From disappearing in a hot air balloon to trying to reach the North Pole, here are 9
expeditions that went terribly wrong.
9.
ARCTIC BALLOON EXPEDITION
In 1897, Swedish explorer Saloman August Andree and two companions, Knut Frænkel, and Nils
Strindberg, attempted to reach the North Pole by hot air balloon.
They set off from the Svalbard Archipelago in Norway and traveled somewhat aimlessly
for the next 65 hours, covering just 295 miles (475 km) before enountering a storm and having
to land the balloon on pack ice.
Over the next two months, the trio pulled their supplies on foot and shot polar bears
for food while combating the elements.
Along the way, Strindberg took around 200 photos with his camera, documenting their
daily struggles for the rest of the world to eventually see.
Meanwhile, Andree and Frænkel kept detailed diaries of their experiences and challenges.
Within two weeks after arriving at White Island east of the Svalbard Archipelago, the men
were dead.
Their fate remained a mystery until 1930, when the Norwegian Bratvaag expedition discovered
their remains and their personal effects.
No detailed examination was carried out to determine the causes of their deaths, which
remains a topic of debate among scholars to this day.
Records show that the men grew increasingly weak and tired, and that they were always
cold and wet.
They frequently suffered from foot pains and diarrhea.
The most commonly accepted theory is that the group likely died from trichinosis, a
parasitic disease brought on by eating undercooked polar bear meat.
But because all three were cremated, we will never know for sure what sealed their fate
during their frigid and exhausting journey.
8.
DISCOVERY MUTINY
The search for the Northwest Passage began centuries before the ill-fated HMS Erebus
and HMS Mutiny disappeared under the command of Sir John Franklin in one of history’s
most famous expedition disasters.
After English explorer Henry Hudson and his crew spent the winter of 1611 icebound in
Hudson Bay in what is now northeastern Canada, the ice finally broke, and he decided that
the crew must continue onward with their journey.
Fed up with their suffering, the starving crew members placed their captain, his teenage
son, and seven others in a small boat, and they were never seen again.
The small group rowed desperately to keep up with the departing vessel, the Discovery,
whose crew released more sails in order to get away from those they left behind.
While the fate of Hudson and his companions is unknown, it’s safe to say that they most
likely perished in the frigid Arctic environment.
The mutineers fared slightly better, with five of the 13 men dying on their way back
to Europe.
7.
THE FRANKLIN EXPEDITION
During the 19th century, explorers scrambled to find a polar sea route linking the Atlantic
and Pacific Oceans, known as the Northwest Passage.
One such attempt, led by Sir John Franklin, set out from England on May 19, 1845.
The two ships under Franklin’s command, the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, contained a
cumulative 129 officers and sailors, none of whom survived.
Both vessels disappeared around two months into the trip after they were last seen near
Passage’s entrance in Baffin Bay.
As experts eventually learned, the ships became stranded by ice in Victoria Strait in what
is now the Canadian territory of Nunavut.
After spending a year icebound, the crews abandoned ship for reasons that remain unclear
to this day, as they had stocked enough food and supplies to survive for a few years.
Clues such as graves, human remains, personal effects, written messages, and Inuit eyewitness
accounts turned up in various places, suggesting that the men died at different times and from
different causes, including hypothermia, lead poisoning or zinc deficiency, starvation,
and diseases like scurvy.
Some of the crew members’ bones contained cut marks, indicating that they became so
desperate, they resorted to cannibalism.
The remains of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were discovered in 2014 and 2016, and research
is ongoing as experts continue piecing together an exact picture of what led to the fateful
decision to abandon ship.
6.
NARVAEZ EXPEDITION
In 1527, Spanish conquistador Panfilo de Narváez led an expedition of 600 men to establish
colonial settlements in Florida.
Along the way, they wiped out an entire village of indigenous people in Cuba who greeted them
with food offerings.
The crew also encountered devastating storms, which claimed two of the fleet’s ships.
While en route to present-day Tampico, Mexico, the expedition was pushed north to Florida
by storms, currents, and winds.
