Scientists have discovered the identity of a cannibalized victim who sailed on the doomed Northwest Passage expedition of 1845 to 1848.

The mysterious fate of Captain John Franklin’s doomed 1845 voyage into the Arctic to find a way through the Northwest Passage has captured imaginations for over a century and a half. A recent scientific paper shed light on the gruesome ends for the expedition’s sailors,

Researchers recently identified James Fitzjames, a captain on the ill-fated HMS Erebus that went looking for the Northwest Passage in 1845

Franklin’s expedition left Kent, England, on May 19, 1845, in the hopes of finally mapping a Northwestern route around the world to Asia. By the time the crew left their ships in 1848, Franklin had been dead for almost a year, so the 105 survivors turned to a senior officer, Commander James Fitzjames, to lead their deadly, futile march.

The skeletal remains of a crew member from Sir John Franklin's 1845 Northwest Passage expedition was identified in a joint study by researchers from the University of Waterloo and Lakehead University.

James Fitzjames was one of the captains of British explorer Sir John Franklin's two ships that went missing in 1845.

THUNDER BAY — Researchers at Lakehead University's Paleo-DNA lab have played a key role in the identification of a senior officer with Sir John Franklin's ill-fated 1845 expedition to find the Northwest Passage.

"Sir John Franklin died on the 11th of June 1847 and the total loss by deaths in the Expedition has been to this date 9 officers and 15 men." Those 105 survivors never made it home, and probably never off the island.

In 1845, Sir John Franklin set out from England with 128 men aboard two ships, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, on a mission to discover the Northwest Passage — a famed sea route from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean through a group of sparsely populated Canadian islands.