In January 1912 a five-man party of Robert Falcon Scott’s British Antarctic (Terra Nova) Expedition reached the South Pole and found that Roald Amundsen’s Norwegian team had beaten them there by about five weeks. All five died on the return march across the Ross Ice Shelf. Petty Officer Edgar Evans collapsed and died at the foot of the Beardmore Glacier on 17 February; Captain Lawrence Oates, crippled by frostbite, walked out of the tent to his death around 16 March; and Scott, Dr Edward Wilson and Lieutenant Henry Bowers died in their tent at the end of March, pinned by a blizzard roughly 11 miles short of a supply depot that held the food and fuel to save them.
The expedition itself was large and well-financed: a shore party of sixty-five men, a scientific programme of lasting value, and a transport plan built around motor sledges, Siberian ponies, dogs and, in the final stage, men hauling their own sledges. The polar journey was the smallest and most exposed thread of that effort. The five men dragged their sledge some 800 miles to the Pole and turned back into deteriorating weather, weakening bodies, and a depot system that left them with too little margin at exactly the wrong moments.
Their bodies, diaries and photographs were found the following spring. Scott’s journals, recovered from the final tent on 12 November 1912, made the deaths public in extraordinary detail and turned the disaster into a national legend of stoic sacrifice. A century of reassessment has been less reverent, tracing the deaths not to a single villain but to compounding decisions — a fifth man added to a four-man ration plan, an over-reliance on human muscle, depots placed short or left thin, and a relief that never came — set against a March on the Barrier that was, by later analysis, abnormally and lethally cold.
In 1913 the brigantine Karluk, flagship of Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s Canadian Arctic Expedition, was beset in the ice of the Beaufort Sea while trying to reach a rendezvous at Herschel Island. The ship drifted helplessly for months and was crushed and sunk on 10–11 January 1914. Of the twenty-five people aboard, eleven died; fourteen survived. The survivors lived because the ship’s captain, the Newfoundland ice master Robert Bartlett, organized the abandoned party on the ice, marched most of it to Wrangel Island, and then walked some 700 miles across the frozen Chukchi Sea and Siberian coast with the Inuit hunter Kataktovik to summon rescue.
The disaster began with a decision by the expedition’s leader. Soon after the Karluk was beset in September 1913, Stefansson left the ship with a small party, stating he was going to hunt caribou, and did not return; the drifting ice carried the Karluk away, and Stefansson devoted himself to the expedition’s continental work, leaving the ship’s company under Bartlett. Whether his departure was a genuine hunt overtaken by the drift or an abandonment of a vessel he judged doomed has been argued ever since. Either way, the twenty-five people left aboard a ship he had chosen — an old, underpowered whaler poorly suited to heavy pack ice — were on their own.
The deaths came in clusters. Two parties that struck out independently across the ice after the sinking vanished or perished; later searches found remains of one group on Herald Island. Three more died on or near Wrangel Island, two of illness traced to spoiled rations and one in violent and never-explained circumstances. Bartlett’s trek brought help, and on 7 September 1914 the survivors were taken off Wrangel Island, including the Inuit family — the hunter Kuraluk, the seamstress Kiruk, and their two small daughters — whose hunting and skin-work were central to keeping the party alive.
In November 1912 the Australian geologist Douglas Mawson set out from Cape Denison in Antarctica with two companions — Lieutenant Belgrave Ninnis of the Royal Fusiliers and the Swiss ski champion Xavier Mertz — to sledge east across Adélie Land as the Far Eastern Party of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition. Two of the three died. On 14 December 1912, more than 300 miles out, Ninnis broke through the snow lid of a crevasse with the rear sledge and was lost into it, taking with him the strongest dog team, the tent, and almost all the party’s food. Mertz died on the return march around 8 January 1913, most likely poisoned by vitamin A from the dog livers the two starving men had been eating. Mawson covered the last roughly 100 miles alone, half-dead, and reached base on 8 February 1913 — only to find the relief ship had sailed hours earlier, condemning him to another year in Antarctica.
