People have sailed, skied, flown and drifted toward the poles for about 250 years, and the documented stories are often stranger than the legends. Here are a telegram that announced a race, an airship over the Arctic Ocean, Inuit memory that found two lost ships, and quiet heroes the famous accounts tend to skip. Where a claim is still disputed, the story says so.
Every tile in a Polar Exploration game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Explorers
nine stories
1From the North Pole to a Custom House desk
On the tile: Matthew Henson1909
For about two decades Matthew Henson worked beside Robert Peary in the Arctic, building sledges, driving dogs, hunting and speaking the local Inuit language. On April 6, 1909, he was one of six men, with Peary and four Inuit, at the place Peary claimed as the North Pole, and Henson said he got there about 45 minutes first. Four years later, President Taft appointed him to federal service, and he started as a messenger at the New York Custom House for $960 a year. He stayed 23 years and became a chief clerk.
On January 17, 1773, Captain James Cook became the first to sail past the Antarctic Circle, with the ships Resolution and Adventure. He crossed it three times on that voyage, but heavy sea ice kept turning him north, and he never saw Antarctica. He saw its icebergs instead, some more than two miles around. Cook reasoned that so many icebergs had to come from a mass of land at or near the South Pole. He was right, although the first confirmed sightings of the continent did not come until the 1820s.
Fridtjof Nansen was the first to cross Greenland's inland ice, and he became internationally famous even though he never reached the North Pole. His second career may have mattered more. After the First World War he was in charge of exchanging about 400,000 prisoners of war between Russia, Germany and the former Austria-Hungary, and in 1921 he took on relief work during the famine in the Soviet Union. That August the League of Nations made him its first High Commissioner for Refugees. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922, and stateless refugees were soon crossing borders with Nansen passports.
Roald Amundsen was granted the Fram to drift across the Arctic Ocean. Then Robert Peary and Frederick Cook both claimed the North Pole, and Amundsen quietly decided to try for the South Pole on the way. He kept the plan from most of his crew until Madeira in September 1910, just before sailing south. His brother Leon then sent a telegram that was waiting for Robert Falcon Scott when he reached Melbourne. It read, "Beg inform you Fram proceeding antarctic. Amundsen." The race was on, and Amundsen reached the pole on December 14, 1911.
5The pub landlord who never talked about Antarctica
On the tile: Tom Crean1877-1938
Tom Crean, a farmer's son from County Kerry, joined the Royal Navy just before turning sixteen and served under both Scott and Shackleton. On Scott's last expedition, when Lieutenant Teddy Evans grew too sick with scurvy to be moved, Crean walked the last 35 miles to Hut Point alone for help, eighteen hours on two sticks of chocolate and three biscuits. It earned him the Albert Medal. In 1927 he opened the South Pole Inn in Annascaul, and he never once gave an interview about his years on the ice. When visitors came to meet the famous explorer, he would politely make his excuses and leave.
6The explorer who left his samurai sword in Sydney
On the tile: Nobu Shirase1910-1912
In November 1910 Lieutenant Nobu Shirase was ready to leave for Antarctica with 27 men and 30 dogs, while Amundsen and Scott were already on their way. His first landing attempt, in March 1911, came too late in the season, so the expedition retreated to Sydney and camped at the harbor for seven months, facing suspicion of spying. The geologist Edgeworth David befriended them, and Shirase gave him his treasured samurai sword, now in the Australian Museum. Shirase's party explored the Ross Ice Shelf in 1912. He spent years repaying the expedition's debts.
Louise Arner Boyd was born in San Rafael, California, in 1887. After her parents died, she used her inheritance to chase a childhood dream. In 1926 she hired her own ship and crew for the polar seas. When her hero Roald Amundsen disappeared in 1928, she joined the 10-week search, and no conclusive trace of him was found. Through the 1930s she led expeditions with the American Geographical Society, photographing and mapping uncharted parts of Greenland. In 1955 she chartered a plane and became the first woman to fly over the North Pole.
In 1986 Ann Bancroft, a teacher and coach, was the only woman on the Steger International Polar Expedition, and she became the first woman to travel across the ice to the North Pole. In 1993 she led the American Women's Expedition, a team of four women who skied more than 600 miles to the South Pole pulling heavy sleds. In 2001 she became one of the first women to sail and ski across Antarctica's landmass. The National Women's Hall of Fame had already inducted her in 1995.
Charles Francis Hall led the Polaris expedition, which sailed to a record farthest north in 1871. That October, returning from a sledge journey, he became violently ill after drinking a cup of coffee, and in his delirium he accused officers of murdering him. He died on November 8. A Navy board of inquiry blamed apoplexy. In 1968 investigators exhumed his body, and tests on his hair and fingernails showed large amounts of arsenic in his last two weeks. Still, murder cannot be proved. He owned his own medical kit and may have overdosed on an arsenic-based patent medicine.
