Publisher's Synopsis
This is an attempt to reconstruct what happened on Sir John Franklin's ill-fated Arctic expedition of 1845-8 written by the anthropologist who found the bodies 138 years after their death.;On 29th June 1981 part of a bleached human skull was found by Dr Beattie's team. This led to three further scientific expeditions over the next five years and in this book the author unravels the circumstances by which the surviving members of Franklin's elite naval forces came within sight of the Northwest Passage which was the journey's goal, only to succumb to the horrors of starvation, scurvy and cannabilism.;The book describes the conclusions which 20th-century forensic and anthropological science has been able to reach following examinations of the well-preserved bodies of the three Victorian seamen, exhumed from the permafrost of Beechey Island.;The cold that had brought about the downfall of Franklin's expedition has preserved the secrets of the death of its members.
