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00:02It was the most ambitious expedition of its day.
00:06One of Britain's most renowned explorers, Sir John Franklin,
00:11and 133 officers and crew set off to conquer the most perilous waterway in the world.
00:19Their mission? To be the first to sail from the Atlantic to the Pacific
00:24through Canada's icy Northwest Passage.
00:28It felt as if it was the domain of death,
00:32the far limit of what human beings could do.
00:38This was the holy grail of Arctic exploration,
00:42and it should have been the British Navy's ultimate achievement.
00:49But instead, two great ships with the best 19th century technology
00:55headed into the polar ice and seemed to vanish.
01:01For 150 years, the reason for the loss of the Franklin Expedition remained a mystery.
01:11Now, a team of investigators has uncovered an extraordinary trail of clues
01:16that raises troubling new questions.
01:22Could it be that the men actually survived the ice, only to turn on each other?
01:29I think this evidence is strongly suggestive of cannibalism among these Franklin crew members.
01:37What was it that wiped out one of the most technologically advanced expeditions
01:41in 300 years of polar exploration?
01:46The story of the Franklin Expedition can finally be told.
01:52Arctic Passage, Prisoners of the Ice, right now on NOVA.
02:17Corporate funding for NOVA is provided by Google and by BP.
02:23The major funding for NOVA is provided by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute,
02:28serving society through biomedical research and science education, HHMI.
02:33Major funding for NOVA is also provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
02:38and by PBS viewers like you.
03:08A spring morning in 1845,
03:12at the offices of the British Admiralty,
03:15Sir John Franklin, a seasoned naval captain,
03:18receives final orders before setting off on a daring voyage of exploration.
03:24Now, Sir John, this is the plan.
03:26His destination, the Northwest Passage,
03:29one of the last unexplored waterways in the world
03:32and perhaps the most perilous.
03:35And then attempt to turn south or southwest
03:39into these uncharted waters.
03:42We have every faith in you, Sir John.
03:48At this time, the only way to reach Asia
03:51is to make an arduous journey around Cape Horn,
03:54a trip that can take six months.
03:57The British believe that there is a shortcut,
04:00a passage through northern Canada that may shave months off the trip.
04:07But after 300 years of trying to penetrate the Arctic ice,
04:11no ship has ever sailed all the way through.
04:18It's a puzzle, it's a matrix, like a maze.
04:22The winds are blowing the ice around,
04:24the currents are pushing the ice.
04:25And for a ship to traverse that was next to impossible.
04:35This expedition will be the 19th attempt by the British Navy
04:39to punch through the passage.
04:41And this time, they're pulling out all the stops.
04:46John Franklin is one of Britain's most experienced Arctic explorers.
04:51At age 59, he may be too old for such a voyage.
04:55But finding the passage has been his lifelong dream.
04:59And his wife, Lady Jane Franklin, has given him her blessing.
05:11Toadsman, south, south, west, 30 degrees, please.
05:15He and his second, Francis Crozier, another veteran explorer,
05:20will lead the largest and most technologically advanced
05:23Arctic expedition ever mounted.
05:26134 men on board the Terror and the Erebus,
05:30a pair of modified warships.
05:35Already among the sturdiest in the fleet,
05:38each has been radically altered for duty in the Arctic.
05:42Shipwrights reinforced their superstructures
05:45and added iron plates to the bow.
05:48They installed a locomotive steam engine,
05:51turning a screw-shaped propeller,
05:53a new invention that will allow the ships to power
05:56through the ice as never before.
06:02You can sense the extraordinary confidence
06:05of people who'd pushed back the frontiers of nature
06:08through the glories of the Industrial Revolution,
06:12this might that they suddenly had at their disposal.
06:15And so they built up this force
06:17into great ships reinforced by steel,
06:19and this would be their fortress.
06:23Also on board, a new technology designed to eliminate the hunger
06:28and sickness that often plagued long voyages.
06:32A 19th century invention that promised to feed the men
06:36as if they were back in London.
06:39Canned food.
06:41We will never starve again.
06:42It will nourish us through winter, spring and summer.
06:46On an earlier Arctic expedition,
06:49Franklin and his crew had to hunt and scavenge for nourishment.
06:52So John, do tell us more.
06:54Eight of them died of starvation,
06:55and he himself barely survived.
06:581890.
06:59We scraped lynching off rocks
07:01and boiled it up with scrag ends and bits of bones.
