It is well-known that the Victorians were keen on science, engineering, and mad inventions. They had a morbid fascination with death, but they had a spiritual side, too. So it was only a matter of time before they became obsessed with spiritualism and the paranormal.

In doing so, they approached the unknown like any other scientific conundrum. They wrote up experiments, tried to attach philosophical treatises to their findings, and considered the illogical, the otherworldly, and the downright bizarre with inquiring and open minds.

Although, occasionally, they were also a bit nuts.

10 Maria Hayden

Maria Hayden was an American medium. In the mid-1800s, she became famous in England as the first medium to demonstrate the new art of rapping, shortly after the more famous Fox sisters had made such an “impression” (also known as a killing) back home.

It is probably fair to say that the media did not treat Hayden kindly. Several Victorian publications set out to ridicule her and her skills. This increased when it was revealed that her rapped-out messages only made sense when she was able to see the letters in front of her.^[1]

When she was asked to turn her back, the messages were largely gibberish. This suggested the possibility that they were coming from Hayden herself and not from her spirit guide.

Hayden’s career as a medium seemed to end quite suddenly. She dropped out of the public eye completely and returned to America. There, she trained as a doctor and practiced for 15 years. It was said that she had “remarkable healing powers.” So good, in fact, that she was later offered a medical professorship at a US university.

9 Annie Horniman

Annie Horniman’s background was rather ordinary. Her family had come up with the idea of selling tea prepackaged rather than loose, which was less messy and much more lucrative.

Like all wealthy Victorian ladies, Horniman had a social project. She was instrumental in creating the arts scene in Manchester, working to bring the theater to the masses. She promoted the work of local dramatists, the benefits of which are still felt today as Manchester has the most thriving theater district outside of London.

But a lady has to have a hobby, too. Horniman was a believer in tarot cards and mysticism in general. She used card readings in all her business affairs, though not always successfully.

Along with Aleister Crowley and Bram Stoker, Horniman became a member of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn for the better understanding of the paranormal. She also believed that she could astrally project to other planets, which she visited as frequently as some people pop to the shops.

While on a tour of the universe in 1898, she encountered a “tall, dignified, and winged” man on Saturn. He was dressed in armor and told Horniman all about his “dying world.” However, the man was fearful of strangers. As a result, Horniman and her companion made themselves invisible so as not to alarm him.^[2]

8 Annie Besant

Annie Besant was a singular woman. She boldly left her clergyman husband and two children because of her anti-religious views and became involved with a former clergyman, Charles Leadbeater, who was a member of Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society. Besant was much interested in spiritualism of all kinds, believing as she did that “matter exists in states other than those at present known to science.”

Besant wrote a book called Thought-Forms, which was not so much about the paranormal as it was about color. Today, Besant would have been diagnosed with synesthesia as her book explained emotion in a table of colors and shapes. The work gave a fascinating insight into the synesthete’s mind. Apparently, passion is purple.

Later, Besant became an advocate for Indian Home Rule. She eventually settled there and adopted a son whom she believed to be the new Messiah and a reincarnation of Buddha.^[3]

7 Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

In 1873, Helena Blavatsky arrived in New York from Russia. She was a philosopher, a student of the occult, and one of the founding members of the Theosophical Society. The aim of the society was to explore the divine powers she believed that humans possessed and thus save the world.

Blavatsky’s particular divine powers included visions, clairvoyance, and conversing with the dead. She claimed that she had disguised herself as a man to fight in the Battle of Mentana, where she was left for dead. But she supposedly used her powers to fight her way back to life. After that, she made a miraculous escape at sea after her ship was blown up.

However, her account lacked proof or credibility. She could not adequately explain why she, a Russian living in America, would want to involve herself in an Italian-French conflict in Rome. Soon, she let this story go.

Blavatsky’s biggest claim to fame was her book, The Secret Doctrine, which explained the birth of mankind from the four Root Races. The first (best) race was as white as the Moon, the second was gold, the third was red, and the fourth was brown which became “black with sin.”^[4]

6 Alexis-Vincent-Charles Berbiguier De Terre-Neuve Du Thym

Alexis-Vincent-Charles Berbiguier de Terre-Neuve du Thym, whom we will call Berbiguier, was born in France in 1765. It is probably fair to say that he was “troubled.”

In 1821, he published his autobiography in three volumes. It detailed his struggles with dark forces, which had earned him the title “The Scourge of Hobgoblins.” According to Berbiguier, he had destroyed as many of these creatures as possible but had discovered that killing them makes them angry.

Berbiguier refused to be examined for possible mental health disorders, believing all doctors to be ambassadors of the hobgoblin world. He increased his efforts to wipe out the plague of hobgoblins, filling his room with plants supposedly lethal to them as well as some empty bottles in which to trap them.^[5]

Berbiguier published his volumes, all 274 chapters of them, which included pictures of the hobgoblins as drawn by him.

5 William Stead

William Stead’s main claim to fame was that he had been aboard the Titanic when it sank. Still, he was an interesting man in other ways. He had been a pioneer of what is now called investigative journalism, writing an expose on child prostitution that ultimately led to the age of consent for girls being raised from 13 to 16.

In 1892, Stead began to report on a different kind of story. He had been getting messages from “the other side.” In fact, he believed that he was receiving messages from a departed fellow journalist. He even employed a team of office staff to record the messages and pass them on to relevant loved ones.

Whether Stead was really getting messages from the dead, we will never know. However, it seems that Stead may have had something of a seer in him because he wrote a short story in 1886 about a ship that sank in the Atlantic.

In the story, the loss of life was so great because the lifeboats could only carry a third of the souls on the ship, leaving many to perish. He also included a warning: Although the story was fictional, it was entirely plausible.

William Stead was not one of the lucky ones who made it onto the boats when the Titanic sank.^[6]

4 William Wynn Westcott

William Wynn Westcott was a doctor, Freemason, and occultist. He also worked as a coroner. He was even briefly considered a suspect in the Jack the Ripper case.

In 1887, Westcott claimed that he was given some mysterious documents by a man who promptly died. It was written in a secret code to which Westcott just happened to hold the key.

When decoded, the documents contained the instructions for an initiation ceremony, following which Westcott was “given permission” to found the Isis-Urania Temple of the Golden Dawn.

Westcott’s society took off, and several more temples were built. He was promoted to Praemonstrator of the Kabbalah. However, it seems that Westcott had upset some higher power. He left some of his papers in the back of a taxi one day, and his spare time activities came to the notice of his employers, who took a dim view of coroners being praemonstrators.^[7]

Forced to choose between the secular and the divine, Westcott chose the one that allowed him to pay his bills and resigned from the society.

3 Dr. Hippolyte Leon Denizard Rivail

Dr. Rivail was a teacher, doctor, translator, and lawyer. Then he became Allan Kardec, “teacher of souls.” Kardec developed his own brand of spiritualism, which he called “Spiritism.”

