The page contains two versions of the Franklin expedition.

The first sits where the information was supposed to go.

It was written in May 1847 on a standard Admiralty form and left in a cairn on King William Island. HMS Erebus and HMS Terror had wintered at Beechey Island, the note explained, and had later become trapped in ice north of King William Island.

Sir John Franklin was still commanding the expedition.

The message ended with two words.

All well.

There was no second sheet of paper when somebody needed one the following April.

So Francis Crozier and James Fitzjames wrote around the first message. The ships had now been trapped since September 1846. Franklin had died on June 11, 1847. Nine officers and fifteen men were dead in total. Erebus and Terror had been abandoned on April 22, 1848.

One hundred and five survivors were ashore.

They intended to start south toward the Great Fish River, now the Back River.

On the same sheet that had said ‘All well,’ Crozier and Fitzjames now recorded Franklin’s death, 24 dead in total, the abandonment of Erebus and Terror, and 105 survivors preparing to march south.

One hundred twenty-nine

Franklin’s expedition left Britain on May 19, 1845. It initially carried 134 officers and men. Five returned home from Greenland aboard the supply vessel, leaving 129 men aboard Erebus and Terror for the voyage into the Canadian Arctic.

The ships themselves were not improvised exploration vessels. Both were former Royal Navy bomb ships, heavily constructed for service in which their hulls had originally been expected to absorb the recoil of large mortars. Both had previous polar experience and were further modified for Franklin’s voyage.

That combination—serious ships, experienced officers, large stores—matters because Franklin later became an unusually fertile place for simple explanations.

Bad food. Lead. Scurvy. Ice. Bad leadership. Too much equipment. Not enough adaptation.

There is evidence around several of those subjects. There is not a surviving record that lets us line them up neatly and assign percentages.

The expedition disappeared slowly enough to leave evidence and quickly enough to leave almost no explanation from the men themselves.

The first graves

Searchers reached Beechey Island in 1850. There they found the expedition’s first winter quarters and graves belonging to sailors who had died during 1845–46.

No wreck. No surviving party. No stack of journals describing what had happened after the winter camp.

Just evidence that Franklin had been there, that some men had died, and that everyone else had moved on.

The people who already knew part of the story

The usual Franklin story describes Britain spending years trying to solve an Arctic mystery. That is true from Britain’s point of view; it is less true if we include the people already living there.

In 1854, Hudson’s Bay Company explorer John Rae spoke with Inuit who described a group of roughly forty white men moving south along the western side of King William Island. They also reported finding bodies farther south and relayed evidence that some of the starving men had resorted to cannibalism. Rae obtained Franklin expedition objects from Inuit, including identifiable silverware and one of Franklin’s medals.

The reaction in Britain is not a flattering piece of the record. Lady Franklin rejected Rae’s conclusions and enlisted Charles Dickens in attacking the credibility of both Rae and his Inuit informants. Dickens publicly argued that British naval officers would not have behaved as Rae reported and suggested instead that Inuit might have killed them.

The question did not stay theoretical. Modern osteological work documented cut marks on human bones recovered from Franklin sites on King William Island, corroborating the larger substance of the nineteenth-century Inuit reports.

It did not prove every detail of every account.

It did settle the larger argument rather badly for Dickens.

The paper

Lady Franklin financed another search expedition, this one commanded by Francis Leopold McClintock.

In April 1859, Lieutenant William Hobson reached Victory Point.

He found a cairn. Inside was a metal tube. Inside that was the page.

This is the best visual in the story because you can see the chronology without reading every word. The first message occupies the center. The second crowds the margins. What had once been enough paper was no longer enough paper.

The updated record says Franklin was dead, twenty-four men had died, the ships were being deserted and 105 people remained.

It is the closest thing the expedition left to an explanation of its own disappearance.

It is also painfully incomplete.

It tells us what the survivors intended to do.

It does not tell us what they actually did next.