07:04Arctic potage.
07:07The story of his brush with death earned him a wry nickname,
07:11the man who ate his boots.
07:13But this time out, he intended to keep his shoe leather on his feet.
07:18So they loaded the ships with more than 30,000 pounds
07:21of fresh meat and vegetables preserved in cans.
07:26This would be the first expedition to rely so completely
07:29on this revolutionary food source.
07:32Each night, Franklin and his officers could look forward
07:35to a proper meal served at his well-appointed captain's table.
07:41And for the men, solid food and plenty of diversions,
07:45including an organ and a library of more than 1,000 books.
07:51The great quantity of material may have seemed frivolous,
07:54but it was really a matter of survival.
07:56If you didn't give the men something to do,
07:59if you didn't keep them occupied,
08:00there was just no way they were going to survive the rigors
08:03of an extended Arctic voyage.
08:06The two ships set sail from London in May of 1845.
08:14According to reports filed by Franklin in July,
08:16both ships made an uneventful crossing
08:19and docked in Greenland to take on additional supplies.
08:23From there, five men returned to England
08:28and others posted letters home.
08:32A young lieutenant, James Fitzjames,
08:35wrote to his brother's family praising Franklin.
08:39Sir John, you have no idea how happy we all feel.
08:43We are very fond of Sir John.
08:46He is anything but nervous and fidgety.
08:49He is full of life and energy and kindness.
08:53We will toast his health when we reach the other side.
08:57Everyone believes we will make it through in a season,
09:00though I hope that we are forced to stay at least one winter in the ice.
09:11On July 28th, 1845, the expedition passed a British whaling ship as they headed into the passage.
09:20The captain of that vessel reported that Franklin's men were in high spirits, confident that they were about to make
09:27history.
09:32In the end, the expedition would be remembered.
09:37Not for its discoveries, but for the disaster it would become.
09:44When the ship sailed into the polar ice, never to return.
09:57When the first winter passed with no word from the men, the Admiralty was not worried.
10:04But when the second winter passed, Lady Jane Franklin began to urge the Royal Navy to send a search party.
10:12Now, if an expedition were to leave this spring...
10:16Franklin's superiors dismissed her concerns.
10:18The Royal Navy began to return to London, believing that the men could survive for at least three years in
10:21the ice.
10:24But as the third winter approached, the Navy's confidence began to waver.
10:29And in 1848, the first of many search parties left England for the passage.
10:36The Royal Navy also offered the staggering sum of 20,000 pounds for the rescue of the crew.
10:44By now, the apparent failure of the expedition was the talk of London, and it shocked Victorian England to the
10:51core.
10:56In three centuries of polar exploration, no expedition of this size had ever been lost.
11:04More than any other, this attempt should have succeeded.
11:08The men had every advantage.
11:11What could have happened?
11:14Were the ships crushed by the ice?
11:19Was the crew struck down by some disease?
11:23The Royal Navy even feared that the men might have been attacked by the Inuit, whom they viewed as savages.
11:32For 150 years, the cause of the disaster remained a mystery.
11:39But a century-old collection of artifacts, historical weather reports, and even forensic evidence are providing new clues.
11:51It's amazing that we can tell this story at all.
11:54It's so fragmentary, the evidence so scattered.
11:57It's taken a tremendous amount of work, different people working in different disciplines, to piece this puzzle together.
12:03And as we have done so, as the picture of what really happened has begun to emerge, we've realized what
12:07they couldn't.
12:08And that's that they were basically doomed from the start.
12:13The first hint that the Franklin expedition carried the seeds of its own destruction was a discovery made in 1850
12:19on Beachy Island,
12:21a rocky little outcropping just 300 miles into the passage.
12:29Today, there's a tiny Inuit community called Resolute nearby.
12:34But in Franklin's day, the area was an uninhabited wasteland.
12:40For historian Russell Potter, Beachy Island remains a vital link to the past, and still holds important clues.
12:50Ever since I first heard the Franklin story, then just grasped the sense of the tragedy there,
12:55Beachy Island has been the magnet for me.
12:58The one place where you could stand and know that you were standing in Franklin's footsteps.
13:06Today, he's making the long and difficult trip to the place where the abandoned remains of a campsite once stood.
13:16They found signs that tents had been erected, a place where a smithy or anvil had been set up,
13:21even some attempt to build a garden up on the shingle.
