Lost his ship in Antarctic ice and brought every one of his men home alive
When the Endurance was crushed by pack ice in 1915, he led 27 men across ice, open ocean and uncharted mountains over 20 months without losing a…
Spent forty years travelling the Ottoman world and wrote it all down in ten enormous volumes
An Ottoman traveller who spent roughly forty years crossing the empire and beyond, from Vienna to Cairo, recording customs, buildings and gossip in a…
A monk in his sixties who walked to India for scripture and sailed home the long way round
Already an old man by the standards of his time, he crossed deserts and mountains on foot to reach India in search of Buddhist texts, then returned…
Skied solo across Antarctica on muscle power alone after her first big expedition nearly broke her
A meteorologist who first went to Antarctica to run a weather station, she went on to lead the first all-female international ski expedition there…
Rescued from a slave auction as a teenager, she became the first European woman to see Lake Albert
Orphaned and sold into slavery as a girl after her family was killed, she was bought free by the explorer Samuel Baker and became his equal partner…
Taught herself Arabic in her thirties and walked alone into corners of the Middle East no Westerner had mapped
Scarred by a factory accident at thirteen and stuck at home through her twenties, she went to Baghdad at 34 and spent the next sixty years travelling…
Skied across Greenland, drifted to the top of the world, then spent his fame on refugees
A scientist who let his ship freeze into the Arctic ice on purpose, walked further north than anyone before him, and later won the Nobel Peace Prize…
A Russian priest who rowed oceans, sailed the globe five times, and circled it by balloon in eleven days
An Orthodox priest and lifelong adventurer who has rowed solo across oceans, sailed around the world five times, and in 2016 flew nonstop around the…
Mapped Arabia for the British Empire, then helped draw the borders of a country still living with them
A British traveller and archaeologist who mapped and wrote about the Ottoman Middle East for years, then used that knowledge to help draw the borders…
A Greenlandic hunter who kept five different Arctic expeditions fed and alive, then wrote it down
A Greenlandic hunter recruited as a teenager, he served on four major nineteenth-century Arctic expeditions as hunter and dog-driver, and left one of…
Crossed the Sahara for five years, alone after his companions died, and mapped half a continent
A German scholar who outlived every other European on a British-sponsored mission, spending five years crossing the Sahara and West and Central…
Heard a radio advert on the way home from a chocolate factory and became the first Briton in space
A chemist from Sheffield working for Mars confectionery, she beat 13,000 applicants, trained for eighteen months in Star City and flew to the Mir…
Set out from Tangier for Mecca at 21 and did not stop travelling for nearly thirty years
A young legal scholar who left home for the pilgrimage and went on to cross Africa, Arabia, India, the Maldives and China, covering more ground than…
The sole survivor of a jungle trek, she emerged from the Amazon after twenty years apart from her husband
Separated from her French husband for two decades by colonial politics, she set out down the Amazon to reach him, survived the deaths of her entire…
A Victorian invalid whose doctor prescribed travel, so she rode through the Rockies, Japan, Persia and Tibet
Ill and depressed at home in Britain, she was transformed on the road, wrote a dozen bestselling books, and became the first woman admitted as a…
Freed from a slave ship as a boy, he helped carry his employer's body a thousand miles home
Rescued from a slave ship as a child and educated at a mission school in India, he joined Livingstone's last expedition and helped carry the…
A car crash ended his flying career, so he went underwater and showed the world what was there
A naval officer who co-invented the aqualung in occupied France, turned a minesweeper into a research ship and made films that taught a generation to…
Piloted a steel ball to the deepest place on Earth and found a fish looking back at him
Using a submersible his father designed, he and a US Navy officer descended nearly eleven kilometres to the deepest known point of the ocean in 1960,…
Freed from slavery by Livingstone, he carried his employer's body a thousand miles to the coast
Freed from a slave gang as a boy by David Livingstone, he became his closest companion and, after Livingstone died, helped carry his preserved body…
Crashed twice trying to reach Australia, then set records across three oceans and died in obscurity
A dentist’s daughter from Rotorua who sold her piano to pay for flying lessons, made the first solo flight from England to New Zealand in 1936, and…
Disguised as a man, she became the first woman to travel all the way around the world
A peasant herb-woman from Burgundy who bound her chest, joined a French naval expedition as a botanist’s valet in 1766, and collected thousands of…
Born without arms, she learned to fly a plane and earn a pilot's licence using only her feet
Born without arms due to a rare birth defect, she taught herself to do everything with her feet and became the first person to earn a pilot's licence…
Sailed alone around the world at sixteen after a collision that nearly ended the attempt
A dyslexic teenager from Queensland who spent 210 days alone at sea in a pink 34-foot yacht, weathering knockdowns in the Southern Ocean, and sailed…
Dives into flooded caves and icebergs most people would not enter with a rope tied to their waist
A Canadian cave diver who explores submerged caves and Antarctic icebergs no one has entered before, work she has repeatedly survived by inches while…