After seeing a display of “table turning” in which the “spirit” causes a table to spin, he became convinced that the spirit was trying to communicate. However, three years earlier, Michael Faraday had explained the phenomenon of ideomotor response, in which muscles can move independently of deliberate thought and thus move tables.

Even so, Kardac wrote The Spirits Book, a guide to communicating with the other side. He believed that our bodies are just temporary containers for the spirit. In addition, the spirits of the departed are always with us, being reborn at different points along the ladder of spiritual rank.^[8]

2 Daniel Dunglas Home

Daniel Dunglas Home believed himself to be exceptional. On developing an interest in spiritualism as a teenager, he decided not to follow the crowd. He held his seances in brightly lit rooms. Rather than the audience holding each other’s hands, he asked them to hold his hands to prove that he was not manipulating objects himself.

At first, his seances were fairly pedestrian—with messages from the dead and ghostly music emanating from nowhere. Then, around 1857, they began to get more interesting. He made spectral hands appear from the ether. Napoleon III’s wife was even said to have recognized the distinctive hand of her dead father because of a deformed finger.

By 1868, he was able to levitate—not just a few feet off the ground but through an open window three stories up. (Or rather, he went into another room by himself and was later seen outside the window, presumably due to levitation. Then he floated back in.)

Though all of this may seem inexplicable and impressive, Harry Houdini maintained that Home was merely a magician and that Houdini could replicate all of Home’s tricks. Nevertheless, Home was a celebrity of his time and had many wealthy admirers.

There was a certain amount of unpleasantness when a rich widow claimed that Home had swindled her. He responded that she had given him money for his “spiritualistic services” and only demanded a refund when she realized that he would not be performing services of a different kind. A trial ensued, and he was forced to reimburse her.^[9]

1 Philippe Nizier-Anthelme Vachod

Philippe Nizier-Anthelme Vachod (or his less formal name, Master Philippe de Lyon) was born in France in 1849. Apparently, he was marked for greatness from the moment of his birth. His mother was said to have experienced no labor pains and delivered him singing with joy. As if that weren’t enough, a raging storm was quieted and a shooting star appeared at the exact moment of his birth.

So, how did this greatness manifest itself?

Well, in 1874, while living in Lyon, Philippe worked in a pharmacy and was able to cure the sick without the aid of drugs. Then he studied medicine. But his fellow students were unimpressed by his healing powers, which they felt made a mockery of their profession, and his license was revoked.^[10]

He became the personal clairvoyant to Tsar Nicholas II and was said to have predicted the birth of the tsarevitch as well as the forthcoming revolution. Philippe even managed to raise a child from the dead.

However, he was unable to repeat the trick when his own child died. When asked to explain this, Philippe said that he had allowed her to die to save the world from an unspecified and unprovable cosmic calamity.

Ward Hazell is a writer who travels and an occasional travel writer.

History tends to look very kindly on those with an adventurous spirit. Whatever their mishaps and shortcomings might have been, they get remembered as courageous explorers who braved the unknown, and their perilous journeys become almost as famous as they do. Think of Edmund Hillary conquering Everest or Robert Scott’s trips to Antarctica. Of course, not every explorer achieves this level of fame. Some of them are almost forgotten, though they put themselves at considerable risk to help us better understand the strange world around us.

10Joseph Thomson’s African Trek

During the “Scramble for Africa” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, most European powers were aggressively trying to colonize as much of Africa as possible through force or diplomacy (typically force). During such a time, expeditions like those of Scottish geologist Joseph Thomson tend to stand out. He became renowned for not killing a single native or losing any of his men to violence during his exploration of Africa. His motto was “He who goes slowly goes safely; he who goes safely goes far.”

This is quite remarkable, considering that Thomson led six separate expeditions through uncharted African territory, covering over 24,000 kilometers (15,000 mi). He mapped out most of Kenya, Nigeria, and Morocco for the Royal Geographical Society and researched many prominent landmarks such as Mount Kilimanjaro and Lake Tanganyika. Thomson’s Falls in Kenya is named after him, as is the Thomson’s gazelle.

His expedition to Lake Victoria in 1883 was his most memorable journey. It was also his most perilous, as Thomson had to make sure to avoid the hostile Maasai people as well as competing German traders. At one point, Thomson was captured by the Maasai but was spared an execution when he convinced them that he was a witch doctor by using effervescent salts.

9Pedro Cabral’s Trip To India

Initially, it looked as if Portuguese navigator Pedro Alvares Cabral had a straightforward mission—follow the route to India established by Vasco da Gama and come back with spices. However, his journey turned out to be more eventful than anticipated. On the way there, Cabral got into a few fights, lost a few ships, won a few ships, and also became the first European to discover Brazil.

Everything started on March 9, 1500 when Cabral left Lisbon with 13 ships. He was quickly carried by winds farther west than intended. On April 22, he spotted land, which he incorrectly concluded was an island and named the Island of the True Cross. We mostly know it by its modern name—Brazil. Obviously, Cabral immediately claimed the land in the name of Portugal, but he still managed to maintain peaceful relations with the native people. Cabral’s first real mishap came when his fleet was passing through the Cape of Good Hope and a storm sank four of his ships along with all the men onboard.

In September, Cabral reached India and established a trading post in Calicut. However, tensions with the local Muslim traders led to a bloody battle in which Muslims attacked and killed most of the people inside the trading post. In retaliation, Cabral bombarded the city and captured 10 vessels before leaving for friendlier pastures. In the end, four of his ships made it back filled with spices, and his mission was deemed successful.

8Benjamin Leigh Smith’s Arctic Adventures

The Arctic and Antarctic expeditions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries have made legends out of many daring explorers such as Ernest Shackleton and Roald Amundsen. But, as usually happens in these cases, some explorers simply got left out of the history books. That was the case with Benjamin Leigh Smith, a British explorer who undertook five expeditions to the Arctic from 1871–1882.

Most of his trips were to Svalbard and Franz Josef Land, two archipelagos in the Arctic Ocean comprising approximately 200 islands total. On one of the expeditions in 1881, Smith’s ship was locked by ice, and he was forced along with his crew to take refuge on nearby Northbrook Island. They’d be stuck there for 10 months. During that time, the crew survived by hunting walruses and using whatever provisions were salvaged. Eventually, they built boats using tablecloths as sails and made it out to sea, where they were finally rescued. Smith didn’t lose a single man.

To be fair, a lot of Benjamin Leigh Smith’s anonymity was self-imposed. He typically avoided public appearances and never published a memoir detailing his Arctic exploits. Today, there are only a couple of glaciers and a nearby island named after him to remind us of Smith’s accomplishments.

