49 Fun Facts About Adventure

Which two men were the first confirmed to reach Everest's summit, in May 1953?

Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary. News of their climb reached London just in time to be announced on the morning of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, four days later.

What happened to Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance in the Weddell Sea in 1915?

Crushed by pack ice. The ship had been frozen in for most of the year before her hull gave way, yet every man of her crew lived to be rescued.

What was the name of the lifeboat Shackleton and five men sailed 800 miles to South Georgia?

James Caird. The boat reached the uninhabited side of South Georgia, so Shackleton and two others then crossed its unmapped mountains on foot to reach a whaling station.

Roald Amundsen led the first expedition to traverse which sea route, in 1903–06, aboard the sloop Gjøa?

The Northwest Passage. Where big naval expeditions had failed, he took just six men in a small fishing boat, shallow enough to hug the coast all the way through.

Which animals hauled Roald Amundsen's sledges to the South Pole, helping him beat Scott by five weeks?

Dogs. Amundsen set out with 52 and planned from the start to kill most of them on the way, as food for the men and the surviving teams.

Which member of Scott's party left the tent saying 'I am just going outside and may be some time'?

Lawrence Oates. Lamed by frostbite, he walked out into the blizzard so that he would not slow the others down; they died all the same, 11 miles short of a supply depot.

Juan Sebastián Elcano completed the first circumnavigation of the Earth in 1522 after which commander died in the Philippines?

Ferdinand Magellan. He was killed in a skirmish on the island of Mactan in 1521, and only one of his ships, the Victoria, completed the circuit, under Elcano.

Marco Polo dictated the story of his travels while imprisoned by which rival of Venice?

Genoa. Captured in the war between the two republics, he found himself sharing a prison with Rustichello of Pisa, a writer of Arthurian romances, who turned his stories into a book.

Which 14th-century Moroccan set out for Mecca in 1325 and kept travelling for nearly 30 years?

Ibn Battuta. He left home as a young man intending only to make the pilgrimage, and ended up roaming some 75,000 miles before he dictated his travels.

Which African animal, brought home by Zheng He's treasure fleet, did the Ming court hail as a qilin?

Giraffe. The mythical qilin was said to appear in an age of peace under a wise ruler, so its arrival was read at court as heaven's seal of approval on the emperor's reign.

Which US president commissioned the Lewis and Clark Expedition?

Thomas Jefferson. He asked Congress to fund the journey before the Louisiana Purchase was even signed, and gave the command to his own secretary, Meriwether Lewis.

Which teenage Shoshone woman traveled with Lewis and Clark from North Dakota to the Pacific?

Sacagawea. She made the whole journey carrying her baby son, born just two months before the party set out, and still found roots and other food for the men along the way.

Which waterfall on the Zambezi did David Livingstone become the first European to see, in 1855?

Victoria Falls. He named them for his queen, though the people living nearby already called them Mosi-oa-Tunya, 'the smoke that thunders'.

Percy Fawcett vanished in the Amazon in 1925 while searching for what?

A lost city he called 'Z'. He was convinced by an old Portuguese manuscript describing stone ruins deep in Brazil, and vanished with his son Jack while looking for them.

Which Black explorer, Peary's companion on seven Arctic voyages, said he reached the North Pole first?

Matthew Henson. He began as Peary's valet after a chance meeting in a Washington hat shop, and in 1988 was reburied with full military honors at Arlington, near Peary's own grave.

The $25,000 Orteig Prize, for the first nonstop flight between New York and Paris, went to which pilot in 1927?

Charles Lindbergh. Six men had died chasing the prize before the young airmail pilot flew the Spirit of St. Louis alone for 33 and a half hours to claim it.

Amelia Earhart disappeared over the Pacific in 1937 while attempting what?

A flight around the world. She had covered about 22,000 miles, with 7,000 to go, when she and her navigator failed to find tiny Howland Island.

What was Thor Heyerdahl's raft Kon-Tiki made from?

Balsa logs. Heyerdahl copied the rafts Spanish conquistadors had drawn, to show that South Americans could have reached Polynesia; his stayed afloat for 101 days before it hit a reef.

Thor Heyerdahl's raft, launched from Peru, took its name Kon-Tiki from a god of which civilization?

The Inca. Kon-Tiki was said to be an old name for their god Viracocha, and Heyerdahl believed a bearded 'Tiki people' had once sailed west from Peru, just as he was about to.

Jacques Cousteau co-invented which piece of diving equipment during the Second World War?

The Aqua-Lung. Working with engineer Émile Gagnan in wartime France, he adapted a gas regulator into a valve that fed a diver air only on each breath, with no hose to the surface.

