Voyages, expeditions, and the people who came back.
52 stories in this theme.
In October 1704 the Scottish sailing master Alexander Selkirk, convinced his worm-eaten ship would sink, demanded to be put ashore on an uninhabited island 670 km off Chile. The ship did sink. Selkirk survived alone for four years and four months, was rescued in 1709 as a goat-skinned 'wild man' — and a decade later Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe.
Read the story →In 1621 Jan Pieterszoon Coen led a VOC force against the Banda Islands — then the world's only source of nutmeg — to enforce a monopoly the islanders kept breaking. Of a population of some 15,000, most were killed, starved, enslaved, or deported; 44 leaders were executed by Japanese mercenaries. The islands were repopulated as slave-worked plantations. One of them was later traded for Manhattan.
Read the story →The Dutch East India ship Batavia wrecked on the Houtman Abrolhos islands off Western Australia on 4 June 1629. While the commander sailed an open boat to Java for rescue, the apothecary Jeronimus Cornelisz established a reign of terror among the roughly 200 survivors, murdering some 110-125 men, women, and children before soldiers he had marooned fought back.
Read the story →On 28 April 1789 Fletcher Christian seized HMS Bounty and set Captain Bligh adrift with 18 men in an open launch. Bligh sailed it 3,618 nautical miles to Timor and lived to be court-martialled and acquitted. The mutineers vanished with Tahitian companions to unlocated Pitcairn Island, burned the ship — and were found 18 years later: one ageing mutineer, nine widows, and a village of children.
Read the story →In February 1959 nine experienced Soviet ski-hikers died on the slope of Kholat Syakhl in the northern Urals. Their tent was found cut open from the inside; the bodies lay up to 1.5 km away, some barefoot in the snow, some with severe internal injuries. Sixty years of theories followed. The modern scientific verdict is a slab avalanche.
Read the story →In 1854 the Hudson's Bay Company surveyor John Rae brought back the first hard evidence of the lost Franklin expedition: Inuit testimony and relics — and reports that the starving crews had resorted to cannibalism. Lady Franklin and Charles Dickens led the assault on his character and his Inuit sources. Every later discovery proved Rae right.
Read the story →On the rainy night of 30 June 1520, Hernán Cortés's army tried to slip out of Tenochtitlan across the Tlacopan causeway and was caught. Hundreds of Spaniards and thousands of native allies died in the lake, many dragged down by the gold sewn into their clothes. Spain remembered it as the Sad Night; Mexico City has renamed it the Victorious one.
Read the story →The French astronomer Guillaume Le Gentil left home in 1760 to observe the transit of Venus from India. War kept him at sea for the 1761 transit; he waited eight more years for the 1769 one — which a single cloud obscured. He returned after eleven and a half years to find himself declared dead, his wife remarried, and his estate divided.
Read the story →From 1565 to 1815, one or two Spanish galleons a year crossed the Pacific between Manila and Acapulco, swapping American silver for Chinese silk and porcelain — the first sustained trade link binding Asia, the Americas, and Europe into one economy. The eastward crossing took four to six months and killed crews by the score; some thirty galleons were lost.
Read the story →In 1324-25 Mansa Musa, emperor of Mali, crossed the Sahara to Mecca with a caravan of legendary size, spending and gifting gold so freely in Cairo that Egyptian chroniclers said its value there stayed depressed for years. The journey put Mali on Europe's maps — literally, holding a gold nugget on the Catalan Atlas — and seeded Timbuktu's golden age.
Read the story →On 4 December 1872 the brigantine Mary Celeste was found under sail between the Azores and Portugal — seaworthy, provisioned for months, cargo intact, and completely empty. Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife, his two-year-old daughter, and the crew of seven were never seen again.
Read the story →In November 1871 the journalist Henry Morton Stanley, bankrolled by a New York newspaper, found the lost missionary-explorer David Livingstone at Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika. 'Dr Livingstone, I presume?' became the century's most famous greeting — though Stanley tore the page from his diary and may have coined it afterwards. The two men's afterlives diverged as sharply as their legends.
Read the story →Ferdinand de Lesseps's canal joined the Mediterranean and Red Seas after ten years of digging — the early years by Egyptian corvée labour in the tens of thousands, with a heavy and uncounted toll of dead. The 1869 opening was the party of the century; within six years Britain owned Egypt's shares, and within thirteen it owned Egypt.