7Carsten Borchgrevink’s Southern Cross Expedition

When talking about Antarctic exploration, the first (and typically only) Norwegian explorer that comes to mind is Roald Amundsen. He was the first person to ever reach the South Pole, and the race between his group and Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed expedition became the stuff of legend. However, another Nordic explorer deserves a mention—Carsten Borchgrevink. His expedition predated Amundsen’s by over 10 years. Although he never reached the South Pole (a feat considered almost impossible at the time), Borchgrevink did set the new record for going the farthest south.

The expedition was known as the Southern Cross, and it took place from 1898–1900. Financed by English publishing magnate George Newnes, Borchgrevink took a ship and left London for Cape Adare. That is where the shore party of 10 people made camp (also the place that would be used as a home base 10 years later by Scott). It was never Borchgrevink’s main objective to reach the South Pole. Although he certainly considered it a possibility, the expedition’s goals were scientific in nature. Half of the shore party members were scientists who studied meteorology, cartography, and geology. Nobody apart from Borchgrevink was an experienced Antarctic explorer, so trying to reach the South Pole would have been borderline suicidal.

Despite Borchgrevink eventually getting overshadowed by Amundsen’s accomplishments, he still has his legacy. Amundsen’s “Framheim” base was destroyed long ago, while Borchgrevink’s base at Cape Adare is still standing and is now considered a historic site.

6David Douglas’s Trip Through The Rockies

David Douglas, a renowned Scottish botanist, undertook several trips through North America in the 19th century, discovering many new plants along the way. He also brought back hundreds of plant species and successfully introduced them to Britain, particularly the Douglas fir, which is named after him. Douglas’s second expedition in 1824 through the Rocky Mountains turned out to be his most productive, although it wasn’t without its mishaps.

There are two things worth noting about Douglas at this stage. He wasn’t a geologist, and the man was almost as blind as a bat. Regardless, he left his party while traversing the Rockies through the Athabasca Pass and climbed the mountain. Douglas did manage to reach the peak and saw another mountain roughly the same height a little to the south. He called them Mount Hooker and Mount Brown after two other famous botanists. This was fine, but Douglas also reported that these were the highest mountains in North America.

According to him, both mountains were 5,000 meters (16,000 ft) above sea level, and everyone believed him. It wasn’t long until maps were showing these giant peaks in the Rockies, and mountaineers were racing to see who would climb them first. Unfortunately, they seemed to be having a bit of trouble finding them because the giant peaks didn’t exist. The mountains mentioned by Douglas were only 2,750 meters (9,000 ft) and 3,000 meters (10,000 ft) respectively. It wasn’t until 70 years later that someone reread his journals and discovered the mistake.

5John Ainsworth Horrocks’s Outback Adventure

John Ainsworth Horrocks, a 19th-century English farmer and explorer, was among the first Europeans to explore the Australian outback. However, his achievements were overshadowed by the tragic yet unique way in which he met his demise during one of these trips.

His first exploratory expedition came in 1840, although this time he was simply looking for good land for his farm. He set off from Adelaide and explored the areas near the Hutt River, also founding Penwortham village in the meantime. He established a large farm in Clare Valley and went back to Britain in 1842 before returning two years later.

Bored with the life of a farmer, Horrocks returned to exploration and uncovered more of the outback. Several landmarks such as Horrocks Pass and Mount Horrocks still share his name. In 1846, he undertook another trek, looking to explore the region near Lake Torrens for more agricultural land. Horrocks had five other people with him, as well as an entire menagerie of animals, including a camel.

It wouldn’t be long before camels became essential for Australian exploration, but back then, Horrocks was one of the pioneers to introduce the animal into this environment. Unfortunately for him, that particular camel was often hostile toward the rest of the group. Horrocks himself got the worst of it—the camel shook him while he was reloading his gun. This caused Horrocks to shoot himself in the face. He was taken home, where he later died of gangrene.

4Charles Waterton’s Exploration Of Guyana

Charles Waterton was a 19th-century English aristocrat. Just like any good aristocrat, he was a bit loony. He was a passionate naturalist, and his trips exploring the wildlife of Guyana became the stuff of legend, especially after Waterton published his wildly successful book, Wanderings in South America.

Waterton’s approach to interacting with wild animals was hands-on enough to make Steve Irwin blush. In one single trip, Waterton obtained hundreds of examples of insects, birds, and reptiles, which he promptly dissected and stuffed. In fact, he perfected his own taxidermy method using a special concoction of chemicals that let Waterton manipulate the animals into lifelike poses.

Waterton obtained most small species from local tribes. The big ones, however, were a bit harder than that. In fact, his book details his efforts to obtain a wild caiman. His native helpers offered to shoot the giant reptile or kill it with curare darts, but Waterton wanted a pristine specimen, so he ended up tackling the caiman with his bare hands. A similar story involved capturing a giant snake.

When Waterton got back home to England, he undertook several conservation projects. During the 1820s, he opened the world’s first nature reserve on his estate, Walton Hall. In 2013, his collection of specimens went to the Wakefield Museum, with Sir David Attenborough there to express his admiration for the 19th-century naturalist. The giant caiman was among the exhibits.

3Richard Burton’s Journey To Mecca

Sir Richard Burton attained worldwide fame for his African trek alongside John Speke to find the source of the Nile. Burton was considered a jack-of-all-trades, skilled in cartography, geography, linguistics, and writing. He could reportedly speak up to 25 different languages (40 if you’re counting dialects).

Before his trip to Africa, Burton became one of the first Europeans (and, more notably, one of the first non-Muslims) to successfully make a Hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca. He took a massive risk, as Mecca was a forbidden city, off-limits to non-Muslims. Burton disguised himself as a Muslim pilgrim, but any mistake could have given him away and likely cost him his life.

Just looking the part would not have been enough. Burton had to be familiar with Muslim traditions if he was to pass as one of them. Fortunately for him, Burton was already fluent in Arabic and pretty knowledgeable of Islamic customs after being stationed as a soldier in India. According to legend, Burton even had himself circumcised to better fit in. In July 1853, Burton was granted a leave of absence from the British Army and left for Mecca from Egypt.

Even as a Muslim, his journey was dangerous, as Burton’s caravan traveled a road frequently attacked by bandits. Despite the perils, Burton returned successfully a few months later and published a book on his trip to Mecca. It became a sensation in Europe and turned him into a folk hero.

2The Bornu Mission

In 1821, English explorer Dixon Denham received the mission of exploring western Africa and establishing a trade route with the Kingdom of Bornu (modern-day Nigeria). He was accompanied by Scottish explorers Lt. Hugh Clapperton and Dr. Walter Oudney. The men set off from Tripoli and would have to cross the Sahara desert to reach their objective. Previous European attempts to do so had all proven unsuccessful.

