Lead poisoning may not have killed Franklin crew
Analysis shows doomed expedition team didn’t have unusual levels of exposure
Lead poisoning was believed to have played a pivotal role in the deaths of the Franklin Expedition crew, but new research suggests otherwise.
“There’s been a number of theories and hypotheses, but one that has stuck around for a number of years following studies in the ’80s is that lead poisoning or lead contamination had impacted the crew of the Franklin expedition significantly, so it played a pivotal role in the decline of their health, whether it be physical or neurological,” said David Cooper, one of the paper’s authors and Canada Research Chair in Synchrotron Bone Imaging in the Department of Anatomy, Physiology and Pharmacology in the College of Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan.
The research team from various universities across Canada (including the University of Saskatchewan and the Canadian Light Source) found, in studying bones and teeth of the deceased, that although there was evidence of lead exposure, there wasn’t enough for it to be unusual for the time period.
“Human bone turns over, it changes, it sort of rebuilds itself, even in adulthood, but at a very slow rate. So what that means is that if the individuals in the expedition had lots of lead within their bones, it really implies that it was there before the expedition,” Cooper said.
There was also no evidence of a dramatic increase in lead exposure around the time of death in almost all of the individuals.
The expedition, made up of 134 men led by Sir John Franklin, set out on May 19, 1845, into uncharted waters between Barrow Strait and Simpson Strait in two ships, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror.
That winter, three crew members died when the ships were locked in ice as they wintered on Beechey Island. The ships became stuck in ice once more in September 1846, this time just off King William Island. Although the ships should have been freed from the ice in the summer of 1847, they remained frozen, which became a death sentence for the crew. Many crew members died, including Franklin himself, who died in June 1847.
On April 22, 1848, the remaining 105 men deserted the ships and set up camp on King William Island, intending to go back to the mainland. However, all of the remaining crew died on the island and on the northern coast of the mainland.
Research began with a collaboration between Cooper, Tamara Varney, a professor at Lakehead University, and Ian Coulthard from the Canadian Light Source, looking at lead poisoning within specimens from the Caribbean that were from British naval personnel.
Cooper said although it began independently of the Franklin Expedition, it became clear their research was relevant, and they brought in new partners to provide access and expertise to the remains of the people who died on the expedition.
“These partnerships are absolutely critical because no one person has all the expertise necessary to sort of wean all the information
We worked somewhat in isolation but in the end came together to forge a union ... putting all the evidence together.
from such specimens. By bringing all of our talents together, we could begin to address these questions in a way that would be extremely hard for any one of us to do on our own,” he said.
“We worked somewhat in isolation, but in the end came together to forge a union in terms of putting all of the evidence together in a way that had never been done before.”
Team members for the study include Cooper and Sanjukta Choudhury (U of S); Ian Coulthard and Brian Brewer (CLS); Tamara Varney (Lakehead University); Anne Keenleyside (Trent University); Madalena Kozachuk, Ronald Martin and Andrew Nelson ( Western University); Douglas Stenton (University of Waterloo), and lead author of the paper Treena Swanston, a post-doctoral fellow at the U of S, who is now an assistant professor at Macewan University.
The research paper was published in PLOS ONE.