clothing covering the right forearm was exposed. The body had been covered in a shroud, or sheet. A portion of the shroud and the underlying shirt sleeve of his right arm had been torn by the pickaxe used during the original exhumation. There also appeared to be damage to the arm itself. The total time of Hartnell’s exposure was close to twelve hours.

Later, back in the labs and libraries of Edmonton, Beattie would begin piecing together a solution to the mystery of Hartnell’s disturbance. Sir Edward Belcher was the first to dig into the graves in October 1852, but, discouraged by the resistant permafrost, his men gave up after excavating only a few inches. A month later, members of a privately funded search expedition exhumed Hartnell. The leader of the expedition was Commander Edward A. Inglefield, and he was accompanied by Dr. Peter Sutherland, who had suggested such an exhumation while serving with Captain William Penny’s search expedition two years earlier. Inglefield’s Arctic exploits were considerable and, in 1853, he was awarded the Royal Geographical Society’s Arctic medal. During the award speech, Sir Roderick Murchison (head of the society) described the exhumation. The transcript of the speech reflects a number of errors and embellishments:

Inglefield’s expedition was one of those supported by Lady Franklin. With a crew of seventeen on board the screw schooner Isabel, they were at Beechey Island on 7 September 1852. In his published journal, Inglefield described his first sight of the graves:

Inglefield did not describe the exhumation of Hartnell in this journal, but there is a blank period in it covering the time between when he and Sutherland finished dining with the officers of the North Star and the departure of the Isabel from Beechey Island shortly after midnight “…with as beautiful a moon to light our path as ever shone on the favoured shores of our own native land.” An unpublished letter written by Inglefield to Rear-Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort on 14 September 1852, fills in this gap:

A remarkable letter and, as the 1984 research showed, accurate in its description of what had happened, even down to the removal of the piece of fabric. This was all the evidence that was needed to explain the history of the grave’s disturbance, the cause of the damage and the mystery of the missing plaque and fabric.

Another letter written by Inglefield on 14 September, this one to John Barrow Jr. at the Admiralty, differs from that to Beaufort, explaining that he had engaged not just Sutherland but six officers in the work, concealing the exhumation from his able seamen as he was wary of “the superstitions feelings of the sailors.” Most notably, where the letter to Beaufort professes detection of a “wasting illness” as Hartnell’s cause of death, Inglefield’s letter to Barrow is equivocal:

Inglefield ends his letter to Barrow with a request for his discretion on the subject, “as the prejudices of some people would deem this intended work of charity sacrilege.” There can be no doubt, when their activities of that day are plotted out, that Inglefield would have been at the gravesite for only three or four hours prior to midnight, the appointed time for the Isabel to set sail, though he reported it was actually 1 AM when they got on board.

By this stage in the 1984 field season, there was no hope that the medical investigations of Hartnell and William Braine could be completed. It was obvious the scientific team would have to return to the Arctic island again to complete the research.

After photographs were taken of Hartnell, they began reconstructing the coffin and the gravesite. The lid was replaced on the coffin in the slightly askew position in which it had been discovered. A thin layer of gravel was lightly shovelled over the lid, and, in anticipation of their return to the site, a bright orange tarpaulin was placed over the gravel-covered coffin. Standing around the grave, shovels in hand, they remarked on how garish the fluorescent tarp looked in contrast to the grey surroundings of the quiet grave. “There will be no trouble in locating the coffin next year with that protecting it,” Kowal said.

With the reconstruction of the surface features of Hartnell’s grave complete, the crew readied to leave the island. The plane would come for them in two days—plenty of time to pack, clean the site and do some more exploring. It was also a time to take in all that they had experienced. Kowal and Ruszala left for a 22-mile (35-km) hike to Cape Riley and back, while Damkjar and Carlson headed up onto the headland of the island.

Beattie spent the time alone, staring out at Erebus Bay. He remembered an account he had read about an earlier visit to Beechey Island, a visit made by the explorer Roald Amundsen in August 1903. Amundsen, on his attempt to sail the Northwest Passage, had stopped at Beechey Island to pay tribute to Franklin. Amundsen later wrote in his narrative, The North West Passage, that he experienced a “deep, solemn feeling that I was on holy ground.” He imagined the bustle of activity that had transpired as the Erebus and Terror prepared to winter here, and also pondered the causes of the deaths so early on in the expedition: “The dark outlines of crosses marking graves inland are silent witnesses before my eyes as I sit here. The spectre of scurvy showed itself for the first time, and claimed, if not many, yet several lives.” Amundsen’s party then “re-erected the only gravestone that had fallen down.” With his small vessel Gjoa anchored in Erebus Bay, Amundsen grappled with the decision of what route to take. He made the correct one, becoming the first man to successfully sail the elusive passage, though he wrote of the Franklin expedition: “Let us raise a monument to them, more enduring than stone: the recognition that they were the first discoverers of the Passage.” As Beattie reflected back on his summer’s experience, he did so with a growing feeling that the very freshness of the Franklin sailors’ bodies guaranteed the success of his own expedition. Little doubt remained that important new insights into the fate of Franklin and his crews would surface during the months of laboratory work ahead.

The team’s final day on Beechey Island, 26 August 1984, was warm and sunny. The tents came down quickly and the gear was carried down by the graves. The gravel in the camping area was smoothed over and some final bits of paper picked up. Beattie then radioed the Polar Shelf base manager in Resolute Bay, and the plane departed to pick them up. Some final photographs were taken of the site and they set up a tripod to take a group picture. As they were doing this they could just make out the sound of a plane to the west. In the Arctic, there is a sixth sense about airplanes: people will suddenly look up and say, “There’s a plane,” and everyone will stop what they are doing and listen intently. Usually nothing is heard, but no one doubts that an aircraft is coming. Within a few brief seconds, the unmistakable sound of the engine is heard by all.

Soon a Twin Otter hissed by overhead. Everyone waved, the cameras came out and all watched as the plane made one pass, then circled and landed.

Sitting on the left side of the plane, Beattie looked out at the graves. During the previous two weeks, he had taken hundreds of photographs of all three and had looked into two of them, yet he felt strangely compelled to take one more photograph through the fogged and scratched window and spinning propeller of the Twin Otter. After pressing the shutter, and before he could wind the camera for a second picture, the plane began to roll. And with a roar and two jarring bumps, the plane was up and away. Seconds later, they were out over Union Bay, turning towards Cornwallis Island, visible to the west. Within forty-five minutes they were all sitting in the eating area of the Polar Shelf facilities in Resolute Bay, sipping coffee and eating a splendid home-cooked meal the staff had put aside for them. The security and hospitality of the Polar Shelf in Resolute was in marked contrast to the small campsite that had been their home. Already, the emotions attached to Beechey Island were fading. Priorities now turned to showers, laundry and news of the outside world. The jet from the south would arrive the next day, and that meant going home. The season had been a success, but still more exciting discoveries awaited them in their laboratories in Edmonton.

13 The Evidence Mounts

Essentially, the body of John Torrington was that of a mummy. What made it so different from mummies recovered from other archaeological sites in the world, however, was the amazing quality of preservation.

When archaeologist Howard Carter opened the three coffins of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen in the Valley of the Kings, he found the monarch’s body in a very bad state of preservation. Dr. Douglas Derry, the anatomist who examined Tutankhamen’s mummy, wrote a detailed report describing the charred and discoloured remains. The report outlined the damage done through the embalming process and through time: “the skin of the face is of a greyish colour and is very cracked and brittle… the limbs appeared very shrunken and attenuated.”

Even mummies better preserved than Tutankhamen, whether embalmed in preparation for burial or intentionally desiccated by exposure to sun or air, have still suffered major alteration to the appearance, colour and detail of their soft tissues.

Of course, the nature of burial can, on rare occasions, result in the unintentional whole or partial preservation of an individual. Some of the best-preserved human remains from antiquity have been found in peat bogs in several locations in northwestern Europe. In some cases the acids of peat bogs have kept human bodies largely intact not for hundreds but for thousands of years. But those same acids badly discoloured the “bog people,” as they are known, leaving skin “as if poured in tar” and hair bright red, and helping to decalcify the bones. Another natural means of preservation can result from cold temperatures and lack of moisture. In 1972,500-year-old mummified human remains, including that of a child, were discovered at Qilakitsoq, Greenland. All of these mummies, however, were rigid and inflexible, the drying and hardening of the tissues having locked the body forever into the position in which it was buried.

Undoubtedly the most amazing aspect of the Beechey Island research was the discovery of the near-perfect preservation of soft tissue. In effect, the unbroken period of freezing from early 1846 to 1984 suspended any major outward appearances of decay, allowing John Torrington to look very much as he had in life, right down to the flexibility of the tissue. Even when samples of Torrington’s tissues were studied by microscope, some of them looked recent in origin. Other clues, however, did reflect the lengthy period of freezing. Details of internal cellular structure were commonly missing, and in most tissues the cells were also partly collapsed. Preservation seemed also to vary within the individual. For example, microscope slides made from bowel samples collected from Torrington appeared as if they were taken right out of a textbook on modern human histology or pathology, while slides made from his other organs showed considerable post-mortem change and loss of detail.

Still, Torrington’s condition was highly unusual, even for a body preserved in ice. Normally, the fats in the organs and muscles of humans or animal cadavers (whether encased in ice, submerged in water or located in a high-humidity environment) are transformed into adipocere, the so-called “fat wax” or “grave wax.” This ivory-white-coloured adipocere has a soapy, cheese-like consistency and a pungent, pervasive and unforgettable smell. While the superficial shape of the organ is maintained under the right conditions, over decades the adipocere changes, ending with desiccation as a firm, though crumbly, body mass, without internal structure. However, Torrington displayed a totally different morphology.

