PHARMACEUTICAL BOTTLE

In 1845, explorer Sir John Franklin set sail from England with two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, in search of a Northwest Passage. The ships and crews vanished. Almost 170 years would pass until an expedition led by Parks Canada in 2014 discovered the wreck of Erebus. This glass bottle is just one of the artifacts recovered from the site, recognized today as the Wrecks of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror National Historic Site in Nunavut. This small glass medicine bottle is marked “Samuel Oxley” and “London.” Oxley was a London chemist who sold “Concentrated essence of Jamaican ginger root,” a compound claiming to cure a variety of ailments from digestive complaints to hypochondria. On board HMS Erebus, it may have been a popular seasickness treatment. This bottle actually had nineteen lead birdshot pellets inside, suggesting that it was reused as a shot flask. Detailed content analysis also found traces of gum arabic and potassium bicarbonate, both of which were carried in every standard nineteenth-century Royal Navy medicine chest. Reuse of containers was frequent during that time period, but to find such clear evidence of multiple use of the same object is quite remarkable.