The history of the study of our planet, travel and geographical discoveries is full of dramatic pages. Many great travelers were not destined to return home, dying in shipwrecks, at the hands of hostile natives, or due to hunger and disease.
The famous Captain James Cook found his death in Hawaii. To this day, there are disputes about whether the aborigines ate the deceased or not. But the circumstances under which Cook died are more or less clear. Other researchers were much less fortunate: their fate remains unknown after tens or even hundreds of years.
Count de La Perouse
Legend has it that King Louis XVI of France, going up to the guillotine, under the knife of which he was to lose his head, asked: "Is there any news from La Perouse?" In 1783, Jean-François de Gallo, Comte de La Perouse, one of the finest captains of the French Royal Navy, was invited to an audience with King Louis XVI. The monarch invited him to lead a round-the-world sea expedition, the purpose of which would be to streamline the discoveries made by James Cook in the Pacific Ocean, and "win the friendship of the leaders of distant tribes." Captain La Perouse accepted such a flattering offer.
The expedition started on August 1, 1785 from the French Brest. Under the command of La Perouse were two frigates - "Bussol" and "Astrolabe", as well as 220 people of the crew. In addition to the sailors, several scientists and three artists went on the expedition.
The Boussol and Astrolabe rounded Cape Horn, visited Chile, Easter Island and the Hawaiian archipelago. In late June 1786, they reached Alaska, where La Pérouse explored the vicinity of Mount St. Elijah. On July 13, here, in the bay, which received the name Port of French, two boats and a barge with 21 people on board were lost due to a strong current.
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The death of the boats of the La Perouse expedition at the Port of the French, 1786
From there, the Boussol and Astrolabe sailed to the port of Monterey, California, where La Pérouse described the Franciscan missions and wrote a critical note of the Indians' ill-reception. Then La Perouse safely crossed the Pacific Ocean, reaching Macau, where the furs caught in Alaska were sold.
Frigates "Boussol" and "Astrolabe"
In 1787, the expedition traveled along the shores of Northeast Asia, explored the Korean Peninsula, and then opened the strait between Sakhalin and the island of Hokkaido. At the same time, Sakhalin La Perouse was mistakenly considered a peninsula.
In September 1787, La Perouse's expedition dropped anchor in Petropavlovsk, where it was warmly received by the Russian garrison. “I could not have received a warmer welcome in my own country, at my best friends, than here in Kamchatka,” La Perouse wrote in a letter to the French ambassador in St. Petersburg. Having sent a messenger with the order to deliver mail to France and the results of research received by this moment, La Perouse moved on.
Petropavlovsk harbor, 1787
The reception in Samoa was strikingly different from the Russian one: 12 sailors, including the captain of the Astrolabe, Fleurio de Langle, were killed in a clash with the natives. January 24, 1788 "Bussol" and "Astrolabe" entered the Botanical Bay, washing the east coast of Australia, where they met with the British fleet.
On March 10, 1788, La Perouse continued his voyage, intending to visit New Caledonia and the Solomon Islands. There was no further news from the expedition. For many years, the fate of the La Perouse expedition remained a mystery to the whole world. But most of all were interested in her, naturally, the French, compatriots of the missing sailors. The legend of the king, on the scaffold, interested in the news of La Perouse, is perhaps only a fiction, but the situation itself is quite possible, since the disappearance of French ships without a trace worried both revolutionaries and monarchists alike.
Shipwreck off Vanikoro Island
Only in 1826, the English captain Peter Dillon discovered the traces of a shipwreck on the island of Vanikoro and connected them with the La Perouse expedition. In the XX century, the oral traditions of the islanders were recorded, telling about the shipwreck in which both ships of the La Perouse expedition were lost. Part of the team survived and lived among the natives for many years. In 2005, a sextant found among the remains of a sextant near the coast of Vanikoro was finally identified, which was actually part of the Bussol ship's equipment. It was not possible to establish whether Captain La Perouse himself survived the shipwreck.
Rear Admiral Franklin
On May 19, 1845, the British ships "Terror" and "Erebus" set off on an expedition, the purpose of which was to search for the Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. The expedition was led by an experienced traveler, Arctic explorer, Rear Admiral of the British Navy, John Franklin. For 59-year-old Franklin, this was the fourth expedition. It consisted of 129 people.
The ships briefly entered Stromness Harbor in the Orkney Islands in northern Scotland, and from there sailed to Greenland. On the west coast of Greenland, the crews of the Terror and the Erebus took on board the provisions of the transport ship and sent letters back to their families.
In early August 1845, the whaling ships Prince of Wales and the Enterprise met the Erebus and Terror in the Baffin Sea as they moored on the ice and waited for favorable conditions to cross the Lancaster Sound. More information about the Franklin expedition has not been reported. The search began in 1848, but no results were obtained.
The ships "Terror" and "Erebus"
Information about the expedition was obtained literally bit by bit. In 1850, the graves of three members of the expedition were found on Beachy Island. In 1859, a search expedition led by Francis Leopold McClintock discovered a note left on King William Island. The note contained data on the fate of the ships and crew members until April 1848. It became known that "Terror" and "Erebus" were trapped in the ice and abandoned by people. The losses of the expedition by that time were 9 officers and 15 sailors.