In 1909 two Americans each announced that they had discovered the North Pole. Frederick Cook said he reached it on April 21, 1908, and Robert Peary said he arrived on April 6, 1909. A commission at the University of Copenhagen examined Cook's evidence and ruled his claim "not proven." Congress held hearings, honored Peary in 1911 and promoted him to rear admiral. Yet the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center notes that neither man could provide indisputable proof, and today it is widely held that neither actually reached the pole.
Earlier expeditions toward Greenland's interior had started from the settled west coast. In 1888 Fridtjof Nansen started from the almost uninhabited east coast instead, so that turning back would be useless and the only way home was across. His five companions included Otto Sverdrup, the Sámi Samuel Balto and the reindeer owner Ole Ravna. Just reaching shore through the drift ice was a close call. Then they skied for six weeks across the ice cap and wintered at Godthaab, now Nuuk. The only way was forward, and in Norwegian, forward is fram.
Sir John Franklin's 1845 expedition to find a Northwest Passage vanished with both its ships, and Inuit along its route were the last to see the crews alive. In 1854 John Rae heard from Inuit that about 40 men had been seen heading south. In 1869 an Inuk named Inukpujijuk marked a wreck's location on Charles Francis Hall's chart and drew his own map. Parks Canada later worked with Gjoa Haven historian Louie Kamookak, and Inuit knowledge combined with modern technology led to the wrecks of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror in 2014 and 2016.
Roald Amundsen and four companions reached the South Pole on December 14, 1911, and spent three days skiing in every direction to be sure they had covered the invisible point. When they left, they put up a small reserve tent sewn by the sailmaker Martin Rønne. Inside was a letter asking Robert Falcon Scott to deliver a second letter, to King Haakon, stating that they had reached the goal. If the Norwegians died on the way back, the news would still get home. Scott's party arrived on January 17, 1912, and found the Norwegian flag.
5The professor who climbed a volcano, then kept walking
On the tile: Magnetic Pole1908-1909
Shackleton's Nimrod expedition had a professor with remarkable stamina. In March 1908 a party led by T. W. Edgeworth David made the first ascent of Mount Erebus, an active volcano. David, his protégé Douglas Mawson and Alistair Mackay then went looking for the South Magnetic Pole, and on January 16, 1909, they became the first to reach it. On that expedition, the Australian Antarctic Program says, David and Mawson completed the longest Antarctic man-hauling sledge journey, 122 days of hunger, hidden crevasses, frostbite and exhaustion.
6Ten men, two tiny huts and the first winter ashore
On the tile: Cape Adare1899
The first buildings in Antarctica went up at Cape Adare in 1899, built by Carsten Borchgrevink's Southern Cross expedition. There were two huts, a living hut and a stores hut, each just 5.5 by 6.5 meters, for 10 men to live in for a year. New Zealand's Antarctic Heritage Trust credits the expedition with being the first to winter over on the continent and the first to use dogs, sledges and skis there. The huts stand in a colony of more than 400,000 breeding pairs of Adélie penguins, the only example left of humanity's first building on any continent.
Ernest Shackleton supposedly recruited his 1914 crew with a newspaper ad that read, in part, "Men wanted for hazardous journey" and "Safe return doubtful." It is often hailed as one of the greatest ads ever written, but nobody has found it. Searchers have combed old books and newspaper microfilm, the Antarctic Circle website offered $100 for a copy, and in 2016 Bob Headland, a former Scott Polar Research Institute curator, added a case of Madeira. An early reference, a 1949 book, dated the ad to 1900, when Shackleton was not organizing any expedition. It is probably a myth.
Robert Falcon Scott's five-man party reached the South Pole on January 17, 1912, and learned that Roald Amundsen had beaten them there by about a month. On January 30, as Amundsen's ship Fram sailed away from Antarctica, Scott's men were only 11 days into their return. They met exceptionally bad weather. Edgar Evans died near the foot of the Beardmore Glacier. Lawrence Oates walked out of the tent into a blizzard for the good of the others. Scott, Edward Wilson and Henry Bowers died in late March, pinned down by a blizzard 11 miles short of One Ton Depot.
On January 9, 1909, Ernest Shackleton and three companions, Jameson Adams, Eric Marshall and Frank Wild, were on the polar plateau within 97 nautical miles of the South Pole. They were short of food and battling blizzards and headwinds, and Shackleton decided to turn around. The march back became a race against time, one the Scott Polar Research Institute says they would have lost if their ship Nimrod had not stayed past its appointed leaving date. Every member of the expedition sailed home in March 1909, and Shackleton was knighted.
