What are the origins of this fun-filled festive custom?
The Terra Nova Expedition of 1910–1913 to Antarctica ended in disaster when Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his entire party of five perished on the return journey from the geographic South Pole. A Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen had beaten the intrepid British explorers to the pole by 34 days.
Swedish polar explorer Salomon August Andrée died along with his companions, engineer Knut Frænkel and photographer Nils Strindberg, after the hydrogen balloon they were traveling in descended onto pack ice and left them stranded in sub-zero temperatures. They'd begun their attempt to reach the geographic North Pole on July 11, 1897, and most likely perished in October of that year.
One of the most notorious episodes in American pioneering history took place over the winter of 1846–1847 in the Sierra Nevada mountain range when a wagon train party from the Midwest became stranded. Some of the party resorted to cannibalism to survive, eating body parts of those who had succumbed to starvation, sickness, and extreme cold. The ill-fated expedition is named after George Donner, who led the party and died along with most of the immigrants.
The infamous British voyage of Arctic exploration that departed from England in 1845 has gone down in history as "Franklin's lost expedition" after the vessels HMS Erebus and HMS Terror under the overall command of Captain Sir John Franklin became icebound for over a year while seeking a navigable route through the Northwest Passage. Franklin and nearly two dozen crew died onsite. The rest of the survivors set out for the Canadian mainland and disappeared. In all, a total of 129 officers and men perished in the icy cold wilderness.
Explorers Robert O'Hara Burke and William John Wills met their deaths along with several others while attempting to cross Australia from Melbourne in the south to the Gulf of Carpentaria in the north, a distance of around 3,250 km (approximately 2,000 mi). The sole survivor of the expedition, an Irish soldier named John King, was hailed as a hero by the admiring colonists of Victoria and became somewhat of a celebrity.
One of the darkest chapters in mountaineering history took place on May 10–11, 1996 when eight climbers caught in a fierce blizzard died on Mount Everest while attempting to descend from the summit. The storm slammed into the peak when no less than 30 people were making their way down through the "Death Zone"—the area above 7,500 m (24,606 ft) where the air lacks the oxygen to support life for long periods. The tragedy received widespread publicity and raised questions about the commercialization of Everest.
It was supposed to have served as a showcase for Soviet space travel technology, but the launch on November 3, 1957 of Sputnik 2— the second spacecraft propelled into Earth—doomed the life of its sole passenger, a dog named Laika. No capacity for her recovery and survival was planned, and she died of overheating or asphyxiation caused by a air conditioning malfunction during the spacecraft's fourth orbit of Earth. The little stray from Moscow is memorialized in the form of a statue and plaque at Star City, Russia, the Russian Cosmonaut training facility.
British explorer Colonel Percy Fawcett disappeared in 1925 along with his eldest son, Jack, and one of Jack's companions during an expedition to seek out an ancient lost city supposedly set deep in the jungles of Brazil. The ironically named Dead Horse Camp was his last known location. The remains of all three have never been found.
On July 8, 1879, the USS Jeannette and its crew of 33 set sail from San Francisco in a quest to reach the North Pole by pioneering a route from the Pacific Ocean through the Bering Strait. Instead, the vessel was trapped by ice and drifted for nearly two years before she was crushed and sunk north of the Siberian coast. Twenty crew died. But incredibly, 13 survived the harrowing ordeal. Pictured is the steam yacht Jeannette (later USS Jeannette) at Le Havre, France, in 1878, prior to her departure for San Francisco, California.
The Ziegler Polar Expedition of 1903–1905, named after William Ziegler who financed the trip, was another bold attempt to reach the North Pole, and another that ultimately failed: the expedition party remained stranded north of the Arctic Circle for two years before being rescued. Amazingly, all but one man survived. Among the crew was Anthony Fiala, a photographer who two years earlier had been a member of the Baldwin-Ziegler Polar Expedition and was responsible for making the National Geographic Society's first film using a Bioscope motion camera. The Baldwin-Ziegler Polar Expedition was also thwarted by ice and bad weather.
How could 50,000 men simply vanish in a desert? It's a question historians have been trying to answer since antiquity. Around 524 BCE, the army of Persian King Cambyses II disappeared in the Egyptian desert. One theory suggests the army was engulfed by a huge sandstorm and decimated. Another argues that the lost army of Cambyses II did not disappear, but was defeated. In 2009, NBC News reported that bones, jewelry, and weapons found in the desert could be the remains of the missing infantry.
Majorcan mariner and explorer Jaume Ferrer set sail from the Balearic island in August 1346 in search of Africa's legendary "Golden River." The outcome of his quest and his fate are unknown. Tantalizingly, the only reference to the expedition is depicted on the famed Catalan Atlas of 1375, which clearly shows his vessel approaching the west African coast.
The Bass Strait that separates Tasmania from the Australian mainland was named in 1793 for British naval surgeon and explorer George Bass. In February 1803, Bass and his crew departed Port Jackson bound for Tahiti and were never seen again.
German explorer Ludwig Leichhardt was quite the celebrity for his exploration of northern and central Australia in the mid-1800s. But in 1848, Leichhardt and his party vanished shortly after setting out on an ambitious trek from the Condamine River in Queensland to the Swan River in Perth, on the other side of the country. No trace of the expedition ever surfaced until 1900 when a tiny brass plate reading "LUDWIG LEICHHARDT 1848" was found near Sturt Creek, between the Tanami and Great Sandy deserts, just inside Western Australia from the border with the Northern Territory. It's now part of the National Museum of Australia collection.