13:28As the first winter approached and the sea turned to ice,
13:32Franklin apparently anchored his ships at Beachy Island.
13:36The men then spread out onto the land, where they spent at least seven months waiting for the summer thaw.
13:43Some of the telling items found at Beachy include hundreds of empty food cans,
13:48a chronometer, a pair of snow knives, and a pair of gloves, left out as if to dry in the
13:57sun.
13:59But searchers also found something disturbing,
14:02a row of graves belonging to three men who were members of Franklin's crew.
14:08Thus saith the Lord of Hosts, consider your ways.
14:18Sitting here with these graves, we know they were here.
14:22Just a very, very haunting and haunted place.
14:26The original headstones, which have since been replaced, did not note the cause of death.
14:31But the most common killer on long voyages was scurvy,
14:35a disease caused by vitamin C deficiency.
14:40However, the expedition carried 9,300 pounds of lemon juice to ward off the disease,
14:46leaving historians to wonder if some new killer was at work.
14:50Something that could have caused the loss not only of these three men,
14:54but of the entire expedition.
14:58At Beachy Island, you have the remains of three members of the expedition,
15:02and almost certainly preserved remains.
15:05So this opens the possibility of understanding the medical reasons behind the disaster.
15:11No modern investigator examined the graves until 1984,
15:15when the Canadian government gave permission to a team of forensic scientists to exhume the bodies.
15:23The scientists hoped that the corpses would be well preserved by the ice,
15:28but nothing prepared them for what they uncovered.
15:36It was such a profoundly moving experience, and also one of shock, really,
15:41and amazement that these sailors from the last century, there they were.
15:45You could see their eyelashes, you could see their eye color.
15:48You can get a sense, almost, of the personality of these characters.
15:53It's as if they had stepped forward in time to sort of answer very important questions that needed to be
15:57asked.
16:00At the gravesite, the forensic team performed autopsies and discovered that the men had died of tuberculosis.
16:08It was a common and deadly disease of the day, but not virulent enough to wipe out the entire crew.
16:19To Franklin, the loss of these young men may have been upsetting, but not necessarily alarming.
16:27For a group of this size traveling through such harsh conditions, cut off from civilization,
16:32some loss of life was nearly inevitable.
16:37If anything, the large number of empty food cans found at the campsite suggested that most of the men were
16:44surviving,
16:44and had made it safely through that first winter.
16:49But searchers were puzzled by the number of usable items left behind.
16:54It suggested that the men had departed suddenly.
16:59What could have caused them to abandon the camp in a hurry?
17:04Perhaps they had no choice.
17:08If there's any explanation of why Franklin had to take off so quickly without leaving any notes behind,
17:13the ice was maybe blown tight against Beachy Island, and he was waiting and waiting.
17:22And then, all of a sudden, the winds turned around, and the ice moved off to the south.
17:28If he saw that one opening, he'd want to grab it right away.
17:31That was his escape.
17:34The ice would have been their main worry.
17:37So the minute he had the opportunity, Franklin would have hoisted anchor and headed deeper into the passage.
17:44And that's where later expeditions made a series of troubling discoveries.
17:49Evidence that Franklin and his men had become stuck once more in the ice.
17:57John Graves has a unique window on the Franklin mystery.
18:01He oversees a collection of Franklin artifacts recovered from the Arctic,
18:06now preserved at the National Maritime Museum in London.
18:11This mysterious trail of personal effects once lay scattered over hundreds of miles of ice and snow,
18:17and were recovered throughout the 1850s.
18:22It was this succession of search expeditions that went out to the Arctic looking for Franklin and his crew.
18:29Little by little, they started to bring back some of the artifacts you see here.
18:34And basically, it's all we have really to try and piece together what happened to Franklin and his men.
18:44The first group of items in the collection were discovered by Dr. John Ray in 1854.
18:50He was a Scottish explorer on a surveying mission.
18:55Traveling overland, he encountered a group of Inuit who had in their possession several small objects that Ray realized must
19:02have belonged to the missing expedition.
19:05They include these two pieces from a telescope, this small wooden container, this brass match case, a pocket knife with
19:16a bone handle, and this small leather working tool.
19:22This wasn't cast off garbage like most of the debris found at Beachy Island.
19:27These were personal items that Franklin's men would not have discarded willingly.
19:33These items recovered from the Inuit was the first hint that something terrible had happened to the Franklin expedition.
