A team of investigators from across Canada, including a trio of Western researchers, have 

raised serious doubt about the popular belief that lead poisoning played a role in the death

of members of the famed Franklin Expedition. The study, Franklin expedition lead exposure: 

New insights from high resolution confocal X-ray fluorescence imaging of skeletal 

microstructure, was published today in PLOS ONE.

In  the  summer  of  1845,  under the command of Sir John Franklin, 128 officers and crew 

aboard the ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror entered the waters of Arctic North America 

with the goal of completing the discovery of the Northwest Passage. Franklin and his crew 

spent the first winter at Beechey Island, where three crewmen died and were buried.

The  following  year  th e  ships  became s tranded in ice off King William Island where they 

remained until April 1848. By this time the crew, now reduced to 105 men, made a desperate 

attempt to reach the mainland. Sadly, not one individual survived.

Previous analyses of bone, hair, and soft tissue samples from the remains of crew members 

found that tissues contained elevated lead levels, suggesting that lead poisoning may have 

been a major contribution to their demise.

However, questions remained regarding the timing and degree of exposure to lead and, 

ultimately, the extent to which the crew members may have been impacted. To address this 

historical question, the research team investigated three hypotheses to test the theory that 

lead poisoning was not the primary cause of the crew's deaths:

• If elevated lead exposure was experienced by the crew during the expedition, the team

• hypothesized that those sailors who survived longer (King William Island vs. Beechey

• Island) would exhibit more extensively distributed lead in their bones;

• The team hypothesized that lead levels would be elevated in bone microstructural

• features forming at or near the time of death, compared with older tissue in the body; and

• Finally, if lead exposure played a significant role in the failure of the expedition the team

• hypothesized that bone samples would exhibit evidence of higher or more sustained

• levels of lead than that of a contemporary British naval 19th-Century naval population

• from Antigua.

Synchrotron-based high resolution confocal X-ray fluorescence imaging in partnership with 

scientists at the Canadian Light Source synchrotron at the University of Saskatchewan and 

the Advanced Photon Source was used to visualize lead distribution within bone and dental 

structures at the micro scale.