In 1845, the British Admiralty prepared HMS Erebus and HMS Terror for the ultimate Arctic quest: discovering the Northwest Passage. To keep 129 men fed for three years, they needed a modern technological marvel: canned food. Enter Stephen Goldner, a cheap-bidding provisioner who won the victualing contract just seven weeks before the ships were scheduled to set sail.
To meet the nearly impossible deadline of filling and sealing over 8,000 heavy metal canisters, Goldner's factory workers rushed the job. Instead of crafting neat external seams, they slapped solder haphazardly onto the inside of the tins. That solder was composed of up to 90 percent lead.
As the provisions sat in acidic stews and salty brine, lead continuously leached directly into the crew's daily rations. When the ships inevitably became trapped in the thick pack ice off King William Island, the officers and crew were not just freezing and battling scurvy; they were suffering from severe, chronic lead poisoning. Modern forensic autopsies conducted during the 1980s on frozen, perfectly preserved bodies revealed lead concentrations up to 228 parts per million, which is over a hundred times higher than normal physiological levels.
The physical and neurological damage from lead toxicity likely induced debilitating fatigue, severe abdominal pain, paranoia, and impaired judgment, drastically accelerating the tragic collapse of the officers and crew. Subsequent Royal Navy supply audits exposed Goldner's abysmal quality control, transforming a cost-cutting bureaucratic victory into a notorious cautionary tale in procurement history.