Read the story →Shortly after midnight on 10 June 1886, Mount Tarawera in New Zealand split open along a 17-kilometre rift. The eruption killed around 120 people, buried the village of Te Wairoa, and obliterated the Pink and White Terraces — silica formations then celebrated as the eighth wonder of the world. Eleven days earlier, tourists reported meeting a phantom war canoe on the lake.
Read the story →Between 1405 and 1433 the Ming admiral Zheng He led seven expeditions of up to 300 ships and 27,000 men across the Indian Ocean — to India, Arabia, and the Swahili coast, returning once with a giraffe for the emperor. Then China turned inward: the voyages stopped, and the records were left to rot or worse. Europe's small ships entered an ocean the treasure fleets had vacated.
Read the story →Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan disappeared on 2 July 1937 between Lae, Papua New Guinea, and Howland Island. The Lockheed Electra was on the final third of a planned round-the-world equatorial circumnavigation. The largest naval search in US history at that point covered approximately 250,000 square miles but found nothing. The fate of the aircraft and its two occupants remains formally unresolved.
Read the story →Salomon August Andrée and two companions launched a hydrogen balloon called the Eagle from Danes Island in Svalbard on 11 July 1897, intending to fly over the North Pole. The balloon crashed onto the ice three days later. The three men spent three months walking to White Island, where they died in early October 1897. Their bodies, their cameras, and their journals were found by a Norwegian fishing expedition in August 1930.
Read the story →Robert O'Hara Burke and William Wills crossed the Australian continent from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria in February 1861. On the return they reached the Cooper's Creek depot on 21 April 1861 to find that the support party under William Brahe had departed nine hours earlier after waiting for them for four months. Both Burke and Wills died of starvation at the creek in late June 1861.
Read the story →The 21-metre granite obelisk known as Cleopatra's Needle was carved at Aswan for Pharaoh Thutmose III around 1450 BCE. The Khedive of Egypt gifted it to New York City in 1877. The 224-ton stone took 112 days to cross the Atlantic in the steamship Dessoug and was erected in Central Park on 22 January 1881. Modern atmospheric pollution has weathered it more in 145 years than the Egyptian desert did in 3,400.
Read the story →Captain James Cook was killed at Kealakekua Bay on Hawaii Island on 14 February 1779. He had returned to repair a broken mast, conflict had escalated after a ship's cutter was stolen, and his attempt to take the Hawaiian high chief Kalani'opu'u hostage in retaliation produced a beach fight in which he was struck on the head and stabbed multiple times. He was 50.
Read the story →The Donner Party of 87 westbound American emigrants was trapped by early snow in the Sierra Nevada in late October 1846, two days short of the pass that would have brought them safely down into California. They spent four and a half months at Donner Lake and Alder Creek camps. Forty-eight survived. The survival depended in part on the consumption of those who had died.
Read the story →Francis Drake left Plymouth on 13 December 1577 with five ships. He returned alone in the Golden Hind on 26 September 1580 with about £400,000 of captured Spanish silver from his Pacific raid — about half the English government's annual revenue. He was the first English captain to complete a circumnavigation. Elizabeth I knighted him aboard the Golden Hind at Deptford on 4 April 1581.
Read the story →HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, under Captain Sir John Franklin, sailed from England in May 1845 to find the Northwest Passage. They were last seen by European witnesses in Baffin Bay in July 1845. The wrecks were finally located on the sea floor in 2014 (Erebus) and 2016 (Terror). All 129 men died, partly from lead poisoning from improperly-soldered food tins.
Read the story →Hannibal Barca crossed the Alps in October 218 BCE with 37 war elephants. All but one were dead within four months. At the Battle of Zama in 202 BCE, Hannibal's 80 fresh African elephants panicked at Roman trumpet signals, turned, and trampled their own infantry. The defeat ended the Second Punic War and Carthaginian power.
Read the story →Jean-François de La Pérouse's two-ship Pacific expedition departed Brest in August 1785 with 220 men. Their last known position was Botany Bay in March 1788. The ships and crews disappeared in the southwest Pacific. The Irish merchant Peter Dillon located the wreckage on a reef off Vanikoro in the Solomon Islands in 1827 — thirty-nine years after the disappearance.