The journey is remembered, accurately, as one of the great ordeals of solo survival in polar history, but the verdict on the party itself is plain: a single crevasse fall, in a region riddled with hidden crevasses, destroyed the expedition’s margin in an instant and killed two of its three men. Everything that followed — the starvation, Mertz’s death, Mawson’s skeletal crawl home — flowed from that one collapse and from the decision, forced by it, to keep the men alive on a diet that was quietly poisoning them.
What makes the case unusually legible is that Mawson kept his diary throughout, recording the loss of Ninnis, Mertz’s decline and his own disintegration in clinical detail. His account, together with later medical analysis, allows the mechanism to be traced precisely: not a single villain but a chain — a crevasse, a catastrophic loss of supplies, an improvised survival diet, and a poison no one in 1912 knew to fear. Mertz and Mawson ate the livers of their Greenland huskies, and those livers carried concentrations of vitamin A high enough to be lethal.
In August 1914 Sir Ernest Shackleton sailed from England aboard the Endurance to attempt the first crossing of the Antarctic continent, from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea by way of the South Pole. The expedition never set foot on the route. Yet of the 28 men aboard Endurance, not one died. The ship was beset in the Weddell Sea pack ice in January 1915, drifted helplessly for ten months, was crushed, and sank on 21 November 1915. The men then survived for almost a year on the ice and the sea — camping on drifting floes, sailing three open boats to Elephant Island, and watching as Shackleton and five others crossed 1,300 kilometres of the Southern Ocean in a 6.9-metre lifeboat to fetch help. It is the archetypal survival epic, and it is included here not as a disaster but as the rare counter-case: the doomed expedition whose people were not doomed.
The crossing itself was a total failure. The Endurance never reached the Antarctic mainland; the South Pole was never approached; the continent was not crossed until 1958, by a different expedition. By any measure of stated objective the expedition achieved nothing it set out to do. What it achieved instead was the preservation of every life under conditions that had killed comparable parties outright — the men of Greely, of the Jeannette, of Franklin. The difference was not luck alone. It was a sustained, deliberate refusal to let the party fracture, hoard, despair or split, enforced by a leader whose single surviving objective, once the ship was gone, was that everyone come home.
This account does not extend to the expedition’s other half. Shackleton’s plan required a second ship, Aurora, to lay supply depots from the Ross Sea side for a crossing party that never came; that Ross Sea party lost three men and is recorded under its own case file. On the Weddell Sea side — the Endurance and her 28 — the toll was zero, and the relevant question is how.
On 25 May 1928 the Italian semi-rigid airship Italia, commanded by the engineer-general Umberto Nobile, crashed onto the Arctic pack ice roughly 120 kilometres northeast of Nordaustlandet in the Svalbard archipelago, while returning from the North Pole. Of the sixteen men aboard, ten were thrown onto the ice when the control gondola struck and shattered; one of them, the mechanic Vincenzo Pomella, was killed on impact. The other six were carried away inside the still-buoyant envelope, which rose, drifted off, and was never found. The survivors on the ice — several injured, including Nobile with a broken leg and arm — salvaged a radio, a tent and some food, and waited. The rescue that followed lasted seven weeks and cost more lives than the crash itself, including that of Roald Amundsen, the most accomplished polar explorer of the age, who disappeared while flying out to search for the men he had quarrelled with two years before.
The Italia was the climax of a brief, doomed enthusiasm for reaching the poles by airship. Nobile had already flown over the North Pole in 1926 aboard the Norge, an expedition led by Amundsen on which the two men had clashed bitterly over credit. The Italia was Nobile’s own command, an Italian state-backed bid to repeat and surpass that flight with scientific observations. It reached the Pole on 24 May 1928 but could not land in the wind, turned back, and was forced down by icing and a loss of control on the return leg — a triumph turned, in hours, into a survival ordeal on a drifting floe, watched by the world over the new medium of shortwave radio.