Right off the bat, problems arose between the Englishman and the two Scots. They had neglected to choose their leader beforehand. The Scots thought Clapperton should be in charge since he was the most experienced, while Denham thought he himself should to be in charge because he felt like it. This created a lot of tension between Denham and Clapperton. Denham even tried to sabotage Clapperton’s leadership by sending back reports of him having homosexual affairs with his Arab servants.

Clapperton wrote about the dangers of traveling the Sahara. He mentioned that the central plateau was littered with skeletons. Despite their issues, the men reached Kuka, the capital of the Bornu Empire, becoming the first Europeans to successful traverse the Sahara. From there, they went their separate ways—Denham explored the region around Lake Chad, and the Scotsmen went to visit nearby states. Oudney died of illness, and Clapperton proceeded to travel alone. Upon returning to Kuka, he met up with Denham. In 1825, the two men returned to Tripoli and then to England, refusing to speak to each other during the whole 133-day trip.

1Sebastian Snow’s Amazonian Adventure

Sebastian Snow started his exotic exploits in the 1950s. Ccompared to everyone else on this list, his adventures are quite recent. However, his eccentricities and royalist attitude were very reminiscent of Victorian explorers from the good ol’ days. Whenever trying to communicate with foreigners, his strategy was to “just speak the Queen’s English loud enough, and everybody understands.”

When he was 22, Snow signed up for an expedition looking to discover the source of the Amazon River. His group aimed to verify the notion put forward by a couple of French explorers that Ninococha, a glacial lake, was the water source for the Maranon River, the largest tributary of the Amazon. Snow and his companion John Brown set off in April 1951 and confirmed the theory.

This was the point where the mission should have ended. However, Snow wanted to become the first person to raft down the entire length of the Amazon. This was completely spur-of-the-moment. Snow was unprepared and barely had any supplies. He managed to survive by stumbling from one friendly village to another, where he could find supplies and food.

Snow had to deal with dangerous rapids, violent bouts of malaria and dysentery, and all the lethal animals the Amazon could throw at him. At one point, he was even approached by a pirate canoe, but he just started yelling Spanish-like gibberish at them, randomly shouting the word pistola until they went away. Despite all the perils, Sebastian Snow completed his journey in July 1952.

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From Columbus to Magellan, the famous travelers of the Age of Exploration have become household names. Before that, we tend to think of the world as a parochial place, with people barely aware of what lay beyond their own backyard. But the truth is that daring explorers flourished in the Middle Ages, crossing vast distances and changing how Medieval people thought about the world.

10Friar Julian

Around 895 A.D., the Hungarians swept out of Eastern Europe, raiding across Europe and establishing themselves firmly in the Carpathian Basin. But they always remembered their distant homeland somewhere across the mountains. In particular, they mourned the Hungarians who had been split from the main group by a Pecheneg attack and left behind before the great migration into Europe. In 1235, King Bela of Hungary asked four Dominican friars to travel east in search of the missing Hungarians and their lost homeland.

Of the four explorers, only a friar named Julian survived the whole journey. He wrote that they had started their search around the Crimea, before trekking across the Caucasus and journeying up the Volga River. According to Julian, he found the Eastern Hungarians living there in a region he called Magna Hungaria (“Great Hungary”). However, by this time Julian had realized that a great threat was brewing. The Mongols were invading Russia and Julian correctly feared that this invincible new force would soon reach Hungary. He hastened back to Europe, where he provided the first detailed warning of the Mongol approach, and the Eastern Hungarians once again passed out of the history books.

9Gunnbjorn Ulfsson

It is fairly well-known that Erik the Red was the first Viking to sail to Greenland and settle there. But Erik did not actually discover Greenland. That honor goes to his relative Gunnbjorn Ulfsson, who reported the existence of a land west of Iceland in the early 10th century.

According to the sagas, Gunnbjorn was sailing to Iceland when he was blown off course by a storm. He reported seeing some skerries (small, uninhabitable islands) rising from the sea to the west and deduced that a larger landmass must lie beyond them. However, modern historians believe that Gunnbjorn was actually seeing the “hillingar,” a well-known mirage caused by “optical ducting” off the Greenland coast.

In any case, Gunnbjorn was right to suspect that a large island lay beyond whatever he saw. This new land was eventually settled by Erik the Red and used by his son Leif as a launch point for his famous voyages to the Americas.

8Rabban Bar Sauma

Often called the Marco Polo of the East, Rabban bar Sauma was born in China in 1220 A.D., not far from modern Beijing. He became a Nestorian Christian monk and became known for his fervent acts of devotion. He eventually decided to undertake a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, requiring him to trek across the Asian landmass. He eventually made it to Baghdad, but a war in the Holy Land meant he could not journey on to Jerusalem.

After a few years in an Armenian monastery, the Mongol ruler of Iran asked Rabban to undertake a diplomatic mission to Europe. The fearless monk was feted in Constantinople and narrowly wriggled out of a difficult situation in Rome, where some cardinals suspected that he was a heretic. He stayed with King Philip of France and made it to the Atlantic Ocean near Bordeaux, where he met with King Edward “Longshanks” of England.

After returning to Persia in triumph, Rabban retired to found a monastery in Azerbaijan. He carefully kept a diary of his travels, providing modern historians with a fascinating outsider’s perspective on Medieval Europe.

7William of Rubruck

After the initial Mongol invasion of Europe, the European powers would send several ambassadors on the long journey to the court of the Great Khan. By far the most insightful was the monk William of Rubruck, who actually was not an ambassador at all and mostly wound up in Mongolia by accident.

During the Seventh Crusade, William asked King Louis XI of France for permission to travel from Palestine to modern Russia, where he hoped to minister to the Christians enslaved by the Mongols during their attack on Hungary a decade earlier. But when he rocked up in Russia, the Mongols completely misunderstood his mission and assumed he was a formal ambassador. As such, they sent him on to the court of Mongke Khan in Mongolia.

William was in no position to argue and found himself swept along to Karakorum, where he spoke with Mongke and participated in a formal debate between Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists (everyone ended up blackout drunk before Mongke got around to picking the winner).

He returned to France around 1255, where he wrote a detailed and often humorous account of his travels (a highlight is a lengthy religious discussion with some Buddhists which suddenly ends because “my interpreter was tired and . . . made me stop talking). Among other breakthroughs, he alerted Medieval Europe to the existence of Buddhism and persuaded mapmakers that the Caspian Sea was landlocked.

6Afanasy Nikitin

Afanasy Nikitin was a merchant from Tver who became arguably the greatest Russian explorer of the Medieval period. He initially left Tver in 1466 on a trading expedition to the Caucasus but was attacked and robbed on the Volga. With his finances in ruins, he decided to seek opportunities further afield and traveled on through Persia to Hormuz, where he took ship for India.

