EREBUS BODIES LICENSE
EREBUS BODIES TV

The relics were clearly from the Franklin Expedition, and were being traded by the area’s natives.

He took with him relics he’d bought from the Inuit people. Rae had heard enough and knew that he needed to head home and report what he’d discovered. Upon returning to that same area, the following spring, the Inuit found around 30 corpses and clear signs of cannibalism.

EREBUS BODIES TV

Pictured: An image from ‘The Terror’, a TV show based on the doomed Franklin Expedition Their leader, thought to be Francis Crozier who was Franklin’s second-in-command, had been able to communicate to them that their ships had been crushed by ice and that they were heading south to hunt food. The Inuit families Rae met in Repulse Bay told him how, four winters previously, some other Inuit had met the survivors of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror dragging a smaller boat south. While in the Boothia Peninsula an explorer, from the Orkney Islands of Scotland, by the name of John Rae obtained credible information from the Inuit people that suggested the last living members of the Franklin Expedition had turned to cannibalism. The theory that the starving men on the ice resorted to eating each other first took hold in 1854. Knife cuts on the bones had already indicated, in the years before Mays and Beattie published their findings, that flesh had been taken from the dead. Signs of breakage and “pot polishing”, which occurs when the bones are heated in boiling water and which usually occurs in the end stages of cannibalism when starving people are particularly desperate, highlights the horrific situation the surviving men of the Franklin Expedition found themselves in. “Attempts had been made to extract marrow from the bones” Looking at bones recovered in the years following the expedition, Mays and Beattie were able to deduce that attempts had been made to extract marrow from the bones in a bid to eke out as much calories and nutrition as possible. Research carried out by archaeologist Simon Mays and anthropologist Owen Beattie, that was published in the Journal of Osteoarchaelogy in 2015, for example revealed the extent of the cannibalism that took place. In modern times, studies have been able to pinpoint the particularly gruesome and gory reality of the expedition’s latter stages. Rumours that the desperate and dying crew resorted to cannibalism have circulated around the doomed expedition since the 19th century, and was (spoiler alert) dramatised in the final episodes of The Terror. Frostbite would have been an issue, for sure.ĭid the men of the Franklin Expedition resort to cannibalism? Exposure to winter temperatures well into minus figures, while wearing inadequate clothing, would have made being stuck in the ice an even more brutal experience for the crew. Hypothermia, starvation, lead poisoning, zinc deficiency as well as scurvy – a disease which results from a prolonged lack of vitamin c – would have killed the crew over time. Several relics were uncovered, while scientific looks at the bodies recovered have suggested that the men on the expedition went through great suffering. Over the years, and following many searches in the decades afterwards, pieces of the mysterious puzzle started to reveal themselves. “Rumours that the… crew resorted to cannibalism have circulated around the doomed expedition since the 19th century”įollowing immense pressure from Franklin’s wife, and others, the Admirality – resonsible for the Royal Navy at the time – set off in search of the missing expedition in 1848. In April 1848, after the expedition’s leader Captain Sir John Franklin and almost two dozen men had died, the survivors led by Francis Crozier and James Fitzjames abandoned their ships and set out for the Canadian mainland. But, just how much of what the book and programme portrays is true?Īfter setting out to traverse the Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic, a naval shortcut that would link up the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in one fell swoop, the Franklin Expedition saw both ships involved – HMS Terror and HMS Erebrus – get stuck in the polar ice.

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The novel and TV show both feature cannibalism, a monstrous polar bear, and take some artistic license with the original true story. The story is based on the infamous real life tale of the Franklin Expedition that departed from England in 1845 and which, eventually, resulted in the disappearance of the 129 men who went on it. The Terror, is a TV show based on Dan Simmons’ novel of the same name.

Erebus bodies