by Owen Beattie
It wasn’t until April that Kowal called Beattie with results of the first tests on Hartnell and Braine: “Not a thing, didn’t find a thing. There’s nothing in the other two,” Kowal said.
Beattie was quiet for a moment, then said: “Well, now it gets more complicated.” His mind was already at work trying to figure out this new twist. But Kowal, now laughing, quickly added: “Wait a minute, I was pulling your leg. The levels are high, there’s no denying it.”
Hair from Hartnell had yielded lead levels ranging from 138 to 313 ppm, while hair from Braine was very similar at 145 to 280 ppm. Although not as high as the lead levels measured in Torrington, the results exceeded the contemporary hair standard by well over twenty times. Subsequent testing would eliminate the possibility of external twentieth-century contamination, and further tests on bone and tissue from Torrington, Hartnell and Braine underscored the accuracy of the hair results.
Furthermore, the fact that the information on lead exposure came from hair meant that the contamination occurred during Franklin’s voyage—not from industrial pollution in the British environment of the day. Possible sources of lead exposure on the expedition were numerous, including tea wrapped in lead foil, pewterware and lead-glazed pottery vessels. But it was the reliance of Franklin’s expedition on tinned food that was the root cause. It has since been calculated that each sailor would have been allotted about a pound (.25 kg) of tinned food every second day, resulting in regular and considerable ingestion of lead. And while there can be no exact explanation of the differences in the level of lead between Torrington on the one hand and Hartnell and Braine on the other, it is quite likely related to differences in the food consumed by the three men and their jobs aboard ship. For example, Torrington, as leading stoker, may have picked up added contamination from lead in coal dust.
What is very clear from the findings, however, now based on more than four (including the Booth Point skeleton and other bones gathered on King William Island in 1982) separate individuals and using the facilities of a series of different labs, is that lead played an important role in the declining health of the entire crews of the Erebus and Terror—not only in their loss of physical energy but increasingly in their minds’ despair. Loss of appetite, fatigue, weakness and colic are some of the physical symptoms of lead poisoning; it can also cause disturbances of the central and peripheral nervous systems, producing neurotic and erratic behaviour and paralysis of the limbs. But it is the effects on the mind that may have been of greatest importance in isolating the impact of lead on the expedition. Under the continuing and prolonged stressful conditions of long periods in the Arctic, even very subtle effects of low lead exposure could have had significant impact on the decision-making abilities of the men, particularly the officers. Only clear minds can hope to make correct decisions.
There is no single reason why the expedition failed, of course; it was a deadly combination of factors. That is why there is no one answer to the question of what caused the Franklin expedition disaster. Perhaps the best that can be done today is to isolate the reasonable possibilities and fit them into the broad circumstances as identified from the scattered remains found at archaeological sites. This is what Beattie was able to do.
In some cases, such as the three sailors from Beechey Island, the effects of lead poisoning were catastrophic. Amy’s autopsy results showed that, like Torrington, both Hartnell and Braine suffered from tuberculosis and died of pneumonia. In addition, radiological evidence obtained by Derek Notman identified a collapsed eleventh thoracic vertebra in William Braine, a condition caused by Pott’s disease, which in turn is usually caused by tubercular infection. But it was the insidious and poorly understood poison, lead, entering their bodies at high levels over the course of the first months of the expedition, that weakened these three young men to the point that they were easily killed off by supervening diseases. Other crewmen would have been as severely affected by the poisoning, which probably explains at least some of the other twenty-one deaths experienced by the expedition in the early period before the ships were deserted on 22 April 1848.
As for the high ratio of officer deaths prior to the death march (nine out of twenty-one), Beattie found possible explanations consistent with the lead findings. If the officers, a rigidly separated and very aloof class, even during long and confined expeditions, were using their pewter tableware and eating a preferential food source (that is, proportionately more tinned food), they may have ingested much higher levels of lead than the other seamen. It is at least possible that Sir John Franklin himself died directly or indirectly from the effects of lead poisoning.
As for those men who died during the tragic death march in the spring and summer of 1848, some may have exhibited classic symptoms of the poisoning, such as anorexia, weakness and fatigue and paranoia, which would have compounded the effects of starvation and scurvy. Other crewmen may not have shown any obvious effects of the poison, perhaps because of differing diets and physical responses to the lead.
It is sadly ironic that Franklin’s expedition, certainly one of the greatest seafaring expeditions ever launched, carrying all the tools that early industry and innovation could offer, should have been mortally wounded by one of them. Yet Beattie now believed he had the scientific evidence to say that this was the case.
When Sir John Franklin sailed from the Thames in May 1845, an entire nation believed that the honour of conquering the Northwest Passage was within his grasp. None could have known that inside the tins stored in the ship’s hold there ticked a time bomb that helped not only to deny Franklin his triumph but to steal away 129 brave lives. And while good hopes decayed in a relatively short time for the expedition crews, the physicians aboard the Erebus and Terror would have been helpless to intervene. The health risks imposed by the use of lead-tin solder were simply not appreciated at that time. (It was not until 1890 that government legislation in Britain finally banned soldering on the insides of food tins.)