In 1884 remains of the American ship Jeannette, crushed and sunk near the New Siberian Islands in 1881, turned up off Greenland. The meteorologist Henrik Mohn argued that a current crossed the Arctic Ocean, and Fridtjof Nansen decided to ride it. Colin Archer built the Fram with a hull meant to be lifted by the ice, not crushed, the way a round nut pops up when squeezed between your fingers. In January 1895 the crew moved stores onto the ice, ready to abandon ship. Instead the Fram was gradually eased upward, out of the pack.
HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were built as Royal Navy bomb vessels, sturdy ships designed to carry mortars, and Terror had served in the War of 1812. Both had already been to Antarctica with James Clark Ross before Sir John Franklin took them north in 1845. For that voyage the Navy installed railway locomotive engines, stripped of their wheels, as auxiliary power, and fitted a device to raise each propeller out of the water to avoid ice damage. The ships also carried heating systems and stoves with tanks for melting ice and snow into fresh water.
3A police schooner that conquered the passage both ways
On the tile: St. Roch1940-1950
The St. Roch was a wooden schooner built in 1928 to supply and patrol the Arctic for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, with a Norwegian immigrant captain, Henry Larsen, and a crew of farm boys from across the country. Leaving Vancouver in 1940, it was trapped in ice for two winters and reached Halifax in 1942, the first ship to cross the Northwest Passage from west to east. In 1944 it went back in 86 days, the first to make the passage in one season. In 1950 it became the first ship to circle North America.
4A one-dollar-a-year submarine under the Arctic ice
On the tile: Nautilus 19311931
In 1931 the Australian-born explorer Hubert Wilkins set out to take a submarine under the Arctic ice. His Nautilus was the old submarine O-12, chartered for $1 a year on condition it be used only for science, and fitted with a large drill for boring up through the ice to fresh air. In Arctic waters the crew found the diving planes missing, and Wilkins believed crew members had sabotaged the boat. It still slid under a floe, with ice scraping terrifyingly overhead. In 1959 the nuclear submarine USS Skate surfaced at the North Pole and scattered Wilkins's ashes there.
5The first Antarctic book, bound with packing crates
On the tile: Antarctic book1908
Shackleton's Nimrod expedition packed a printing press. During the Antarctic winter of 1908, at the expedition's hut at Cape Royds, the men produced Aurora Australis, the first book published in Antarctica. Ernest Joyce and Frank Wild did the printing on a press supplied by Joseph Causton and Sons and brought from England. The artist George Marston drew the front cover and ten illustrations. Bernard Day, the expedition's motor expert, bound the volumes using boards from packing cases made of Venesta board.
In 2017 conservators from New Zealand's Antarctic Heritage Trust were near the end of conserving almost 1,500 artifacts from Cape Adare when they found a Huntley and Palmers fruitcake, still wrapped in paper inside the remains of its tin. The tin was in poor condition. The cake, the Trust reported, looked and smelled almost edible. It probably belonged to the Northern Party of Scott's Terra Nova expedition, which used Cape Adare in 1911 and is documented as carrying that brand. Under the Trust's permit, it has to go back to Cape Adare.
After Endurance was abandoned in the Weddell Sea ice, photographer Frank Hurley went back to the wreck for his glass plate negatives, diving for them in several feet of icy water in the flooded hold. Weight mattered on the lifeboats, so at Ocean Camp Shackleton had Hurley choose. They kept 120 images and smashed the rest, so that no one would be tempted to change their minds. Hurley packed away his gear except one small pocket camera and three spools of film. His film South, released in 1919, became a great success.
Douglas Mawson's Australasian Antarctic Expedition was the first to establish an Antarctic radio link, relaying through a station on Wireless Hill on Macquarie Island with a German-made Telefunken spark transmitter and Morse code. Macquarie Island made its first contact on February 13, 1912. A month later the men heard on Hobart radio that Amundsen had reached Hobart after being first to the South Pole. At windy Commonwealth Bay, masts took almost a year to raise, and contact with Australia came in February 1913. The Western Base got no news at all, because detector parts were missing.
In January 2010 conservators found five crates encased in ice under Shackleton's 1908 base at Cape Royds, three of Mackinlay's whisky and two of brandy. One whisky crate was flown to New Zealand and carefully thawed at Canterbury Museum, revealing 11 bottles still wrapped in paper and straw. Three bottles went to Scotland for sensory and chemical analysis, and in 2011 Whyte and Mackay's master blender, Richard Paterson, recreated the century-old whisky. In 2013 the three original bottles were returned to Antarctica, and the crates went back to the hut.
