In May 1845 the Royal Navy sent Sir John Franklin into the Canadian Arctic with two bomb vessels, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, to complete the last unmapped link of the Northwest Passage. Every one of the 129 men aboard died. The ships were beset in the ice off King William Island in September 1846, were never freed, and were abandoned in April 1848. The survivors dragged boats and sledges south across the sea ice and the island toward the Back River and died strung out along the way, of cold, starvation, scurvy and the slow toxic accumulation of a flawed supply system. It remains the deadliest disaster in the history of polar exploration.
The expedition was, on paper, the best-equipped Arctic venture Britain had ever launched: three years of tinned provisions, steam engines, internal heating, libraries. It vanished into a region the Admiralty believed it understood and did not. No survivor was ever found, and no continuous written account survives beyond a single two-line note left under a cairn at Victory Point. That note, signed by Captains Francis Crozier and James Fitzjames, records that Franklin had died on 11 June 1847 and that 105 men deserted the ships on 22 April 1848 — the last dated word from anyone aboard.
What is known of the men’s final months comes not from the Navy but from the Inuit, who saw the survivors, who later found their bodies and their gear, and who told searchers plainly what had happened: men starving, men dying as they walked, and bodies that bore the marks of cannibalism among the last to live. The Hudson’s Bay surveyor John Rae carried that testimony back to Britain in 1854 and was vilified for it, most famously by Charles Dickens, who could not accept that British sailors might eat their dead and dismissed the Inuit as unreliable savages. The forensic record has since proved the Inuit account correct in nearly every particular. The same Inuit knowledge, carried in oral history for more than a century and a half, ultimately led searchers to the wrecks of Erebus in 2014 and Terror in 2016.
In 1881 the United States Army Signal Corps sent twenty-five men under First Lieutenant Adolphus Greely to Lady Franklin Bay, on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic, to run a scientific station for the First International Polar Year. The expedition’s research went well; its logistics did not. The relief ships that were meant to resupply the party failed two summers running, leaving the men to retreat south and then to slowly starve. Of the twenty-five, only six were rescued alive in June 1884. Nineteen died. The toll included one man shot on Greely’s order for repeated food theft, and several of the dead were later found with flesh cut from their bodies — cannibalism of the dead by the starving, which the forensic record supports and which the survivors never publicly admitted.
The scientific phase, from 1881 to 1883 at Fort Conger, was a success. The party gathered two years of meteorological, magnetic and astronomical data, and a sledging team reached a new Farthest North of 83°24′N. The disaster lay entirely in the supply chain. Under the plan, a ship would bring fresh provisions in 1882 and, if needed, again in 1883; if no ship came, the party was to retreat south by boat to meet relief near Smith Sound. Both ships failed — the first turned back by ice, the second crushed by it — and the contingency that should have saved the men instead delivered them to a barren shore with almost nothing to eat.
What followed was a winter of deliberate, documented dying. From a hut of stone and overturned boat at Cape Sabine the men starved through the dark, rationing scraps, boiling sealskin and lichen, and dying one after another from late 1883 into the summer of 1884. When the relief squadron finally reached them on 22 June 1884, it found seven men barely alive in a collapsed tent; one of those died days later. The survivors came home to honour and then to scandal, as the manner of the deaths — the execution, and the cannibalism — became public.
In July 1897 the Swedish engineer Salomon August Andrée tried to reach the North Pole by hydrogen balloon, lifting off from Danskøya (Danes Island) in Svalbard with two younger companions, the physicist and photographer Nils Strindberg and the engineer Knut Frænkel. All three died. The balloon, named Örnen (Eagle), stayed aloft for only about two and a half days before settling onto the pack ice on 14 July, roughly 300 miles short of the Pole. The men then walked and dragged sledges south across the drifting, breaking ice for nearly three months, reached the uninhabited island of Kvitøya in early October, and died there within days. Their fate was unknown for 33 years.
The expedition was a wager on a single unproven technology. Andrée had convinced the Swedish establishment — and the financier Alfred Nobel and King Oscar II among his backers — that a balloon equipped with sails and trailing drag-ropes could be steered across the polar basin in a few days, bypassing the years of man-hauling that had defeated every surface expedition. The drag-rope steering system did not work. It rested on a mistaken theory of how a balloon could be made to deviate from the wind, and during the launch much of the rope gear tore away, leaving the Eagle an ordinary balloon at the mercy of the wind almost from the start.
