John Torrington

Petty Officer John Shaw Torrington (1825 — 1 January 1846) was an explorer and Royal Navy stoker.cite web |url=http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=1571 |title=John Torrington (1825 - 1846) - Find A Grave Memorial |accessdate=2007-06-29 ] He was part of an expedition to find the Northwest Passage, but along with the rest of the crew, including the leader, Sir John Franklin, mysteriously died early in the trip. His body was exhumed in 1984, to try to determine the cause of death.cite web |url=http://www.mummytombs.com/mummylocator/featured/franklin.htm |title=The Franklin Expedition: Featured Mummy |accessdate=2007-06-29 ] It was the best preserved example of a corpse since the Tollund Man in the 1950s.cite web |url=http://www.civilization.ca/academ/articles/sway_10e.html |title=Civilization.ca - Scholars - Archaeological Discovery in Organic Terrain in Canada |accessdate=2007-06-29 ]

The Northwest Passage expedition

Torrington was a part of an expedition to find the Northwest Passage, a sea route to Asia, via the northern edge of North America. There were about 128-134 crew members,cite web |url=http://www.ekkane.org/Biographies/BioFranklin.htm |title=Sir John Franklin |accessdate=2007-06-29 ] who set off from Greenhithe, England in two ships, the HMS "Terror" and HMS "Erebus", on 19 May 1845. The trip was expected to last about three years, so the ships were packed with provisions said to include more than 120,000 pounds of flour, almost 17,000 litres of alcohol and about 8,000 tin cans of meat, soup and vegetables. However, after late July no one heard from or saw the crew again.

Search expeditions

There were many search parties sent out to look for the missing crew, but until 1850 nothing significant was found. In 1850, the ruins of a stone hut, some food cans, and three graves of crew members were stumbled upon. One of these was Torrington's grave. He had apparently died only about seven months into the expedition. However, this finding only raised further questions as to why they had died so early in the expedition. It was later found that the entire crew had perished, for reasons believed to be poor judgement. In 1976, the graves were relocated on Beechey Island, Nunavut, Canada. In 1980 anthropologist Owen Beattie decided to analyze the bodies and try to solve the mystery.

Autopsy

After ensuring Torrington's descendants were aware of the plan, Beattie and his team began their work on 17 August 1984. Torrington's coffin was 1.5 meters deep in the permafrost, which the team had to dig through. When they retrieved the coffin and opened it, they saw how well preserved the outer parts of Torrington's body were, apparently not much different from the day he was buried. In order to thaw the body, the team had to pour water on the ice, section by section. Once thawed, they undressed the body to examine it. They found that Torrington had been very sick at the time of his death — he was so thin all his ribs were visible, and he only weighed about 85 pounds. After conducting a thorough autopsy and taking some tissue samples, the team left to analyse their findings.

Tissue samples revealed that Torrington's body had probably been stored on board ship while his grave was being dug; in almost all areas, significant cell autolysis had occurred, and cell definition was very poor. His brain was almost completely gone, leaving only a "yellow granular liquid". ["Report on the Exhumation of John Torrington", Dr. Roger Amy, Department of Pathology, University of Alberta, p. 1] The lungs showed scarring from earlier bouts with Tuberculosis as well as signs of more recent pneumonia. After toxicology analysis showed heightened levels of lead in Torrington's hair and fingernails, the team concluded Torrington had died from pneumonia, after suffering from various lung problems, which were aggravated by the lead poisoning. It seemed the canned food was the cause of this. More tests revealed a high level of lead in all three men. This is probably the chief cause of the expedition's failure. Photographs of Torrington, in a remarkable state of outward preservation, were published widely, including in People magazine which named him one of the world's most interesting personalities in 1984, and the widely-reprinted photograph inspired James Taylor to write a song, "The Frozen Man".

References

Further reading

*cite book |last=Beattie |first=Owen |coauthors=John Geiger |title=Frozen In Time: The Fate of The Franklin Expedition |origyear=1998 |publisher=Douglas & Macintyre |language=English |isbn=1-55054-616-3