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 May 1596 the Dutch navigator Willem Barentsz set out on his third Arctic voyage, seeking a northeast passage over the top of Russia to the riches of Asia. The ship, captained by Jacob van Heemskerck with Barentsz as chief pilot, was trapped in the ice off the northeastern coast of Novaya Zemlya — Nova Zembla — in the late summer of 1596 and could not be freed. The party of 17 was forced to overwinter on the Arctic shore, building a timber lodge they called Het Behouden Huys, the Saved House, from the wreckage of their own ship. It was the first time Europeans are known to have survived a winter in the high Arctic. When the ice still held the ship the following June, the survivors abandoned it and set out south in two small open boats. Five men died, including Barentsz himself, who succumbed on 20 June 1597, days into the boat journey. Twelve survived to reach the Russian mainland and, eventually, Amsterdam.
The voyage failed at its object: there was no navigable northeast passage at that latitude, and the route to Asia was not found then or for centuries. What the expedition achieved instead was the demonstration — paid for with five lives and a winter of bears, cold and scurvy — that the polar night was survivable, and a meticulous written record of how. The carpenter Gerrit de Veer kept a journal that became one of the most famous accounts in the history of exploration, the first detailed European description of an Arctic overwintering, from the building of the house to the day Barentsz died.
The expedition is remembered chiefly through that record and through the Saved House itself, which stood frozen on the Novaya Zemlya coast for nearly three centuries until a Norwegian expedition rediscovered it in 1871, its contents — clocks, books, tools, the men’s possessions — preserved by the cold almost exactly as they had left them. Barentsz did not return, but his name endures on the sea he charted at the cost of his life, the Barents Sea.
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.
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.