Equally intriguing, a similar level of preservation was later observed in the 5,300-year-old iceman found in the Otztal Glacier of the Italian Alps in 1991. And in meetings and discussions between Beattie and Dr. Konrad Spindler of the University of Innsbruck, the lead investigator of the Tyrolean iceman project, it was verified that there is a relationship between the mummification process and the temperature at which the bodies are stored. As Spindler wrote of his discovery: “Transformation into fat wax takes place at temperatures around 0°C [32°F]; mummification with gradual dehydration, on the other hand, occurs at lower temperatures, from about five degrees below zero on, in which case permafrost conditions represent the decisive requirements.”

LABORATORY RESULTS of the autopsy on John Torrington painted a picture of a young man wracked with serious medical problems. Unfortunately, despite careful study of the organ samples by Roger Amy at the University Hospital in Edmonton, a specific cause of death could not be established.

What was most obvious at the time of the autopsy were Torrington’s blackened lungs, a condition called anthracosis—caused by the inhalation of atmospheric pollutants such as tobacco and coal smoke and dust. Also, his lungs were bound to the chest wall by adhesions, a sign of previous lung disease. Microscopically visible destruction of lung tissue identified emphysema, a lung disease normally associated with much older individuals; evidence of tuberculosis was also seen. Amy’s interpretation of the adhesions, and of the presence of fluid in the lung associated with pneumonic infection, suggested to him that pneumonia was probably the ultimate cause of death.

However, it was in the trace element analysis of bone and hair from Torrington that the probable underlying cause of death was found. Atomic absorption analysis of Torrington’s bone indicated an elevated amount of lead of no—151 parts per million (the modern average ranges from 5–14 parts per million). Although not as high as those found in the Franklin crewman from Booth Point, the level of bone lead was still many times higher than normal. Torrington would have suffered severe mental and physical problems caused by lead poisoning and, so weakened, finally succumbed to pneumonia. (One theory as to why the Booth Point skeleton had greater lead contamination is that the Franklin sailor found in 1981 lived more than two years longer than John Torrington, and was thus exposed to lead on the expedition for a longer period.)

Most vital to Beattie’s investigation, however, were the results of a trace level analysis conducted on hair. (Four-inch-/10-cm-long strands of hair from the nape of Torrington’s neck had been submitted for laboratory analysis to determine if Torrington had been exposed to large amounts of lead. The hair was long enough to show levels of lead ingestion throughout the first eight months of the Franklin expedition.) For Beattie was astounded by the results of the carefully controlled test. Lead levels in the hair exceeded 600 parts per million, levels indicating acute lead poisoning. Only over the last inch or so did the level of exposure drop, and then only slightly. This would have been due to a drop in the consumption of food during the last four to eight weeks of Torrington’s life, when he was seriously ill.

By combining information gathered from the manner of Torrington’s burial, the new information about his physical condition and illnesses and period accounts of similar burial services conducted in the Arctic, it was now possible for Beattie and his research colleagues to re-create Torrington’s final days, death and burial with some accuracy.

There is no question that during the last couple of weeks of life, John Torrington would have known his time had almost come. Beattie’s studies revealed that the petty officer’s health had never been good, but in late December 1845, it was different. John Torrington was dying. He had boarded the Terror eight months earlier, doubtless filled with high hopes. He must have been outwardly healthy when the expedition made its last contact with whaling vessels in late July and early August, or he would have been sent home. Indeed, sickness seems to have struck in September, about the same time that Franklin’s two ships anchored for the winter some 660 feet (200 metres) off the northeast section of Beechey Island.

It was a slow-moving and lingering illness. The early symptoms of the deadly combination of emphysema and tuberculosis with lead poisoning would have included loss of appetite, irritability, lack of concentration, shortness of breath and fatigue. Torrington probably continued to work until mid- to late-November, when he would have been sent to the sick bay. The lack of any bed sores on his body shows that during much of December, on the advice of the ship’s physician, Torrington would have taken slow walks below deck several times a day. There he could talk with friends and, from time to time, before the illness became acute, look out through the gloom of the Arctic winter at the barren, snowswept rock of Beechey Island.

Torrington’s physical condition would have worsened dramatically over Christmas. His behaviour would have grown unpredictable, with dramatic mood swings that must have caused grave concern to surgeons Alexander Macdonald and John Peddie. For there was no way that these men, with the knowledge and equipment of their time, could have known the true nature of his illness. All they would have been able to do for Torrington through most of the course of his disease was to keep him well-fed, likely relying more heavily on tinned provisions as the preferred food. Yet, despite their attention, his weight would have continued slowly dropping to the point of malnutrition. Then, probably during the last days of 1845, Torrington developed pneumonia, a serious blow considering his already diminished state of health. He would never again look out into the Arctic night.

Sometime in the days immediately preceding death, Torrington would have given his few possessions to someone who would promise to return them to his father and stepmother when the expedition had sailed through the Northwest Passage into the Bering Strait and returned triumphantly to England. Towards the end, the twenty-year-old sailor would have fallen into a delerium, then suffered a series of convulsions before dying on New Year’s Day.

News of the expedition’s first loss would likely have spread quickly through the crew of the Terror, and the surgeon would have notified Captain Francis Crozier. Within minutes, the men of the Erebus, including Franklin, would have been informed of John Torrington’s death. The surgeons probably debated the cause, going over the protracted and progressive nature of his disease before concluding it was pneumonia complicated by a history of tuberculosis. There was no call for an autopsy. Torrington’s body was then carefully cleaned and groomed below deck, where the temperature probably hovered continually around 50°F (10°C). It was 1 January, and his death surely cast a shadow over any New Year celebrations.

After Torrington’s body was washed, he was dressed in his shirt and trousers. The two surgeons took care in binding his limbs to his body: one of them wrapped a cotton strip round the body and arms at the level of the elbow, tying a bow at the front; the other quickly tied cotton strips round the big toes, ankles and thighs.

Above deck, where the ship had been draped with a canvas cover to keep out the snow and some of the cold (the temperature would still be around 14°F/-10°C), the carpenter Thomas Honey and his mate Alexander Wilson began carefully constructing the coffin, Macdonald having provided them with Torrington’s measurements. They used a stock timber, mahogany, measuring ¾ inch (1.9 cm) thick by 12 inches (30 cm) wide. The lid and coffin bottom were each constructed of three pieces: a long central piece with shaped sections attached by dowels to each side. The box was constructed of the same type of wood; the curves at the shoulder produced by kerfing (a series of parallel cuts made across the inside width of the board, allowing it to be bent without breaking). Square iron nails were used to secure these sections together.

The coffin lid and box were then carefully wrapped in navy blue wool material, held in place by narrow white ribbons nailed to the coffin and outlining its contours. Torrington’s messmates had taken great care in preparing the labelled metal plaque that was to be attached to the outside of the coffin lid. Another task of the carpenters, under the direction of one of Terror’s lieutenants, was the preparation of an inscribed headboard.

Carrying picks and shovels, a small group of seamen from the Terror then walked from the ship to a location on the island just up-slope from the armourer’s forge. Here, they used their feet and shovels to sweep away a thin layer of snow from a small area of beach gravel. In the bitter cold, where the earth seemed like iron, they must have wondered about the seemingly backbreaking work they’d been assigned. But Franklin had ordered a proper burial, as close as circumstances would permit to that which John Torrington would have received in his native Manchester. After perhaps a few brief words, several of the seamen grabbed a pickaxe each.

The digging would have been treacherous and difficult, illuminated only by lamplight. In the near darkness, the pickaxes would have sent up showers of sparks as they struck against the icy earth. As the sailors took turns hacking at the ground in the deepening grave, they finally reached a depth of 5 feet (1.45 metres).

Preparations for the burial of John Torrington would have taken a day or two, but finally the small, slender coffin was lowered on ropes over the ship’s side down to the ice, several feet below. It was probably then secured to a small sledge and no doubt draped with a flag. A party of seamen picked up the ropes secured to the front of the sledge and began to drag it slowly over the ice and snow towards the gravesite. If Beattie’s own experience of King William Island was any indication, it must have been a tortuous trail, with small hummocks of ice preventing them from dragging the coffin in a straight line. Instead, they would have had to zigzag towards the shore.

A small procession would have followed, probably made up of Torrington’s messmates and friends from the Terror and led by Sir John Franklin, Captain Francis Crozier, Commander James Fitzjames and some of the Terror’s officers. Someone carried the wooden headboard, a monument not only to Torrington but, as events turned out, to the whole expedition.

A layer of snow found on the coffin lid by Beattie and his team shows that a light snow was falling that day, early in January 1846. The men who stayed on the ships probably watched as, man by man, the procession was swallowed by the snow. Soon all that would have been seen were the lamps, flickering and swaying like fireflies around the shadows of the invisible party. Then they too disappeared.

Franklin probably presided at the burial. He was a deeply religious man who, eight months earlier, had asked the British Admiralty to furnish one hundred Bibles, prayer books and testaments for sale at cost aboard the ships.

The snow, a spiralling yellow curtain in the lamplight, swirled around the group standing at the graveside. Some sifted and settled into the grave, obscuring the last view of Torrington’s coffin. Each breath of Franklin’s would have been made visible by the gripping cold, the sound of his voice blending with the icy, penetrating wind that always seems to blow at Beechey Island. His words were probably brief, but presented with obvious reverence and sincerity. Quickly, the ceremony was over, and thoughts turned away from the young man who, just months before at Woolwich, near London, had joined Franklin’s carefully selected crew a relatively healthy man.

