Greely's own 1886 primary memoir declines to detail or substantively deny the cannibalism charge, calling it "such a painful topic"

arctic-explorationgreely-expeditionlady-franklin-bay-expeditioncannibalismsurvival-cannibalismprimary-sourcesbiography

In Three Years of Arctic Service (1886), Adolphus Greely's own two-volume, first-person account of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition, the words "cannibal" and "anthropophagy" do not appear anywhere in the book's index — a conspicuous omission from an otherwise exhaustively indexed narrative. In the Conclusion, Greely addresses the controversy only obliquely: he asserts general command responsibility, states "I know of no law, human or divine, which was broken at Sabine," and declines to "dwell longer on such a painful topic." He also explicitly hands off the narrative of the rescue itself — the moment at which the condition of the dead would have been most directly observed — to the man who led it: "The story of the rescue has been modestly told by the chief actor," referring readers to Winfield Scott Schley's own account rather than narrating it himself.

Read as a primary record, the book neither confirms nor substantively denies the specific charge; it is a calculated silence, paired with a general claim that no law was broken, from the one person best positioned to know what happened at Camp Clay. That silence stands in contrast to the contemporaneous medical-press treatment of the postmortem evidence as settled (claim-1884-medical-journal-cited-epidermis-in-stomachs-as-cannibalism-proof) and to the later quantitative case that survival without cannibalism was implausible (claim-2002-bioenergetic-study-finds-greely-expedition-food-shortfall-implies-cannibalism). It is the one gap in the record that none of the corroborating tracks fills: Greely's own testimony about what happened at Camp Clay (claim-greely-arctic-disaster-survivor-ran-us-weather-bureau-1887-1891).