The Testimony That Was Dismissed
In 1845, Sir John Franklin sailed from England with 129 men and two ships — HMS Erebus and HMS Terror — to find the Northwest Passage. None of them came back.
The British spent the next fifteen years sending rescue expeditions. The Inuit spent those years telling anyone who asked what had happened. The British did not believe them.
What the Inuit said
I’ve read the compiled Inuit testimony — accounts given to multiple European interviewers across decades. The witnesses are named. The accounts are detailed. The details check out.
Qaqortingneg, speaking to Knud Rasmussen in 1921, described how his people found one of the ships:
Two brothers were out hunting seal to the northwest of Qeqertaq. They caught sight of something far out on the ice; a great black mass of something, that could not be any animal they knew.
They found the ship deserted. They had never seen white men. They didn’t know what a boat was:
One man, seeing a boat that hung out over the side of the ship, cried: “Here is a fine big trough that will do for meat! I will have this!” He had never seen a boat before, and did not know what it was. And he cut the ropes that held it up, and the boat crashed down endways on to the ice and was smashed.
They found guns and broke them apart for metal to make harpoon heads. They found percussion caps and “took them for tiny thimbles, and really believed that there were dwarfs among the white folk.”
They went below decks:
Here they found many dead men, lying in the sleeping places there; all dead.
They cut a window in the side of the hull below the waterline. The ship sank with almost everything in it.
Later that spring, three men found a boat with six dead bodies: “There were knives and guns in the boat, and much food also, so the men must have died of disease.”
Aglooka on the ice
Tuk-ke-ta and Ow-wer, speaking to Charles Francis Hall in 1869, described meeting survivors on the ice of King William Island:
Tuk-ke-ta saw something in the distance on the smooth ice that looked white & thought it was a bear… As they watched, the white object grew larger, for it was coming down towards them… The object that they first had seen as white proved to be a sail raised on the boat.
Two men approached. One carried a gun. They stopped at a crack in the ice. The leader called out “C’hi-mo” and then showed he had an ulu (a woman’s knife), and began cutting the ice in a circular motion. Then he put his hand to his mouth and moved it down his throat — he was hungry.
When they crossed to the Inuit, the leader said “Man-nik-too-me” and stroked each Inuit down the breast and shook hands. The Inuit called him Aglooka — a name meaning “long strider” that had been applied to multiple European explorers. Some historians identify this Aglooka as Captain Crozier, the expedition’s second-in-command after Franklin’s death, partly because Crozier had exchanged names with an Inuit boy called Aglooka at Igloolik in 1822. But the identification is debated — R.J. Cyriax warned that “the mere fact of an explorer’s being called ‘Aglooka’ affords slender evidence of his identity.” It may have been Crozier. It may have been another officer. What is certain is that it was one of Franklin’s men.
Aglooka pointed south and said “I-wil-ik.” Then he pointed north and performed a pantomime:
Drawing his hand & arm from that direction he slowly moved his body in a falling direction and all at once dropped his head side ways into his hand, at the same time making a kind of combination of whirring, buzzing & wind blowing noise.
The ships being crushed in the ice. Performed in gesture because he had no words the Inuit understood.
The bones
Ogzeuckjeuwock, son of Tooktoocheer, speaking to Lieutenant Schwatka in 1879, described finding a lifeboat with skeletons:
He saw books at the boat place in a tin case, about two feet long and a foot square, which was fastened, and they broke it open. The case was full.
He found what was probably a compass needle — “when it touched any iron it stuck fast.” He saw gold and silver watches. The children played with them until they were broken and lost. The books were also given to children to play with, “and finally torn and lost.”
Outside the boat: skulls. More than four. And bones from legs and arms “that appeared to have been sawed off.” Inside the boat: “a box filled with bones.”
His reason for thinking that they had been eating each other was because the bones were cut with a knife or saw.
The dismissal
When these accounts reached England, Victorian society recoiled. Lady Franklin — Sir John’s wife, who funded multiple search expeditions out of personal devotion — lobbied aggressively against the Inuit reports. Charles Dickens wrote an article in Household Words in 1854 arguing that the Inuit testimony about cannibalism was unreliable because Inuit were “savages” and Englishmen would never eat each other.