IN MANY WAYS, Torrington’s was an uneventful death, yet the confirmation of high lead levels in his body was of great significance in the context of the entire expedition. Beattie had stepped beyond the conventional theories about the expedition’s end. It now seemed clear that the startling proof of lead poisoning in Torrington, coupled with the results from the Booth Point skeleton and the bone remains gathered in 1982, demonstrated that lead had played an important, if not pivotal, role in the Franklin disaster. Lost was the accepted explanation of scurvy and starvation alone carrying off the expedition. Beattie’s medical findings from Torrington opened the door on a whole new way of looking at this and other nineteenth-century expeditions. But such a radical new theory about the underlying cause of the destruction of one of history’s great voyages of discovery needed to be backed up by as much evidence as possible. The more bodies demonstrating lead contamination, the more credible the case that the theory applied to the entire expedition.

Therefore, the laboratory discoveries made during 1984 only served to underline the importance of returning to Beechey Island and establishing the cause of death of Hartnell and Braine. Another important part of the investigation would be to establish what conditions must have been like on the expedition during 1845–46, and to reconstruct the last months and days in the lives of the three men buried on Beechey Island. Their bodies would provide an unprecedented and privileged opportunity to look into British and Canadian history—but a three-dimensional history, represented by the only true “survivors” of Franklin’s expedition.

After the 1984 field season ended and news of the preservation of John Torrington and John Hartnell was announced, two indirect descendants of Hartnell contacted Beattie. Donald Bray of Croydon, England, was astonished to see coverage of Beattie’s expedition and to hear the name of his ancestor mentioned. Bray, a retired sub-postmaster, had devoted years to tracing his family history and was in possession of rare letters and documents that added haunting insights into Hartnell’s family and life. Most touching were two letters to John and Thomas Hartnell, one sent by their mother, Sarah, and the other by their brother, Charles, both of which were intended to greet the sailors upon their completion of the Northwest Passage. The two men never received the letters, dated 23 December 1847. John Hartnell had already been dead for nearly two years and Thomas’s death probably came the following summer on King William Island.

“My Dear Children,” Sarah Hartnell’s letter began, “It is a great pleasure to me to have a chance to write you. I hope you are both well. I assure you I have many anxious moments about you but I endeavour to cast my prayers on Him who is too good to be unkind.” After a reference to her own illness and other news about family and friends, the letter ended: “If it is the Lord’s will may we be spared to meet on earth. If not God grant we may all meet around His throne to praise Him to all eternity.” Perhaps Sarah knew, as parents sometimes do, that her sons were facing their deaths.

Another descendant of John Hartnell would, along with three other specialists, join Beattie’s scientific team when he returned to the field in 1986. Brian Spenceley, a professor at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and a great-great-nephew of Hartnell, would soon be able to experience that which no other man has: to look into the eyes of a relative who has been dead for more than a century.

14 Hartnell Redux

Jumping out of the Twin Otter onto the snow-blanketed ground of Beechey Island on 8 June 1986, Beattie was temporarily blinded by the bright, sunny sky and the sun’s rays reflecting off the white ground. Only gradually did major geographical features and the three tiny headstones that poked their way through the snow become visible, assuring him that he was once again on the island where so many memories lay.

This time Beattie planned to complete his examinations of the Franklin graveyard; part of his research team had already arrived with him from Resolute. That group, consisting of archaeologist Eric Damkjar, project photographer Brian Spenceley, historical consultant Dr. Jim Savelle (who was a co-investigator with Beattie during the 1981 season and now served as a research scholar at the Scott Polar Research Institute) and field assistants Arne Carlson, Walt Kowal and Joelee Nungaq would set up camp and then conduct the detailed archaeological work and exhumations. A team of specialists consisting of pathologist Dr. Roger Amy, radiologist Dr. Derek Notman, radiology technician Larry Anderson and Arctic clothing specialist Barbara Schweger would arrive one week later.

Beattie was starting his 1986 field season earlier than in 1984, in order to avoid the problem of water run-off from melting snow. But as the temperatures remained below freezing in June and a brisk wind swept across the island for a good number of days, heightening the cold, the investigators had to endure additional hardships.

Each of the crew quickly set to work establishing camp, consisting of the usual array of individual and communal tents, with one new addition, a 16-foot-tall (5-metre) flagpole, where the bright red-and-white Canadian flag snapped in the near constant winds alongside the flag of the Northwest Territories. During this work, however, Beattie’s mind was fixed on something else. For two years, one question had nagged him. It was a question posed by almost everyone he had talked to about the research on Beechey Island: Was there any guarantee that the bodies of John Torrington and John Hartnell were again encased in ice after their 1984 reburials? The theory that the summer meltwater would trickle down into the filled-in excavations, seep into the coffins and subsequently freeze was a good, logical one. But Beattie wondered if the process were so simple. The 1984 exhumation of John Torrington was final and complete; there could be no verification of the theory there. However, uncovering John Hartnell, exposed once in 1852 and again in 1984, would soon answer the question.

A tent was again erected over Hartnell’s grave to protect the exhumation process from the elements. As before, digging was extremely difficult. The exposure of Hartnell’s coffin required twenty-four hours of continual digging by Kowal, Carlson, Savelle and Nungaq, a process that had now become almost mechanical. One person would labour with the pickaxe until either the pain in his hands or the exhaustion in his arms required rest. The loosened ice and gravel would then be shovelled into buckets by one or two of the excavators, lifted out of the grave to another of them and finally dumped on the growing pile of “back-dirt.” Conversation between the excavators began with recollections of previous archaeological digs, especially those of 1984, but as the hours passed, the relentless sound of the pickaxe, broken regularly by the rasping, fingernail-on-blackboard sound of the shovel pushing into resistant gravel and ice, eventually won out.

When the coffin lid was finally exposed and the limits of the coffin identified, the group took a long overdue rest and waited for the arrival of the team of specialists. To this point, the excavation was a replay of 1984. But the next step, the removal of the coffin lid, though also done in 1984, would this time provide an answer to the question of the refreezing of the bodies. They were therefore poised at the true beginning of the 1986 investigation.

During the break in the exhumation work, Beattie and Damkjar returned to the food-tin dump for a more detailed survey than the one they had conducted in 1984. Two days were spent thoroughly documenting what was left of the tins. Out of the original 700 or so, fragments of fewer than 150 remained. Tins are a very transportable, recognizable and desired artefact for amateur archaeologists and collectors, and, over the decades, people had been depleting the information pool represented by the containers. None of those remaining was complete and most were badly fragmented. But all portions of the tins were represented, including the soldered seams.

The area of the tin scatter was gridded with string and tied in to a datum point. Each square of the grid was photographed and searched, and every tin fragment located and described. All of the larger pieces and those with particularly good features were individually photographed. Samples of “ordinary” tins were collected for later study, along with some tins that were particularly good examples of poor soldering and manufacture.

On the second day of work at the can dump, Beattie and Damkjar were interrupted by Nungaq, who had been out hiking on the ice of Union Bay during the break in the digging. He came walking quickly along the spit towards them, his dog Keena held tightly by her chain. “There’s a bear coming,” he said, as he trotted up the rise of the mound. Pointing west, he continued: “Look, over there, it’s coming right for us.” Little interest in the tins remained, as Beattie and Damkjar squinted out over the bright field of ice. Then Beattie saw it. The bear’s head was lowered and it did not appear to be moving at all, though its body was swaying slightly from side to side. From this quick glimpse, Beattie recalled an important lesson. He remembered when he was a student pilot and his instructor had lectured him: “If you spot another airplane coming your way and it appears to be moving, you’re safe—just keep your eye on it. But if that plane looks like it is standing still, watch out, because it’s coming straight for you.” A strange thing to recall at this particular time, but the rule still applied. Although the bear was a good distance away, perhaps a mile, it looked awfully big. And within minutes they were all heading back to camp, cameras swinging from their necks, clutching notebooks, tripods and rifles. They did not want to leave either expensive camera equipment or their collected data at the tin dump for the bear to play with, so they had filled their arms with everything taken to the site. Halfway back to camp, they turned to see the bear crossing the spit with a slow, purposeful gait. They breathed easier when they watched the bear stop for a moment to test the air, then move on, heading across Erebus Bay to Devon Island.

The Twin Otter carrying Amy, Notman, Anderson and Schweger at last swept over the camp. Beattie noticed right away that skis had been strapped onto the tundra wheels of the aircraft. The thin layer of snow on the island made landing there impossible; the plane would have to land offshore, on ice-covered Erebus Bay. That meant that the heavy load of equipment on board, over half of the 3,300 pounds (1,500 kg) of equipment to be used during the research, would have to be carried across the ice and up the beach to their camp. After brief greetings, the eleven-member team watched the Twin Otter leave, then spent the next two hours at that difficult task.

Exhumation work resumed with the digging of a work area adjacent to the right side of the coffin. This exposed the coffin’s side for the first time, and immediately, something of interest was discovered: three “handles” were found spaced along the side of the coffin wall. However, these were not real handles like the ones on Torrington’s coffin, but symbolic representations made out of the same white linen tape that decorated the edges of the coffin.

As in 1984, the team used heated water to accelerate the thawing process. There was no running water on the island, so Kowal developed a highly efficient method of melting snow, providing a constant, though meagre, water source. The water was heated, two buckets at a time, on naphtha stoves located in the adjacent autopsy/X-ray tent. When ready, Kowal carried the buckets across to Carlson and Nungaq, who would slowly pour the water over the dark-blue-wool-covered coffin. When too much water had accumulated in the bottom of the grave, making work virtually impossible, an electric sump pump was lowered in. The water drawn out of the grave was then directed through a hose away from the excavation area. It seemed to Beattie that the thawing was much more difficult than it had been in 1984; the time of year probably accounted for the difference. Although they did not test the temperature of the permafrost in 1984 or 1986, it seemed that at every depth it was colder in June than in August.