American travel writer and adventurer Richard Halliburton is famous for his audacious swims along the Nile, the Panama Canal, and the Grand Canal of Venice. But it's his fatal decision to attempt a voyage across the Pacific Ocean from Hong Kong to San Francisco in the Chinese junk Sea Dragon that Halliburton is best remembered. At some point during the journey in March 1939, the vessel capsized. On October 5, 1939, Halliburton was declared dead. His body was never recovered.
Ill-planned and ill-executed, the Brusilov Expedition of 1912 was a Russian maritime undertaking to explore and map a route from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific via a northeast passage known as the Northern Sea Route. Led by Georgy Brusilov, who captained the Svyataya Anna, the expedition disappeared without a trace, the fate of the vessel and its crew unknown to this day. Pictured is the Svyataya Anna before departing for her last trip.
Led by the distinguished Australian geologist and polar explorer Douglas Mawson, the Australasian Antarctic Expedition (1911-1914) successfully explored and charted vast areas of previously unexplored regions, collected geological and botanical samples, and made important scientific observations, but not without mishap. The expedition was marred by the deaths of two of its members, leaving Mawson, their sledding partner, to make an arduous solo trek back to base, where he missed his ship, the SY Aurora, thus spending an extra 12 months at Cape Denison along with a relief party of six. Pictured: Douglas Mawson at Cape Denison.
Surely one of the most far-fetched and impractical expeditions ever devised, the Darién Scheme of the late 1690s was an attempt by 2,000 or so Scottish pioneers, among them traders, financiers, and former officers and soldiers, to establish New Caledonia, a colony on the Isthmus of Darién (today's Isthmus of Panama). Disease, lack of food, and attacks from hostile Spaniards eventually led to the evacuation of the colonialists. Of the total 2,500 settlers that set off, just a few hundred survived.
Did Mali seamen become the first to cross the Atlantic Ocean and reach the New World before Christopher Columbus? Early Arabic histories of West Africa recall voyages by mariners during the reign of Mansa Abubakari II, King of Mali in 1300-1311. Abubakari sent two large fleets westward across the Atlantic, commanding the second one in 1311. Was this a possible instance of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact? We will never know. They never returned home.
Vasily Perovsky was an imperial Russian general and statesman who set out from Orenburg in October 1839 with 5,000 men intent on conquering his central Asian foe. Problem is he met an unusually cold winter, lost most of his camels, and was forced into retreat after barely making it halfway.
In 1497, Giovanni Caboto, whose anglicized named was John Cabot, commanded the earliest-known European exploration of coastal North America since the Vikings. Based in Bristol, England, the fêted Cabot was then commissioned in May 1498 to undertake a third voyage to the region. Last sighted off the coast of Ireland, Cabot and his fleet were never seen again, presumed lost at sea.
Gaspar and Miguel Corte-Real were two brothers who participated in various exploratory voyages sponsored by the Portuguese Crown. In 1501, Gaspar Corte-Real reached what we today call Newfoundland. Two of the expedition's three ships made the return trip to Portugal, but the vessel carrying Corte-Real was lost. His brother Miguel attempted to find him in 1502, but he too disappeared off the map. Neither was ever again heard from.
English explorer and adventurer Humphrey Gilbert set sail in June 1583 with a fleet of five vessels bound for North America and where he succeeded in annexing Newfoundland as a English colony. But during the return voyage to the British Isles, his ship foundered near the Azores with the loss of all lives.
The Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1913–1916 was organized and led by Icelandic-American explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Three ships, the Mary Sachs, the Alaska, and the Karluk (pictured) were employed. When the Karluk became marooned in ice, Stefansson and a small party disembarked the vessel leaving 25 crew onboard. The Karluk drifted and was eventually crushed by ice and sunk. In all, 11 men died before rescue.
In 2000, Ranulph Fiennes, generally regarded as Britain's greatest living explorer, attempted to walk solo and unsupported to the North Pole. The expedition failed when his sleds fell through weak ice and Fiennes was forced to pull them out by hand, resulting in severe frostbite.
Sources: (Historic UK) (NBC News) (National Geographic) (Smithsonian Magazine) (JSTOR Daily)
In 1980, Chinese biochemist and explorer Peng Jiamu vanished without trace while leading an expedition to Lop Nur, a dried up former lake in China. He had left a note indicating that he was going to look for water, but was never seen again.
"Houston, we've had a problem." Apollo 13 was to be the third mission to land on the Moon. But an explosion in one of the oxygen tanks crippled the spacecraft during flight and the mission had to be aborted. The crew were forced to orbit the Moon and return to the Earth without landing.
Some of history's greatest feats of exploration are noted for their failure rather than success. Heroic attempts to discover new lands or chart unknown territory have resulted in several lost treks, ill-fated voyages, and doomed expeditions, with many an intrepid explorer never seen again.
Click through and discover the quests that went horribly wrong.
Spanish explorer Panfilo de Narvaez's disastrous 1527 expedition to the New World resulted in his own demise and that of nearly 600 crew after a hurricane struck the fleet, leaving 300 survivors to trek overland where most fell victim to attacks by indigenous nations or disease. Only four of the original party survived by making an astonishing eight-year journey by foot to present-day Mexico City.
Historical expeditions with unfortunate outcomes
Journeys that turned out to be disastrous
LIFESTYLE Journeys
Some of history's greatest feats of exploration are noted for their failure rather than success. Heroic attempts to discover new lands or chart unknown territory have resulted in several lost treks, ill-fated voyages, and doomed expeditions, with many an intrepid explorer never seen again.
Click through and discover the quests that went horribly wrong.