A retired firefighter whose cave-diving hobby became the reason twelve trapped boys came home
A British cave diver and former firefighter who spent decades pushing the limits of flooded cave exploration as a hobby, then led the underwater…
First to the South Pole, first through the Northwest Passage, and prepared for both by listening
He learned dog-driving and fur clothing from the Inuit, kept his change of plan secret from almost everyone, and reached the South Pole in December…
The only one of nine who finished the first non-stop solo race around the world, and gave away the prize
In a small wooden ketch with a broken radio and self-steering, he spent 312 days alone at sea in 1968-69 to become the first person to sail non-stop…
Walked seventeen hundred miles across the Australian desert alone with four camels and a dog
An Australian writer who spent nine months in 1977 walking roughly seventeen hundred miles alone across the Australian desert with four camels and a…
A kidnapped Shoshone teenager whose knowledge and calm saved an American expedition
Kidnapped from her people as a child and later sold into marriage, she carried her infant son across the Rockies while guiding, translating and…
Answered a newspaper advert and became the first American woman in space, then went back to teaching
A physicist and near-professional tennis player who flew on the space shuttle in 1983, fielded questions about make-up and crying, and spent her…
A girl from a Pakistani mountain village who became the first Pakistani woman to reach the summit of Everest
Raised in the remote Shimshal valley of northern Pakistan, she became the first Pakistani woman to summit Mount Everest and later completed the Seven…
Rowed, cycled and kayaked around the world under her own power, surviving a typhoon along the way
A British adventurer who rowed solo across the Indian Ocean, then spent four years circling the globe entirely under her own power, surviving a…
A disguised Bengali scholar who mapped forbidden Tibet and inspired a character in Kim
A schoolteacher and Tibetan scholar who travelled twice into a Tibet closed to outsiders, gathering maps and manuscripts for the British while…
Wrote the rules that keep cave divers alive, then died breaking his own depth record
An American cave diver who set numerous depth and distance records and wrote the safety rules that shaped modern cave diving, before dying while…
Enslaved as a child, he became the guide every famous explorer of East Africa depended on
Captured and sold into slavery as a boy, he was freed in India and returned to Africa, where he led and translated for Burton, Speke, Stanley and the…
A childhood abuse survivor who climbed Everest, then took other survivors up its lower slopes with her
A Peruvian-American survivor of childhood sexual abuse, she became the first Peruvian woman to summit Everest and the first openly gay woman to…
Kidnapped to Europe and sold into slavery, he came home to find his people wiped out by disease
Captured by an English captain and sold into slavery in Spain, he escaped to England and eventually returned home, only to find his entire village…
Failed five times to circle the world alone by balloon, then did it, then vanished flying anyway
An American businessman who failed five times before becoming the first person to fly solo nonstop around the world in a balloon, and who later…
Walked on the seabed at 381 metres tethered to nothing, and has spent seven thousand hours underwater
A marine botanist who led the first all-women team to live underwater in 1970, set a depth record in a pressurised suit, and now campaigns to protect…
Reached the summit of Everest on his seventh attempt
A Sherpa who ran away from home as a teenager to be near the mountains, he tried Everest six times over twenty years before standing on top with…
Terrified of water as a boy, he crossed the Pacific on a balsa raft to test an idea everyone dismissed
He built a raft of logs and rope, sailed it 4,300 miles from Peru to Polynesia in 1947 with five companions and a parrot, and spent his life arguing…
Survived three Antarctic expeditions, walked 35 miles alone to save a comrade, then ran a pub
A farm boy from Kerry who joined the Navy at fifteen and became the man Scott and Shackleton both wanted beside them when things went wrong, which…
An Inuk guide whose sewing and survival skills kept a stranded ice-floe crew alive for months
Known to Europeans as Hannah, she and her husband guided and interpreted for Arctic expeditions for two decades, and her practical skill helped a…
A textile worker and amateur parachutist who spent three days alone in orbit in 1963
Picked from the factory floor for her parachuting, she became the first woman in space and, more than sixty years later, is still the only woman to…
Left a banking career at fifty to become the first woman to reach the highest and lowest points on Earth
A former banking executive who took up mountaineering in her forties, she became the first woman to climb the highest peak on every continent, reach…
Built a submarine to reach the bottom of all five oceans, then went and did it himself
An investor and former naval officer who commissioned a submersible capable of reaching any ocean floor, then piloted it to the deepest point of all…
The first woman to climb K2, who kept going into the Himalaya until the mountains kept her
An electronics engineer from Wrocław who became the first Polish person on Everest and the first woman on K2, and died on Kangchenjunga trying to…
Climbed the highest peak on every continent to put Bangladesh, and its silenced voices, on the map
A Bangladeshi mountaineer and activist who became the first person from Bangladesh to climb the Seven Summits, using the project to campaign for…