19:42The Inuit told Ray that they had seen ships trapped in the ice, and white men on foot, walking south.
19:52But Ray couldn't figure out where they'd seen the men.
19:56They had no maps, and their directions seemed vague.
20:01But that wasn't the worst of it.
20:04The Inuit also told Ray that some of the men had turned to what they called the last resource.
20:12Cannibalism.
20:15In Britain, the report was not well received.
20:20The Admiralty frankly refused to believe the Inuit testimony.
20:25It was thinking the unthinkable, basically.
20:28And so subsequent search expeditions were dispatched to try and uncover the truth.
20:36By the time of Ray's discovery, almost 10 years had passed since Franklin left England.
20:42The Admiralty had privately concluded that there was no hope of ever finding survivors.
20:50But Lady Jane Franklin remained determined, and she financed search parties of her own.
20:59Then, in 1858, Leopold McClintock, one of the men she hired to search for her husband, landed on King William
21:07Island,
21:09where he and his men made two important discoveries.
21:16The first, an abandoned boat.
21:19The boat had been mounted on a sled, and was rigged with harnesses for pulling by the men.
21:27It was loaded with equipment and personal effects, and a pair of skeletons.
21:37The second find lay 20 miles farther up the coast of the island.
21:41A written note, protected by a metal can, and placed inside a carefully constructed pile of stones, called a cairn.
21:52A single page that gave haunting testimony as to the fate of the men.
22:00It began with the standard Admiralty form, and the message,
22:05All well, Sir John Franklin commanding.
22:09It was dated May of 1847, and it noted that the ships had been stuck in the ice since September
22:16of 1846.
22:18The current position was given as 70 degrees north, 98 degrees west.
22:25The northern tip of King William Island.
22:28Apparently, this is where the expedition had ground to a halt.
22:34Franklin had probably sailed west from Beachy for about 75 miles,
22:38before turning south into a channel called Peel Sound,
22:43which led to King William Island.
22:48For Franklin, these were uncharted waters.
22:52But he and the Royal Navy believed that this route to the south was the key to the passage.
23:01Peel Sound opens into a network of channels that eventually leads all the way to the Bering Strait and the
23:07Pacific Ocean.
23:12To Franklin, that would have been a very, very tempting route to take,
23:16particularly if it was open, free of ice.
23:20And Peel Sound, we know today, is very, very changeable from year to year.
23:24One year it can be completely wide open, another year it can be choked up with ice,
23:28so that it's impassable even by modern ships.
23:33What Franklin didn't know is that polar ice funnels down from the north
23:37through what is now called McClintock Channel,
23:40eventually piling up at the southern end of Peel Sound.
23:45Franklin couldn't see that icy impasse when he turned south.
23:49But once he ran into it, he may have been unable to escape.
23:54At the bottom end, at the south end of Peel Sound,
23:57is where he runs into that huge stream of Arctic Ocean polar ice
24:02that is probably where he met his demise.
24:07At the south end of Peel Sound, the ice may simply have outflanked the Erebus and the Terror.
24:14At least that's what an addition to the note found on King William Island indicated.
24:20Around that message in the margins was written a second, far more disturbing message.
24:27Dated 1848, more than a year after the original note was written,
24:32Francis Crozier, the captain of the Terror, added in the margin that the ships were still trapped in the ice,
24:38in the same location.
24:41They hadn't moved in nearly two years.
24:48What had gone wrong?
24:50Usually the polar ice melts during the summer.
24:54Could it be that this time, the ice simply didn't melt?
25:02The nightmare scenario is that I'm never going to get out of this ice.
25:05I'm facing another long winter.
25:08It's going to get dark. It's going to get very cold.
25:10And here I am out on the ice that's still moving around.
25:13I don't know where this ice is carrying me.
25:16No previous polar expedition had ever reported a summer so cold that the ice didn't break up.
25:25That anomaly puzzled polar scientist Roy Koerner.
25:30Recently, he set out to learn just what kind of weather Franklin had to contend with during that fateful year.
25:39Koerner and his team regularly drilled down into the Arctic ice cap,
25:43retrieving samples that they can use to understand temperature patterns from other eras.
25:50At most latitudes, ice is impermanent.
25:53But north of the Arctic Circle, it tends to hang around.
25:59Even for thousands of years.
26:02Koerner retrieved a sample from more than 100 meters below the surface.
