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hubie [soylentnews.org] writes:

One of the great mysteries of the Victorian Age was the disappearance of the Franklin Expedition [bbc.com] to discover the Northwest Passage. The belief is that their ships became locked in ice and the crews had to abandon them. In the 1980s, three bodies were found and examination of the bodies showed signs of elevated levels of lead. Because of this, most people believed that the crew was poisoned by the solder used in the tin cans of their provisions and that they fell to delirium and cannibalism as a result of the lead poisoning. When it was later pointed out that the food the expedition carried was not acidic enough to leech the lead out of the solder, attention was turned to the water pipes used to distribute drinking water on their ships.

In 2014 and 2016, two of the expedition ships were found. Despite the passage of time, they found the storerooms to have been well organized and not showing signs of a crew experiencing the hallucinations or delirium symptoms of lead poisoning. The remains of one of the crewmen, John Hartnell, still contained intact finger and toenails, analysis of which is able to reveal the week-by-week changes in his body. These results were reported in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports [sciencedirect.com] and they show that Hartnell had a severe zinc deficiency, not lead poisoning [nature.com]. A severe zinc deficiency would have suppressed his immune system and made him vulnerable to other more likely diseases such as pneumonia and tuberculosis. Hartnell did show relatively high levels of lead in his nails, but that was only in his last few weeks of life. They propose that Hartnell's dying body probably broke down and released long-stored lead from his bones into his blood and nails.

“The lead theory is pretty much dismantled by this point,” says Ron Martin, an analytical chemist at Western University in London, Canada. In 2013, he analysed bone fragments from several crewmembers including Hartnell, and concluded that they had experienced consistent lead exposure throughout their lives, with no spike during the expedition.

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