There is often a terrible price to pay in human exploration reliant upon new technology. That fact was vividly demonstrated again in recent years by the failure of the space shuttles Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003. Indeed, our explorers of space share a bond with past explorers of the unknown frozen shores of the earth. In many ways, there is no difference between the Franklin and space shuttle disasters. Time, technology, social conditions and politics have changed, but the spirit and motivation underlying both endeavours remain. Both used the most advanced technology of their time and both paid the ultimate price. An article published in an 1855 edition of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine laments those dangers:
We confess we have not heart enough, in the general enterprise of knowledge, to view such a sacrifice as that of Franklin and his crew without a chill of horror: there is something frightful, inexorable, inhuman, in prosecuting researches, which are mere researches, after such a costly fashion… and when we hear of the martyrs of science, whether they perish among the arctic snow or the sands of the desert, we begin to think of science herself as a placid Juggernaut… with benevolent pretensions, winning, by some weird magic, and throwing away with all the calmness of an abstract and impersonal principle, those generous lives.
These thoughts, published even before M’Clintock made his grisly discoveries, could have been written in response to Beattie’s. But such conclusions dwell only on the failure of science and technology and deny the achievements. For after Franklin, others followed. They too used the latest technology available to them, and they succeeded not only in tracing a Northwest Passage but in conquering the last and most forbidding land on earth.
Epilogue: The Age of Lead
For decades, the elaborate historical constructs fashioned by students of the Franklin disaster provided a grimly satisfactory explanation of the tragedy, one that neatly adhered to prevailing expectations. Fundamentally, the expedition was viewed as a momentous test of endurance against the malignant forces of
nature; Franklin’s defeat, alas, confirmed the hideous risks that that entailed. Subsequent investigations rarely strayed from the well-worn path—reliance on the cumulative wisdom of early searchers, written records and accepted truths—to consider physical clues, such as first-hand observation and analysis of food sources. Even then, the work was encumbered by the limitations of the existing technology for scientific analysis.
When a Franklin expedition tin, retrieved by M’Clintock, was opened and examined in 1926, the beef contents were declared to be “perfectly satisfactory.” In light of the catastrophic health consequences of ingesting the lead-contaminated contents of such tins, they would seem to have proven rather less than satisfactory to those reliant on the tainted provisions. Results from the contemporary analyses of the human soft-tissue samples by Walt Kowal, Owen Beattie and their colleagues, published in 1991 in the Journal of Archaeological Science, only served to underscore the dramatic nature of the lead poisoning identified in the bodies of Beechey Island. Comparison with lead levels in modern populations, even in instances of occupational exposure, confirmed the devastating effects. Lead levels in the soft tissues of the crew members averaged ten to thirty times higher than in modern unexposed individuals. The pattern was similar in all soft tissues examined, including the aorta, stomach, kidney, liver, lung, spleen, bladder, muscle and intestine.
Examination of preserved soft tissues and previously analyzed hair excluded the possibility that the lead exposure was simply a product of non-expedition factors, such as the environment of nineteenth-century industrial Britain. While the three crewmen died early on, within only seven to eleven months of sailing, sufficient time had elapsed to have eliminated most lead absorbed into the soft tissues before their departure. Lead resides in different body tissues for different periods of time after cessation of exposure. In the case of soft tissues, half of the lead present in an organ or tissue would have been eliminated in approximately twenty-one to forty days, with levels continuing to decline at a predictable rate. It is clear that the source of lead exposure originated not from factors or conditions encountered in England, but from those encountered aboard the discovery vessels themselves—aboard the Erebus and Terror. Here, too, contemporary scientific methods provide confirmation.
Diagrammatic representation of the lead isotope analysis.
The tissues and solder were subjected to lead isotope ratio analysis, a means of “fingerprinting” the source of lead. The results indicated that the lead in the tissues was identical to that in the solder used in the food cans. These findings, published in the journal Nature, in 1990, concluded that the lead contamination came not from a variety of sources, but, without exception, from a single European geological location. Had the body lead resulted from chronic personal exposure to a variety of local and environmental sources before the crews’ embarkation, or even afterward, it is unreasonable to suppose that all the individuals would have demonstrated the same isotopic ratios. Unless the sampled sailors had literally lived under the same roof (a possibility discounted by British Admiralty records that show the crews were drawn from regions throughout the United Kingdom), the ratios of lead found in the tissues of each crew member would have been skewed differently. What’s more, while representing short-term exposure, the lead in the soft tissues was indistinguishable from lead in the bones. This evidence confirms that the lead stored in the bones of crew members before the expedition was swamped by the subsequent massive exposure resulting from the solder in the tins. There is no question of the source of the lead found in the bodies of Franklin’s men: it came from the tinned foods. The devastating impact on their health followed.