26:09By counting ice layers and by analyzing the chemical content of the core,
26:13he zeroed in on a section that he could date back to the late 1840s.
26:19He hoped it might be able to tell him more about the conditions that Franklin's men faced.
26:26The reason ice cores give the history of the climate in the past is that everything that happens on the
26:32surface is preserved as the ice gets buried.
26:36If the surface of the snow melts, the water percolates down and it forms these ice layers.
26:42The more it melts, the more ice layers and the thicker the ice layers.
26:48Koerner found that within the 1840s ice core, there was simply no sign of the transparent ice layers that form
26:55when snow melts.
26:59Koerner had once before seen another ice core like this, dated from the early 1970s.
27:08In that case, he had actual weather reports to compare it to.
27:13And he learned that the ice from the 70s had formed during a very cold period of almost permanent winter.
27:23The point to make on this core is the absolute near absence of any signs of melting whatsoever.
27:31None of those clear layers at all, just bubbly ice that is formed from compression of snow that doesn't melt
27:37in the summer.
27:40The finding convinced him that Franklin faced similar conditions, when much of the sea ice had not melted at all.
27:50For an expedition hoping to sail the passage with 19th century technology, the conditions would have been deadly.
27:58If it's a cold summer, that ice isn't going to go out and open up.
28:03The channels are ice infested still.
28:06The ships that they used in those days, they don't have the power to get through even the modest ice.
28:14Kerner's evidence confirmed that Franklin and his men had encountered freak weather conditions, more severe than previous explorers had reported.
28:24Worse than that, Kerner's ice core showed that this period of extreme cold likely lasted for five long years.
28:35This terrible run of bad luck trapped the men in the wilderness.
28:41But there was even worse news.
28:45Also written in the margin of the note, another entry read,
28:50Sir John Franklin died on the 11th of June, 1847.
28:57It continued,
28:59The total loss by deaths in the expedition has been to this date, nine officers and 15 men.
29:08They were still living on their ships and probably had plenty of food, but a mysterious killer now stalked their
29:16ranks.
29:23They that go down to the sea and ships, that do business in great waters,
29:32these see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep.
29:38For he commandeth and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof.
29:48They mount up to the heaven, they go down again to the depths.
29:53Their soul melteth away because of trouble.
29:59They reel to and fro and stagger like a drunken man.
30:06It's clear from everything we know he was a beloved commander.
30:09He'd been in the Arctic before and only one other officer had.
30:13I think that his presence is a tremendous reassurance to everyone there,
30:17and his loss would have been a terrific blow.
30:20So that the waves thereof are still.
30:24Then are they glad because they are quiet.
30:30Sir John Franklin died even before the first search expeditions left England.
30:36In that year, Lady Jane continued to write poignant letters to her missing husband,
30:42unaware that she was already a widow.
30:46I desire nothing but to cherish the remainder of your days, however injured and broken your health may be.
30:54I live in you, my dearest.
31:02Three years after the expedition left England, the commander and 20% of the 128-man crew lay dead.
31:11Already, it was one of the deadliest disasters in the history of polar exploration.
31:18The final entry on the note said that the men had abandoned the safety of their ships and were now
31:24walking south.
31:30In that brief note, second-in-command Francis Crozier testified to a terrible truth.
31:36The expedition lay in ruins, and the chances of anyone getting out alive were rapidly fading.
31:46The whole plan for traversing the Northwest Passage depended on being able to sail through it.
31:53They didn't have a plan for getting away except by sailing out.
31:58They didn't have, for example, lightweight sledges adapted to the terrain.
32:03All they had was what was on the ship, that lavish factory full of Victorian contrivances and good ideas.
32:12The boat they'd converted into a sled was filled with the crew's personal possessions.
32:17As it was later found by a search party led by Leopold McClintock,
32:21it's estimated to have weighed a staggering 1,400 pounds.
32:27After three years marooned in the Arctic, dying one by one,
32:32their overland escape attempt must have been an act of desperation.
32:42The nearest outpost lay 600 miles to the south.
32:47A daunting distance to travel by foot, especially with so much gear in tow.
32:55This boatload of strange relics of Victorian culture, the Vicar of Wakefield, prayer books, New Testament in French,
33:02carpet slippers, chocolate, tea, button polishers, buttons, silver plate and utensils,
33:08all of the detritus of this inner culture of the ships that they tried to take with them.
