The Donner Party was a group of roughly 87 American emigrants — families and hired hands travelling in ox-drawn wagons — bound for California in 1846 under the nominal leadership of the Illinois farmer George Donner and the businessman James Frazier Reed. Lured off the established trail onto an untested “shortcut,” they reached the Sierra Nevada too late in the season and were trapped by early snow near Truckee Lake (now Donner Lake) in the first days of November 1846. They remained snowbound for some four months. Of the roughly 87 who set out, about 39 died of starvation, cold and exhaustion, and the survivors — split between two camps and a doomed escape party — resorted to eating the bodies of the dead.
The catastrophe was made by decisions, not weather alone. The party’s fate was sealed when it adopted the “Hastings Cutoff,” a route promoted by Lansford Hastings in a guidebook he had never fully travelled. Far from saving distance, the cutoff added an estimated 125 miles, wrecked the wagons in the Wasatch Range and the Great Salt Lake Desert, killed oxen, and consumed the weeks of margin the party needed to clear the mountains before winter. By the time they reached the Sierra crest, the first blizzard had closed the pass.
Through the winter the emigrants sheltered in three crude cabins at the lake and in tents at Alder Creek, six miles back, where the Donner families had been forced to halt. As food ran out — first the cattle, then dogs, then boiled hides — people began to die. On 16 December 1846 a party of seventeen, soon called the “Forlorn Hope,” set out on improvised snowshoes for help; of the fifteen who pressed on, eight died, their bodies eaten by the survivors, and two Miwok guides, Luis and Salvador, were shot for food. Seven reached the Sacramento Valley after about a month and raised the alarm. Four relief parties struggled up between February and April 1847; the last survivor, Lewis Keseberg, was brought out around 21 April. Two-thirds of the women and children lived; only about a third of the men did.
The Emin Pasha Relief Expedition was a British-organized venture of 1886–89, led by Henry Morton Stanley, to march across central Africa and bring out Emin Pasha — the German-born governor of Egypt’s Equatoria province, isolated near Lake Albert after the Mahdist revolt cut him off from the north. Stanley approached not from the east coast but up the Congo, a far longer route, and in June 1887 divided his force of nearly 800 men on the Aruwimi River. He pushed ahead with an Advance Column through the Ituri rainforest and left a Rear Column of about 271 men at a camp called Yambuya, under Major Edmund Barttelot, to wait for porters promised by the slave-trader Tippu Tip and then follow. The Rear Column was not relieved in time and disintegrated. When Stanley returned to it at Banalya in August 1888, more than half the men were dead or had deserted, its officers were dead, dying, invalided or gone, and accounts of starvation, savage floggings and a recorded atrocity against an enslaved African girl had begun to spread.
The expedition’s professed purpose — relief — sat uneasily with its conduct. It was a private enterprise of the Scramble for Africa, funded by a committee under the shipowner William Mackinnon, entangled with King Leopold II’s Congo Free State and British commercial ambitions in East Africa, and it moved through the lands and lives of central African peoples as if they existed only to be used. The route through the Congo basin and the Ituri forest was murderous: of the 389 men of the Advance Column who left Yambuya, only 169 reached Lake Albert alive. The Rear Column’s fate was worse in character if not in raw numbers, because what destroyed it was not only disease and hunger but the cruelty of its own command.
The dead must be counted plainly, and most were African: the Zanzibari, Sudanese and Manyema porters who died of starvation and untreated illness, the men flogged to death on Barttelot’s orders, and above all the enslaved girl whom the naturalist James Sligo Jameson paid to have killed and eaten so that he could sketch it. Stanley did reach Emin Pasha and brought survivors to the east coast in 1889, but the venture is remembered less for that than for the Rear Column, an episode that stands as a case study in how an imperial expedition can become an engine of the suffering it claims to relieve.
The Roosevelt–Rondon Scientific Expedition descended the Rio da Dúvida — the “River of Doubt,” an uncharted tributary of the Amazon in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso — between February and April 1914, and very nearly killed the former United States president Theodore Roosevelt. It was led jointly by Roosevelt and the Brazilian army officer and explorer Colonel Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, who had discovered the river’s headwaters in 1909 and whose expertise, discipline and knowledge of the interior carried the party through. Of roughly twenty-two people who descended the river, three died: one paddler drowned in rapids, one camarada was murdered by another, and the killer was left behind in the forest. Roosevelt survived, gravely weakened, and never fully recovered his health.
The expedition trekked overland across the Brazilian highlands from December 1913, reaching the put-in on the River of Doubt and beginning the descent on 27 February 1914. The river proved far worse than imagined: a succession of rapids, gorges and waterfalls that forced exhausting portages, smashed and swamped the dugout canoes, and stretched a journey planned for weeks into a two-month ordeal through fever country. The camaradas — the Brazilian backwoodsmen who paddled and hauled — bore the heaviest labour. On 15 March the paddler Antônio Simplício da Silva drowned when his canoe was lost in the rapids; his body was never recovered. In early April a camarada named Julio de Lima, caught stealing food, shot and killed the foreman Manoel Vicente da Paixão; Julio fled into the jungle and was left behind.
Roosevelt himself nearly became the fourth death. On about 22 March he badly gashed his leg helping to free a canoe, the wound became infected, and malarial fever drove his temperature toward 105°F; the expedition’s physician, Dr José Antônio Cajazeira, twice operated, once lancing an abscess. Delirious and unable to walk, Roosevelt at one point asked to be left behind so as not to slow the others, and his son Kermit refused to allow it. The party reached Rondon’s pre-arranged relief at the confluence with the Aripuanã River on about 26 April 1914. Rondon renamed the river the Rio Roosevelt. Roosevelt, who had lost a quarter of his body weight, returned home broken in health and died less than five years later.
The Calvert Scientific Exploring Expedition set out from Mullewa, Western Australia, on 13 June 1896 to fill in the last blank spaces on the colony’s map, crossing the Great Sandy Desert toward the Fitzroy River in the Kimberley. It was a camel survey of eight men under the surveyor Lawrence Allen Wells, financed by the London mining promoter Albert Frederick Calvert and conducted under the South Australian Branch of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia. Two of the eight died in the desert: Charles Frederick Wells, the leader’s cousin and second-in-command, and George Lindsay Jones, the young mineralogist and photographer.
The deaths followed a decision to divide the party in waterless country. By October 1896 the expedition was deep in the dunes, its camels sickening on poisonous plants and water nearly impossible to find. From a camp near a soak the party called Separation Well, Charles Wells and Jones rode off on a “flying trip” to the north-west to extend the survey, intending to rejoin the main column at the next watering point. The two parties never met again. The main body reached the Fitzroy on the Derby track in early November; Wells and Jones, unable to find water and with their camels failing, turned back to follow the main party’s tracks and died of heat and thirst on or about 21 November 1896.
Their fate was not known for half a year. Lawrence Wells mounted repeated searches, and the Western Australian government sent the surveyor William Rudall, who relied on an Aboriginal tracker named Cherry and quartered some 60,000 square kilometres of desert without finding them. The mummified bodies were found at last on 27 May 1897, about 26 kilometres south-west of Joanna Spring, by a recovery party that included two Aboriginal trackers and the Afghan cameleer Dervish Bejah. Jones’s diary, recovered with the remains, recorded the dwindling water, the loss of the camels, and the men’s last failed search for a soak. The geographical results were real; so was the cost, and a colonial inquiry later cleared Lawrence Wells of blame for the separation that killed two of his men.