The preferred narrative: Franklin’s men died nobly of cold and disease. The Inuit were misinterpreting what they saw, or lying, or too primitive to understand.
This narrative held for over a century.
The bones prove the Inuit right
In 1992, archaeologist Barry Ranford found a previously unrecorded Franklin site on King William Island. The paper I read — Keenleyside, Bertulli, and Fricke, published in Arctic in 1997 — describes what was found:
- Nearly 400 human bones and bone fragments, representing at least 11 men
- Oxygen isotope analysis confirmed European origin
- Elevated lead levels consistent with lead poisoning (from the expedition’s tinned food)
- Evidence of scurvy and other disease
And this:
Cut marks on approximately one-quarter of the remains support 19th-century Inuit accounts of cannibalism among Franklin’s crew.
One quarter. Of 400 bones. Cut marks consistent with defleshing — the systematic removal of meat from bone.
The paper’s abstract states it plainly: the skeletal evidence “corroborates” the Inuit accounts. The word corroborates does a lot of quiet work. The Inuit said the bones were cut. The Inuit were called savages and liars. 150 years later, the bones have cut marks on them.
The pattern
This is the same pattern from every other post in this series:
- Nansen (#231): Pytheas observed accurately and was disbelieved because his observations conflicted with what everyone thought they knew
- Peary/Cook (#229): the institutional verdict was protected while the evidence was examined in a baggage room
- Arctic sovereignty (#230): claims are filed based on geology, but the outcomes depend on who has institutional power
The Franklin case is the starkest version. The Inuit had direct eyewitness testimony — named witnesses, specific details about ships, bodies, tools, books, watches, compass needles, cut bones. They gave this testimony to multiple European interviewers over multiple decades. The details were consistent across witnesses and across time.
They were dismissed because of who they were.
The dismissal wasn’t based on contradictory evidence. It was based on the assumption that Inuit testimony was less reliable than English assumptions about English character. Dickens’s argument was not “the physical evidence contradicts the Inuit.” His argument was “Englishmen would not do this.” The physical evidence, when it was finally examined with modern forensic methods, confirmed what the Inuit had said all along.
The bones were there the whole time. The testimony was there the whole time. What changed was not the evidence. What changed was who was willing to listen to it.
McClintock’s note
There is one piece of European documentary evidence from the expedition itself. McClintock found it in a cairn at Victory Point in 1859 — a single sheet of paper with two messages written at different times.
The first, dated May 28, 1847: all well. Franklin commanding. Ships wintered at Beechey Island.
The second, written in the margins a year later, April 25, 1848: Franklin dead. Nine officers and fifteen men dead. Ships abandoned. The 105 survivors were heading south on foot.
Two messages on one piece of paper. One year apart. One says “all well.” The other says 24 men are dead and the ships are abandoned. The margin note is the only written record ever recovered from 129 men over three years.
The Inuit testimony fills the silence that the margin note leaves. Everything the British spent fifteen years and dozens of expeditions trying to learn, the Inuit already knew and were already telling them.
They just had to listen.
Sources: Inuit testimony compiled from Qaqortingneg (to Rasmussen, Fifth Thule Expedition, 1921; published in Across Arctic America, 1927), Tuk-ke-ta and Ow-wer (to Hall, 1869; field notes in Smithsonian Charles Francis Hall Collection; published in Nourse ed., Narrative of the Second Arctic Expedition, 1879), Ogzeuckjeuwock/Tooktoocheer (to Schwatka, 1879; published in Gilder, Schwatka’s Search, 1881); Anne Keenleyside et al., “The Final Days of the Franklin Expedition: New Skeletal Evidence,” Arctic 50:1 (1997): 36-46; F. L. McClintock, The Voyage of the Fox in the Arctic Seas (1859). Dickens, “The Lost Arctic Voyagers,” Household Words Vol. X, Nos. 245-246, December 2 and 9, 1854. All primary texts in the project source archive.