Nikitin arrived in India in 1469. At that time, the country was virtually unknown in Russia, but he fit in well and traveled widely through the Deccan. He found he got along better with the local Hindus than their Muslim rulers, who kept trying to talk him into converting. He wrote extensive descriptions of the local temples and religious practices and made visits to Calicut and Sri Lanka, where he described the famous Adam’s Peak as a holy site for Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims.

In 1472, Nikitin became homesick and decided to make the journey back to Tver. Along the way, he visited Ethiopia and Oman, but he sadly died in Smolensk, Russia, just a short distance from his beloved Tver.

5Li Da and Chen Cheng

Li Da and Chen Cheng were two Chinese eunuchs who undertook a dangerous expedition through Central Asia in the 1410s. Li Da was by far the more experienced traveler, having already made two trips into the heart of Asia. But he did not write about them, so he has been almost forgotten. But Chen Cheng did keep a detailed diary, so he gets all the glory, although he was always subordinate to Li Da.

The two eunuchs set out in 1414, on a diplomatic mission for the Yongle Emperor. They journeyed through a desert for 50 days, then navigated the barren terrain of the world’s second lowest depression, and clambered past the Tian Shan mountains. They waded through salt marshes and lost most of their horses crossing the Syr River. Finally, after 269 days, they reached Herat, presented their gifts to the sultan and went home. Astonishingly, Li Da would make the same journey twice more, always making it through without a scratch.

4Odoric of Pordenone

Beginning in the late 13th century, the Franciscan monks began a determined effort to establish a presence in east Asia. They sent out missionaries like John of Montecorvino, who became the first Catholic Bishop of Peking (Beijing), and Giovanni de’ Marignolli, who journeyed widely through China and India. Perhaps the best traveled of all was Odoric of Pordenone, a Franciscan of Czech extraction who set out for the east around 1316.

After some time in Persia, Odoric preached throughout India before taking ship for modern Indonesia, where he visited Java, Sumatra, and possibly Borneo. Arriving in China, he based himself in Beijing but continued to travel widely (he was particularly impressed with Hangzhou) for the next three years. He then decided to return home via Lhasa, Tibet.

After returning to Italy, he dictated his biography from his sickbed (which may explain why they abruptly end after Tibet). He died in Udine in 1331. His memoirs became enormously influential—but not in the way he might have hoped. An unknown hack rewrote them to add all sorts of ludicrous events and fantastical beasts and published them as “The Travels Of Sir John Mandeville,” which became a smash medieval bestseller.

3Naddodd and Gardar

According to the saga of Ari the Wise, the first Viking to discover Iceland was a settler in the Faroe Islands called Naddodd, who was blown off course by a storm to a place he called “Snowland.” This accidental discovery was followed up by a Swede named Gardar Svarsson, who explored the coast of the island and wintered there before sailing back to Scandinavia, full of praise for the new land. Thanks to Gardar’s daring and Naddodd’s ability not to die in a storm, the Vikings would quickly settle in Iceland, where their descendants remain to this day.

Oddly, the sagas insist that Noddodd and Gardar were not the first Europeans to reach Iceland. According to Ari, Scottish or Irish monks known as Papar were already living as hermits in Iceland when the Norse arrived, but they quickly left as “they did not want to share the land with heathens,” leaving behind “Irish books.” Of course, Ari was writing 250 years later, and supporting evidence for the Papar’s existence is thin, so use your best judgment there.

2Benjamin of Tudela

Very little is known about Benjamin of Tudela since his travelogue remains the only source for his life. He was a Jew who set out from Tudela in Spain around 1160 and kept a careful record of his travels. After journeying through Barcelona and southern France, he spent some time in Rome before traveling south through Greece to Constantinople.

From Constantinople, he took ship for the Holy Land and journeyed through Palestine and Syria to Baghdad and Persia. His writings then describe Sri Lanka and China, but the descriptions become fantastical, and most historians believe he did not make it farther than the Persian Gulf.

Benjamin’s primary value to historians was his focus on the Jewish communities he encountered everywhere on his travels, which tended to be ignored by later travelers. His writing remains the best travelogue of this hidden Medieval world.

1Ibn Battutah

It is impossible to write about medieval travelers without mentioning Ibn Battutah, the greatest traveler of his age and arguably of all time. While most medieval explorers journeyed for trade, diplomacy, or religion, Ibn Battutah simply loved traveling: he was a natural tourist. As a result, it has been seriously suggested that he covered more miles than anyone else until the invention of the steam engine.

Born into a wealthy Moroccan family, Ibn Battutah was sent on a pilgrimage to Mecca as a youth. It was supposed to prepare him for a career as an Islamic judge, but instead, it awakened his wanderlust. Instead of returning home, he crisscrossed the Middle East and then sailed down the East African coast to modern Tanzania.

Running low on funds, Ibn Battutah then decided to journey to Delhi, where he had heard the sultan was extremely generous. Typically, he went via Turkey, Crimea, Constantinople, and the Volga River in what is now Russia. Finally, he reached Afghanistan and crossed the Hindu Kush into India, where the sultan showered him with gifts and sent him on a diplomatic mission to China.

Unfortunately, he was robbed, caught in a war, and shipwrecked (in that order), losing all the gifts the sultan had asked him to present to the Chinese court. Too afraid to return to Delhi, he spent a few years hiding out in the Maldives, then visited Sri Lanka, Bengal, and Sumatra, before finally making it to China around 1345.

Returning to the Middle East two years later, he found the region ravaged by the black plague and quickly returned to Morocco. After a quick jaunt to Spain, he embarked on his last great journey, crossing the Sahara and exploring the Malian Empire. In 1353, he returned to Morocco, wrote his memoirs, and promptly vanished from history.

Man explored the world long before the days of Columbus and Magellan. Even in the earliest moments of human history, when the known world was little more than what extended within sight, there were men who were sent out to explore the unknown.

When the first explorers set out into unknown parts of the world, they had no way of being prepared for what they saw. They saw parts of the world that were completely unlike anything they had ever imagined. Then, they had to come home and try to find a way to put the things they had seen into words.

10Hanno and the Burning Jungle

Around the sixth or fifth century B.C., a Carthaginian called Hanno the Navigator set out with 30,000 people in 76 ships and sailed along the western coast of Africa. It is believed that he made it as far as modern Ghana—at the time, the furthest anyone had gone into the continent.

Nobody in his world, at this time, had any idea of what to expect in West Africa, and Hanno came back with some strange reports about the people who lived there. He described people with almost mythic powers, claiming that there were a group of men living in caves who could run faster than horses.

His most harrowing story, though, comes from his exploration of an island. “In the daytime we could see nothing but the forest,” Hanno reported, “but during the night we noticed many fires alight and heard the sound of flutes, the beating of cymbals and tom-toms, and the shouts of a multitude.”

