The New York Times
His ship disappeared in the Arctic 176 years ago. DNA offered a clue.
On July 9, 1845, two months after leaving Greenhithe, England, Warrant Officer John Gregory wrote a letter to his wife in Greenland describing his first sighting of whales and icebergs. Gregory, who had never been at sea before, was aboard HMS Erebus, one of two ships that set sail on Sir John Franklin's 1845 expedition to find the legendary Northwest Passage, a sea route through the Canadian Arctic used as a trade route should serve Asia. . Sign up for the New York Times Disaster Strike The Morning newsletter. The Erebus and HMS Terror got stuck in the ice on Victoria Straits off King William Island in what is now Nunavut, Canada. In April 1848, the survivors (Franklin and nearly two dozen others had already died) marched to a trading post on mainland Canada. All 129 explorers eventually perished and succumbed to brutal blizzard conditions and freezing temperatures. The doomed expedition lasted in public imagination, the inspirational fiction of Mark Twain and Jules Verne and, more recently, the 2018 AMC series "The Terror," fueled in part by rumors that the crew had resorted to cannibalism. The wreck remained silent until 2014 when a remote-controlled underwater vehicle captured the silhouette of the Erebus near King William Island. Two years later, advice from a local Inuit hunter led to the discovery of terror in the icy waters of Terror Bay. John Gregory's descendants only learned of his fate more than 175 years after the letter was sent from Greenland. Some sailors had been identified after being found in marked graves. But Gregory's DNA and a sample of an offspring born in 1982 were recently compared. This made him the first researcher on the trip whose remains were positively identified by DNA and genealogical analysis. This process was similar to the one used to identify murder suspects during those years. and victims in unsolved cases. Jonathan Gregory, 38, who lives in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, received an email from researchers in Canada confirming that the swab he sent them confirmed that he was a direct descendant of John Gregory. He had heard of his family's connection to the expedition, but until the DNA matched, "it was really a theory." (Although he calls himself Joe, the resemblance between their names "makes a lot of sense," Gregory said.) A British Columbia relative who Gregory had never met posted a Facebook message in 2019 after receiving a request from Researchers had received to ask descendants of expedition sailors to submit DNA samples. "I took a chance," said Gregory in a telephone interview. "For us it's history." Douglas Stenton, a professor at the University of Waterloo and researcher on the project, said the team, which included researchers from Lakehead University and Trent University, began focusing in 2008 on documenting the locations and getting new information about the show . But in 2013 they became interested in the human remains and tried to "identify some of these men who actually became anonymous in death". "It is truly a story of human endeavor in one of the most difficult environments in the world," said Stenton, "which results in catastrophic loss of life for reasons we do not yet understand." The circumstances that led to the disappearance of the crews are still unclear. The researchers continued to gather evidence of the expedition's failure as artifacts were discovered over the years. Gregory's remains were unearthed on King William Island in 2013, about 50 miles south of where the ships were abandoned. He likely died a month after leaving the ships, Stenton said, a trip that "wasn't exactly a pleasant trip in the true sense of the word". Gregory was between 43 and 47 years old when he died. Stenton said it was a relief to finally give one of the sailors a name and a face, as the researchers were able to make a facial reconstruction of what Gregory might have looked like as the details of the expedition "remain elusive to you." know, 175 years old. For the past eight years, says Stenton, the team's researchers had "high hopes" of being able to compare a sample from a living offspring with a sailor from the DNA pool obtained from the first 16 samples, I don't produce a match, which makes Gregory's pairing "very rewarding," he said. While the identification didn't change the history of the expedition, Stenton said that "the more people we can identify, the more useful information is that help us better understand "what happened to the explorers. He said he was grateful for the families who submitted DNA, whether or not they were compatible not, and added that he was happy to share details of the seaman's later years with Gregory's family. He informed them that Gregory was not alone when he died as the remains of two other sailors were found in the same location. "There is a strange feeling about all of this," said Gregory, "but at the end of the day I think it's going to end." This article originally appeared in the New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times Company
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