Read the story →Ferdinand Magellan died on the island of Mactan in the Philippines on 27 April 1521 in a skirmish with the local chief Lapu-Lapu. His fleet of five ships had left Sanlúcar de Barrameda in September 1519 with 270 men. Eighteen survivors aboard the single remaining ship Victoria reached Spain on 6 September 1522 under Juan Sebastián Elcano. The voyage was the first complete circumnavigation of the planet.
Read the story →Maria Sibylla Merian, a 52-year-old Frankfurt-born artist and naturalist, sailed alone with her younger daughter to the Dutch colony of Suriname in June 1699. Over two years she documented the life cycles of approximately 90 South American insect species, ate the same food as her enslaved Indigenous and African informants, and produced the 1705 *Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium* — one of the founding works of modern entomology.
Read the story →Douglas Mawson and two companions were 480 km from base on the Australasian Antarctic Expedition when one fell into a crevasse on 14 December 1912 with the dogs and most of the supplies. The second died of probable hypervitaminosis A on 8 January 1913. Mawson walked back alone for thirty days. By the time he reached base on 8 February 1913, the soles of his feet had detached and he had eaten his remaining sled dogs.
Read the story →The Mayflower sailed from Plymouth on 16 September 1620 with 102 passengers — about 41 of them religious Separatists from the Leiden Dutch exile community, the rest paying passengers — and 30 crew. The 66-day crossing landed at Provincetown Harbor on 21 November 1620. The Mayflower Compact was drafted aboard the ship the same day before the passengers disembarked.
Read the story →John White returned to the Roanoke colony on 18 August 1590 — three years after he had left for England to resupply — to find the entire 115-person colony gone. The houses were dismantled, the heavier equipment buried, and the word CROATOAN was carved on a post. White assumed the colonists had moved to the Croatoan tribe's island 50 miles south. He never returned to confirm. Their fate is unresolved.
Read the story →Saladin died at Damascus in 1193 and was buried in a simple wooden sarcophagus inside a small mausoleum north of the Umayyad Mosque. The substantial wooden tomb remained unchanged for seven centuries. Kaiser Wilhelm II visited in November 1898, was substantially moved, and paid for the marble tomb that now sits next to the original.
Read the story →Captain Robert Falcon Scott and four companions reached the South Pole on 17 January 1912, thirty-three days after Roald Amundsen's Norwegian expedition had got there first. All five died of exhaustion, frostbite, and starvation on the return march. Scott's body and his journal were found by a search party eight months later, eleven miles from the One Ton Depot they had been trying to reach.
Read the story →Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance was beset in the Weddell Sea pack ice on 19 January 1915 and was crushed and sank on 21 November 1915. The twenty-eight men reached uninhabited Elephant Island in April 1916; Shackleton then crossed 800 miles of the southern ocean in an open lifeboat to South Georgia. All twenty-eight survived. The wreck was located on the Weddell Sea floor in 2022.
Read the story →Pliny the Elder commanded the Roman naval fleet at Misenum on 24 August 79 AD when Vesuvius erupted. He ordered the fleet to evacuate civilians from the affected shore. He died on the beach at Stabiae approximately twenty hours later, probably of a heart attack triggered by inhaled volcanic gas. His nephew Pliny the Younger wrote the eyewitness account.
Read the story →Louis-Auguste Cyparis was the most famous of the two survivors of the 1902 Mount Pelée eruption. He was recruited by Barnum & Bailey's Circus in 1903, toured the United States as "the man who lived through doomsday" for the next eight years, and died in obscurity in Panama in 1929.
Read the story →Edward John Trelawny organised the August 1822 beach cremation of Percy Bysshe Shelley's drowned body at Viareggio. He kept Shelley's heart (rescued from the funeral pyre, supposedly) and spent the next sixty years substantially writing and substantially fabricating the canonical English version of the Shelley-Byron Italian Romantic decade.
Read the story →Hans Egede arrived in Greenland in 1721 expecting to find the lost Norse community. He found Inuit. Over the following fourteen years he learned the local Kalaallisut language well enough to compile the first European dictionary and grammar of any Inuit language — published in 1750 by his son Paul.