After photographs of the cleaned coffin were taken and it was measured (79 by 19 by 13 inches/203.5 by 48 by 33 cm deep), the delicate task of loosening and removing the already damaged lid was started. When at last it was lifted, Beattie and Carlson could see immediately that Hartnell’s right arm area and face, both exposed in 1984, were again completely encased in ice. “Well, the water flowed back in, didn’t it?” Beattie said. The question had been answered. Standing by Hartnell’s ice-protected body, Beattie thought about the condition of John Torrington only a few steps away. He was now satisfied that the young petty officer was again suspended in time by the very process that had allowed them a brief, privileged glimpse in 1984.

Damkjar, standing alongside the upper edge of the grave with the others, pointed out that the ice around Hartnell appeared quite discoloured. The ice in the centre of the block, about where Hartnell’s chest should be, was not an opaque white as with Torrington, but very brownish, even mottled.

Soon the work of exposing the body began, the warm water quickly unveiling the features of the seaman’s face. This was an overwhelming experience for Spenceley, Hartnell’s great-great-nephew, who stood close by the grave’s edge, gazing in silence at his own family history over a distance of 140 years.

There did not seem to be any major deterioration in the tissues during the two-year hiatus. One observation made in 1984 was that Hartnell’s left eye was well-preserved while his right eye appeared to be damaged, and it had been unclear whether this had happened while he lived or somehow shortly after his death. Inglefield’s reports on the exhumation that he and Sutherland had conducted in 1852 had not indicated any problem with Hartnell’s right eye. But in 1986, Beattie noticed immediately that, in addition to the shrunken right eye, Hartnell’s left eye showed some shrinkage as well. He concluded that it is likely that exposure, for even a brief period, causes changes peculiar to the eyes, leaving the rest of the external features unaffected. In other words, the exposure of Hartnell in 1852 probably induced changes in the right eye—the fact that the left eye appeared normal to the researchers in 1984 indicated that Inglefield and Sutherland probably did not expose the left side of the face. The shrinking of the left eye over the two years that had passed since its exposure in 1984 supported the theory.

As the ice surrounding Hartnell thawed, it became apparent that he was wrapped in a white shroud from his shoulders down. The damaged shirt sleeve on his right arm was exposed through a tear in the sheet and pieces of the coffin lid appeared to have been driven forcibly into his right chest wall during the 1852 exhumation. When the obscuring ice was melted higher up the arm, the tears in the shroud, shirt sleeve and undergarments were visible as scissor or knife cuts. Obviously, to fully expose Hartnell’s arm, Sutherland had had to make cuts in the shroud and clothing. This evidence showed that the investigation of Hartnell’s body in 1852 was limited to his face and right arm. It would have been too difficult and taken too much time for Sutherland to do more.

On Hartnell’s head was a toque-like hat, which in turn was resting on a small frilled pillow stuffed with wood shavings. Thawing of the ice surrounding the body continued until Hartnell was completely exposed. Nothing was moved by the group until the shrouded body had been thoroughly described and photographed. The next stage was the folding back of the shroud, which took a very long time because only the very thinnest layer of the exposed shroud and body was actually thawed and additional thawing of the fabric was required.

As Hartnell was unwrapped from the shroud his left arm was exposed, followed by his right arm. Immediately, Amy and Beattie could see that the arms had been bound to the body in the same manner as was seen on Torrington, though this time the material used was light brown wool. However, his right hand was lying on an outside fold of the binding. It was clear that his right arm had been extracted by Sutherland, who, when his examination was complete, had not tucked the hand back underneath the binding but left it lying on top.

Hartnell’s blue-and-white-striped shirt was of a similar pattern to that seen on Torrington, though the stripes were not printed but woven (a more expensive material than that found on Torrington) and the design was also different from Torrington’s. It was a pullover style, and some of the front buttons were missing, the buttonholes being tied shut with loops of string. The lower portion of the shirt had two letters embroidered on it in red and the date “1844.” The letters appeared to be “TH,” and it may be that the shirt had originally belonged to John Hartnell’s younger brother and expedition companion, Thomas.

Underneath the shirt was a wool sweater-like undergarment, and beneath that a cotton undershirt. He was not wearing trousers, stockings or footwear. Beattie and Schweger were puzzled that Hartnell should have had three layers of clothing covering his upper body and nothing on below the waist. They suspected that there may have been a viewing of the body aboard the Erebus prior to burial, with the man’s lower half covered by the shroud.

Hartnell’s legs and feet were slightly darkened and very shrunken and emaciated by illness and in part by the freezing. Like Torrington, his toes were tied together. In preparation for the temporary removal of Hartnell’s body for the X-ray examination and autopsy, the shroud was completely pulled back and Hartnell’s cap removed, revealing a full head of very dark brown, nearly black, hair, parted on his left. Without his hat, Hartnell lost much of the sinister look that first confronted the scientists in the summer of 1984. Instead, he appeared to be simply a young man who, for some mysterious reason, had died at the age of twenty-five on 4 January 1846.

Now began the most difficult and unpleasant phase of the exposure. Even as Hartnell lay in the coffin, apparently ready to be gently lifted out, his body was still part of the permafrost, solidly frozen to the mass of ice below. Slowly and carefully, water had to be directed underneath the body, freeing it a fraction of an inch at a time. The permafrost had a grip that would not let go without a fight. But finally, the scientists won the battle and the body was freed.

Before lifting Hartnell from his coffin, his right thumbnail was removed and samples of hair from his scalp, beard and pubic area were collected for later examination and analysis. Beattie, Carlson, and Nungaq then lifted the body out of the grave onto a white linen sheet, where it was immediately wrapped. Hartnell was carried a distance of 10 feet (3 metres) to the autopsy/X-ray tent, where Notman and Anderson prepared to take a series of X-rays while he was clothed. Still frozen to the bottom of the coffin were Hartnell’s nineteenth-century shroud, and beneath that, a folded woollen blanket. Damkjar, over the next day, struggled to remove these two items. When they were finally freed, they were handed over to Schweger for analysis and sampling.

Notman and Anderson had already set up their X-ray “clinic” inside the autopsy tent. The next order of business was the assembly of the darkroom tent. Beattie had provided them with the inside dimensions of the long-house tent months before and, using these, they had designed a unique, collapsible and portable darkroom. The structure consisted of a tubular metal frame that was screwed together; over this, a double layer of thick black plastic (cut, formed and taped together) was pulled and tucked in along the floor. On one side they had fashioned a door from a double overlap of the plastic cover, forming a light trap. Inside the darkroom, Anderson had just enough room to stand and manoeuvre around the chemical tubs. A mechanical timer was hung inside as well as a battery-operated safe light.

Kowal gave them a hand in melting the no gallons (500 litres) of clean, strained water required for the X-ray film development. Four large Coleman stoves were running in the tent constantly, and Kowal would bring in buckets of snow to melt. When a bucket was ready it was poured through a fine strainer directly into the large plastic garbage bins they had brought as chemical holders. When the tubs were finally filled with water (which took a whole day), Anderson mixed his chemicals. He then made wood-framed structures to hold the film sheets in their development frames, and these were lowered into the tubs. A 200-watt aquarium heater was then immersed in the liquid, which would bring the temperature up to the 68°F (20°C) thought necessary to provide controlled development.

The X-ray unit was a remarkably compact yet powerful instrument mounted on four tubular steel legs. Too fragile to risk being sent from their clinic at the Park Nicollet Medical Centre in Minneapolis as normal freight, Notman and Anderson had bought an airplane ticket for it, and everyone had a good laugh when they told how the machine, named Fragile Bulky Notman on its ticket, had “sat” in the first-class section at the front of the plane during the flight into Canada while they had to sit back in economy class.

When in use, the machine would be lifted over the body, its legs positioned firmly in the gravel. A focusing light beam on the bottom of the unit would then be turned on to illuminate and define the area to be X-rayed before a film plate was slid under the body.

Notman and Anderson tested their X-ray set-up on a polar bear scapula, found lying on one of the beach ridges near the gravesite. The results were very encouraging: holding the X-ray up, Notman described the bony details of the scapula to the others. Although they had been told by a number of experts that they were not likely to succeed in getting satisfactory X-rays under such difficult field conditions, his voice betrayed a note of gleeful triumph and self-satisfaction. Anderson’s face also seemed to say, “Well, they were all wrong! I knew we could do it!”

With this air of success, Notman and Anderson began the difficult job of X-raying the clothed John Hartnell. The X-ray area on the ground adjacent to the door was the same as where the autopsy was to be performed. When an exposure was to be made, either Notman or Anderson would put on a heavy, full-length lead apron and all other people in the tent would line up behind their protector. A loud call of “exposing” would be made for the benefit of people working outside the tent, so that they could move away to a distance of at least 100 feet (30 metres) before the exposure was made.

Anderson would then take the film plate into the darkroom for processing. Ten to fifteen minutes later he would emerge with the dripping film, which he hung by pegs to clotheslines stretched across the length of the tent. He and Notman would then examine the quality of the film and decide if there was any need to change their technique.

When the initial X-raying of Hartnell had been completed, Notman, Anderson and Amy stood in front of the row of hanging film to begin the preliminary examination. Anderson quickly pointed to the first X-ray: “He’s got a solid block of ice in his head.” The frozen brain tissue obscured the X-ray image, meaning they’d have to X-ray again after further thawing. Looking at the chest X-rays, Notman pointed to a small feature near Hartnell’s neck. “We’ve got our first metallic object,” he said. “It looks like a ring on its side.” (In fact, the metal was the frame of a decorative, embroidered button.) The chest X-rays were also confusing in that the internal organs appeared uncharacteristic and of unusual and varied densities—an unexpected series of observations on the first X-rays ever to be taken under such circumstances.

