A frozen Arctic grave held its secret for 181 years until DNA revealed four more sailors from Franklin's doomed expedition

In May 1845, 129 British sailors set sail into the Arctic, never to be seen alive again. Their goal: to navigate the North-west Passage, the legendary sea route through the Canadian Arctic linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The expedition, led by Sir John Franklin on board two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, ended in one of the worst disasters in polar exploration history, with the death of all 129 crew members.

Almost 180 years later, today, DNA science is doing what 19th-century search parties could not: put names to the men who died there.

According to a peer-reviewed study, “DNA identifications of three 1845 Franklin expedition sailors from HMS Erebus,” published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports by the anthropologists at the University of Waterloo, DNA from skeletal remains matched samples donated by living descendants, identifying four more sailors by name. That brings the total number of crew members identified to six.


What actually happened out there?
To understand why this is important, you need to know how complete the disaster was.

The two ships became trapped in ice off King William Island, in what is now Canada’s territory of Nunavut, and the crew was forced to spend two winters locked in the pack ice. Franklin died on June 11, 1847. On April 22, 1848, the surviving 105 men abandoned the ships and began to walk, walking and dragging boats on sleds, in a desperate attempt to reach the Canadian mainland. According to Live Science, all of them died along the way.

Since the mid-1800s, remains have been found scattered across King William Island and the Adelaide Peninsula, but for most of history, those bones had no names.

Four sailors finally get theirs
The University of Waterloo team, led by Dr. Douglas Stenton, compared DNA from skeletal remains to mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA from living descendants. All four matches had a genetic distance of zero, the strongest possible evidence that they shared a common ancestor, according to the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports study.

Three of the four sailors were on board HMS Erebus: William Orren (Able Seaman), David Young (Boy 1st Class, 17 years old when he joined the voyage), and John Bridgens (Subordinate Officers' Steward). Scientific American reports that all three died at Erebus Bay on King William Island.

The fourth identification is the most striking.

A 166-year-old cold case, finally closed
The remains of the fourth sailor, discovered 130 kilometers away from the others, have now been positively identified as Harry Peglar, Captain of the Foretop on HMS Terror. So far, he is the only Terror crew member to have been identified through DNA.

But what makes Peglar’s story so gripping is the cold case it’s wrapped around. In 1859, his body was found along with his personal papers, including a seaman's certificate and the "Peglar Papers" that contain poetry and what historians call descriptions of events on the expedition. The University of Waterloo says they are among the only written records ever recovered from the Franklin expedition. But for a hundred years, the body was a subject of debate among historians, because it was wearing apparel that didn't match a man's ranking. DNA has now settled that argument.

Historian Russell A. Potter has speculated that Peglar may have worn the dead shipmate’s coat intentionally, a detail that suggests how desperate those final days may have been.

A BBC journalist finds out he's descended from one of the dead
One of the more unexpected developments was that a BBC News journalist, Rich Preston, found out through this research that he is a direct descendant of John Bridgens.

“It was such a huge surprise to hear from the team that my DNA was a match with one of the sailors on the doomed Franklin expedition,” Preston said, according to a University of Waterloo press release. Preston has worked on a BBC genealogy program before, making the discovery of this story in his own family history even more extraordinary.

Earlier identifications and a call for more DNA donors

These four discoveries derive from prior work of the same team. CNN reports that researchers have previously identified John Gregory, Engineer of HMS Erebus, in 2021, and James Fitzjames, Captain of HMS Erebus, in 2024, whose remains showed evidence of cannibalism. The four new sailors identified show no such evidence.

The team is now asking other living descendants to come forward and donate DNA. To qualify, participants must prove through genealogical documentation that they are direct descendants of a crew member through an unbroken maternal or paternal line, according to the University of Waterloo.

Nearly 180 years after 129 men vanished beneath the Arctic ice, science is still finding them, one name at a time.