An oracle he had brought with him urged him to leave the island and soon as possible. When he was back on his boat and looked back at the island, it was on fire. “Large torrents of fire emptied into the sea, and the land was inaccessible because of the heat,” Hanno wrote. “Quickly and in fear, we sailed away from that place. For four days, we saw the coast by night full of flames.”

9Himilco and the Sea Monsters of Britain

While Hanno went south, down Africa, another Carthaginian, Himilco, traveled north, along the coastline of Europe and all the way up to modern England. He set up colonies along the way and opened trade routes with the people who lived there, who he called “a vigorous tribe” that were “proud spirited, energetic and skillful.”

The strangest part, though, is how Himilco describes his trip. According to Himilco, Britain was under a constant fog, with shallow waters so full of seaweed that it was nearly impossible to move a ship an inch. And, he claimed, it was filled up with “numerous sea monsters.”

It is not entirely clear what Himilco actually saw. He may have struggled with some animal he had never seen before and mistaken it for a monster—or he might have just lied. That is the most popular theory—that Himilco thought his discoveries in Britain were so valuable that he had to keep them secret from the world. When he came home, he told the Greeks there were killer sea monsters to keep them from exploring Britain for themselves.

8Necho and the Trip around Africa

Sometime in the sixth century B.C., the Egyptian Pharaoh Necho outdid Hanno’s trip. He sent men out down the Red Sea and had them follow the coast of Africa, heading all the way down to the tip of South Africa, up along the west, and back through the Nile. These were the first people in all of history to circumnavigate the continent.

The trip took more than two years to complete. Every autumn, the men would dock their ship wherever they were and set up farms to survive through the winter. Then, in the spring, they would head back aboard their ship and sail off again.

These people traveled further south than any Egyptian had before them—which made them the first to see the sky from the southern hemisphere. When they came home, they reported that they had seen the sun shine from the north.

To the people of the ancient world, though, the idea of a southern hemisphere was incomprehensible. They thought the men were delusional. Our main record of this trip comes from the Greek Herodotus, who scoffs at their claim that the sun was further north. “Some believe it,” he wrote, “but I do not.”

7Hecataeus’s Journey around the World

During the sixth century B.C., Hecataeus, a Greek geographer, explored as much of the world as he could. He had been to Egypt and parts of Africa, and was pretty sure that he had seen and heard enough to chart the whole world.

He tried to catalog every part of the world in a book called “Journey Around the World” and even made his own world map. His map showed the world as a round disc with Greece in the center. The world, he believed, stretched no further west than the Strait of Gibraltar, no further east than the Caspian Sea, and no further south than the Red Sea. Beyond these points, there was nothing but water.

Not every Greek believed him. Herodotus made fun of him, writing, “I laugh when I see that many have designed maps of the earth” that made it look “exactly circular” with “an ocean flowing round the Earth.” He was pushing his own map of the world—his, though, was pretty much the same, except that he made the earth a bit more of a misshapen blob, and he had helpfully written the word “cannibals” over northern Europe.

6Pytheas and the Frozen Ocean

Around 325 B.C., Pytheas became the first Greek to sail up the northernmost point of Britain and circle the islands. He came home and gushed about everything he had seen—and nobody believed him.

Almost every record we have of Pytheas’s journey is from somebody who thinks he is lying. The Greek Strabo wrote off his entire trip as a lie, referring to him as “Pytheas, by whom many have been misled.” In particular, he mocked Pytheas for saying that Britain had a coastline 4,545 miles (7314 km) long. To Strabo, that seemed impossibly big—but, if anything, Pytheas’s measurements were too small.

His reports include some descriptions that seem to suggest he reached the Arctic. He said that, north of Britain, there was a “frozen ocean” where the nights get so long that “on the winter solstice there is no day.”

Some of his word choices, though, make it pretty clear why the Greeks did not believe him. North of Britain, he claimed, “there was no longer either land properly so-called, or sea, or air, but a kind of substance concreted from all these elements, resembling a sea-lungs.” Nothing, he said, could cross the sea-lungs.

It sounds mythical and impossible, and kind of made-up—but he might just not have known how to describe what he was seeing. Some today think that he saw slaushed ice drifting in the sea and was just doing his best to try to explain it.

5Nearchus’s Violent Trip down the Indus River

Around the same time, Alexander the Great sent out a man named Nearchus to explore the Indus River, wanting to see if there was a safe path down the river. Nearchus was given men and ships and went out—and ended up getting into enough fights with natives to make the Spanish Conquistadors look peaceful.

As soon as he started, Nearchus was stopped by a monsoon. He had to spend a month waiting for the weather to calm down. The native people, though, attacked his camp so often that he ended up having to build a fortified base out of stone just to hold them off.

When he finally got going, he found another group of natives with stone age technology who tried to scare him away from landing. According to Nearchus, these people were completely covered in hair, with nails “rather like beasts’ claws.”

Nearchus immediately tried to kill them all, launching missiles at them from their boat and sending an armored phalanx in to slaughter the rest. He boasted, “They, astounded at the flash of the armor, and the swiftness of the charge, and attacked by showers of arrows and missiles, half naked as they were, never stopped to resist but gave way.”

He slaughtered or took captive every person he could run down, only complaining afterward that “some escaped into the hills.”

4Zhang Qian’s Journey to Mesopotamia

Around 113 B.C., the Emperor of Han sent an explorer named Zhang Qian out west, to find out who lived there, and, it seems, whether they could be added to his empire.

Zhang Qian made it into part of Mesopotamia, exploring parts of Parthian Persia and the Seleucid Empire that were tightly connected to the European powers. He came back with some of the first descriptions the Chinese ever heard of these places.

He was fascinated by Western coins. “They bear the face of the king,” he reported back. “When the king dies, the currency is immediately changed and new coins issued with the face of his successor.”

He came to the Seleucid Empire when it was collapsing after years of Civil Wars. In its weakened state, he saw it as a place “ruled by many petty chiefs,” subservient to the Parthians.

On the whole, though, he was not impressed. “All these states,” he reported back to the emperor, “were militarily weak.” With a few gifts from the Han Empire, Zhang Qian believed, every one of them could be made subservient.

3The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea and the First Chinese Contact

Around A.D. 60, the Greeks wrote a book called “The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea.” It was their description of the Indian world—but it is particularly unique for having one of the first European descriptions of a Chinese person.

The unknown writer reported seeing a tribe he called the “Sêsatai,” believed to be Chinese, journey into India. He describes them as “short in body and very flat faced” and says that they came carrying massive packs “resembling mats of green leaves.”

The Sêsatai would lay out their great mats and hold a festival in India. Then, after days of celebration, these people would leave their mats behind and head back into China.

