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On 25 May 1859, a search party walking the south coast of King William Island found a skeleton lying face down on a gravel ridge. Next to it was a leather wallet, roughly the size of a paperback, packed with damp handwritten paper.
Franklin expedition DNA has now settled who that man was, and the answer is the plain one that almost nobody had been backing. The papers in the wallet belonged to Henry “Harry” Peglar, Captain of the Foretop on HMS Terror. The clothes on the body did not look like they belonged to him at all.
So for 166 years there was a body with somebody’s name in its pocket and no certain name of its own.
Why Everyone Thought He Was Someone Else
Captain of the Foretop was a senior petty officer’s job. Peglar ran the men who worked the upper sails — the ones who went aloft in weather nobody sane goes aloft in. It was a rank you could see on a man.
The jacket on this body was not that. It matched a steward or an officer’s servant, somebody who worked below, laid tables and looked after another man’s kit. Found with him was a small clothes brush, which is exactly the sort of thing a servant carries and exactly the sort of thing a topman does not.
The handwriting deepened the problem. The papers are not all in one hand. Scholars who have spent careers on this argued that Peglar had died earlier, somewhere else, and that a friend had picked up his wallet and carried it until he went down too.
A name was even attached to the theory: Thomas Armitage, gun room steward on the same ship, who had served alongside Peglar on HMS Gannet in the 1830s. The right job, the right build, the right friendship. It made a good story, and good stories are hard to dislodge. The museum that holds the wallet still has a catalogue note saying the remains are “more likely” Armitage’s.
What the Franklin Expedition DNA Actually Proved
Anthropologists at the University of Waterloo have been building something patient and unglamorous for years: a DNA reference set from Franklin expedition remains on King William Island, matched against samples volunteered by living descendants back in Britain.
In May 2026 they announced four new identifications. Three came from Erebus Bay — William Orren, able seaman; David Young, boy first class; and John Bridgens, subordinate officers’ steward — all from HMS Erebus. The fourth was Harry Peglar, found roughly 130 kilometres away, and the only man from HMS Terror identified this way so far.
“Three of the sailors we have identified are from HMS Erebus, and they all died at Erebus Bay,” said Dr Douglas Stenton of Waterloo. “The fourth, the only sailor from the HMS Terror to be definitively identified by DNA analysis, was found 130 kilometres away.”
His colleague Dr Robert Park put his finger on why this particular match mattered more than the arithmetic suggests: “It was interesting to conclusively identify this sailor because the body was found with almost the only written documents from the expedition ever found.”
That is the part worth stopping on. One hundred and twenty-nine men went into the ice with two ships. Apart from a single official note left under a cairn, what survives in their own handwriting is essentially this wallet. Everything else — every letter home, every journal, every list — is gone.
Six men have now been named by DNA in total, counting John Gregory in 2021 and Captain James Fitzjames in 2024. Reading identity out of material this old and this cold is its own quiet revolution; the same techniques are now being pointed at things nobody used to think of as biological evidence at all, right down to working out what medieval books are physically made of.
A Wallet of Turtles, Trinidad and Backwards Writing
Here is the thing that surprises people who go looking at the actual contents. The Peglar Papers are not a shipwreck diary. They are barely about the Arctic at all.
The wallet held eleven items. A seaman’s certificate, now unreadable. A handwritten account of his sea service, written around the four edges of the page in a square. A parody of a popular poem about the sea, dated 21 April 1847. A London address for a Mr John Cowper. A slip that just says “Sentimental Song.” An account of catching a turtle. Lines about something that happened at Trinidad. A story from Cumana, in Venezuela.
Some of it is written backwards — “eht” for “the” — and most of it is spelled by ear rather than by rule.
It reads like a man’s pockets, not a man’s testimony. Warm places, old jokes, a song title he did not want to forget, an address he meant to use. Whatever he thought he was keeping, it was not a record for historians. It was the ordinary furniture of a life, carried through a winter that was taking everything else.
The Line He Spelled Wrong
And then, in among the turtle and the poem and the London address, one item is different. Lines beginning:
O Death whare is thy Sting, the Grave at Comfort Cove
The rest trails off into something about doubt and is hard to read.
Those are not his words. They come from the burial service in the Book of Common Prayer — the passage read aloud over a body before it goes into the ground, or over the side. Every man on those two ships had heard it. By the spring of 1848, when 105 survivors abandoned the ships and started walking, most of them had heard it far too many times.
Now look at the spelling. “Whare.” A capital S dropped into the middle of a line. That is not how somebody copies from an open book in front of him. It reads much more like a man writing down words he knows by ear, because he has stood still and listened to them being said over people he knew.