The bone structure was largely unremarkable, with the exception of a suspected compression fracture of one of the vertebrae in the lower part of the neck, representing a subacute injury that would not have been fatal. Hartnell may have fallen on the expedition. Some degenerative bone changes were also identifiable in the left shoulder and left elbow; found in someone so young, these sorts of bone changes (spurring and lipping) usually indicate a response to some form of injury. Also, one of the small long bones of the left foot showed evidence of osteomyelitis, or a bone infection, which could have made Hartnell susceptible to systemic infections (blood poisoning). Any of these injuries or conditions could have resulted in Hartnell being confined to sick bay, where he would have been given tinned foods as a medical comfort.

However, except for the details of the bones, little could be determined, let alone identified, from these first X-rays. Beattie wondered if the soft tissue preservation, which appeared so good to the eye, was in fact not good enough to allow X-ray information to be collected. Notman was frustrated with these first findings for, even in the desiccated and eviscerated Egyptian mummies he had studied in the past, there had always been some recognizable details in his X-rays. Only the autopsy would provide the answers.

It had been difficult to position the body with the clothing still on, and, spurred on by the confusing results of the first X-rays, Notman and Anderson wanted to try again after the clothing had been removed. Beattie, Amy, Nungaq and Schweger began the difficult task of unclothing Hartnell. “What we’ll do is ask the patient to sit up,” Amy said, a request for Beattie and Schweger to support the body while he attempted to remove the outer shirt. Trained in the medical field, Amy, Notman and Anderson always referred to the sailors as patients, reflecting their strictly professional attitude towards medical procedures and research, even in these extraordinary circumstances. After some initial attempts to slip the clothes over Hartnell’s head and off his limbs, it was decided that it would be necessary to cut the fabric. To minimize damage to the clothes, Beattie made a single vertical cut up the back of each garment. Doing this avoided the over-extension of the limbs and prevented any stress being placed on the material, which could have caused tearing both in the fabric and along the seams.

As the clothes slipped off the body the scientists made a truly astonishing discovery.

“Son of a bitch, he’s already been autopsied! Son of a gun!” said Amy. “We’ve got an upside down ‘Y’ incision. This sort or thing has not been seen before, this is absolutely unique.”

Running down John Hartnell’s chest and abdomen was a sutured incision that left no doubt that, in the short hours after his death, a surgeon on the Erebus, probably assistant-surgeon Dr. Harry D.S. Goodsir, an anatomist by training, had attempted to establish the cause of death. It’s no wonder Amy was so excited at this discovery. Here he had an unprecedented opportunity to view the handiwork of a medical predecessor of long ago. By conducting his own autopsy, Amy would actually be assisting this long-dead doctor. The surgeon of the Erebus certainly anticipated that he would bring the information from his autopsy back to England. Now the full extent of that information would finally be known.

This important discovery begged the question: Why had the surgeon conducted an autopsy? To find out the cause of death, obviously; but what had prompted the decision? Perhaps the death of John Torrington of the Terror only three days before was part of the reason. There may also have been some symptoms associated with Hartnell’s death that left serious doubt in the minds of the surgeons as to the cause of death. A challenge faced Amy, who had to sort through the riddle.

The standard incision in an autopsy performed today is “Y”-shaped, with the arms of the “Y” extending down from each shoulder and meeting at the base of the sternum (breastbone). From this point, the incision continues down to the pubic bone. In the case of Hartnell’s autopsy, however, the incision was upside down: the arm of the “Y” originated near the point of each hip, meeting near the umbilicus (belly button) and extending up to the top of the sternum. Given that the procedures for autopsy technique in the mid-nineteenth century are not well represented in today’s scientific literature, Beattie wondered if the incision indicated that the surgeon was concentrating on the bowel or whether this was the habitual procedure for autopsy followed by the surgeon. Amy was later able to reconstruct, step by step, what the original pathologist had done. The extent and direction taken during this first autopsy would provide clues to the suspicions held by the surgeon relating to the cause of death.

That an autopsy had been done solved the mystery of the strange X-rays: the surgeon of the Erebus had removed the organs for examination, then replaced them in one mixed mass. Not surprisingly, this disrupted anatomy resulted in a meaningless collection of soft-tissue detail in the first X-rays taken by Notman and Anderson. Also, the brownish discolouration seen in the ice when the lid was first removed probably resulted from blood and other fluids seeping out of the incision when water filled the coffin during the summer of 1846.

After Notman and Anderson had completed a second series of X-rays, a process that took another six hours (for a total of fourteen hours of X-raying), they retired for a well-deserved rest, but not before a slightly hair-raising experience. The X-raying had continued into the late hours, and most of the crew had retired to their tents. Savelle and Nungaq were sitting in the kitchen tent talking. Beattie was in the autopsy/X-ray tent, more as company for Notman and Anderson than as help. Keena, the dog brought along to serve as a watch for polar bears, was tethered outside the kitchen tent and could be heard whining in her familiar, annoying way. Suddenly Keena stopped whining—unusual in itself. But then she barked madly. The three men in the autopsy/X-ray tent looked at each other. They had never heard her bark before and they knew that there had to be a good reason: a bear. Then they heard the “pop pop pop” of rifles being fired and, off in the distance, voices shouting, “Bear, bear in camp!” Beattie reached for the rifle he had brought down to the tent and slowly stuck his head out. The tents over the graves and the autopsy/X-ray tent were separated from the main grouping by about 330 feet (100 metres), and, peering round the edge of Braine’s tent back towards the main camp, he saw a bear standing in the open space. Notman and Anderson were now beside Beattie, sizing up the situation. Beattie had Kowal’s gun, one with which he was not familiar—and sure enough the bolt jammed twice, but the third and final bullet went into the chamber cleanly. Notman, looking around for some other weapon, grabbed a shovel. Anderson had his camera. So armed, the three stayed behind Braine’s tent out of sight of the bear, which soon became annoyed at the noise of guns and people. It ambled off, angling towards the beach. Passing downwind of the graves, just 65 feet (20 metres) away, it then caught the scent of the three and of John Hartnell. As it paused with its nose in the air, Beattie thought, “Oh, brother, it’s gonna come this way.” But then he heard “twang twang twang,” as three bullets ricocheted off the gravel beside the bear, forcing it back in slow retreat, and the crisis ended as the bear ambled down the beach and out onto the ice. From that point on during the summer, someone always stayed outside keeping watch with the dog. From the bear tracks in the snow, Nungaq was able to determine that it had come in off the ice close to the kitchen tent, chased some gulls, wandered up to the food cache beside the kitchen tent and then saw the dog and decided to sniff it out. No wonder Keena had barked: when people started to pop their heads out of tents to see what the commotion was all about, the bear and the dog were nose to nose. Keena was lucky. Notman, Anderson and Beattie were lucky. It may have been close to the end of a long day, but none of the crew was ready for sleep now.

With the X-raying complete, Amy and Beattie, dressed in green surgical gowns, white aprons and blue surgical caps, began the autopsy. Hartnell was first measured and weighed. He was taller and heavier than Torrington, at 5 feet 11 inches (180 cm) and 99 pounds (45 kg). Amy then reopened the inverted “Y” incision by cutting the original sutures. He noted that several knife cuts were made on the surface of the chest plate before the ribs had been successfully divided during the original autopsy. It soon became obvious that Franklin’s surgeons had not focussed their attention on the bowel, as their incision suggested; it seemed they believed the cause of Hartnell’s death concerned the heart and lungs. In the earlier autopsy, Dr. Goodsir had removed the heart with part of the trachea. He would first have held the heart up to look at its apex for signs of disease; then he made two cuts, one each into the right and left ventricles, to look at the valves. When he had finished with the heart, he dissected the roots of the lungs to look for evidence of tuberculosis and made a few cuts into the liver looking for confirmation of the disease. Hartnell’s bowel was untouched. On completion of the autopsy, Dr. Goodsir replaced Hartnell’s chest plate (the anterior portion of the ribs and the sternum) upside down. The original autopsy turned out to have been a cursory one that could have been conducted in less than half an hour. During his investigations, the surgeon of the Erebus would have found confirmation of tuberculosis of the lungs. Once observations about the original autopsy had been completed, Amy began his own much more detailed investigation. Beattie labelled the sample containers and sealed the samples handed to him by Amy, while Spenceley photographed the proceedings.

First, any frozen water from inside the body was collected, as these fluids would have come from the tissues. Then, after sterilizing his surgical instruments in the open flame of a naphtha stove, Amy cut a frozen piece from each of the organs and placed these samples in a sterile container that was promptly sealed and kept frozen in a cooler. The samples would later undergo bacteriological analysis in the laboratory. Other samples of organs and tissue were then taken and placed in preservative, to be later studied under a microscope. Amy occasionally made observations about the condition of Hartnell, such as the state of blood vessels: “Vessels don’t contain blood, they contain ice and the ice is clear.” Many of the organs were found to be in a fair state of preservation, though the brain had turned to liquid. Finally, bone was cut with a surgical saw from the femur, rib, lumbar vertebra and skull. From start to finish, when Amy resutured the original 1846 incision, the autopsy took the three men nine hours to complete. It had been very thorough.

