The Victorian Exploring Expedition set out from Melbourne on 20 August 1860 to make the first south-to-north crossing of Australia, from the southern colonies to the Gulf of Carpentaria, under Robert O’Hara Burke, a police superintendent with no exploration experience, and the surveyor and astronomer William John Wills. It was the most lavishly equipped expedition Australia had then mounted — roughly £57,000, nineteen men, twenty-six camels, twenty-three horses, and tonnes of supplies — and it failed not for want of provisions but through command, judgement and a fatal indifference to the people who knew the country.
Burke drove the party forward by repeatedly splitting it and stripping it down for speed. A four-man forward team — Burke, Wills, John King and Charley Gray — reached the Gulf country in February 1861 and turned back. Gray died on the return. The three survivors staggered into the Cooper Creek depot on the evening of 21 April 1861 to find it abandoned; the depot party under William Brahe, after waiting more than four months, had ridden out that same day, missing them by roughly nine hours. The cached supplies left at the marked “Dig Tree” were not enough to save them.
Burke and Wills died near Cooper Creek around late June or early July 1861 of starvation and exhaustion, their decline hastened by eating nardoo, an aquatic fern whose seed is toxic unless processed. Only John King lived, because the Yandruwandha people — on whose Country the men died — fed him fish and properly prepared nardoo, sheltered him, and kept him alive for some three months until a relief party reached him on 15 September 1861. The expedition is remembered in Australia as a heroic tragedy; the more accurate account is of preventable mismanagement survived only through Aboriginal generosity that the colonial mythology long erased.
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 Narváez expedition was a Spanish colonising venture that sailed from Spain in June 1527 under Pánfilo de Narváez with roughly 600 people, intending to conquer and settle “La Florida,” the Gulf Coast of North America. It disintegrated almost completely. After storms and desertions, about 400 landed near Tampa Bay in April 1528; within months the land party was cut off from its ships, ground down by hunger, disease and conflict, and forced to build five crude rafts to escape along the coast. The rafts were scattered and wrecked, Narváez himself was lost at sea, and of the roughly 600 who had set out, only four men survived. They reached Spanish territory in Mexico in 1536 after an overland ordeal of some eight years.
The four survivors were Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, the expedition’s treasurer; the captains Andrés Dorantes de Carranza and Alonso del Castillo Maldonado; and Estevanico, an enslaved North African man — variously described as Moroccan — whose knowledge, languages and labour were essential to the group’s survival and who is too often reduced to a footnote. Cast ashore on the Texas coast in November 1528, they lived for years among the Indigenous peoples of the Gulf Coast and the interior, at first as captives and labourers, later as traders and as healers whose reputation travelled ahead of them. Stripped of armour, horses and the apparatus of conquest, they survived only because Indigenous communities fed, sheltered, employed and guided them.
The expedition is sometimes told as a conquistador’s heroic trek; it was nothing of the kind. It was the collapse of a conquest, after which four destitute men were kept alive across a continent by the very peoples the venture had come to subjugate. Cabeza de Vaca recorded the journey in his Relación (also published as Naufragios, “Shipwrecks”), the first detailed European account of the interior of North America and an unusually attentive, comparatively humane record of its peoples. His later career as a colonial official, and his arguments for treating Indigenous peoples less brutally, grew directly out of those eight years of dependence on their generosity.
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 Darién Scheme was the Kingdom of Scotland’s attempt, between 1698 and 1700, to plant a colony called New Caledonia on the Isthmus of Panama and seize the overland trade between the Atlantic and the Pacific. It was the project of the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies, promoted above all by the financier William Paterson, a co-founder of the Bank of England, and it was financed not by a handful of merchants but by the savings of a whole nation: the Company raised roughly £400,000 sterling, on the order of a fifth to a quarter of Scotland’s liquid capital. It failed almost completely, and it killed almost everyone who sailed.
The first fleet of five ships — the Saint Andrew, Caledonia, Unicorn, Dolphin and Endeavour — left Leith in July 1698 with about 1,200 colonists and reached the Darién coast on 2 November 1698. The settlers built a township they named New Edinburgh and a stockade, Fort St Andrew, on a hot, swampy bay with poor water and ground that would not feed them. Malaria, yellow fever and dysentery did the rest. Within about eight months the colonists were dying at a rate reported near ten a day, and in July 1699 the survivors abandoned the settlement; only some 300 of the first 1,200 ever returned to Scotland.
A second fleet of more than 1,000 settlers, sent out in ignorance of the disaster, reached Caledonia Bay at the end of November 1699 to find the first colony deserted and overgrown. Disease, a fire that destroyed a supply ship, and a Spanish land-and-sea blockade finished the venture; the Scots capitulated to the Spanish in early 1700 and sailed away, and only a few hundred of the second fleet survived. Across all the sailings roughly 2,000 of about 2,500 colonists died. The financial wreck helped persuade Scotland’s ruined elite that the country could not stand alone, and it fed directly into the 1707 union with England that created Great Britain.
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.