20 Doomed Expeditions That Ended In Astonishing Rescues

Ernest Shackleton was attempting to traverse Antarctica by land. His vessel, Endurance, was crushed in the sea ice in the Weddell Sea. His crew of 28 men was marooned on drifting ice. Shackleton and five other crew members sailed in an open lifeboat all the way to South Georgia, then trekked overland across the mountainous interior to a whaling station. Several months later, he boarded a Chilean tugboat named the Yelcho to retrieve the rest of the crew. All 28 men were rescued, alive and well.

In 1846, 87 emigrants under the leadership of James Reed and George Donner began their journey to California. By taking a shortcut, known as the Hastings Cutoff, they lost precious time. An early snowstorm left the Donner party stranded near Truckee Lake, and without any means of sustenance, they killed their animals and ate their leather harnesses before resorting to eating one another. Exiled from the party earlier in the year, Reed rallied assistance from Sutter’s Fort, and four rescue expeditions traversed the Sierra Nevada between February and April 1847, bringing out 48 survivors. Another 39 perished.

General Umberto Nobile was piloting his airship Italia back from the North Pole in 1928 when it crashed onto Arctic sea ice. Nine men clung to a tent. The other six were carried off by the detached envelope and never seen again. Swedish pilot Einar Lundborg landed a plane on the ice and chose to fly out the injured Nobile first, not last. It took 48 days and six nations before the Soviet icebreaker Krassin reached the rest on July 12, 1928.

The Soviet scientist Otto Schmidt led an expedition on the reinforced cargo steamer Chelyuskin in an effort to traverse the Northern Sea Route in a single season. But ice crushed the ship near the Bering Strait, causing it to sink and killing one crewman. The remaining 104 people, including women and small children, established camp on a drifting piece of ice that they scraped flat enough to serve as a runway. Over the next few weeks, Soviet pilots, including Anatoly Liapidevsky, performed dozens of landing missions, and by spring, all 104 had been evacuated.

Captain Robert Bartlett commanded the Karluk, flagship of a 1913 Canadian Arctic expedition, and was on board when pack ice closed in and crushed the vessel close to Wrangel Island. He brought all the survivors safely ashore on the island, then undertook a 700-mile trek with Inuit hunter Kataktovik, not to Alaska but into Siberia, going first to Cape Jakan and then to Emma Harbour before making their way back across the Bering Strait to send word for help. That September, a rescue ship reached the 12 castaways still stranded there. Only 14 of the original 25 aboard the Karluk had survived.

In 1528, Pánfilo de Narváez brought about 300 men ashore in Florida for a colonizing expedition of 600 people. Disease and violent attacks decimated his party, and when a group of survivors constructed crude raft-like vessels to escape, they were wrecked on the shore of Texas instead. Eight years of enslavement and wandering later, only four remained alive. They were the expedition’s treasurer, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, two Spanish officers, and Estevanico, a Moorish slave who would become an interpreter with local tribes. In 1536, the four found their way to a Spanish slave-hunting party in Mexico, which escorted them back to safety.

In 1881, Adolphus Greely took 25 men to Ellesmere Island in the far north of Canada on a scientific mission. His supply ships did not arrive. He moved them to Cape Sabine, where most of them died of starvation and exposure over the winter. Subsequent medical reports showed the starving survivors had cut flesh from the dead to keep themselves alive, but Greely did not order this, as was later claimed. A Navy relief fleet found him and six companions alive under a collapsed tent. They were a few days from death, though one of the men died during the return voyage.

In 1879, George De Long took the Jeannette through the Bering Strait into the frozen north, looking for a warm current that supposedly opened the way to the North Pole. After 21 months in the pack ice, the Jeannette cracked open like a dry walnut shell, and the crew had to lug their lifeboats across the Arctic to reach the Lena Delta on the coast of Siberia. They were separated by a gale, and De Long was among those who perished, dying of starvation in the delta. But one boat, captained by Chief Engineer George Melville, made it to safety in a Siberian village. Though he himself was suffering from frostbite, Melville organized a search effort that rescued additional crewmen, and 13 of the 33 survived.

As Shackleton’s own ship, Endurance, was crushed and lost in the Weddell Sea, another party of ten men, led by Aeneas Mackintosh, was laying supplies across the other side of Antarctica in preparation for an expedition that would never take place. The crew of their ship Aurora had been swept to sea, and they were almost without equipment. Still, they laid every single depot, suffering from scurvy and frostbite. One of them, Arnold Spencer-Smith, succumbed to scurvy. Mackintosh and another man disappeared after the sea ice gave way underneath them. Shackleton eventually returned to the repaired Aurora to bring home the remaining seven men.

