The 3 most disastrous expeditions of all time

In the earlier years of exploration, there was a race between the superpowers of the world to be the first to find new lands and trade routes. Dozens of countries sent ships to find routes through the Northwest Passage, or organized groups of daring explorers to find the rumored temples of gold within the Amazon rainforest. Because there was the potential to make a great deal of wealth from finding such things, people didn’t seem to care or realize just how many died before them trying to find the very things they were looking for themselves. There have been thousands of people going missing over the centuries on various expeditions, but here are the three most disastrous expeditions of all time.

The Franklin Expedition – 129 Dead

The Northwest Passage is a shipping route across the north of Canada that would connect Europe and the east coast of America to its west coast and the East Asian countries. This would save a huge amount of time and money and would mean whoever found a path through would become vastly wealthy. This all happened before the completion of the Panama Canal in 1914, and also before people realized there was no practical or safe way to sail across the north coast of Canada, but the dream of finding a trade route sent thousands of people to their deaths.

(Sir John Franklin 1786 – 1847)

129 of these people were the crews of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror who were led by Sir John Franklin. The Franklin Expedition is one of the most mysterious in the history of Arctic exploration because no one actually knows what happened to them. The plan was to sail past the west coast of Greenland and hope to find a route through where the ice wasn’t too thick. It is theorized that both ships were trapped in pack ice, which carried them for an unknown distance before squeezing the hulls open. The men would have been forced to live on the ice sheet until help came, but it never did. Very few bodies were recovered and it wasn’t until 170 years after the ships went missing that they were detected at the bottom of the sea.

The Lost City of Z – Colonel Percy Fawcett and his men

There are many stories of cities of gold and lost civilizations hidden within the jungle of the Amazon, and Percy Fawcett just couldn’t resist the chance to find what he referred to as the lost city of Z. He’d been on 7 expeditions to South America between 1906 and 1924 to map previously unexplored areas of the jungle and to find the source of two river systems. During these journeys, he heard tales of a lost city filled with gold somewhere deep in the jungle that belonged to a now-extinct civilization.

His 8th and last expedition to South America departed in April of 1925 after he received enough financial support from investors in London. He left with his son and his son’s best friend on what was supposed to be a two-year trip, but the last people to see them were the guides who took them into the first part of the jungle. To this day, none of the three bodies have been found and no one knows how they died. The two most likely theories are they either succumbed to one of the many illnesses or conditions you can get in the jungle, or they came across an unfriendly tribe who killed them.

The 1527 Narvaez expedition – 596 dead

Pánfilo de Narváez was a Spanish explorer who was tasked with founding a colony in North America in what is now modern-day Florida. He left Spain with a fleet of 5 ships and 600 men in 1527 and expected the voyage to last no longer than 3 months. At various points along the voyage, the fleet was battered by a series of powerful storms which destroyed some of the ships and badly damaged the others, but two of the ships managed to land on the coast.

(Pánfilo de Narváez)

The Native American tribes at the time didn’t take kindly to the presence of the Spanish and began to attack them, picking off a few men here and there. With the losses suffered by the Spanish at sea, their numbers were too few to survive setting up a colony and they planned to return to sea and head home. They had to delay setting off due to even more storms, and when they finally made it to sea on a single ship, they lost almost everyone else along the voyage, forcing them to return back to American mainland. Only 4 of the 600 men sent on the expedition survived and reached Mexico city in 1536.