33:18You can imagine these people desperately wanting to carry their precious world with them,
33:23that everything they trusted was now going to become not an advantage but a problem.
33:28So that they were burdened now by their numbers, they were burdened now by the weight of their stores.
33:34And above all, burdened by the fact that they didn't know what to do with the land that they were
33:40now suddenly totally dependent on.
33:45It would have been murderously difficult to haul such a heavy load through the snow.
33:52At some point, they apparently abandoned it on the west coast of King William Island.
33:58And it's there that the Trail of Clues runs out.
34:05Based on this trail of evidence, the Admiralty decided that Franklin's men had simply starved to death trying to walk
34:11out of the wilderness.
34:12And for more than a century, that was the official narrative.
34:15But there were eyewitnesses, as it turns out, people who actually saw Franklin's men in this last extremity.
34:21And their story is quite different from the official Admiralty version.
34:27In 1869, an American journalist, Charles Francis Hall, found these eyewitnesses when he spent five years in the Canadian Arctic,
34:36often living with Inuit families.
34:41Did you ask him where these people came from, what direction they were walking from?
34:46He met dozens of indigenous people who retained detailed memories of Franklin's crew and their ships.
34:54He met hundreds of thousands of people.
34:57Hall carefully recorded their testimony.
35:00But once again, it was discounted by the British,
35:04who considered the Inuit to be unreliable.
35:10Russell Potter has made a new study of Hall's notebooks,
35:14digging them out of an archive at the Smithsonian,
35:17where they'd been hidden away for more than 100 years.
35:22Hall was just a very diligent man.
35:24He trusted the Inuit. He believed in their stories.
35:28He carefully corroborated one story with another to try to see how accurate that was likely to be.
35:34It matches very well with the physical evidence we have.
35:37It really is a highly accurate and amazingly well-preserved oral tradition.
35:43The Inuit told of an abandoned camp.
35:46A tent place, as Hall translated it.
35:51And it was a grisly sight.
35:55And they gave him a very vivid description of this place.
35:58They had seen tents on the land, bodies inside the tents, abandoned equipment.
36:05The Inuit placed the location of the camp somewhere on King William Island,
36:09the same island where the abandoned boat and the note had been discovered.
36:16They described the bodies they saw there.
36:19They said that the faces were black, a symptom of frostbite.
36:25They also said that the insides of the men's mouths were black as well.
36:30And that could only mean one thing.
36:34Three years into their Arctic journey, scurvy was ravaging the men.
36:42The British Navy had long known that lemon juice could stave off the disease.
36:47But what they didn't know is that the active ingredient, vitamin C, loses its potency over time.
36:54By 1848, the men would have begun to suffer the terrible effects of the disease.
37:00The first symptoms of scurvy are a sort of a general lassitude and a weakness.
37:05And it mainly affects the gums.
37:07They become swollen, they become purple.
37:09The slightest touch means they bleed very, very easily.
37:12As it develops, the bleeding goes on everywhere.
37:14You can get bleeding into your eyes, you get bleeding into your muscles, and this is particularly painful.
37:20The main muscle that you're using to try and pull this sledge through the snow,
37:24and you've got this agonising bleeding into the muscles and into the joints,
37:28so it would have just slowly but horrendously killed them.
37:33The men would have recognised the symptoms of scurvy.
37:37But they wouldn't have recognised the symptoms of an even more insidious illness that may have been affecting them.
37:46While performing autopsies on the three young sailors buried on Beachy Island,
37:51the investigators also removed hair and bone tissue for later analysis.
37:58In a Canadian laboratory, scientists found something surprising in those samples.
38:03Levels of lead, six to ten times higher than normal.
38:09Enough to cause severe lead poisoning.
38:15Where did it come from?
38:19Some suggested that the lead levels could have been caused by the industrial air pollution of Victorian England.
38:28But Ann Keenleyside, a Canadian anthropologist, decided to examine the evidence from a new angle.
38:37First, Keenleyside's test confirmed the extraordinary levels of lead in the bodies.
38:42They were so high that these individuals would have almost certainly been suffering from serious physiological and neurological problems.
38:52Then, using a process called X-ray fluorescence,
38:56she discovered the lead concentration was higher in soft, spongy bones than in other places in the body.
39:03It was a vital clue, because soft bones, like the vertebrae, regenerate themselves every few years.
