This Sailor From the Franklin Expedition Died in the Arctic in a Uniform That Didn’t Belong to Him. Now, DNA Has Revealed His Identity
In 1859, a search party looking for traces of the lost Franklin expedition to the Arctic stumbled upon the skeleton of a man “slightly built, and perhaps above the common height.”
Nearby, they found a clothes brush; a comb; and a wallet containing several papers, including a seaman’s certificate for Henry Peglar, captain of the foretop on HMS Terror, one of the two ships involved in the ill-fated expedition. Curiously, the man’s clothing was more typical of a Royal Navy steward or officer’s servant—ranks far below Peglar’s senior status. Adding to the mystery was the fact that the pages stashed in the wallet were written backward, their meaning still largely inscrutable to this day.
Scholars have long argued that the skeleton belongs to a sailor of lower rank than Peglar, perhaps a friend entrusted with his belongings after his death. But a new DNA analysis published in the journal Polar Record confirms that the remains found on King William Island are indeed Peglar’s.