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 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 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 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 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 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.