They landed 15 miles (24 km) north of the entrance to Tampa Bay near Boca Ciega Bay,
which Narváez decided was unsuitable for settlement.
He ordered 300 men to head northward on land and 110 others to travel in the same direction
along the coast in ships.
The two groups were to reconvene at a large harbor that Narváez claimed was “impossible
to miss.”
But this never happened, because no such large harbor existed.
The land expedition suffered from disease, starvation, and the consequences of hostile
encounters with Indigenous populations as they attacked villages and stole their food.
At one point, the expeditioners killed their own horses for food and materials.
By September of 1528, the group was reduced to just 80 survivors, who washed ashore on
Galveston Island off the Texas coast after attempting to sail to Mexico on makeshift
rafts.
They were enslaved by the local Indigenous population and continued to perish amid the
harsh conditions they encountered.
Narváez himself died at some point throughout the ordeal.
Only four original party members survived after wandering throughout the American Southwest
and northern Mexico for eight years.
In 1536, they crossed paths with Spanish slave catchers in Sinaloa, who helped them reach
Mexico City.
5.
JEANNETTE EXPEDITION
In a bid to become the first people in recorded history to reach the North Pole, the 33-man
crew of the USS Jeanette departed from San Francisco on July 8, 1879 with plans to reach
their destination by sailing through the Bering Strait.
Shortly after sending its last communication on August 27, the ship became trapped in floating
ice in the Bering Sea and drifted erratically for the next 21 months.
In mid-June 1881, the Jeanette was slowly crushed under the pressure of the ice in the
Siberian Sea.
Left stranded 497 miles (800 km) north of the Siberian mainland, the crew unloaded some
provisions onto the ice and began the long, arduous trek inland as their ship sank to
its watery grave.
With three small boats in tow, they trudged through snow and slush that was sometimes
waist-deep, encountering brutal weather along the way.
Twenty crew members, including Captain George Washington De Long, died throughout the journey,
with at least one man succumbing to starvation and seven others perishing when their boat
capsized and sank during an attempt to sail to the Siberian mainland.
Only some of the Jeanette’s wreckage was ever found, appearing on an ice floe in 1884.
In 2015, Russian adventurer and TV personality Andrey Khoroshev announced plans to locate
and recover the sunken vessel.
Unfortunately, finding the ship has proven more difficult than he thought it would be,
and the Jeanette remains missing to this day.
4.
ABUBAKARI EXPEDITION
During the 14th century, a powerful ruler of the Mali empire named Abubakari II reigned
over much of modern-day West Africa.
But he was apparently unfulfilled by his position in life and was curious about what else was
out there in the world, waiting to be discovered.
Abubakari is said to have handed the throne to his brother, Kankou Moussa, in 1311 before
attempting to cross the Atlantic Ocean with a fleet of ships that never returned.
He wanted to know if the vast body of water had another bank, according to Malian scholar
Gaoussou Diawara, who wrote a book about Abubakari’s travels.
Nobody knows for certain what happened to the expedition, but at least two scholars,
including Diawara, have suggested that Abubakari’s fleet reached the New World, making landfall
in what is now Brazil.
This would have been 200 years before Columbus arrived in the Americas.
In their arguments, Diawara and researcher Ivan van Sertima reference an abstract of
Columbus’s log by Bartolomé de las Casas, which describes encountering “Black” people
on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic).
Many, if not most mainstream experts hesitate to agree, citing a lack of solid evidence
of pre-Columbian contact between Africa and the New World.
No African artifacts from the era have been found throughout the Americas, although it
doesn’t mean that none are there, waiting to be discovered.
3.
TERRA NOVA EXPEDITION
Between 1910 and 1913, an Antarctic expedition led by British Navy Captain Robert Falcon
Scott sought to acquire new scientific information and be the first group of humans to reach
the geographic South Pole.
Scott’s team initially consisted of 14 men, but most of them abandoned the journey and
headed back to their base at Ross Island at some point along the way.
The remaining five explorers reached the South Pole in January 1912, only to realize that
a team led by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had beaten them by 34 days.