Everyone was exhausted, yet work was continuing nearby in Braine’s tent in preparation for his exposure. Hartnell’s body was tightly wrapped in the autopsy sheet and carried into his own tent. When Schweger finished documenting the Hartnell fabrics, the group arranged for his reburial. The blanket was repositioned in the bottom of the coffin and the original shroud laid back in position. His body was passed down into the grave and placed in the coffin. The shroud was then closed over him, and it was soon time for their final moment with the young sailor.

Just before midnight on 18 June, they all gathered in Hartnell’s tent. Schweger had brought the clothing—wrapped in mylar, an inert material that would protect the clothes. Spenceley and Beattie jumped down into the grave, and Schweger passed them each item of clothing, which they placed carefully alongside the shrouded body. Once this was complete, the lid was lowered down, but, as they tried positioning it on the coffin, the two men could not get it to fit as they had found it—a layer of ice had formed on the top edge of the coffin, and this had to be chipped away before the lid would fall into its proper place. Beattie took the small chisel hammer and removed the ice within a few minutes, and the reburial continued. Spenceley and Beattie, helped out of the grave by the others, now joined the ring of researchers standing at the graveside. A spontaneous moment of silence was punctuated by the sound of the wind snapping the tent flaps and the sorrowful howling of Keena. “One hundred and forty years ago, his brother was standing in this same spot,” Beattie said at last, breaking the silence.

Slowly, the group filed out of the tent and, with hardly a word spoken, they all began to fill buckets with gravel and complete the process of reburial. At this time, none of them could fail to feel the transience of human existence and the reality of death. Exhuming Hartnell had been a hard thing to do, something very difficult to deal with. But now it was finished and, for the moment, there was relief that this one door was closing on their project. But in the tent next to them, the excavation of Private William Braine of the Royal Marines had already uncovered a surprise.

15 The Royal Marine

As with torrington and Hartnell’s graves, a string grid was placed over Braine’s grave. Damkjar made scale drawings of I the surface features in each square of the grid, while Spenceley, hovering on a ladder over his tripod-mounted camera, took a series of Polaroid photographs to be used during the reconstruction.

On the snow beside the grave, the crew assembled another long-house tent. This was lifted over the headboard and positioned over the grave, allowing some manoeuvring space at each side of the structure. The tent was then tied to Hartnell’s tent and the corners secured to large metal pegs driven into the permafrost.

The gravel covering the grave and filling the spaces between the limestone rocks was removed by trowelling, and, during this cleaning process, a few artefacts were found that had, over the decades, worked their way into the cracks and corners of the grave. The exact positions of these objects, mainly wood fragments and bird bones, were recorded in reference to the string grid that still covered the grave. One of the large, slab-like limestone rocks was covered with a mat of gravel consolidated by a well-established colony of mosses, and the crew did not disturb this tiny islet of vegetation. They lifted the huge rock so that the eventual reconstruction of the grave would include the micro-garden.

One of the distinctive features of Braine’s grave was the highly structured nature of its surface features. The overall impression was that it represented a crypt, and the detail of parts of the structure seemed to confirm this. A major challenge to the excavators would be the accurate reconstruction of the grave. So the rocks were removed, identification numbers and orientation indicators were penned on their undersides. These were then carried outside the tent and placed in rows on the snow, the larger rocks being used as anchoring weights for the edge of the tent.

Two hours were spent in identifying and removing nearly one hundred rocks from the surface of the grave. One of the more interesting of the large rocks was the roughly circular slab lying on the surface at the foot of the grave. Two-thirds of the exposed surface had a black colouration, which Savelle said had been applied to the grave by Penny in 1853–54. When the rock was upended, they saw that the underside was nearly completely painted black. It was apparent that this rock had at one time been standing at the foot of the grave and had functioned as the footboard seen in some of the engravings and paintings made at the site during the 1850s.

The next step, after all the rocks had been removed, was to begin the now familiar task of removing the permafrost. Kowal, Carlson, Savelle and Nungaq began digging and, eighteen hours later, encountered the first signs of Braine’s coffin. The excavation of Braine’s grave exemplified the determination of the crew, as they worked virtually non-stop for a total of 37 hours until the goal had been reached and the coffin completely exposed. Braine had been buried very deeply, down 6½ feet (2 metres) in the permafrost, and his coffin turned out to be the largest of the three—82 by 19 by 13 inches (211 by 49 by 33 cm) deep. This combination resulted in the removal of considerably more permafrost than from either Torrington or Hartnell’s graves: all four sides of Braine’s grave excavation had to be extended as the size of the coffin became obvious.

As the final inches of permafrost were picked away, the texture softened, signalling the approach of the coffin. Aware that both Torrington and Hartnell had been buried with plaques attached to their coffin lids, Kowal explored carefully the position on the lid where a plaque would have been placed. One of the thrills of archaeology is that discoveries, even those that are predictable because of previous experience, are invariably a surprise. The discovery of Braine’s plaque was no exception: the first, small exposure of the plaque revealed its completely unexpected appearance. It was copper-coloured and, as the exposure was enlarged, Kowal could see that it was metal, with the green-blue patina of copper oxidation showing on the small portion of the edge that had been carefully exposed. Kowal continued to widen the window over the plaque, which seemed to be extensive. The words punched into the metal began to emerge, and eventually the whole plaque was uncovered. It was huge, 13 by 17 inches (33 by 44 cm), and great care had obviously been taken in its preparation. The plaque read: “W. BRAINE R.M. 8 CO. W.D. H.M.S. EREBUS DIED APRIL 3RD 1846 AGED 33 YEARS.”

The “4” in 1846 was backwards. Everyone was thrilled by the preservation and quality of the plaque, which, while constructed differently from Torrington’s, was just as touching. With a lot of digging still to do, the plaque was covered by a piece of plastic and a thin layer of gravel to protect it during the continuing exposure of the whole coffin.

The coffin lid appeared to be in excellent condition, and Carlson felt that he could remove the lid without shearing the nails, but instead by carefully prying it with a crowbar. He began slowly, but the nails pulled free quickly and within twenty minutes the lid was loose and ready to be lifted. Carlson and Beattie, one at each end, lifted the lid slowly and gently straight up, supporting it on their arms as they passed it up to Nungaq and Damkjar, who immediately took it out of the tent.

“I see some bright red,” said Carlson, as all the researchers peered at an area of blood-red ice covering Braine’s face. Beattie glanced along the length of the coffin. He could see part of a shroud over the chest area. In direct contact with the coffin lid, it had not been obscured by the opaque ice that filled the rest of the coffin. When the thawing was started, the red colour over Braine’s face quickly took on texture and shape. It was a kerchief of Asian design with a pattern of leaves printed in black and white. As the ice melted in the rest of the coffin, the outline of the whole shroud was soon determined.

Within a few hours, the upper half of the enshrouded body was exposed. It was the most arresting vision the researchers had experienced at the site. The outline and contours of the body could be perceived in the ivory coloured shroud, but the sight was dominated by the bright red kerchief lying over Braine’s face. The vivid colour seemed so out of place deep within the grave, and the filmy nature of the material caused it to cling tightly to the face it covered, accentuating the outlines of Braine’s brow, nose, chin and cheeks; in the centre, behind small tears in the kerchief, the black oval of his partly opened mouth was visible. Poking through the tears were some incisor teeth, producing a frightening, scarlet grin that left every one of the crew transfixed.

The edges of the kerchief were still frozen deep in the recesses of the coffin; it was not yet possible to remove it to reveal Braine’s face. By pouring water into the corners of the coffin, the material slowly loosened and could be partly rolled back. As it was retracted, the face took on character and an identity.

By now, the team had been working for sixteen hours without rest. Beattie, aided by Damkjar, described the scene to the others as it became visible to him: “There’s a beard, curly and dark… got to be careful. There are the teeth, there’s an ear. It looks like he’s balding a bit.” Then Beattie stepped back to take in the view of a man who appeared severe and life-toughened, very much a nineteenth-century Royal Marine private. “Look at that. After a long day’s work it’s really something to see,” he said quietly, as if to himself.

Braine’s teeth were in very bad condition and one of his front teeth had been broken in life, causing the exposure of the pulp cavity. His lips, unlike Hartnell or Torrington’s, were pulled tightly over his teeth—perhaps the kerchief had prevented the lips from curling outwards. His nose was slightly flattened. He would have stood nearly 6 feet (181 cm) tall, and the large coffin seemed too small for him. When he had been originally placed in the coffin and the lid attached for the first time, it had pressed down onto his nose.

His eyes were deeply sunk into the eye sockets and were only one-quarter open. The eyeballs did not appear to be very well-preserved but he still had a sleepy, nearly alive appearance. A scar on his forehead indicated that he had been struck or had cracked his head against an object several years before his death. Finally, it was possible to remove the rest of the kerchief from the face, and they saw that his hair was nearly black, long and partly curly, and that he was indeed balding.

After pulling the shroud away, his shirt and right arm and hand were also exposed. “Look at that hand, it’s very well-preserved,” Beattie said. “Nice shirt, there’s not a mark on it, it looks brand new.” No sign of his left arm could be found, and the possibility that it may have been amputated was discussed. As thawing progressed, they discovered that his left arm was frozen underneath his body. Beattie at first thought Braine had been too big to be placed in the coffin with his arms in their natural position. But they later saw that it would have been just as easy to have placed his arms over the sides of his chest and still have room for the coffin lid. His body and head, too, were not positioned carefully, and one of his undershirts had been put on backwards, leading them to conclude he was placed hastily in the coffin.

