franklin+Archaeology+and+Science+reveal+about+their+appearance



When Owen Beattie ran investigations over the three bodies, he had gained many results...

Forensic science tells us that John Torrington was one hundred and sixty three centimetres tall. An anonymous newspaper journalist also states that: //‘...Torrington looked anything but grotesque. The expression on his thin face, with a pouting mouth and half closed eyes gazing from delicate light brown eyelashes was peaceful. His nose and forehead in contrast to the natural colour of the rest of his face, where darkened by contact with the blue, wool coffin covering...’// From this we can see that the bodies were well preserved, with only his nose and forehead seeming visually unnatural. Owen Beattie also states that though his arms and legs were bound, he was limp. This heavily implicates that John Torrington was somewhat injured before his death. He was also found to be 38.6 kilos in weight, indicating that he would have been severely underweight, and implying that he may have been sick and did not want to eat, or he may have died from starvation.

In 2009, Alan Ogden of the University of Bradford applied modern forensic techniques to the body of Harry Goodsir a lieutenant aboard the HMS Erebus on the expedition in a successful attempt to reconstruct his face. Lead researcher Simon Mayes writes that //"That the body was accorded formal burial suggests that the death occurred before the final throes of the expedition when the dead seem to have been left unburied and, in some cases, cannibalized"// This shows that Goodsir died earlier on in the expedition, prior to tragic fate that his fellow seamen suffered.