James Fitzjames

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James Fitzjames (27 July 1813 – c. May 1848) was a British Royal Navy officer and explorer. The illegitimate son of a man with ties to the Navy, Fitzjames distinguished himself in an ill-conceived expedition to establish a steamship line in Mesopotamia in the 1830s, and in combat during the Egyptian–Ottoman War and the First Opium War. In 1845, Fitzjames was tapped by Sir John Barrow as a potential leader of an expedition to the Northwest Passage, but was instead named as captain of HMS Erebus under Sir John Franklin. Known as Franklin's lost expedition, both ships that had embarked on that voyage became trapped in the Arctic ice off King William Island in 1846. Following Franklin's death the next year, Fitzjames became second-in-command to Captain Francis Crozier of HMS Terror. The ships were abandoned in April 1848 and the survivors set out for the Canadian mainland. Fitzjames and twelve others died in the vicinity of Erebus Bay, 80 kilometres (50 mi) from where they had abandoned the ships. His remains were rediscovered in 1993 and forensically identified in September 2024.