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 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.
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.