1Six men, one lifeboat and about 800 miles of ocean
On the tile: James Caird1916
To get help for the men stranded on Elephant Island, Shackleton set out for South Georgia with five others in the lifeboat James Caird. Before they left, the expedition artist George Marston gave up his oil paints to help caulk the boat. On the voyage of about 800 miles, Frank Worsley managed only four sightings to navigate by, yet brought them to King Haakon Bay after a little more than two weeks. Shackleton, Worsley and Tom Crean then made the first crossing of the island's unmapped mountains to the whaling station at Stromness.
When Shackleton sailed for help in the James Caird, he left Frank Wild in charge of the 22 men on Elephant Island. They turned two lifeboats into a shelter and waited through the southern winter, and the Scott Polar Research Institute says it was largely due to Wild that morale held. Shackleton's first three rescue attempts failed. On August 30, 1916, he finally reached them aboard the Chilean naval tug Yelcho. Wild died in South Africa in 1939, and in 2011 his ashes were buried at Grytviken, South Georgia, beside the grave of his lifelong friend Shackleton.
In November 1912 Douglas Mawson led a sledging party east from Commonwealth Bay with Belgrave Ninnis and Xavier Mertz. Ninnis plunged into a crevasse along with a sledge carrying many of their supplies. Mertz later died of exhaustion, starvation and possibly toxicity from eating the dogs' livers. Alone, and determined to bring back the data and specimens they had collected, Mawson struggled for 30 days to reach base, only to miss the departing ship Aurora by hours. Six men who had volunteered to search for his party stayed and spent a second winter there with him.
4The captain who crossed the sea ice to Siberia for help
On the tile: Karluk1914
In August 1913 thick ice trapped the Karluk, flagship of the Canadian Arctic Expedition, off Alaska. It drifted for months and sank north of Siberia on January 11, 1914. Captain Robert Bartlett of Newfoundland, who had broken trail for Robert Peary in 1909, got the castaways to Wrangel Island. Then he and an Iñupiat hunter named Kataktovik set off across the ice to the Siberian coast and went on to Alaska, where they sent a rescue mission. The survivors were picked up in September 1914, though 11 members of the expedition had died.
In the fall of 1872 the badly damaged Polaris was trying to head south when a storm in Smith Sound separated 19 people from the ship on an ice floe. They were men, women and children, because the Inuit on the expedition had their families with them. For six months they drifted some 1,300 miles on the ice, until a sealer rescued them off Labrador. Meanwhile the rest of the crew ran Polaris aground near Etah, Greenland, and waited out the winter before a Scottish whaler picked them up.
In 1881 Lieutenant Adolphus Greely and 24 men went north to run an Army weather station at Fort Conger on Lady Franklin Bay. In 1882 three of them set a new record for the closest approach to the North Pole. Then the supply ships failed. One was blocked by ice in 1882, and another was crushed in 1883. The men retreated to Cape Sabine and went hungry through the winter. At home, Henrietta Greely kept pressing officials and the press until another rescue was authorized in April 1884. On June 22 it found seven survivors, and six lived.
While Endurance was trapped in the Weddell Sea, Shackleton's second party worked on the far side of Antarctica, laying food and fuel depots for a crossing that never began. On May 6, 1915, a blizzard drove their ship Aurora from its moorings, leaving ten men ashore with minimal supplies. They laid the depots anyway. Only one tent had been unloaded, a D-shaped design by George Marston, and it kept the sledging parties going for two seasons. Three men died. In January 1917 Aurora returned and picked up the seven survivors.
The Belgian Antarctic Expedition under Adrien de Gerlache spent a year drifting with the ice in the ship Belgica, in a region whose western part is now called the Amundsen Sea. The first mate was Roald Amundsen. The doctor and photographer was Frederick Cook, who had volunteered after the original physician resigned. While the ship was frozen in, Cook studied the crew's psychological difficulties, and he led the effort to saw a canal through the ice that set the Belgica free. Amundsen admired Cook's ability and initiative, and they stayed friends for life despite their very different fates.
In March 1895 Fridtjof Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen left the drifting Fram with three dog sledges to try for the North Pole. The moving pack ice beat them back on April 9, at 86 degrees 14 minutes north. They made for Franz Josef Land and wintered in a crude hut they built. In May 1896 they set off in two kayaks lashed together, and at Cape Flora on June 17, by remarkable coincidence, they met the British explorer F. G. Jackson, who took them home. They landed at Vardø on August 13, the very day the Fram broke free of the ice.