A trail of things

McClintock and later searchers began finding what the men had left behind. There were bones, clothing, books, silverware and other naval objects. At Erebus Bay, searchers found a heavy sledge carrying one of the ship’s boats. Two bodies were associated with that site.

There is a strong temptation to turn the inventory into a diagnosis.

Why drag this? Why keep that? Why carry a boat across land?

Those questions are fair. The confident psychological answers usually are not. We do not know every purpose the retreating party assigned to the equipment, how long every object remained with them, or how often groups separated, turned back or changed plans.

The archaeology shows what reached particular places; it does not hand us the meeting minutes.

The man with somebody else’s clothes

One of McClintock’s discoveries created a smaller mystery that lasted almost as long as the expedition mystery itself.

A sailor’s body was found on the south side of King William Island in 1859. With him were papers connected to Harry Peglar, Captain of the Foretop aboard HMS Terror. They included his seaman’s certificate, poetry and fragments that appear to describe events during the expedition.

The problem was his clothes. They looked more appropriate to a steward or officer’s servant than to a sailor holding Peglar’s rating.

For more than a century, historians had a body, a set of personal papers and reasons to doubt that the two belonged together.

Researchers eventually compared DNA from the skeleton with descendants of Peglar and descendants of several men who had served as stewards. The steward comparisons produced no match.

Peglar did.

In a paper published in 2026, Douglas Stenton and colleagues concluded that the sailor found in 1859 really was Henry Peter “Harry” Peglar of HMS Terror.

The papers had been telling the truth.

The clothes had been telling us something else.

We still do not know exactly what.

Three more names returned at the same time: William Orren, Able Seaman; John Bridgens, Subordinate Officers’ Steward; and David Young, Boy 1st Class.

All three served aboard Erebus. Their remains were associated with Erebus Bay, and DNA supplied by living relatives matched archaeological samples.

The new identifications also restore distinctions hidden by the phrase ‘Franklin’s men.’ William Orren was an able seaman, John Bridgens a steward, and David Young a Boy 1st Class — the Royal Navy’s rating for a young sailor. The expedition carried 129 people into the Arctic, not one anonymous body of ‘men.’

Six names so far

James Fitzjames had been easier to see historically. His photograph survives. His signature is on the Victory Point note. After Franklin died, Fitzjames and Francis Crozier were the two senior officers whose names appear beneath the final known message from the expedition.

His body was another matter.

In 2024, researchers compared Y-chromosome DNA recovered from a tooth at a King William Island archaeological site with DNA from a living relative. The match allowed them to identify part of the assemblage as Fitzjames. At that time he became only the second member of the 105-person retreating party to be positively identified by DNA, after Erebus engineer John Gregory in 2021.

The site contained hundreds of bones representing at least thirteen Franklin sailors. Fitzjames’s mandible carried cut marks.

There is no useful reason to make that more graphic than it is.

The marks show that Fitzjames died before at least some of his companions and that his remains were processed afterward in circumstances consistent with survival cannibalism. They do not tell us who did it. They do not tell us exactly how Fitzjames died.

What they do is give a name to one of the people inside the evidence Inuit had described in the 1850s.

That is enough.

The 2026 identifications bring the current DNA-confirmed total to six.

John Gregory. James Fitzjames. William Orren. David Young. John Bridgens. Harry Peglar.

Three of the newly identified Erebus sailors died around Erebus Bay. Peglar, the only member of Terror so far definitively identified through DNA, was found roughly 130 kilometres away.

That distance matters because the final Franklin story is not one retreating column freezing in one place.

Remains occur across King William Island and the Adelaide Peninsula. Modern work has had to re-examine the geography almost bone by bone.

The Lady Be Good case offers a useful parallel: finding a missing machine and finding the people who left it are not necessarily the same search problem.

The Franklin ships would eventually prove the same thing on an almost absurd scale.

The ships were still missing

The nineteenth-century searches found enough material to reconstruct much of the expedition’s failure.

They did not find Erebus or Terror.

