UW researchers ID four Franklin sailors

Arctic archaeology is usually a story about fragments — a boot here, a bone there, a name maybe attached decades later. But this week, a University of Waterloo-led team turned four sets of remains from the 1845 Franklin expedition back into specific people. That matters because the Franklin disaster is one of the most picked-over mysteries in exploration history, and even now a lot of the dead are still anonymous. The new DNA matches don’t solve the whole story. They do make the last phase of it less blurry. ### What actually changed? The team identified four sailors from Sir John Franklin’s doomed Northwest Passage expedition by matching DNA from skeletal remains with DNA donated by living descendants. The names are Harry Peglar of HMS Terror, plus William Orren, David Young, and John Bridgens of HMS Erebus. That pushes the total number of Franklin crew members identified through this project to six. It has been argued over for more than a century. In 1859, searchers found a skeleton at Gladman Point with papers tied to Harry Peglar — including the documents later nicknamed the “Peglar Papers” — but the clothing on the body seemed wrong for a petty officer. That mismatch kept the identity in dispute. The DNA result basically ends that argument: the remains were Peglar’s. Why does that matter so much? Nineteenth-century naval rank was visible in what a man wore, so the outfit on the body suggested someone lower-status, more like a steward than a captain of the foretop. That made historians wonder whether the papers had been borrowed, swapped, or carried by someone else. The catch is that desperate expeditions scramble normal rules. Clothes get traded, reused, stripped from the dead, or worn for warmth rather than rank. DNA is what finally cuts through that mess. ### Who were the other three? William Orren was an able seaman, David Young was a Boy 1st Class, and John Bridgens was a subordinate officers’ steward — all from HMS Erebus. Their remains were found at Erebus Bay. That matters because it confirms those three survived the expedition’s first three years, made it to the retreat phase, and died during the final attempt to escape south after the ships were trapped in ice. Quite a lot, actually. Waterloo’s team said the three Erebus men died at Erebus Bay, while Peglar from Terror was found about 130 kilometers away. That spread hints that the retreat from the ships was not one neat marching column with everyone dying in one place. It looks more like a breakup under extreme stress — men moving in separate groups, or at different times, across a huge stretch of Arctic ground. That last part is an inference, but it fits the locations now tied to named individuals. ### How are they doing this 180 years later? The project started in 2013 and uses a pretty demanding combination of ancient DNA work and genealogy. Researchers extract DNA from teeth and bones, then compare those profiles with samples from living descendants of expedition crew. Earlier rounds identified John Gregory in 2021 and senior officer James Fitzjames in 2024. So this isn’t one lucky hit — it’s a growing identification system. Franklin history has long been built from objects, Inuit testimony, scattered written traces, and educated guesswork. DNA adds a different kind of evidence — person-level certainty. Once a skeleton has a name, the surrounding artifacts, location, and trauma marks become much more useful for reconstructing the expedition’s collapse. That is how a famous mystery slowly stops being legend and starts becoming a mapped human disaster. ### Bottom line This is not just a story about four names. It’s a sign that one of the most famous dead ends in Arctic history is becoming legible, one confirmed sailor at a time.