This was one of the first contacts between the European world and the Chinese—although not a single word was spoken. The Greek writer simply watched them celebrate and leave, writing them off as a primitive tribe—unaware he had made contact with a massive eastern empire.

2Gan Ying’s Journey to Europe

Shortly after, in A.D. 97, the Han Empire sent an explorer named Gan Ying out west to make contact with Europe. It is likely that they had heard stories about the empires to the west, and Gan Ying was to find out if these places were real.

Gan Ying made it out west to Parthia and spoke to the sailors there, but they convinced him not to go on to Europe. “The ocean is huge,” the sailors told him, warning him a trip across the sea could take up to three years. “The vast ocean urges men to think of their country, and get homesick, and some of them die.”

Instead, Gan Ying got them to describe Rome in as much detail as possible. He reported back that it was a massive kingdom with five palaces in the capital. “The people of this country are all tall and honest,” he reported back. “They shave their heads, and their clothes are embroidered.”

Rome, he learned, was aware of the Han Empire, and had tried to trade with them. The Parthians, though, had kept them apart to dominate Rome’s trade with the East.

1The Wei Zhi and the Tattooed People of Japan

In A.D. 297, explorers from the Chinese Wei Kingdom traveled around the Japanese islands and reported back what they had heard. They were not the first people to make contact with Japan, but they explored the eastern sea more thoroughly than ever before. If there is any truth to what they wrote, Japan has gone through some major changes.

“Men, great and small, all tattoo their faces and decorate their bodies with designs,” the Wei explorers reported back. The people of Japan, they claimed, covered themselves in these tattoos to “keep away large fish” when they go swimming.

They traveled south of Japan, too, where they claimed to have found an “island of the dwarfs where the people are three or four feet tall.” They put the Island of the Dwarfs about a year’s travel southeast of Korea, near the “Land of the Black-Teethed People” and the “Land of the Naked Men.”

There was a time when there was no greater calling than that of an explorer. So much of the world was still unknown to us and it was up to a few brave and curious adventurers to probe the deepest, darkest corners of the planet to illuminate the rest of us.

It was dangerous work and many lives were sacrificed during the pursuit of this noble endeavor. As you are about to see, some men who probed the unfathomable abyss were never heard from again.

10. The Vivaldi Brothers

Not much is known about Vadino and Ugolino Vivaldi. We know that they were two brothers from the Republic of Genoa who lived during the second half of the 13th century and that they were both thriving maritime merchants. Whether or not the siblings had a history of exploration and adventure, we cannot say, but in 1291 they set off on a very ambitious journey – to try and find a sailing route from Europe to India via Africa. 

Basically, it was the cape route that they were looking for – the sea lane that traversed the South Atlantic Ocean, rounded Africa at the Cape of Good Hope, and then crossed the Indian Ocean. It served, basically, as the most important shipping route in the world for centuries, but the Vivaldi brothers attempted to sail it almost 200 years before it was actually discovered by European explorers. 

Suffice it to say that things did not go to plan. The brothers left Genoa in May 1291 aboard two galleys, possibly named the Sanctus Antonius and the Alegrancia. They were known to have made it out of the Mediterranean and to have sailed off the coast of Morocco, but once they hit the open ocean, they were never heard from again.

9. John Cabot

Like the Vivaldi brothers, Giovanni Caboto was an Italian explorer, but he sailed under the auspices of King Henry VII of England, hence the anglicized version of his name, John Cabot. The adventurer undertook three voyages for England, but it is his second journey in 1497 that he is most famous for. Simply known as the Cabot Expedition, this trip saw the intrepid explorer reach the coast of North America, becoming the first European to do so since the Vikings. The exact spot where he landed is still under debate, although the Canadian Government recognizes Cape Bonavista in Newfoundland as Cabot’s landfall.

Since this voyage was a success, Cabot intended to repeat it a year later, with the full backing of the king. This time, he had more ships, and they had been loaded with merchandise, suggesting that Cabot was looking to trade. 

The fleet set off from Bristol in May 1498. We know that one of the ships was damaged early on during a storm and had to return to England. From that point on, the expedition and John Cabot himself simply disappeared from the historical record. Possible outcomes for them included the obvious – that they were lost at sea – or that they reached Canada, but shipwrecked and died at Grates Cove on the Avalon Peninsula.

However, some historians believe that Cabot did make it back to England in 1500 and died there a few months later, although this doesn’t really explain why there is no mention of his return or death. 

8. Henry Hudson

A hundred years after Cabot, there was another navigator who sailed under the English flag and explored the northeastern coast of North America. He was Henry Hudson, the man who gave his name to the Hudson River, the Hudson Strait, and a few other places.   

There are quite a few similarities between Henry Hudson and our previous entries. Like Cabot, he undertook several successful voyages to the New World during the early 1600s. Then, like the Vivaldi brothers, Hudson embarked on a very ambitious mission that proved to be his doom. In his case, it was the search for the Northwest Passage, the sea route that connected the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans by passing through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. 

The first man to successfully complete this route was Roald Amundsen in 1906, so we already know how things went for Hudson who attempted it 300 years earlier. The explorer set off from London in 1610 aboard the Discovery with a crew of 23, including his son, John Hudson. He reached the Arctic Ocean, but got trapped in ice in James Bay and had no choice but to go ashore and wait out the winter. 

Miraculously, the expedition only lost one man during the coming months but, by the time spring came around, most of the crew wanted to return back to England. They mutinied and placed Henry Hudson, his son, and seven loyal shipmates in a boat and cast them adrift, and they were never seen again.

7. La Pérouse 

During the late 18th century, the Age of Enlightenment was in full swing, and expeditions of scientific exploration were the new hot ticket. Following the voyages of James Cook, France felt like it was lagging behind England slightly, so in 1785 King Louis XVI ordered his government to organize an expedition around the world and complete Cook’s exploration of the Pacific.

The man chosen to lead this scientific mission was Jean-François de Galaup, Count of La Pérouse, a senior naval officer who had distinguished himself fighting against England during the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution. La Pérouse was given command of two frigates – La Boussole and L’Astrolabe – fully stocked with the most modern scientific equipment of the day, plus a sizable library, and a crew that included multiple scientists.

The expedition left France in August 1785 and, for three years, things went very well. La Pérouse started by sailing to South America, then rounding Cape Horn and traveling northwards all the way to Alaska. He then crossed the Pacific and reached East Asia before heading south to Polynesia. In January 1788, the two ships reached Australia, where they docked for a month-and-a-half. They left in early March and were never seen again.

Their disappearance was considered a national tragedy in France and several rescue missions could not find a trace of what had happened to them. Even King Louis XVI, on the day of his execution, was reported to have asked his captors on the way to the guillotine if there was any news of La Pérouse.