Some things that belonged to members of the expedition were found among the Eskimos. Local residents said that the travelers died of hunger and disease. In addition, there were assumptions, which were later confirmed, that among the desperate members of the expedition there were cases of cannibalism.
Search and research work continues to this day. It was found that most of the members of the expedition died on the islands of Beachy and King William from hunger, hypothermia, pneumonia. The fate of John Franklin himself has not been reliably established.
Baron Toll
On June 8, 1900, the schooner Zarya departed from the pier on the Neva with the participants of the Russian polar expedition, headed by the Russian geologist and polar explorer Baron Eduard Vasilyevich Toll. The expedition was equipped by the Imperial Academy of Sciences and had the main goal of exploring a part of the Arctic Ocean north of the Novosibirsk Islands and searching for the legendary Sannikov Land. The expedition consisted of more than 20 people. In the fall of 1900, the expedition stopped for the winter in Colin Archer Bay near the Nordenskjold archipelago in the Taimyr Bay. In the summer of 1901, the expedition surveyed Taimyr.
In the summer of 1902, the expedition split up: Baron Toll, accompanied by the astronomer Friedrich Seeberg and two hunters, Vasily Gorokhov and Nikolai Dyakonov, left the schooner to make the transition to Bennett Island in sleighs and boats. It was assumed that in two months "Zarya" would approach Bennett's Island to pick up Toll's group. However, severe ice conditions led to the fact that the Zarya could not approach Bennett's Island on time, received serious damage and was forced to leave for Tiksi.
Schooner "Zarya"
In 1903, a rescue expedition was sent to help Toll, led by Alexander Kolchak. Having reached Bennett's Island, Kolchak established that Toll's group, having successfully reached the island, had taken up research work while waiting for the "Dawn". Since the leader of the expedition did not envisage a new wintering, the reserves were used up, and new ones were not made. On October 26, 1902, Toll's party moved south from the island. Toll's note, discovered later by Kolchak, ended with the words: “We are going south today. We have provisions for 14–20 days. Everyone is healthy. October 26, 1902 ".
Members of the expedition on the schooner "Zarya"
Kolchak took the diaries and other materials of the expedition left by Toll in the parking lot. He failed to find traces of travelers. The Baron and three of his companions remain missing to this day.
Pilot Amelia Earhart
On May 20, 1937, 39-year-old American pilot Amelia Earhart, accompanied by navigator Frederick Noonan, began a round-the-world flight on the Lockheed Electra L-10E twin-engine monoplane. By July 2, Earhart and Noonan had successfully completed 4/5 of the entire route. However, the most difficult flight was ahead. On July 2, the pilot's plane took off from the coast of New Guinea and, after 18 hours of flight over the Pacific Ocean, was supposed to land on Howland Island.
Howland Island is a piece of land 2.5 kilometers long and 800 meters wide, protruding only three meters above sea level. Finding it in the middle of the ocean with the navigation aids of the 1930s is a daunting task. Nevertheless, Amelia Earhart, who by that time was already a real legend of aviation, the first female pilot to fly over the Atlantic, was confident in her abilities.
A runway was specially built on Howland for Amelia Earhart, where representatives of the US authorities and reporters were waiting for her. Communication with the aircraft was maintained by a guard ship, which served as a radio beacon. By the estimated time, the pilot reported that she was in a given area, but she could not see the island or the ship. Judging by the level of the last radio message received from the aircraft, the Lockheed Electra was somewhere very close, but never appeared.
When communications were cut and the plane was about to run out of fuel, the US Navy launched the largest search operation in its history. However, a survey of 220,000 square miles of ocean, numerous small islands and atolls yielded no results.
Howland Island
On January 5, 1939, Amelia Earhart and Frederic Noonan were officially declared dead, although there is still no exact information about their fate. According to one version, the plane that spent fuel simply crashed into the ocean, according to another, Earhart landed the plane on one of the small islands, but during landing, the crew lost contact and received serious injuries, which led to their death. There is also a version that the pilots who suffered an accident could have been captured and later executed by the Japanese military. However, none of the versions has received reliable evidence to this day.
Sigismund Levanevsky
On August 12, 1937, a DB-A aircraft with tail number N-209 and a crew of six took off from an airfield near Moscow. The crew commander was Sigismund Levanevsky, Hero of the Soviet Union, a member of the expedition to rescue the steamer "Chelyuskin".
Behind Levanevsky's shoulders were several ultra-long-distance flights. This time he had to, having overcome the North Pole, reach the city of Fairbanks in Alaska. “Whenever I visited America, people gave me the most cordial and friendly welcome. I hope this flight will help strengthen good relations between our countries,”35-year-old Levanevsky told the New York Times before taking a seat in the cockpit.
But the flight was difficult from the very beginning, and the radio messages from the board became more and more alarming. In the last radiogram, Levanevsky reported on the failure of the rightmost engine and bad weather conditions. The plane did not arrive at Fairbanks at estimated time. Searches conducted both in the USSR and in the United States did not yield any results.
For 80 years now, there have been periodic reports that the plane of Sigismund Levanevsky was discovered. However, they never received confirmation. According to various versions, the plane, deviating from the course, could fall in Yakutia, or, conversely, suffer a catastrophe, having already reached the coast of Alaska. Be that as it may, it has not been possible to reliably establish the fate of Levanevsky's crew to this day.