Science: Franklin's Cemetery

While a Norwegian sealer was visiting White Island off Spitzbergen last month and discovering the 33-year-lost remains of Explorer Salomon August Andrée & comrades (TIME, Sept. 1), an airplane full of Canadians flew northeast from Copper Mine in the Northwest Territories to King William Island on an expedition to chart arctic coastlines for the Canadian Government. At King William Island, Major L. T. Burwash, leader of the party, set out on foot with his two companions. They had not walked far when they stumbled upon something which looked like a graveyard. Digging away the snow and ice which neatly covered the mounds, they found skeletons of men. Tucked away in a cairn of rocks was a faded blue jacket, part of a tent. They had discovered the last camping ground of the Franklin Expedition, which set out from England 85 years ago to find a northwest passage to the Pacific.

Eskimos and northern winds had scattered many of the remains. The precise rows of the graves indicated that the men had died slowly, had been buried by their weakened comrades. Many seemed to have been victims of scurvy or starvation.

In 1845, Sir John Franklin, who had been the first to trace the MacKenzie and Coppermine Rivers some 25 years before, sailed for the arctic with 129 men in the ships Erebus and Terror. The party was last seen by a whaler near the entrance to Lancaster Sound (west of Baffin Bay) on July 26, 1845. England grew alarmed at their continued disappearance, sent out rescue parties which explored thousands of arctic miles, succeeded in finding traces of the lost expedition. Fourteen years after Franklin's disappearance the camp of the expedition was located on the island and a diary found which told of their meeting with great ice packs. All their efforts to reach a Hudson's Bay Co.'s settlement were frustrated by the terrific northern gales with which they were not fitted to cope. The cemetery found by Major Burwash is probably the only portion of Franklin's camp which has not now been found.