illuminator newsletter #31
18 March 2024
New land archaeology paper out today from Douglas Stenton and Robert Park.
Recent editions of the classic Frozen In Time dramatically open with the 1981 discovery of a skeleton near Booth Point, around which the archaeologists Beattie and Savelle find clues to suggest cannibalism — namely, potential defleshing cut marks on a femur bone, and a worrying distribution of the bones around a stone tent circle. This archaeological site, designated NcLa-1, is the subject of today’s new Franklin Expedition paper. Stenton & Park add a wealth of new artifact recoveries to the understanding of the site, in particular firearm related, from examinations over the last decade. Stenton & Park also return to fine details from the original Inuit testimony, to tip the needle away from probable cannibalism, and instead toward the methodical burial of a man beneath large stones, fully clothed, very tall, lying face upwards, hands crossed or folded over the breast, with illness visible at his gums.
Stenton & Park have recovered DNA from the remains. The set awaits a match from Franklin Expedition descendant families.
https://journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/index.php/arctic/article/view/78992
RECENTLY
7 February 2024
Jonathan Moore, Manager for Parks Canada’s Underwater Archaeology Team, has been interviewed by Hilary Bird regarding this year’s dive season.
3 March 2024
Olga Kimmins drills down on sources for interpreting Captain Crozier’s character.
https://www.thethousandthpart.com/notes/crozier-in-secondary-sources
18 February 2024
Fifteen years ago, Franklinists visiting London began finding Northwest Passage graves around the city and posting photographs online. Alison Freebairn has discovered that the historian Richard J. Cyriax was making these same rounds nearly a century earlier, taking photographs and then mailing them to other Franklin historians. Freebairn has also here published the first (to my knowledge) public photograph of Cyriax himself, loaned from a descendant’s family collection. The venerable old historian appears as a young man on a bicycle in a pinstripe suit.
https://finger-post.blog/2024/02/18/richard-j-cyriax-and-his-franklin-graves-photography/
22 February 2024
A warning that death is graphically described herein. Over this past year, Sam Pope has written a dozen articles researching the life of John Franklin’s first wife, Eleanor Anne Porden. In this recent article, Pope draws together sources describing Eleanor’s death by tuberculosis (just after Franklin departed on his 2nd overland expedition). Knowing that this disease has been suspected of afflicting the three men on Beechey Island, it is distressing to read just how difficult such a death could be, even if one had all the amenities of suburban London within reach. (Incidentally, Richard J. Cyriax’s career focus as a doctor was on tuberculosis.)
https://eleanorporden.com/2024/02/22/her-soul-has-been-summoned-to-that-better-sphere/
29 February 2024
Wolfgang Opel has written about two lesser-known Germans who contributed to the Franklin search: Berthold Seemann and Matthäus Warmow.
https://www.trimaris.de/2024/02/29/matthaeus-warmow-berthold-seemann-und-franklin/