It wasn’t until almost 50 years later that sailors found remnants that suggested that both ships smashed against the reef of an island called Vanikoro and sunk, but this still did not explain the fates of the crewmen. Local oral history said that survivors spent months on the island, building a schooner before setting out to sea again and disappearing once more.

6. Douglas Clavering

Scottish naval officer Douglas Clavering made a name for himself as an Arctic explorer, leading an expedition that surveyed Greenland and the Svalbard archipelago in 1823. That, however, had nothing to do with his mysterious disappearance. After making his successful return to England, Clavering was given a different commission as part of the West Africa Squadron, Britain’s recent anti-slavery initiative. 

The squadron was formed in 1808, following the passing of the Slave Trade Act, and it consisted of a fleet of Royal Navy ships that patrolled the waters off the coast of West Africa in an effort to suppress slavery. Captain Clavering became part of this squadron in 1825, after being appointed commander of the brig-sloop HMS Redwing. 

Although the West Africa Squadron seized around 1,600 slave ships during its 50-year existence, little is known of Clavering’s personal involvement. What we do know is that two years after his appointment, the Redwing set sail from Sierra Leone and was never seen again. Bits of wreckage that washed ashore suggested that the vessel might have caught fire, perhaps from a lightning strike.

5. Baron von Toll

In 1900, geologist and explorer Baron Eduard von Toll was commissioned by the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences to lead a new Russian polar expedition to the arctic to survey an archipelago called the New Siberian Islands. Specifically, he was to search for the mythical Sannikov Land and prove, once and for all, whether or not the island actually existed.

This landmass had been first spotted a hundred years earlier and, ever since then, several explorers claimed to have seen it, including von Toll himself during an earlier expedition. This made him perfect for the mission so, in June 1900, he set off for the arctic with a 19-man team aboard the Zarya. 

Unfortunately for von Toll, Sannikov Land did not exist and this proved to be his undoing. After two years in the arctic, his team gathered plenty of scientific data, but no sign of the elusive island. With the expedition coming to a close, von Toll tried one last bold gamble. After the winter of 1902 passed, he and three crewmen left the Zarya and went on a separate journey using sleighs and canoes to maneuver easier through the archipelago. They were supposed to rendezvous with the rest of the team on Bennett Island, but the thick ice prevented the ship from getting anywhere close. From that point on, the fate of von Toll and his three crewmen became a mystery. Months later, a search party found their camp on Bennett Island along with several notes written by the explorer, but no trace of the men could ever be found.

4. Joshua Slocum

In 1898, Canadian sailor and adventurer Joshua Slocum turned into a worldwide sensation after becoming the first man to single-handedly sail around the world. He had spent the last three years traveling 46,000 miles aboard his sloop named Spray. Slocum then wrote an account of his experience titled Sailing Alone Around the World, which became an international bestseller.

Slocum’s success also provided him with some financial stability, which allowed him to buy some land and settle down. However, the old seadog soon realized that he was more at home on the open ocean than on terra firma, so he resumed his sailing, often traveling between the United States and the West Indies or South America. 

Unfortunately, it was one such trip that led to Slocum’s demise. In November 1909, he left Massachusetts and headed for the Caribbean aboard his trusty Spray. He was last seen resupplying in Miami before disappearing. Neither man nor ship was ever found. Although the obvious scenario suggests Slocum perished at sea, especially since he apparently never learned to swim, there is another idea that suggests that the adventurer faked his disappearance in order to start a new life away from his family.

3. Roald Amundsen

In the pantheon of polar explorers, the name Roald Amundsen probably rings out greater than any other, but not even he was spared an untimely and uncertain demise.

In 1906, Amundsen led the first expedition that successfully navigated through the Northwest Passage. Five years later, he became the first man to reach the South Pole. Those were his two biggest claims to fame, but Amundsen stayed involved with arctic exploration until the very end.

On May 25, 1928, the polar airship Italia crashed somewhere in the Svalbard archipelago. This prompted an international rescue mission, which included an aging Amundsen, who boarded a Latham 47 flying boat prototype with a team of five to help search for the wreckage. The plane left Tromsø, Norway on June 18 and disappeared without a trace over the Barents Sea. 

The wreckage of the Italia was eventually found and multiple survivors were rescued, but the same could not be said for Amundsen’s Latham 47. Even modern searches using the latest sonar technology and underwater vehicles have yielded no results so, for now, the final resting place of one of the greatest arctic explorers remains a mystery.

2. Michael Rockefeller

Michael Rockefeller was born into the fabulously wealthy Rockefeller family, but unlike his predecessors, he eschewed the worlds of business and politics and opted, instead, for a life of adventure. 

After studying history and economics at Harvard, Rockefeller took an interest in ethnology and anthropology. In 1960, he joined an expedition to serve as the sound man on a documentary about the Dani people in Western New Guinea, back then part of the Netherlands. While there, Michael encountered another group of people called the Asmat, who fascinated the young Rockefeller with their artwork.

The following year, he funded his own expedition back to New Guinea, hoping to study the Asmat people in detail and even organize an art exhibition back in New York. The team consisted only of him, Dutch anthropologist Rene Wassing, and two local Asmat teenagers. For three weeks, the expedition went well, as Rockefeller visited and traded in 13 different villages, amassing a sizable collection of Asmat artifacts.

Things went wrong on November 16, while the team was sailing down a river to the next village. Some powerful waves and crosscurrents overturned the boat, plunging all four men into the water. The two Asmat teenagers quickly swam ashore and went to get help, but Wassing and Rockefeller had no choice but to hold onto the overturned raft and drift down the river. After an entire night like this, Rockefeller tried to make it to shore…and that was the last time that anyone ever saw him. Wassing was spotted from a helicopter and rescued the following day.

Rockefeller’s official cause of death was drowning, but in the years that followed, a story went around that he had actually been murdered and cannibalized by the people from a village called Otsjanep. However, by then, Western New Guinea was no longer part of the Netherlands, so no official investigation was ever carried out.

1. Peng Jiamu

We end with the most recent entry on our list, which goes to show that even in modern times, there are still plenty of unknown parts of the world that hold hidden perils. By 1980, Peng Jiamu had already established himself as one of China’s premier biochemists, having taken part in multiple scientific expeditions over the previous 25 years to study the wildest, most remote regions of the country. That year, he left to explore the Lop Nur, a desert in the Tarim Basin. Five days into the mission, Peng vanished without a trace, seemingly swallowed by the vast emptiness of the desert. 

It appeared that the scientist left the camp alone in the middle of the night to search for water and got lost in the desert. This was very puzzling given that Peng was an experienced explorer who would have known better. Add to that the fact that extensive searches by the Chinese government uncovered no signs of him and this prompted several conspiracy theories that suggested that Peng could have been murdered by his colleagues, kidnapped by the Russians or Americans, or even defected of his own will. The truth remains a mystery.