Identification of a senior officer from Sir John Franklin’s Northwest Passage expedition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
• Remains of Franklin expedition sailor discovered in 1993 identified via DNA. • Genetic study reveals place of death of Captain James Fitzjames, HMS Erebus. • Captain James Fitzjames died less than 80 km from where the ships were deserted. • New insights into cannibalism on the 1845 Franklin Northwest Passage Expedition. Arctic Canada’s King William Island and Adelaide Peninsula have preserved the unidentified skeletal remains of many of the 105 sailors who perished while trying to escape the Arctic at the end of the 1845–1848 Franklin Northwest Passage expedition. Over the past decade, we have attempted to identify those individuals through DNA analysis using samples obtained from living descendants. Here we report on comparison of Y-chromosome profiles from a tooth recovered from King William Island and a buccal sample from a donor descended from one of the expedition’s senior officers. The results reveal a genetic distance of one, suggesting that they share a common paternal ancestor. We conclude that DNA and genealogical evidence confirm the identity of the remains as those of Captain James Fitzjames, HMS Erebus .
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".