Thawing the body was again a matter of pouring warm water over the frozen sections. In the cold of the grave the warm water would send up clouds of steam filled with the pungent smells of wet wool and cotton. Hours of this smell took its toll on some of the crew and the emotional strain of the work drained them all. Braine, being buried so deeply, was in colder ground, and the ice would not yield without a battle. They had tremendous difficulty in thawing the portions of the clothing and shroud frozen to the bottom of the coffin, which trapped Braine within it. Warm water poured directly onto the material seemed to have little effect, and the team struggled for eighteen more hours before they were able to free him from the ice. Even then, they had to cut the clothing up the small portion of exposed back and lift him, not only out of the coffin, but out of his clothes as well. Beattie and Amy then eased him up to the side of the grave, handing him to Savelle and Kowal, who positioned him on a plastic sheet.

Immediately noticeable was the extremely emaciated appearance of this man—literally a skin-covered skeleton. Braine would have weighed less than 88 pounds (40 kg). He must have been extremely ill during his final days. Every rib could be counted and it was possible to identify features on his hip bones. His face also reflected his condition, the skin drawn taut over the cheeks and eye sockets. His limbs had a spidery appearance; so thin were his arms that his hands appeared very large. For Beattie, lifting this frail and lifeless man up and out of his grave, coming as it did after such tremendous effort to free him, was the most difficult aspect of his work on Beechey Island. The strained faces of the others illustrated that he was not alone in these feelings.

Exhausted though the team was, Braine was immediately wrapped in a sheet and carried across to the X-ray tent. Notman and Anderson, who had been sleeping after their difficult work on Hartnell, were roused so they could begin their work. The X-raying of Braine was carried out much as it had been with Hartnell, though the situation was quite different as Braine had not had a previous autopsy. Both worked continuously for nearly twelve hours until the X-raying was completed.

Before the others could rest they still had to remove Braine’s clothing from the coffin for Schweger to analyze. With the body removed, thawing accelerated and the job was completed in an hour. During the initial thawing of the foot-end of the grave, Carlson thought he detected a different kind of fabric peeking out just below the shroud-wrapped feet. Not until the body had been removed and further thawing of the shroud had taken place was his observation confirmed. Rolled up and placed under Braine’s feet were a pair of stockings. These were quite large and appeared to be of a heavy material, and one had a hole in it. The thawing and removal of the shroud and kerchief were left for the following day. Beattie, Kowal, Savelle, Amy and Damkjar wandered back to the cook tent, had a wash outside and went in for food and drink. They were then able to have a brief rest before returning to conduct the autopsy.

When they gathered again, all suffered terrible headaches and dizziness. Some felt they would be physically ill. They came to the conclusion that they were suffering the effects of carbon monoxide poisoning from the two stoves that burned continuously during the removal of Braine from his coffin. Although the tent flap had been tied open and a breeze had blown through during the work, the fumes had gathered in the grave pit, creating the problem.

When Amy and Beattie entered the X-ray/autopsy tent to begin their work, Notman pointed out a series of lesions on Braine’s body: on the left and right shoulders, in the groin area and along the left chest wall. These lesions involved the skin and in some cases the tissue and muscle below. Close inspection revealed teeth marks. Notman and Amy agreed that rats must have attacked the body while it had rested aboard the Erebus, prior to burial.

Rats were a common problem on nineteenth-century ships and caused difficulties even among Arctic expeditions. Elisha Kent Kane, the United States Navy officer, had experienced severe problems with the vermin while commanding the Advance in the Franklin search from 1853 to 1855:

Even efforts to fumigate the ship with the “vilest imaginable compounds of vapours—brimstone, burnt leather, and arsenic” failed to get rid of the rats.

Notman had compared the X-rays of Hartnell with those just taken of Braine and described one interesting difference to Beattie: “With Hartnell’s skull we could not penetrate to see bony details with X-rays because of the solid block of ice inside. That’s what is creating this uniform whiteness,” he said, pointing at the X-ray. “In contrast, Braine’s skull could be penetrated quite easily. I really don’t have any explanation for that because they were buried under similar circumstances.”

Further examination of the X-rays revealed some degenerative arthritic changes in the hands, possibly related to occupational stresses. The feet also showed arthritic changes, in particular, the big toes had a condition called hallux rigidus. These observations would be consistent with a man of Braine’s age and occupation. In addition to arthritic changes, small bony projections, probably benign bone tumours (osteochondromas), were seen in the bones of the knees (on the tibias).

The autopsy took seven hours and was extremely comprehensive. Like Hartnell’s, it was performed on the ground with the body resting on a sheet of white plastic. Written and recorded accounts were made during the whole period, and a thorough photographic record taken. Beattie assisted Amy during the autopsy, labelling storage containers and collecting tissue samples.

Unlike either Torrington or Hartnell, Braine was partially decomposed, demonstrating that some time had elapsed after William Braine’s death before the burial actually took place. An explanation for this apparent delay is difficult to find, though two possibilities were discussed. During the spring of 1846, parties were sent away from the ships to survey parts of nearby Devon Island. Franklin campsites had been discovered by searchers north of Beechey Island on the west coast of Devon Island and at Cape Riley. It is possible Braine had been with one of these parties when he died; after suffering a rapid decline in health in the manner of later sledge crews, some members of which became so ill that they had to be hauled back as passengers on the sledges they were meant to be pulling. There was even physical evidence to support this: The presence of ulcerations over the anterior surface of both shoulders indicated the likelihood of abrasion from sledge hauling. With two graves already located at Beechey Island, his body would have been returned for burial at the tiny cemetery. Wrapped and secured to a sledge he would have frozen within a few hours, though decomposition would have already set in. When the sledge party arrived at the ships, he may have been taken on board for examination by the doctors, followed by preparation for burial. During the time spent on ship, the rate of decay would have accelerated. Another possibility was related to poor weather. Braine may have died when the weather conditions did not allow his immediate burial. This seems a less reasonable explanation, as the body could easily have been placed in a cool or even freezing part of the ship, where the amount of observed decomposition would have been far less likely to occur. Whatever the reason, the decomposition was at least a possible explanation for Braine’s body being placed quickly and without care in the coffin.

During this final autopsy, Beattie wondered what Torrington, Hartnell and Braine would have thought about his research. The three men were explorers in their own time, either through conscription or by choice, involved in dangerous exploits that embodied the Victorian ideals of adventure, imperialism and self-sacrifice. Now, at least in body, they had emerged from the ice to briefly visit the 1980s. They could not have foretold such an odyssey.

With the autopsy and X-rays complete, a plane arrived on 20 June to pick up Amy, Notman, Anderson, Schweger and Spenceley. Those remaining on site wrapped Braine’s body tightly in cotton and lowered it to Beattie and Savelle, who were standing in the grave. Gently, they laid the body in the coffin and positioned it carefully. Minutes before, Beattie had spread the shroud along the bottom of the coffin and, once the body had been placed on it, the left side of the shroud was brought over the body, followed by the right side, which was tucked underneath. The kerchief, undershirt, sweater, shirt and stockings, each wrapped in protective mylar, were then placed in the coffin and the lid lowered into position. The north side of the tent was pulled back, and the sun, low in the northern sky at 11 PM, illuminated the headboard and inside walls of the tent. Standing beside the grave, bathed in brilliant yellow sunlight, the team silently gave a moment of reflection and respect to William Braine. Beattie then jumped into the grave, and a bucket of gravel was passed down to him. He slowly emptied the bucket over the plaque, spreading the gravel in a protective layer on its surface.

The filling of the grave began immediately. The huge pile of gravel, resting beside the grave, attested to the depth of the burial. Two people shovelled gravel into buckets while the others took turns carrying the buckets to the grave and pouring them in. Soon the gravel pile began to shrink, and within three hours the grave had been filled to a point where the large rocks could be repositioned on the surface—but mental and physical exhaustion had taken hold, and this task would be completed the following day.

Several days were spent completing the restoration of the site, and, after dismantling their camp, the remaining researchers left in two groups: Beattie, Nungaq and Kowal on 24 June, with Carlson, Savelle and Damkjar following on 27 June.

Other than the Franklin search expeditions of the 1850s, no one else had spent so much time at the site where the crews of the Erebus and Terror had experienced their first Arctic winter, and the early searchers had departed with many questions still unanswered. But Beattie left Beechey Island convinced that Petty Officer Torrington, Able Seaman Hartnell and Private Braine would provide some answers, for it seemed they had lived again for a few brief hours during the Arctic summers of 1984 and 1986.

16 Understanding a Disaster

The frozen tissue, hair and bone samples from both John Hartnell and William Braine were carried back to Edmonton in a small insulated cooler, and, within two days of leaving Beechey Island, were stored in a deep freeze at the University of Alberta Hospital. So much depended on this tiny box of samples. This was the evidence that would either confirm or defeat Beattie’s theory about the impact of lead on the Franklin expedition.

If trace element analysis of the samples revealed lead levels dramatically lower than had been obtained from Torrington and the Booth Point skeleton, then the source of lead exposure for those previously tested would have to be re-examined. The question would then be: Why only Torrington and not the others? But if elevated levels of lead were identified during the testing of the remains of Hartnell and Braine, then a much more substantial argument could be made for the underlying impact that lead would have had on the expedition. Five years of research now hinged on the extraction and analysis of the information locked in the tissue samples.

Such analysis, however, takes careful planning, and, in the following months, while Kowal prepared to test the human samples, Beattie spent his time studying the ten tin cans collected at Beechey Island.

Again, there was no question that lead contamination from the solder would have been considerable, but, on closer examination, the tins also revealed something unexpected, something Beattie and Damkjar had overlooked while plotting and describing the artefacts on the island. The side seams of some of the tins were incomplete. In fact, it appeared as if the tinsmith who made them had failed to properly seal the end part of the seams. The significance of this missed step in the manufacturing process cannot be overemphasized, as it would have resulted in spoilage of the food contained in the tins. It is, therefore, important to understand the design of the tins supplied to Franklin’s expedition, both for the location of solder and the reason for the flaws.

