Left alone on an Arctic island with a dying man and a cat, she taught herself to survive for two years
A young Iñupiat seamstress who joined an expedition to Wrangel Island to pay for her son’s medical care, and became its only survivor after the four…
An Arab envoy whose eyewitness account of a Viking funeral survived a thousand years by accident
Sent by the Abbasid caliph on a diplomatic mission to the Volga region, he recorded one of the only eyewitness accounts of Viking traders in the…
Climbed a volcano further than anyone had gone and came back seeing nature as one connected system
A Prussian naturalist who spent five years travelling Latin America measuring everything he could, climbing higher than any recorded person before…
Reached the forbidden city of Lhasa at 55 disguised as a beggar, after four months walking in winter
An opera singer and anarchist who became a Buddhist scholar, lived in a Himalayan cave for two years and, in 1924, walked into Tibet’s capital as the…
The first person to walk in space, whose suit swelled so much he nearly could not get back inside
A pilot and painter who floated outside his capsule for twelve minutes in 1965, then landed in a snowbound forest and spent two nights waiting for…
Shipwrecked and enslaved, he spent eight years walking home and returned arguing for indigenous rights
Shipwrecked on the Gulf coast in 1528, he lived for years as a captive, trader and healer among indigenous peoples of what is now the American South…
Flew the Atlantic alone in 1932, refused to be a passenger in her own life, and vanished over the Pacific
A social worker who scraped together money for flying lessons, became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, and disappeared in 1937 near…
A typist from Hull who flew solo to Australia in a second-hand biplane with a hundred hours of experience
She learned to fly at weekends, qualified as Britain’s first woman ground engineer, and in 1930 flew 11,000 miles from Croydon to Darwin in nineteen…
First woman to reach the North Pole over the ice, then the first to cross Antarctica
A dyslexic schoolteacher from Minnesota who struggled through school, then walked and skied to both poles and across the whole of Antarctica with a…
Left her husband and children in Boston and cycled around the world for a bet and a new name
A Latvian-Jewish immigrant and mother of three who, in 1894, set off to become the first woman to cycle around the world, funding the trip through…
Made the worst journey in the world for three penguin eggs and spent his life asking what it was for
Too short-sighted to be accepted, he paid his way onto Scott’s last expedition, survived a winter march in temperatures below minus 60, and wrote the…
Thrown from a moving train and left on the tracks, she climbed Everest on a prosthetic leg two years later
A national-level volleyball player who lost her leg after robbers pushed her from a train in 2011, decided in hospital to climb Everest, and reached…
Built the balloon that reached the stratosphere, then the submarine that reached the ocean floor
A Swiss physicist who designed a sealed balloon capsule to reach the stratosphere in 1931, then applied the same pressure-vessel thinking to invent…
Flew a balloon and then a solar plane around the world, continuing a family habit of extremes
A psychiatrist from a family of extreme scientists, he co-piloted the first balloon to circle the globe nonstop in 1999 and later the first…
A Kenyan bush pilot who flew the Atlantic alone against the wind and crash-landed in a Nova Scotia bog
Raised on a farm in colonial Kenya, she trained racehorses, scouted elephant from the air, and in 1936 became the first person to fly solo non-stop…
Refused by every flying school in America, she learned French and went to France to earn her licence
A sharecropper’s daughter and Chicago manicurist who became the first Black woman and first Native American woman to hold a pilot’s licence, and…
The Aboriginal navigator and diplomat who sailed right around Australia before it had that name
A Kuringgai man from the Broken Bay area, he sailed with Matthew Flinders around Australia, using his diplomacy to defuse encounters between the crew…
A mill worker turned missionary whose maps of Africa served both abolition and empire
A missionary doctor who mapped huge stretches of central Africa while campaigning against the slave trade, he vanished for years, was found by a…
Ran away from farm work at thirteen and ended up leading her own expeditions across Africa
Married to a famous taxidermist, she went on two African expeditions as his equal partner, then after their divorce led her own trek into Congo…
A young naval officer who spent five hours descending to a depth no one had ever reached
A US Navy officer who piloted the bathyscaphe Trieste with Jacques Piccard to the deepest known point of the ocean in 1960, then spent the following…
A beekeeper who reached the top of Everest and spent the rest of his life building schools below it
Shy, awkward and physically unremarkable as a boy, he climbed Everest with Tenzing Norgay in 1953, drove tractors to the South Pole, and gave decades…
An Olympic sailor who walked across the closed heart of Asia on a forged permit
A champion sailor and skier who turned to overland travel, she crossed Soviet Central Asia and then walked from Beijing to Kashmir through territory…
Sailed alone around the world faster than anyone before her
A girl from landlocked Derbyshire who saved her school dinner money for three years to buy a dinghy, she went on to set the record for the fastest…
Lost his sight as a teenager, then became the first blind person to stand on top of Everest
Blind from a genetic condition by age thirteen, he trained for years in mountaineering and in 2001 became the first blind person to summit Mount…
