The Tale of the Bones, Part III

Bones of contention

Huxley's identification did not go unchallenged -- indeed, one of the foremost men involved in the Franklin search, Dr. John Rae, doubted that it was a Franklin skeleton at all. The value of Rae's opinion, however, was limited by the fact that he did not have access to Hall's field notebooks or journals, and since Nourse's edition of Hall's narrative wasn't published until 1879, he had no idea of Hall's success; he simply expressed his doubt that Hall could have persuaded any Inuit to take him so far as King William Island. But there was another problem: for some reason, in the same box as the bones, there was a metal blade, perhaps the head of a spear, stamped with the words "THE SHIP." Rae gave it as his opinion that it could not possibly have been used by Franklin's men, as they had plenty of guns and ammunition, though he admitted that he had seen "pieces of gun barrels hammered with all sorts of forms" by the Inuit. This artifact, as it turned out, was completely unrelated to the skeleton and may well have ended up in the box simply because Hall obtained it around the same time.

As recounted in Nourse (p. 400), it was just a few days earlier that he had, while searching unsuccessfully for the bodies reported to be on the Todd Islets, that he encountered an Inuk by the name of "Koo-nik," who gave him a number of items taken from the wrecked at "Ook-joo-lik"(which we now know to be HMS Erebus); he gave Hall

"a silver spoon ... and a second smaller mahogany box, with another spoon and many other articles, including pieces of copper with two stamps of a broad arrow, and a steel spear-head on which was  stamped " THE SHIP." All these had been brought from one of Franklin's ships and from the shore on the south side of Ook-joo-lik (O'Reilly Island). Knives, needles, thimbles, beads, and rings were
given in return."

Detail of Edmond Le Feuvre's letter

The spear-head seems to have caused confusion to Inglefield and Huxley as well, and influenced Dr. Rae's negative opinion about the bones. But there was not merely skepticism on these fronts only, but even -- once they were made aware of Huxley's view -- on the part of Le Vesconte's own family as to whether the bones were in fact his. We know this thanks to a surviving letter from Edmond Philip Le Feuvre, who was not only the executor of Le Vesconte's estate, but his cousin. Here is an excerpt from his letter to Le Vesconte's sister Rose Henrietta in May of 1873:

I quite agree with you that the fact of there being a little spec of gold in one tooth is no evidence that the remains are those of an officer, and I quite think the right thing has been done in them being deposited at Greenwich. I confess I wish they had been deposited in consecrated ground but they will be preserved quite sacredly when they are in front of the monument erected to the memory of the Expedition, and I suspect our church laws would not have permitted a burial service to have been performed in the absence of all proof of identity.

Edmond also mentions that he had called upon Sophia Cracroft, Lady Franklin's niece and companion, and that she apparently was convinced by Huxley's account, and by "the photograph of the pencil drawing" -- this must mean that a photographic copy of the sketch made in New York had been provided to her! -- but then muddles things by saying "this could not in any way be relied on being simply a copy of the daguerreotype likeness." Here, Edmond is in error -- having seen the sketch we know it's based on the skull -- but this gives us the wonderful vision of Sophy sitting at home, comparing the photograph of the sketch with her own copy of the Daguerreotype of Le Vesconte!

And, although in some ways for wrong reasons such as this, the skeptics were to be proven right -- although not for more than a century and a half. The proof will be the subject of the next (and for now final) chapter of this story.