Arctic bones could rewrite a boy’s own adventure tale

BRITAIN: Ballads have been written about Sir John Franklin and his heroic men.

‘‘With a hundred seamen he sailed away/To the frozen ocean in the month of May,’’ went one account of his doomed attempt to cross the Northwest Passage. ‘‘Through cruel hardships they vainly strove/Their ships on mountains of ice were drove.’’

The mystery of what happened to his ships among those ice mountains inspired generations of schoolboys.

There could, after all, be few better models of Victorian manhood than his crew’s exploration, stoicism and tragic disappearance in the uncharted Arctic.

Yet, the mystery may be even deeper than they imagined. What if what was on display was not just heroic manhood, but womanhood too?

That is the tantalising possibility offered up by DNA analysis of the bones of the crew, which has yielded the surprise result that four could just conceivably be female.

Here, in the icy bleakness of what became an Arctic death march, did women struggle alongside men, having disguised their sex to sign up for the great adventure?

In the 170 years since Franklin’s expedition to the Northwest Passage, subsequent explorers have pieced together what befell his ships, Erebus and Terror.

They left Britain in 1845, in an attempt to force a route across the top of the world. But it was not to be. The last sighting of them was in Baffin Bay in 1846 and after that, as far as the Victorians were concerned, they and their 129 crew simply disappeared.

Partly thanks to notes left behind in cairns, we now know most of what happened.

Shortly after the final sighting, they became trapped in ice. They expected it to melt in the summer, but it didn’t - nor did it show signs of doing so the spring after.

That was when they abandoned ship, in a desperate attempt to reach a Canadian trading post. None made it. Slowly, strung out along that route, the grim remains of the crew have been collected.

Douglas Stenton, director of heritage for the Nunavut territory in northeastern Canada, thought the bones had few secrets left when he began a DNA analysis.

But he found four bones, of Europeans, that should not have been there: the DNA showed they did not have a Y chromosome.

This was, to say the least, a surprise. ‘‘In planning the analysis it hadn’t occurred to us that there might have been women on board,’’ he said.

His instinct was, and still is, that the results were wrong. DNA degrades rapidly, and later tests have given ambiguous results. But equally, writing in the Journal of Archaeological Science, he said he could not dismiss the finding out of hand.

‘‘Women are known to have served in disguise in the Royal Navy in the 17th and 18th centuries.

‘‘Some of these women were smuggled on board ship, and others disguised themselves as men and worked alongside the crew for months or years before being detected or intentionally revealing themselves to be female,’’ he wrote.

It is almost certain that we will never establish the truth.

Stenton argues that, even with the proud maritime history of cross-dressing women seeking adventure, to have four on one expedition seems a stretch.

So maybe they really are just men, their DNA degraded so far that their sex cannot be determined. But, equally, there is the prospect that they are not - that the results are correct.

If so, then of all the great untold tales of exploration, surely among the greatest is that of these women, the stowaways who defied society’s expectations, braved the uncharted Arctic ocean - and knew as they died that history would never even record their names. The Times

Sir John Franklin’s ships Erebus and Terror were trapped in ice exploring the Northwest Paassage. He and the crews died trying to make their way to safety. New science suggests at least one of the sailors was a woman.