And the line itself is not a sad one, which is easy to miss because of where it was found. It is not asking where death’s sting is because it cannot locate it. It is taunting. The whole shape of it is: you had one, and you have lost it. Somebody a very long time ago put that in writing and meant it as a challenge — that the last word about a person does not belong to the thing that killed them, and that God does not lose track of people the world has lost count of.
That is an odd thing to be carrying in a coat pocket at the end of the earth. It is also, if you sit with it for a minute, close to the only thing worth carrying there. He folded it back into the wallet and kept walking. (If you have ever wondered where a line like that actually comes from, the free Bible Answers assistant will show you the passage and the context — it opens in ChatGPT.)
A Name Given Back
None of this changes what happened. The ships were lost, the men were lost, and the science that named four of them cannot reach back and feed a single one of them.
But something did change. The wrong coat had held the story for 166 years, and the coat was never the evidence anybody thought it was. He was not an unknown man carrying a friend’s papers. He was Harry Peglar, born 1811, of London, Captain of the Foretop, HMS Terror — and he was carrying his own.
Families feel this at a much smaller scale all the time. A date comes round and the loss is suddenly present again, decades on, as if no time had passed at all — which is why grief tends to hit hardest on the anniversary. Time does not really file people away. It just stops saying their names out loud.
Then, occasionally, somebody says one again. A cousin six generations down gives a cheek swab in a warm kitchen in England, and a man on a gravel ridge in the Arctic gets his name back.
Questions People Ask About the Franklin Expedition DNA Identifications
Who was Harry Peglar?
Henry “Harry” Peglar, born in 1811, was Captain of the Foretop aboard HMS Terror on Sir John Franklin’s 1845 expedition to find the Northwest Passage. Captain of the Foretop was a senior petty officer’s post, in charge of the sailors who worked the upper sails. Peglar died during the expedition, in which all 129 men were lost, and his remains were found on King William Island in 1859. He was positively identified by DNA in 2026.
What are the Peglar Papers?
The Peglar Papers are a small collection of handwritten documents found inside a leather wallet beside a skeleton on King William Island in May 1859. They include a seaman’s certificate, an account of sea service, a parody of a poem about the sea dated 21 April 1847, notes about catching a turtle, incidents at Trinidad and in Cumana in Venezuela, London addresses, and lines beginning “O Death whare is thy Sting.” Some of the writing runs backwards and most of it is spelled phonetically. They are held by Royal Museums Greenwich and are close to the only surviving writing from the expedition’s crews.
How were the Franklin expedition sailors identified by DNA?
Researchers led by anthropologists at the University of Waterloo extracted DNA from skeletal remains recovered on King William Island and compared it with samples donated by living descendants of men on the 1845 Franklin expedition. Four identifications were announced in May 2026 — William Orren, David Young and John Bridgens of HMS Erebus, and Harry Peglar of HMS Terror — published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports and in Polar Record. Including John Gregory in 2021 and Captain James Fitzjames in 2024, six men have been named this way.
Why was the body thought to belong to Thomas Armitage instead?
The skeleton found in 1859 was dressed in clothing matching a steward or an officer’s servant rather than a senior petty officer, and a clothes brush was found with it. Thomas Armitage, gun room steward on HMS Terror, had served with Harry Peglar on HMS Gannet in the 1830s, which made him a plausible candidate for a man carrying a friend’s wallet. The theory stood for over a century and a half until DNA testing showed the remains were Peglar’s own.
Where can you see the Peglar Papers today?
The wallet and its papers are in the collection of Royal Museums Greenwich in London, catalogued with the objects recovered by the McClintock search expedition of 1857 to 1859. The leather wallet measures about 155 by 175 millimetres. Individual items and images can be looked up through the museum’s online collections catalogue.
Over to You
Here is the question this one leaves behind: does putting the right name on someone who died 178 years ago actually matter, or is it only for the living? Plenty of people would say the dead are past caring and the effort belongs to the descendants. Others would say a name is owed regardless of who is left to hear it. Tell us which side you land on in the comments — we read them.
Worth Passing On
- A body found in the Arctic in 1859 was wearing the wrong coat, so for 166 years nobody could say for certain who he was. DNA just did. https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/bgodinspired-news/franklin-expedition-dna-sailor-wrong-uniform/
- Almost nothing survives in the handwriting of Franklin’s 129 lost men. What does survive is one sailor’s wallet — full of turtles, a poem, a London address, and one line about death he spelled wrong. https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/bgodinspired-news/franklin-expedition-dna-sailor-wrong-uniform/
- He was carrying words he’d clearly learned by ear, not from a book. Somewhere in the Arctic, at the end of everything, a sailor wrote down a line that taunts death. Read it here: https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/bgodinspired-news/franklin-expedition-dna-sailor-wrong-uniform/