That took another century and a half.

Parks Canada began a renewed multi-year search in 2008. The effort used sonar, underwater archaeology and a body of Inuit knowledge that had been accumulating since people in the region first encountered Franklin’s ships and survivors.

On September 2, 2014, sonar revealed HMS Erebus. In 2016, HMS Terror was located in Terror Bay.

Parks Canada is explicit about the role of Inuit knowledge in both discoveries.

Parks Canada credits Inuit knowledge with helping locate both wrecks. British searchers treated the ships as missing for generations, while Inuit accounts preserved information about where the expedition had gone and what had been seen.

The search became enormous

Franklin’s disappearance generated one of the largest search efforts of the nineteenth century. The Admiralty offered rewards not only for rescuing the crews but for information sufficient to establish their fate.

The irony is difficult to miss. Britain spent enormous sums trying to obtain information that Inuit witnesses were already supplying in forms many Victorian investigators did not know how—or did not want—to trust.

The wreck is no longer an ending

The discovery of Erebus in 2014 opened a new archaeological phase. Parks Canada and Inuit partners could now investigate the expedition through the wreck itself, not only through scattered remains, documents and objects recovered on land.

Parks Canada and Inuit partners now cooperatively manage the wrecks. Archaeologists have conducted hundreds of dives and recovered material from Erebus ranging from scientific and navigational equipment to footwear, bottles, personal effects and items from officers’ cabins and crew spaces.

The archaeology has an unusual ownership arrangement too. Recovered Franklin artifacts are co-owned by Parks Canada and the Inuit Heritage Trust.

The historical investigation has, in other words, become more collaborative than the original search ever was.

The note keeps getting less complete

The Victory Point note is still the most efficient document in the entire story.

It took a catastrophe involving two ships and 129 people and reduced the surviving situation to a handful of lines.

Franklin dead.

Twenty-four dead in total.

Ships abandoned.

105 survivors.

Heading south.

That was all Crozier and Fitzjames could leave.

Everything discovered afterward has made those lines more complicated. Inuit testimony showed that men survived long enough to be seen farther south. Bones showed where some died. Cut marks confirmed an awful part of testimony Victorian Britain had rejected. Wrecks showed where the ships ended up. Artifacts are rebuilding life aboard them.

DNA work is now attaching names to remains that had long been catalogued as part of an anonymous retreat: Harry Peglar, William Orren, David Young, John Bridgens, James Fitzjames and John Gregory.

Harry Peglar. William Orren. David Young. John Bridgens. James Fitzjames. John Gregory.

Six so far.

The first message on the paper still says all well.

It was written first.

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Sources & Further Reading

The source base runs from the surviving expedition document and nineteenth-century Inuit testimony through modern archaeology, genetics and active federal heritage management.

• Parks Canada, “Searching for Franklin.” Institutional narrative connecting Inuit testimony, nineteenth-century searches and the modern wreck discoveries.
• Parks Canada, Inuit knowledge and the Franklin expedition. Essential context for the eyewitness and oral-history record that informed both nineteenth- and twenty-first-century searches.
• The Victory Point note. Public-domain facsimile of the Admiralty form containing the 1847 and 1848 messages.
• Francis Leopold McClintock, The Voyage of the Fox in the Arctic Seas (1859). Primary published account of the expedition that recovered the Victory Point record and much of the evidence establishing the final route.
• University of Waterloo, “DNA matches identify four more sailors from Franklin expedition,” 2026. Institutional summary of the Harry Peglar, William Orren, David Young and John Bridgens identifications.
• Stenton and colleagues, Harry Peglar DNA identification, Polar Record (2026). Peer-reviewed resolution of the Peglar body/papers/clothing problem.
• Stenton, Fratpietro and Park, James Fitzjames identification (2024). Peer-reviewed genetic identification and archaeological context.
• Parks Canada, Wrecks of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror archaeology program. Current record of underwater research, artifacts and cooperative management with Inuit partners.