And I know this one is not about pirates, but so many people
enjoyed this series that I thought it might be relevant. I thought it
was an interesting update about what might have really happened to the
expedition. (The article is from 2018, but might still be new to some people.) How did the HMS Terror and Erebus expedition perish?
Entire Arctic Expedition Perished, but Not Because of Lead
Study looks at fate of crew aboard HMS Erebus and HMS Terror
In
a Sept. 9, 2014 image provided by Parks Canada, HMS Erebus is pictured
on a sonar scan in the Queen Maud Gulf in Nunavut. (Parks Canada/The
Canadian Press via AP)
(Newser)
–
In 1845, Sir John Franklin set
sail from England in the hopes of discovering and successfully
navigating the Northwest Passage. Instead, all 128 crew members aboard
the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror ended up dead. Nearly
all of them actually survived until April 1848, when they fled ships
that had been ice bound and sought help on foot, only to perish on King
William Island. Both shipwrecks were uncovered in the past four years,
and Gizmodo
reports "well-preserved bodies" of some of the dead sailors have been
located in graves. But what felled them all remained unknown though
there was a theory: lead poisoning. Now, a study published in PLOS One
concludes that wasn't it. The theory was born from prior tests on bone,
hair, and tissue taken from some sailors' remains, with the thinking
being that tin cans and the ships' water filtration systems may have
pushed levels upward.
The Canadian researchers laid
out three hypotheses: that the sailors who survived longer would have
more lead in their bones, that "bone microstructural features" that grew
near the time of death would show higher levels than older tissue, and
that the lead levels would be higher than those of other contemporaneous
sailors. They then used a high-resolution scanning technique to compare
bone and dental remains with those from the Royal Navy cemetery in
Antigua and found that none of the hypotheses held up—and so, "taken
together," the researchers found the lead poisoning theory unsupported.
Where does that leave us? One of the researchers tells the CBC
things could have just gradually deteriorated. "They would have been
starving. They would have had nutritional deficiencies." (Read about
Franklin's wife's relentless mission to find her missing husband.)