Furthermore, research conducted on skeletal remains discovered at a previously unrecorded site discovered on King William Island in 1992 served to provide independent corroboration of Beattie’s research. The results of this new investigation, published by Anne Keenleyside et al in the Journal of Archaeological Science in 1996, stated that the “pattern of distribution of lead between bones indicates excessive intake of lead during the period of the expedition. Predictions of blood lead levels based on the measured bone lead concentrations, suggest that the current upper limit for occupational exposure recommended to prevent neurological changes was exceeded.” In 1997, a second publication arising from this research stated that “elevated lead levels in the remains are consistent with previous measurements and support the conclusions of Beattie and colleagues that lead poisoning had greatly debilitated the men by this point.”
Tinned foods came into widespread use among the general population by the late 1800s, becoming “almost a necessity,” and this popularity was mirrored by a dawning sense of the danger posed by the use of solder containing lead. These suspicions are recorded in the medical literature of the time. Documented instances of “metallic poisoning,” or lead poisoning, attributed to consumption of tinned foods, began to appear in the 1880s, and reference is made to the common complaint regarding drops or fragments of solder found mixed with the food contents within the tins. The Medical News in 1883 warned: “In cases of obscure nervous affections look out for lead-poisoning, and bear in mind the use of canned food as a source of such poisoning.” Physicians started to raise questions as to the desirability of tinning as a means of food preservation. Changes to the design of food cans were subsequently introduced, addressing the most obvious lead-contamination sources, but not before the world’s most prestigious medical journal, The Lancet, asked why bottles were not substituted for tins. The answer surely lay with an industry that had an enormous capital stake in the trade, and the jobs associated with it. Nor are the serious consequences of lead relegated to the nineteenth century. Only in recent decades has lead been removed from house paints, gasoline and food tins (though tinned goods and lead-glazed ceramics in developing countries continue to be problematic); as well, drinking water is monitored to identify and manage the hazard.
Microbiological research into Hartnell and Braine also produced another curious, perhaps ominous, discovery. Not only have bacterial strains of the genus Clostridium survived the prolonged period of freezing, but some of the strains have shown resistance to modern antibiotics, a remarkable characteristic considering that the bacteria originated nearly a century before the development of antibiotics. It has been suggested that strains of bacteria more tolerant of pollutants can also show resistance to antibiotics. Medical researchers are only beginning to investigate the significance and implications of this evidence, especially in relation to the role of environmental pollutants in exacerbating the development of such resistance. There is a certain irony in the possibility that men who lived during the reign of Victoria should be the ones to alert scientists to such an insidious effect of the poison, lead, in our own time.
It is certainly not easy—and for some, doubtless impossible—to entertain the notion that so basic an instrument of human convenience as a tin can could have been a major factor in the loss of the Franklin expedition. From a purely emotional standpoint, it should have been anything else. If rigid adherence to conventional interpretations of the disaster is not to be followed, with scurvy, starvation, stress and hypothermia judged the relevant health factors, then at least it would be more palatable to know that any new evidence to arise did so from investigation of more glamorous sources of information, such as the Erebus and Terror, still at rest in the icy deep. The fundamental lesson of the forensic investigation into the Franklin expedition is the very recognition that so great an undertaking as the most celebrated of all Arctic voyages could be vulnerable to so apparently minute a factor. Profound questions arise from the investigations of the simple evidence represented by the tins, questions not limited to the role of lead as a factor in the fate of the Franklin expedition, but rather the health consequences of European food-preserving technology of the nineteenth century on an entire era of exploration.
Before Franklin, there were the curious references to an unexplained illness
that appeared in the narrative of Captain George Back from 1836–37. Immediately following Franklin, there was the official report of Sir James Clark Ross regarding his unsuccessful 1848–49 search expedition. It is notable that Ross, like Franklin, was supplied with tinned provisions by Stephan Goldner. The outbreaks of “debility” amongst Arctic expeditions did not end there, however; another outbreak is germane to this discussion.
Commander George Washington De Long, captain of the 1879–81 Arctic voyage of the U.S. steamer, Jeannette, had taken specific precautions against “debility.” Whilst unconvinced about lime juice’s efficacy, he well understood “the importance attached to it by Arctic medical authorities and Arctic voyagers generally [and] did not care to depart from an established custom.” De Long had three barrels of lime juice loaded aboard the Jeannette. The expedition also carried large stores of canned meats, soups and vegetables.
De Long sought the North Pole, failing which he intended to navigate the Northwest Passage. It would be a privately backed expedition; De Long’s benefactor was a newspaper proprietor, James Gordon Bennett, owner of the New York Herald and the man who also assigned correspondent Henry Morton Stanley to travel to Africa to locate the British missionary Dr. David Livingstone. Bennett’s influence was such that he was able to secure an Act of the United States Congress declaring the Jeannette’s voyage a “national undertaking.”
De Long had been involved in an earlier cruise into the eastern Arctic, and had written, “I never in my life saw such a dreary land of desolation, and I hope I may never find myself cast away in such a perfectly God-forsaken place.” He was not an Arctic lion either, in appearance (balding, pince-nez) or temperament (he was sensitive and studious), but he had caught a bad case of what his wife termed “the polar virus.”