39:12These individuals were exposed to this lead over a fairly recent period of time before their death.
39:19So this was short-term exposure from some source on the expedition.
39:27Based on her finding, researchers took another look at the clues found at Beachy.
39:33They found that the food cans had been sealed with solder, a soft metal compound that contains lead.
39:41Chemical analysis showed that the lead in the cans matched the lead found in the bodies.
39:49It's like a fingerprint that was found in the bodies, in the organs, in the tissues, in the bone.
39:54And that was the smoking gun.
39:59It's like a fingerprint.
40:00Apparently, the lead had contaminated the food, causing lead poisoning, a deadly illness.
40:06Symptoms include fatigue, confusion, and paranoia.
40:11Not enough by itself to cause death.
40:14But if the men were weakened by illness, the poison would have been a devastating complication.
40:21When you combine lead and scurvy, you suddenly have this tag team undermining the health of the crewmen.
40:29It really was a recipe for a mass disaster.
40:35And the key ingredient in that recipe?
40:38The very technology that was meant to keep them alive.
40:41We will never starve again.
40:44It will nourish us through winter, spring, and summer.
40:52In the autumn of 1848, the fourth winter in the Arctic, the window for escape was rapidly closing.
41:01As the men became weakened by hunger and disease, the bonds between them began to unravel.
41:10It's clear from the Inuit testimony that at this point, the traditional discipline is beginning to break down.
41:15The men are separating to different groups, possibly hostile to one another.
41:19Some are heading back to the ships.
41:21Some camped on the land.
41:22Some walking out by their own directions.
41:25None of them under the traditional central command that the Navy would expect.
41:28It's really the beginning of the end for them.
41:31Everyone is trying to find their own solution.
41:35That breakdown in morale was starkly apparent from Inuit testimony,
41:39describing an incident that took place on one of the ships still trapped in the ice off the coast of
41:44King William Island.
41:50An elderly woman reported to Hall that a man from her village had come upon a group of survivors on
41:55board that vessel.
42:04The Inuit went to the ship all alone.
42:08The Inuit went to the ship all alone.
42:09He said there were men there.
42:11He said they had black faces, black hands, black clothes on.
42:17They were black all over.
42:29This Inuit was very alarmed because they would not let him get away.
42:35Then a captain came out of the cabin and put a stop to it.
42:41Leave him!
42:49Then the captain took this Inuit down with him into his cabin.
42:52There is a tent.
42:53He told him to look over to the land where there are men living in a big tent.
42:59He said neither the Inuit nor any of his people must ever go there.
43:03You must not go there!
43:07You must go!
43:09Go!
43:10Go!
43:12Look, come here!
43:22The Inuit were not told why some of the men were living separately.
43:30But in 1994, human bone fragments discovered on King William Island suggested one chilling possibility.
43:42Ann Keenleyside tested these bones as well and found that they also contained lead from the food supply, linking them
43:50to the Franklin Expedition.
43:53Then she examined the surface of the bones under a powerful electron microscope.
44:00We saw very distinct cut marks.
44:02These were quite different from animal tooth marks.
44:05These looked like very definite cut marks, as if they were made by some kind of a knife or a
44:10metal blade.
44:15Keenleyside then plotted the pattern of the cut marks on a skeleton.
44:20A lot of the cuts were located in the vicinity of the joints.
44:24Some of the bones that would have been covered by a lot of flesh or soft tissue.
44:28We also found cuts, interestingly, in the bones of the hands and feet.
44:32And the hands and feet are probably the most human aspects of the body apart from the face.
44:38And the fact that we were finding cuts in those locations suggested to me that perhaps these individuals were intentionally
44:44removing those more human aspects of the body.
44:49I think this evidence is strongly suggestive of cannibalism among these Franklin crew members.
44:56I don't see any other possible explanation that would account for those cut marks.
45:03Keenleyside's tests finally corroborated the Inuit accounts of cannibalism recorded both by the Scottish surveyor John Ray and the American
45:12journalist Charles Hall.
45:15The same testimony despised and discounted by the British for over a century.
45:24According to other Inuit eyewitnesses, not all of the men stayed on or near the ships.
45:37In Hall's records are the words of two elderly Inuit called Takita and Owa, who described
45:43an encounter with a small band of men walking south on the polar ice.
45:49We were out sealing when we saw something on the ice.
45:54As they drew nearer, we realised it was white men.
45:59They asked us for food.
