Frozen in Time Read Free

that had existed. British and American searchers grasping to understand the disappearance were confounded by what little remained of the expedition. Sketchy stories told by the native Inuit, some artefacts, human remains and one tragic note found by nineteenth-century searchers are all that historians have been able to rely on for their reconstruction of events.
    Walking along the gravel and sand beaches on a blustery and near freezing June day in 1981, members of an archaeological team from the University of Alberta surveyed a spit of land near Booth Point, on the south coast of King William Island, for human skeletal remains. They hoped their research would uncover clues to the events of the expedition’s agonizing final days. They knew that some of the last survivors had crossed from here to a place on the mainland known as Starvation Cove, where the tragedy had reached its inevitable conclusion. The researchers were following the lead of one of the early Franklin searchers, an American explorer named Charles Francis Hall, who in 1869 recorded an Inuit account of a grave belonging to a member of the lost expedition:
    After traveling about half an hour, the party halted on a long low spit, called by the natives Kung-e-ark-le-ar-u, on which the men… ‘knew that a white man had been buried.’ This, however, was chiefly from the accounts which they had had from their people; only one of these had ever seen the grave. The spot was pointed out, but the snow covered all from view. A monument was erected, and its bearings… carefully noted.
    The first day of survey work in 1981 failed to turn up anything. It was on the second morning, 29 June, that field assistant Karen Digby walked up to forensic anthropologist Owen Beattie and archaeologist James Savelle clutching what looked like a broken china bowl in her right hand. “I think this is something important. Is it human?” Digby asked as she handed the white skull bone to Beattie.
    It was the first major discovery of their fieldwork, representing the starting point of Beattie’s forensic investigation. Having marked the location of her find, Digby led the rest of the crew to the spot. Still visible in the sandy soil was the depression where the human skull fragment had rested, and, placing the discovery back in the depression, the researchers began the process of meticulously searching the finger of land for other remains.
    At first, only a few fragments of bone were found. But after six hours of careful survey work, in which every inch of ground was covered, the researchers had discovered, photographed, mapped and then collected thirty-one pieces of human bone. Most of the remains were found exposed on the surface, others were hidden by occasional pockets of vegetation or had been nearly swallowed by the sand.
    The texture of the bone illustrated the severity of the northern climate. Exposed portions were bleached white, and powdery flakes of the outer bone surface cracked and fell off if handled too roughly. Sharing the exposed surfaces were small and brightly coloured colonies of mosses and lichens, anchored firmly on the sterile white of the bone as if braced for another harsh winter. By contrast, the ivory-brown undersides of the bones, never exposed to the sun or elements, were found to be in extremely good condition, with all anatomical detail preserved. The researchers also discovered several artefacts at the site, including a shell button common in the early and mid-nineteenth century and a clay pipe stem like those carried on the Franklin expedition. The skeletal remains and artefacts were found over a 33- by 50-foot (10- by 15-metre) area, at the centre of which lay the remnants of what had been a stone tent circle.
    One of the first and most important questions that forensic anthropologists ask when examining human remains is, “How many individuals are represented?” Carefully