In 1845, tinned preserved food was still a relatively recent innovation, one that would have an immediate and major impact on maritime exploration. The tin container itself, patented in England in 1811, was immediately embraced by the British for use in its Royal Navy in most parts of the world. It was an invention that presumably would allow expeditions to winter successfully in the Arctic and make an assault on the Northwest Passage seem destined for success.

The first containers were constructed from a tinned wrought-iron sheet bent round a cylindrical form, with the edges allowed to lap over one another. The tinsmith then placed his soldering iron on each formed seam (internal and external), where he floated a bead of solder along most of its length. The seams were left unsoldered at the top and bottom ends.

The top and bottom end pieces were then bent to form a flange. When the ends were placed on the cylinder body, the flange slid over either the outside or the inside of the cylinder, depending on the tin type. (The flange was the reason why the tinsmith did not solder the body lap-seams all the way to the top and bottom: the end pieces could be slipped onto the cylinder body without being blocked by seam solder.) However, when the ends were soldered on, the small gaps between the lap-seam and the flange were not always sealed with a drop of solder. The incomplete seam very likely resulted in the spoilage of some of the expedition’s food supply, which supported the conclusions of some of the leading Franklin searchers.

The top end piece of each tin also had a filler hole that varied in size, depending on the size and type of canister. The top end piece was attached first, then heavily soldered on the inside. The bottom end piece was then attached, and it too was soldered internally through the filler hole in the top end piece. Solder was then applied round the outside of the end seams.

Food was pushed through the filler hole and the tin then almost completely immersed in boiling water (sometimes containing calcium chloride to increase the cooking temperature.) When cooking was complete and while the food was still at temperature, the filler hole was covered by a cap, secured with solder. The tins, now completely sealed, formed a partial vacuum upon cooling. The next step was to paint the outside of the tins to protect them against damage and corrosion. (The solder itself was made up of more than 90 per cent lead, with the balance being tin. This high lead level produced a solder that had poor “wetting” characteristics—in other words, it did not flow readily when in a liquid state. This meant it did not migrate easily into the spaces formed between two pieces of metal, as would solder with a higher tin content.)

The contract for the tinned preserved food was given to Stephan Goldner on 1 April 1845. On 5 May, the day Franklin received his sailing instructions, the superintendent of the Victualling Yard at Deptford reported that only one-tenth of the contract had been supplied. This was followed three days later by a promise from Goldner that by 12 May, all the meat would be delivered and the soups by 15 May, though he did ask for and receive permission to pack the soups in tins larger than in the original specification. There is a good chance that in the rush to complete the order, quality control suffered and some food that would later spoil was included among the 8,000 tins supplied to the expedition. If a significant proportion of the food went bad, it would have added a considerable burden to the expedition.

As Beattie continued his research into the problem tins, Roger Amy submitted the tissues collected under sterile conditions for bacteriological assessment. The preliminary results of this research identified tuberculosis in the lung tissue of William Braine, though there had been no success in culturing the organism. However, bacteria collected from the bowel of William Braine (an uncommon form of the genus Clostridium, associated with the human bowel) was cultured. Remarkably, bacteria dating to 1846, and once part of William Braine, is still alive today.

Then, in early 1987, Walt Kowal and experts at the Alberta Workers’ Health and Compensation laboratory in Edmonton began to test hair samples collected from Torrington in 1984 and Hartnell and Braine in 1986. Again, the method of testing involved the combustion at high temperatures of solutions made from samples of the hair. (The resulting emissions are characteristic of a particular element, such as lead, and can be identified and quantified.) The first tests were run on hair collected from the crown and nape areas of Torrington’s head. They revealed levels ranging from 413 to 657 parts per million (ppm), very similar to the extremely high levels previously identified in hair samples taken from Torrington.

It wasn’t until April that Kowal called Beattie with results of the first tests on Hartnell and Braine: “Not a thing, didn’t find a thing. There’s nothing in the other two,” Kowal said.

Beattie was quiet for a moment, then said: “Well, now it gets more complicated.” His mind was already at work trying to figure out this new twist. But Kowal, now laughing, quickly added: “Wait a minute, I was pulling your leg. The levels are high, there’s no denying it.”

Hair from Hartnell had yielded lead levels ranging from 138 to 313 ppm, while hair from Braine was very similar at 145 to 280 ppm. Although not as high as the lead levels measured in Torrington, the results exceeded the contemporary hair standard by well over twenty times. Subsequent testing would eliminate the possibility of external twentieth-century contamination, and further tests on bone and tissue from Torrington, Hartnell and Braine underscored the accuracy of the hair results.

Furthermore, the fact that the information on lead exposure came from hair meant that the contamination occurred during Franklin’s voyage—not from industrial pollution in the British environment of the day. Possible sources of lead exposure on the expedition were numerous, including tea wrapped in lead foil, pewterware and lead-glazed pottery vessels. But it was the reliance of Franklin’s expedition on tinned food that was the root cause. It has since been calculated that each sailor would have been allotted about ½ pound (.25 kg) of tinned food every second day, resulting in regular and considerable ingestion of lead. And while there can be no exact explanation of the differences in the level of lead between Torrington on the one hand and Hartnell and Braine on the other, it is quite likely related to differences in the food consumed by the three men and their jobs aboard ship. For example, Torrington, as leading stoker, may have picked up added contamination from lead in coal dust.

What is very clear from the findings, however, now based on more than four (including the Booth Point skeleton and other bones gathered on King William Island in 1982) separate individuals and using the facilities of a series of different labs, is that lead played an important role in the declining health of the entire crews of the Erebus and Terror—not only in their loss of physical energy but increasingly in their minds’ despair. Loss of appetite, fatigue, weakness and colic are some of the physical symptoms of lead poisoning; it can also cause disturbances of the central and peripheral nervous systems, producing neurotic and erratic behaviour and paralysis of the limbs. But it is the effects on the mind that may have been of greatest importance in isolating the impact of lead on the expedition. Under the continuing and prolonged stressful conditions of long periods in the Arctic, even very subtle effects of low lead exposure could have had significant impact on the decisionmaking abilities of the men, particularly the officers. Only clear minds can hope to make correct decisions.

There is no single reason why the expedition failed, of course; it was a deadly combination of factors. That is why there is no one answer to the question of what caused the Franklin expedition disaster. Perhaps the best that can be done today is to isolate the reasonable possibilities and fit them into the broad circumstances as identified from the scattered remains found at archaeological sites. This is what Beattie was able to do.

In some cases, such as the three sailors from Beechey Island, the effects of lead poisoning were catastrophic. Amy’s autopsy results showed that, like Torrington, both Hartnell and Braine suffered from tuberculosis and died of pneumonia. In addition, radiological evidence obtained by Derek Notman identified a collapsed eleventh thoracic vertebra in William Braine, a condition caused by Pott’s disease, which in turn is usually caused by tubercular infection. But it was the insidious and poorly understood poison, lead, entering their bodies at high levels over the course of the first months of the expedition, that weakened these three young men to the point that they were easily killed off by supervening diseases. Other crewmen would have been as severely affected by the poisoning, which probably explains at least some of the other twenty-one deaths experienced by the expedition in the early period before the ships were deserted on 22 April 1848.

As for the high ratio of officer deaths prior to the death march (nine out of twenty-one), Beattie found possible explanations consistent with the lead findings. If the officers, a rigidly separated and very aloof class, even during long and confined expeditions, were using their pewter tableware and eating a preferential food source (that is, proportionately more tinned food), they may have ingested much higher levels of lead than the other seamen. It is at least possible that Sir John Franklin himself died directly or indirectly from the effects of lead poisoning.

As for those men who died during the tragic death march in the spring and summer of 1848, some may have exhibited classic symptoms of the poisoning, such as anorexia, weakness and fatigue and paranoia, which would have compounded the effects of starvation and scurvy. Other crewmen may not have shown any obvious effects of the poison, perhaps because of differing diets and physical responses to the lead.

It is sadly ironic that Franklin’s expedition, certainly one of the greatest seafaring expeditions ever launched, carrying all the tools that early industry and innovation could offer, should have been mortally wounded by one of them. Yet Beattie now believed he had the scientific evidence to say that this was the case.

When Sir John Franklin sailed from the Thames in May 1845, an entire nation believed that the honour of conquering the Northwest Passage was within his grasp. None could have known that inside the tins stored in the ship’s hold there ticked a time bomb that helped not only to deny Franklin his triumph but to steal away 129 brave lives. And while good hopes decayed in a relatively short time for the expedition crews, the physicians aboard the Erebus and Terror would have been helpless to intervene. The health risks imposed by the use of lead-tin solder were simply not appreciated at that time. (It was not until 1890 that government legislation in Britain finally banned soldering on the insides of food tins.)

THERE IS OFTEN a terrible price to pay in human exploration reliant upon new technology. That fact was vividly demonstrated again in recent years by the failure of the space shuttles Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003. Indeed, our explorers of space share a bond with past explorers of the unknown frozen shores of the earth. In many ways, there is no difference between the Franklin and space shuttle disasters. Time, technology, social conditions and politics have changed, but the spirit and motivation underlying both endeavours remain. Both used the most advanced technology of their time and both paid the ultimate price. An article published in an 1855 edition of Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine laments those dangers:

These thoughts, published even before M’Clintock made his grisly discoveries, could have been written in response to Beattie’s. But such conclusions dwell only on the failure of science and technology and deny the achievements. For after Franklin, others followed. They too used the latest technology available to them, and they succeeded not only in tracing a Northwest Passage but in conquering the last and most forbidding land on earth.