Read the story →When the Emperor Justinian closed the Athenian Academy in 529 AD, the surviving senior pagan philosophers led by Damascius migrated east to the court of the Sasanian Persian king Khusrau I. Khusrau received them with substantial honour, supported their philosophical work for several years, and eventually negotiated their safe return to the Roman Empire in 532.
Read the story →Strabo of Amaseia wrote the seventeen-book *Geographika* between approximately 20 BC and 23 AD. The work was substantially the last great Hellenistic geographical synthesis. Strabo disagreed with most of Eratosthenes's specific positions on geographical method, but cited him so extensively in the process of disagreeing that Strabo is now the principal surviving source for Eratosthenes's lost work.
Read the story →The 1815 Tambora eruption destroyed the small Sumbawan kingdom of Tambora and killed its entire population of approximately 12,000 people. The Tambora language — a Papuan rather than Austronesian tongue, unrelated to all other documented Indonesian languages — died with them. Only a 48-word vocabulary survives.
Read the story →The same Greek sponge divers who found the [Antikythera mechanism](/articles/antikythera-mechanism) in 1900–1901 brought up a 1.96-metre bronze statue of a young man. He is one of perhaps a dozen complete or near-complete classical Greek bronzes that have survived to the present. He has been in Athens for almost 125 years.
Read the story →The Eratosthenian Earth circumference (about 250,000 stadia, accurate to 2%) was the standard ancient figure but had been substantially undermined by a competing late-antique calculation by Posidonius. Columbus took the smaller Posidonian figure as his planning baseline. If he had used Eratosthenes's number, he would never have sailed.
Read the story →An earthquake struck Rhodes in approximately 226 BC, knocking down the Colossus, damaging substantial portions of the city walls, and producing widespread Aegean damage. The Hellenistic kings of Egypt, Macedon, Syria, and Pergamon all sent substantial financial and material aid — the first known case of coordinated international disaster diplomacy.
Read the story →[Stamford Raffles](/articles/stamford-raffles-singapore) signed the founding treaty for Singapore on 6 February 1819 and then sailed away. William Farquhar — a 49-year-old Scottish officer who had spent 24 years in the East India Company — was left in charge as the first Resident. He ran the colony for five years and was written out of its founding myth.
Read the story →The Antikythera mechanism was not the only thing on the 60 BC Greek shipwreck. Spongers in 1900 brought up four life-size bronze sculptures and a marble youth that nobody could date. Then they found the planetary computer. The other finds have been quietly upstaged for a century.
Read the story →Cholera had been an endemic disease of the Ganges delta for centuries. In 1817 it suddenly became a global pandemic — moving across Asia, the Middle East, East Africa, and eventually Europe over six years. The trigger was probably the Tambora eruption of 1815 disrupting Bengali agriculture two years earlier.
Read the story →In 529 the Emperor Justinian closed the philosophical schools of Athens. The Academy that traced its descent to Plato had operated for almost 900 years. Its surviving teachers, led by Damascius, walked east into Sasanian Persia. Five years later they walked back.
Read the story →Erik the Red was exiled from Iceland in 982 for killing two men. He spent three years exploring the next island to the west. He returned, organised a settler expedition of 25 ships, and gave the new territory the most successful real-estate name in medieval European history.
Read the story →The standard narrative of European maritime expansion credits Vasco da Gama with finding the sea route from Africa to India in 1498. The Portuguese sailed the route. The man who navigated them across the Indian Ocean was almost certainly an Arab named Ahmad ibn Majid.
Read the story →Before he killed Richard III at Bosworth and founded the Tudor dynasty, Henry Tudor was a 14-year-old Welsh nobleman fleeing England after the Yorkist victory of 1471. He spent the next fourteen years as a guest, prisoner, and pawn at the Breton court.
Read the story →Stamford Raffles spent a decade governing Java, founded Singapore, and was the most important English Asianist of his generation. He lost his Sumatran governorship, his fortune, four of his five children, and most of his collection in a single bad year.
Read the story →Hans Egede spent fifteen years on the Greenland coast looking for Norse Christians who had been dead for three centuries. He found ruins, ice, and Inuit.
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