A 2002 peer-reviewed bioenergetic reanalysis found Greely expedition's documented food supply fell roughly 2 million kcal short, calling survival without cannibalism implausible

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Węsławski and Legeżyńska, writing in Arctic (journal of the Arctic Institute of North America, vol. 55, no. 4), reconstructed the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition's food budget from ship's rations, hunting logs, and the amphipod ("sea flea") catch recorded in survivor diaries, cross-checked against a 1998 field survey on the same stretch of Ellesmere Island coast — baited traps set in Rosse Bay, several kilometres south of the Pim Island starvation camp — which recovered the same carrion-feeding amphipods. They calculated total documented food energy at about 4.8 million kcal against a minimum group requirement of about 6.8 million kcal across 5,725 person-days — a shortfall of roughly 2.0 million kcal — and found individual survivors accumulating energy deficits "of over 86,000 kcal before the rescue in June 1884," a level of deficit the authors argue is not survivable on documented food alone. Their conclusion is unhedged: "it seems certain to us that the prolonged survival of some men was due to their engaging in cannibalism."

The same paper characterizes Winfield Scott Schley's 1887 official report of the relief expedition — which examined the recovered bodies directly — as stating that flesh had been removed from the dead, "apparently to serve as bait for shrimps"; that characterization is secondhand (Schley's report itself is unread in this vault) and is not the basis for the kcal figures above, which rest on the authors' own reconstruction. This 2002 quantitative case is independent of, and corroborates, both the contemporaneous forensic claim in the medical press (claim-1884-medical-journal-cited-epidermis-in-stomachs-as-cannibalism-proof) and the conspicuous silence of Greely's own primary account (claim-greely-1886-memoir-declines-to-address-cannibalism-charge); together the three sit against the hedged, Tier-3-sourced "rumors of cannibalism" phrasing in claim-greely-arctic-disaster-survivor-ran-us-weather-bureau-1887-1891.