What happened afterward was reconstructed only because the men kept meticulous diaries and Strindberg kept photographing to the end. On 5 August 1930 the Norwegian sealing ship Bratvaag, hunting walrus off the long-ignored Kvitøya, stumbled on the last camp: a boat, bones, journals, and Strindberg’s exposed film, frozen and preserved for a third of a century. Some 93 of roughly 240 negatives were salvaged and developed in Stockholm. The recovered diaries and photographs make Andrée’s the rare doomed expedition that documented its own slow death almost to the final day, and the cause of that death — trichinosis from polar-bear meat, cold, exhaustion, or some combination — remains debated to this day.
In 1879 the U.S. Navy lieutenant George Washington De Long took the steam barque USS Jeannette north through the Bering Strait, chasing a theory that a warm Pacific current would open a navigable route to an ice-free sea at the top of the world. The theory was false. About 20 of the 33 men aboard died, including De Long himself. The ship was beset in the pack ice in September 1879, drifted helplessly for nearly two years, and was finally crushed and sunk north of Siberia on 13 June 1881. The survivors then hauled three boats and sledges south across the ice toward the Siberian mainland, were scattered by a gale off the Lena Delta, and died in ones and twos of cold and starvation in one of the most desolate corners of the Arctic.
The expedition was financed by James Gordon Bennett Jr., the proprietor of the New York Herald, the same press baron who had sent Stanley to find Livingstone. Its scientific premise came from the German geographer August Petermann, who held that the warm Kuro Siwo current flowed north through the Bering Strait and dissolved the polar ice into an “open polar sea.” Unknown to De Long, the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey had already concluded the current had no such effect. The Jeannette sailed into the pack on the strength of a hypothesis that the available science had already refuted.
What the disaster produced, against the men’s intentions, was knowledge. De Long kept his journal almost to his death, and it was recovered from the snow of the Lena Delta the following spring, fixing the record of the party’s final weeks. And in 1884 wreckage from the Jeannette was found frozen into an ice floe off southwestern Greenland — on the far side of the Arctic — proving that a current carried ice clear across the polar sea from Siberia. That single observation inspired Fridtjof Nansen to design the Fram and deliberately freeze a ship into the same drift, turning the Jeannette‘s destruction into the foundation of a more successful method of polar travel.
In August 1897 the Belgian naval officer Adrien de Gerlache sailed from Antwerp aboard the Belgica, a converted Norwegian whaler, with a crew of 19 drawn from five nations, intending to survey the Antarctic coast and press toward the South Magnetic Pole. In March 1898 the ship became trapped in the pack ice of the Bellingshausen Sea and could not be freed before winter. The Belgica thus became the first vessel ever to overwinter in Antarctic waters — not by design that the crew welcomed, but as a trap. Locked in the ice through the months-long polar night, the men were struck by scurvy, paralyzing depression and, in at least one case, insanity. Two died: one washed overboard before the ship was beset, one of a heart condition during the winter. The rest survived, and in March 1899, after sawing and blasting a channel through the floe, the Belgica broke free and limped home.
The expedition’s place in history is double-edged. It opened the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration and proved that humans could survive a winter on the frozen Southern Ocean. It also served as a clinical demonstration of what that winter does to the unprepared body and mind: the slow assault of vitamin deficiency, the psychological collapse brought on by perpetual darkness and confinement, and the near-disintegration of a command structure as its officers fell ill. The ship was saved less by its nominal leadership than by two junior members — the American surgeon Frederick Cook and the young Norwegian first mate Roald Amundsen. As de Gerlache and the captain, Georges Lecointe, were laid low, Cook and Amundsen took charge, forcing the crew to eat fresh seal and penguin meat against the commander’s distaste, organizing the men against despair, and devising the scheme that finally cut the ship out of the ice. The Belgica is therefore both the first Antarctic winter and a case study in how a polar party survives one: by fresh food, enforced activity and the refusal to surrender to the dark.