The death toll falls into two ledgers. The crash and its aftermath killed Pomella, the six men in the lost envelope, and Malmgren, who died on the ice during a desperate march for help. The rescue itself killed others: Amundsen and the five men of his French flying-boat crew vanished without trace, and further rescuers died in crashes. Eight of the original sixteen survived, lifted off by the Soviet icebreaker Krasin and by aircraft. The episode ended the age of polar airships, ruined Nobile’s reputation in Fascist Italy for two decades, and became a lasting study in how a rescue, badly coordinated and driven by competing nations and egos, can multiply a disaster rather than contain it.
The Ross Sea party was the forgotten half of Ernest Shackleton’s 1914–17 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. While Shackleton attempted to cross Antarctica from the Weddell Sea, this second party, operating from the opposite Ross Sea coast under Captain Aeneas Mackintosh, was to lay a chain of supply depots southward across the Ross Ice Shelf to the foot of the Beardmore Glacier, so that Shackleton’s crossing team would have food and fuel for the final stretch to McMurdo Sound. The depots were laid. The crossing never came: Shackleton’s ship Endurance was crushed in the Weddell Sea pack before his party ever set foot on the continent. Three men of the Ross Sea party died completing depots for a journey that no one would ever make. Of the men stranded on the Antarctic side, seven survived and three did not.
The party’s ordeal was compounded by the loss of its ship. On 7 May 1915 a gale tore the Aurora from her moorings off Cape Evans and drove her out to sea, locked in the pack, leaving ten men ashore with minimal supplies, clothing and equipment. Marooned, under-provisioned, and unaware that the crossing party would never come, those men nonetheless judged that lives depended on the depots being laid. They sledged south through two seasons, improvising clothing and gear, hauling loads in temperatures and conditions that broke their health, and completed the depot chain to Mount Hope at the foot of the Beardmore. The cost was severe: scurvy, frostbite, snow-blindness and exhaustion ground the men down on journeys lasting months.
Arnold Spencer-Smith, the expedition’s chaplain and photographer, collapsed with scurvy on the return from the farthest depots and died on the ice on 9 March 1916, carried on a sledge to the end. Two months later, on 8 May 1916, Mackintosh and Victor Hayward walked out from Hut Point toward Cape Evans across newly formed, unstable sea ice during a blizzard, against advice, and were never seen again — almost certainly drowned when the ice broke up. The survivors were rescued in January 1917 by the refitted Aurora, with Shackleton himself aboard. They learned that the depots they had nearly died to lay had been needed by no one. It remains one of polar history’s bleakest demonstrations of effort and sacrifice rendered futile by a failure half a continent away.
The Brusilov expedition was a Russian attempt, begun in 1912, to sail the Northeast Passage — the Northern Sea Route across the top of Russia from the Atlantic to the Pacific — aboard the schooner Svyataya Anna (St. Anna) under Lieutenant Georgy Brusilov. It failed catastrophically. The ship sailed too late in the season, was beset by ice in the Kara Sea off the Yamal Peninsula in October 1912, and was never freed. Locked in the pack, she drifted helplessly northward for nearly two years, carried far beyond her intended route to about 83° North, near Franz Josef Land. Of the roughly twenty-four people aboard, only two survived: the navigator Valerian Albanov and the sailor Alexander Konrad, who walked out across the ice in 1914. Brusilov, the ship, and everyone who stayed with her vanished and were never seen again. Around twenty-two people died.
The expedition was undone before it began by poor planning and a late start, and then by the long, grinding entrapment that followed. Through 1913 the Kara Sea did not release the ship; by 1914 she had drifted into latitudes far from any shipping, and scurvy had taken hold among captain and crew. Judging the ship doomed to drift indefinitely, the navigator Valerian Albanov asked to be relieved of his duties and to leave on foot. Brusilov agreed, and in April 1914 Albanov set out across the moving pack toward Franz Josef Land with thirteen other men, hauling improvised sledges and kayaks.
