The authors of the above paper apologise to the readership of Polar Record and give notice that, as a result of a transcription error, one data point was omitted and another incorrectly included in their Fig. 1. The figure presents individual data points to illustrate levels of lead (μgPb/g) in ten bone types from seven skeletons of crew members of the Franklin expedition. Specifically, the data point having the value of 100μgPb/g for the ulna of Skeleton 3 was in error and is now deleted, whilst a data point which had been omitted for the calcaneus of Skeleton 6 has now been added with the value of 504.2μgPb/g. Please see revised figure below.

Re-analysis of the corrected data set confirms that these small changes have no effect on the outcome: the random effects model estimates the standard deviation and 95% confidence interval of the mean lead level (log scale) across the crew to remain exactly as reported in the published paper, namely 0.48 (95% CI = 0.27–0.85). Therefore, the conclusions to be drawn from Fig. 1, and from the paper as a whole, remain completely unchanged. The authors draw attention to the correction of this small but regrettable error in order to ensure full accuracy in the reporting of the results.