All five men died on the return journey, encountering frostbite and malnutrition as they combated
ruthless blizzards and the unforgiving cold.
They perished one by one over a several-week span, with crew member Edgar Evans being the
first to die.
Crippled by a war injury and possibly gangrene, Lawrence Oates was the next to pass away.
In what’s believed to be an act of self-sacrifice, he left the group’s tent and never returned,
most likely to prevent the rest of the men from being slowed down by his debilitating
condition.
Scott’s journal entries detailed the unimaginable suffering he and the three remaining survivors
endured.
In his diary, he confronted the realization that they were all going to die, writing in
one of his last passages that “These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.”
The men who had stayed behind during the expedition embarked on a search for their missing crew
members the next month and discovered three dead bodies in their sleeping bags.
2.
LUDWIG LEICHHARDT
Ludwig Leichhardt was a Prussian-born nationalist and explorer who mounted three overland expeditions
to explore Australia during the 19th century.
He developed a reputation for his resilience early on in his journeys, at one point returning
to Sydney with his crew long after they had been presumed dead.
Things took a turn for worse during Leichhardt’s third expedition in 1848, which sought to
cross the Australian interior on horseback -- a nearly 3,000 mile (4,500 km) east-to-west
journey through unexplored wilderness.
Leichhardt’s party, which consisted of five Europeans and two Aboriginal guides, was last
seen on April 3 of that year in the Darling Downs region of southern Queensland.
Their fate remains a mystery, with many naturally assuming that the party died at some point
during what was supposed to be a two-to-three-year journey.
In 1900, an artifact known as the Leichhardt Plate was found attached to a burnt gun that
was wedged into a boab tree near the Western Australia-Northern Territory border.
A prospector named Charles Harding, who employed the Aboriginal man who found the nameplate,
kept the object until 1917, when a teenager named Reg Bristow-Smith befriended him and
convinced him to hand it over.
The National Museum of Australia eventually gained access to the plate and determined
that it’s genuine
While the Leichhardt Plate suggests that the expedition made it much further along in their
journey than originally thought, its discovery does not explain what happened to the explorers.
Some believe that a mutiny may have occurred, or that the party starved, drowned, or was
murdered.
Another more far-flung theory suggests that they lived out their days in the company of
an Aboriginal tribe, never again interacting with the society from which they came.
1.
DYATLOV PASS INCIDENT
In January 1959, a group of 10 young but experienced cross-country skiers, consisting of eight
men and two women, trekked into the Ural Mountains near Yekaterinburg, Russia for what was supposed
to be a three-week trip.
They set up camp near the base of a peak known as “Dead Mountain” as a blizzard approached,
and nine of the expeditioners’ mutilated bodies were later found scattered throughout
the area, with several corpses bearing cracked skulls and bones, two missing their eyes,
and another whose tongue was cut out.
Searchers found their tent slashed from the inside, as if the travelers had tried escaping
on a moment’s notice.
They had abandoned their dinners and personal effects, and some of the bodies were found
wearing only socks and underwear.
The only survivor, Yura Yudin, had turned back earlier in the trip due to back pain.
Hypothermia and frostbite were ruled as the official causes of death, despite the horrific
injuries on some of the corpses.
Nobody was ever implicated in the suspicious deaths, despite widespread demands for justice,
and in early 2019, the Russian government finally reopened its investigation into the
incident.
A new study claims that the group likely died in a small avalanche.
While this hypothesis is nothing new, a reexamination of the evidence stands by this as the most
plausible explanation.
Skeptics point out that the injuries are atypical of those caused by an avalanche, and that
there was no evidence at the site of one having occurred.
Computer simulations and the expeditioners’ diary entries detailing strong winds challenge
long-held notions about how the slope was too shallow for an avalanche, and how a lack
of snowfall meant that one couldn’t have happened.
For now, however, the mystery remains unsolved, and the only certain fact about the Dyatlov
Pass Incident is that it was a horrifying tragedy that left surviving loved ones without
answers or closure.
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