The march was a ninety-day ordeal across some of the most treacherous terrain on earth — shifting floes, open leads, pressure ridges, and a sea ice that drifted them backward even as they walked forward. The party fractured and died by stages; some turned back, others were lost. Only Albanov and Konrad reached land, at Cape Flora on Northbrook Island, where by chance they were rescued by the Svyatoy Foka, the ship of the separate, also-stricken Sedov expedition, in 1914. Albanov carried out the ship’s logbook and his own diary, the only substantial records of the expedition to survive, later published as In the Land of White Death. The Svyataya Anna and all who remained aboard, including Brusilov and the 22-year-old nurse Yerminia Zhdanko, were never found. A century later, in 2010, searchers on Franz Josef Land recovered remains and artifacts thought to belong to the lost escape party, the first physical trace of the expedition’s fate.
Six men of Robert Falcon Scott’s British Antarctic (Terra Nova) Expedition, cut off by pack ice on the coast of Victoria Land in early 1912, dug a snow cave on a barren rock they later named Inexpressible Island, endured the Antarctic winter on seal and penguin meat, and then walked roughly 200 miles back to the expedition base — and every one of them lived. The party was led by Lieutenant Victor Campbell of the Royal Navy and comprised the surgeon and naturalist George Murray Levick, the geologist Raymond Priestley, and three ratings: Petty Officer George Abbott, Petty Officer Frank Browning and Able Seaman Harry Dickason. Unlike Scott’s polar party, dying that same season on the far side of the Ross Ice Shelf, the Northern Party suffered and survived intact.
The ordeal was not the goal of any plan; it was the consequence of one failing. The party had been set ashore at Evans Coves, near Terra Nova Bay, in January 1912 to do a few weeks of geological survey, with provisions sized to match. When the ship Terra Nova could not return through the ice to retrieve them — twice it tried and was driven off — the six were left on an open coast as the brief Antarctic autumn closed, with sledging rations meant for weeks and a winter of darkness ahead.
What followed was an exercise in disciplined improvisation. The men hunted seals and penguins while any could be found, killing an estimated 120 penguins and 15 seals; they excavated a cave roughly 12 feet by 9 in a hard snowdrift, lit and heated it with blubber lamps and a blubber stove, and lay through the polar night in filth, smoke and near-starvation, rationing each day’s food and reading aloud to hold morale. Dysentery and enteritis, probably from tainted meat thawed in contaminated vessels, ran through the group, and Browning was reduced to near-collapse. When the light returned, they harnessed themselves and hauled south, crossing the treacherous Drygalski Ice Tongue, and reached the safety of the main base in early November 1912 — emaciated, scurvy-touched, but all six alive.
In 1913 an American scientific expedition sailed north to reach and explore “Crocker Land,” a vast Arctic landmass that the explorer Robert Peary had reported sighting in 1906 from the far north of the Canadian archipelago. The land did not exist. The party, led by Donald Baxter MacMillan and sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History, the American Geographical Society and the University of Illinois, crossed hundreds of miles of polar sea ice in the spring of 1914 toward a horizon that proved to be a mirage — a Fata Morgana thrown up by the ice — and then could not get home. A succession of relief ships failed or were frozen in, and the men were stranded in northwest Greenland for four years, finally extracted in 1917. One human life was taken on the ice, not by the cold but by a member of the party: the ensign Fitzhugh Green shot dead the Inuit guide Piugaattoq, an experienced hunter who had correctly judged the land to be an illusion.
The expedition’s central error was epistemic. It committed years, money and lives to verifying a sighting that the man who made it appears to have known was false — Peary recorded no land in his diary at the time he later claimed to have seen Crocker Land — and it pressed deep onto breaking spring sea ice in pursuit of an image that the Inuit on the party identified immediately as poojok, mist. The science the expedition gathered along the way, in geology, ethnography and natural history, was substantial and is preserved in major museum collections. But its defining facts are a phantom continent, a four-year stranding, and a killing on the ice for which no one was ever charged.
From a base at Etah, Greenland, the sledging march struck out across the frozen ocean in spring 1914; by 27 April MacMillan had to concede that the land they had followed for days was not there. On the return, having sent Piugaattoq and Green ahead together, Green shot the Inuk hunter and reported him dead. The men then waited out year after year as ships sent to bring them home were turned back or trapped, until Robert Bartlett’s Neptune finally carried the last of them out in 1917.