46:04Can you help us?
46:06We need food.
46:10The officer also signalled that two ships lay in the ice to the north.
46:17Then he made a motion of falling sideways, whistling and blowing.
46:22They're stuck.
46:23It was the sound of a ship being crushed in the ice.
46:39The Inuit stayed for the night and gave the men some seal meat, but they were on a hunting
46:44expedition and had to leave the next day.
47:00Early next morning, we set off.
47:02The leader tried to make us stop, but we were in a hurry and did not know the man was
47:08starving.
47:09Stop!
47:15The Inuit simply packed up and left.
47:19And when you think about it, that seems like a terrible thing, but it's really an act of self-preservation.
47:24There's no way that a small band of Inuit, even the most skilled hunters, could have kept
47:28alive 30 starving men in the middle of that landscape.
47:31There just wasn't enough food even for their own families.
47:34They didn't really have any choice.
47:47In recent years, a few skeletal remains have turned up along a 30-mile stretch of King William
47:52Island.
47:59These bones tell the grim tale of what may have happened to those who never gave up trying
48:04to walk to safety.
48:07At first, they buried their dead in makeshift graves.
48:11But then, weakened by cold and hunger, the rest simply died and were found where they fell.
48:20After such a long struggle, when death finally came, it may have felt like a welcome release.
48:32In the Arctic, you feel like the elements are not passive, you feel like you're involved
48:38in some malevolent force.
48:41When you experience extreme cold for the first time, it's like a glove closing around you.
48:50You feel like you don't want to fight, you want to give in, you want to close down your
48:58senses.
48:59After time, it's almost as if the cold has seeped through to your heart.
49:04And I don't mean your physical heart, I mean your soul, your very being, because you feel
49:09like no longer fighting.
49:16And once you've given up that fight, and you just want to sleep, you just want to become
49:20part of that oblivion.
49:31The final report in Hall's notes came from an Inuit hunter who claimed to have found four
49:36white men half dead on the ice sometime around 1851.
49:44He sheltered them for the winter.
49:47When the spring came, they gave him an officer's sword as a gesture of thanks.
49:54Then they said goodbye and headed for home, never to be seen again.
50:11Piece by piece throughout the 1850s, news of the relics uncovered by the search parties
50:16made its way back to Britain.
50:20In 1859, 14 years after Franklin left England, the search was officially called off.
50:30Lady Franklin never gave up her hope that some members of the expedition may have survived,
50:36even though she had learned from the note that her husband was dead.
50:44What secrets may be hidden within those wrecked or stranded ships, we know not.
50:50What may be buried in the graves of our unhappy countrymen, or in caches not yet discovered,
50:56we have yet to learn.
50:58And thus left in ignorance and darkness, with so little obtained.
51:04Can it be fitting to pronounce that the fate of the expedition has been ascertained?
51:16For years, historians and scientists have searched for clues to the fate of the Franklin expedition,
51:22and at last their evidence taken together offers a plausible answer to this enduring mystery.
51:32After sailing south through Peale Sound, Franklin's men became trapped in the ice off King William Island.
51:41They tried to walk south to safety, but exposure, lead poisoning and scurvy crippled them.
51:48Those who could made it back to the ships to wait for rescue that never came.
51:55Another group camped nearby, possibly ostracized from their brethren for having resorted to cannibalism.
52:05Two years later, some Inuit encountered a group of 30 men walking south.
52:11These men died one by one along the coast of King William Island.
52:19Finally, after six years lost in the Arctic, four men were still trying to make it home when
52:26they encountered a group of Inuit.
52:29I think it's fairly clear that this expedition just wasn't prepared for some of the things
52:33that could happen.
52:34But they hadn't planned to hunt or live off the land, they didn't have any provision for
52:37doing so.
52:39They had made a lot of assumptions about what would work and how they would get through,
52:42and they were extraordinarily optimistic assumptions, as it's turned out.
52:48I think that's what makes it so tragic.
52:53Britain's hopes of being first to sail all the way through the polar ice died with Sir John
52:58Franklin and his crew.
53:01But the lost expedition did help to complete the map of the Arctic.
53:06Franklin's trail led search parties into uncharted waters that turned out to be the long-sought
53:11link between the Atlantic and the Pacific, finally proving the existence of the Northwest Passage.
53:28is
53:28on...
53:29are
53:29are
53:30that
53:31has
53:31you
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