In 1921, a 23-year-old Iñupiaq seamstress named Ada Blackjack of Nome, Alaska, was among five people chosen by Vilhjalmur Stefansson to stake Canada’s claim to Wrangel Island, an expedition organized from afar. The three men in the party trekked to Siberia to find help when rescue ships didn’t show up as planned, and disappeared without a trace. Blackjack stayed behind with the fourth man. After she had nursed him until he died of scurvy, she survived alone on the island by learning to hunt and trap. Eventually, a relief schooner picked her up.

British meteorologist August Courtauld volunteered to man a solo weather station on Greenland’s ice cap as part of a survey for a future transatlantic air route. Blizzards buried his tent, and his fuel ran out in his last few weeks, plunging him into darkness. Two rescue attempts ended in failure before Gino Watkins, leader of the expedition, mounted a third and glimpsed the top of a flag sticking out of the snow. Courtauld had been alone for 150 days when he was dug out alive.

While on a voyage to the North Pole on the Polaris, assistant navigator George Tyson found himself stranded with 18 others when a storm split their ice floe away from the ship. They were kept fed by Inuit sealers and bear hunters Ebierbing and Hans Hendrik. Hendrik’s infant son, born aboard the ship months earlier rather than on the ice floe as later stories claimed, rode along in his mother’s parka. A sealing steamer later picked up all 19.

North Pole-1, the first station of its kind, was a four-man Soviet outpost dropped onto an ice floe in the Arctic under the command of Ivan Papanin. Ernst Krenkel, the radio operator, radioed the motherland every day while the floe drifted southward for several months. In the winter that followed, storms had reduced the floe to a small piece which cracked under their tent. Icebreakers from the Soviet Union broke through the pack ice off Greenland and brought out the four men with all their data.

Otto Nordenskjöld, a Swedish geologist, led a scientific expedition to the Antarctic Peninsula aboard the ship Antarctic. After the ship was crushed and sunk by ice, the 29-man crew split into three isolated groups spread out along the coast. The three groups survived a polar winter in stone-and-turf huts, eating penguin meat, before crossing the sea ice to reassemble. An Argentine gunboat located the group and took home the 28 survivors. The only member who did not survive had already died of heart disease.

The U.S. Navy gunboat Saginaw was commanded by Montgomery Sicard when she went aground on a coral reef at distant Kure Atoll, leaving 93 stranded on a minuscule island with barely enough provisions. Coxswain William Halford and four volunteers set out in a small open boat, rowing and sailing toward Honolulu for help. Weeks later, the boat capsized in the surf off Kauai, drowning four of the five. Halford crawled ashore and got word to the Hawaiian authorities, and Hawaiian authorities chartered a steamer to retrieve the other 88 men on the island.

The first attempt at a transatlantic flight was made by an American journalist, Walter Wellman. He took five other crewmen and a stray cat on board his airship, the America. When engine problems caused the America to sink low over open water, far away from land, wireless operator Jack Irwin sent out a radio signal in Morse Code to alert others. It was the first distress call ever sent from an aircraft in flight. The steamship Trent caught Irwin’s signal and rescued the six crewmen, as well as the cat.

Sir John Ross, a Scottish naval officer, sailed the Victory in search of the Northwest Passage, but the ship got stuck in the ice near the Boothia Peninsula for four winters. Ross had his men eat fresh seal meat and fat and wear fur like the Inuit, which helped them avoid scurvy. They eventually left the ship and dragged the boats north across the ice, where a whaler rescued them by accident. That whaler turned out to be Ross’s old ship, the Isabella.

Robert McClure sailed the Investigator out of the Bering Strait looking for Sir John Franklin, whose expedition had vanished searching for the Northwest Passage, and successfully charted the Northwest Passage, although he had to abandon his ship, which was quickly frozen in Mercy Bay, Banks Island, while his crew was afflicted with scurvy and starvation. A lieutenant came to him on a sledge from a second trapped Royal Navy ship, the Resolute, 160 miles away, and McClure’s men left the Investigator and walked to the Resolute. In other words, the Northwest Passage was completed on foot.

From 1872 to 1874, the Austro-Hungarian expedition led by Julius von Payer and Karl Weyprecht on board the Tegetthoff was trying to find a Northeast Passage above Russia. The ship got caught in the pack ice. As they drifted, they came upon an uncharted region called Franz Josef Land, which they mapped, then abandoned the ship. The 23 men dragged the boats over the ice for months, then rowed until they reached land and were rescued by a Russian schooner. One of the engineers had died from sickness.

Douglas Mawson, an Australian scientist, embarked upon the continent with two fellow researchers, Belgrave Ninnis and Xavier Mertz. Ninnis went missing, along with all their food and tents, after falling into a crevasse. Mertz died of illness a few weeks later. Alone, suffering severely from frostbite, Mawson walked for 100 miles until he reached Cape Denison, his base, only to see Aurora sail away without him. He and six crewmen who had remained behind looking for him were left stranded for a second Antarctic winter, until Aurora returned to take them home.

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