In 1960 the bathyscaphe Trieste reached the seabed's deepest point in which ocean feature?

The Mariana Trench. Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh spent just 20 minutes on the floor of its Challenger Deep, nearly 11 km down, and reported seeing flatfish even there.

Reinhold Messner was the first person to climb all 14 of what?

Eight-thousanders. These are the peaks above 8,000 metres, all in the Himalaya and Karakoram; Messner needed 16 years to climb them all, and did it without bottled oxygen.

Who was the first woman to reach the summit of Everest, in 1975?

Junko Tabei. Twelve days before the summit an avalanche buried her camp and knocked her unconscious; Sherpa guides dug her out, and she was climbing again within days.

Which British explorer led the Transglobe Expedition, the first surface journey to circle the world by way of both poles?

Ranulph Fiennes. He was still at it decades later, reaching the summit of Everest at 65 on his third attempt and admitting that he 'felt dreadful' at the top.

Aron Ralston freed himself from a boulder in a Utah canyon in 2003 by doing what?

Amputating his own arm. After five days pinned, he broke the bones and cut through with a dull pocket knife, then rappelled down a cliff and hiked for miles to find help.

Which 3,000-foot Yosemite wall did Alex Honnold climb alone without a rope in June 2017?

El Capitan. He reached the top in 3 hours 56 minutes by a route called Freerider, having rehearsed its hardest moves on a rope many times first.

Which spacecraft carried Yuri Gagarin once around Earth on the first human spaceflight, in 1961?

Vostok 1. Gagarin did not land inside it: about 7 km above the ground he ejected, and he came down separately under his own parachute.

Which Apollo 11 astronaut stayed in lunar orbit while Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the Moon?

Michael Collins. Each pass behind the Moon cut his radio link to every other human, yet he wrote that he never felt lonely and that his third of the mission mattered as much as theirs.

Phileas Fogg's wager to circle the globe in 80 days is made with his friends at which London institution?

The Reform Club. Fogg stakes £20,000 there, and wins only because travelling east all the way had gained him a day he had not noticed.

What is the name of Phileas Fogg's valet in Around the World in Eighty Days?

Passepartout. Fogg hires him on the very day of the bet, having just sacked his predecessor for bringing shaving water two degrees too cool.

Which New York World reporter circled the globe in 72 days in 1889–90, beating Phileas Fogg's fictional 80?

Nellie Bly. She travelled with a single handbag, found time to call on Jules Verne at his home in France, and still got back days ahead of her own target.

Which Robert Louis Stevenson novel first ran as a serial in the children's magazine Young Folks, signed 'Captain George North'?

Treasure Island. Stevenson spun it around a treasure map to amuse his stepson on a rain-soaked holiday, and his working title was The Sea Cook.

At which inn does young Jim Hawkins first meet the old sailor Billy Bones?

The Admiral Benbow. Bones promises Jim a silver fourpenny a month there to keep his 'weather-eye open for a seafaring man with one leg', and often stalls before he pays up.

Which author's castaway Robinson Crusoe spends 28 years on his island?

Daniel Defoe. He left his own name off the 1719 first edition and presented the story on its title page as the castaway's memoir, 'written by himself'.

Which real castaway is Robinson Crusoe thought to be based on?

Alexander Selkirk. He asked to be put ashore on a Pacific island because he thought his ship unfit to sail; he was right, it sank, but he waited more than four years for rescue.

What is Indiana Jones's academic profession?

Professor of archaeology. Even the famous name is borrowed: The Last Crusade reveals that he was born Henry Jones Jr. and took 'Indiana' from the family dog.

Which Indiana Jones film, released in 1984, is a prequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark?

Temple of Doom. Complaints about its violence under a PG rating led Spielberg himself to propose a new category, and PG-13 arrived that same summer.

Which TV survival expert became the UK's youngest-ever Chief Scout in 2009, aged 35?

Bear Grylls. He had stood on the summit of Everest at 23, yet called leading the Scout movement a bigger privilege than that climb.

Having turned back 97 miles from the South Pole, Shackleton reportedly told his wife: better a live donkey than a dead what?

Lion. His four-man party was running out of food, and he judged that reaching the pole would mean dying on the way back; turning round got all of them home alive.

On which ship did Amundsen sail to Antarctica for his South Pole expedition?

Fram. She had been lent to him for an Arctic voyage; only at Madeira did he tell his crew they were going south instead, and send Scott a telegram to say so.

Where did the Lewis and Clark Expedition spend the winter of 1805–06 before starting home?

Fort Clatsop, Oregon. They built it within reach of the Pacific and named it for the local Clatsop people, then spent a wet, flea-ridden winter there, sick and short of food.

Which Indiana university, where Amelia Earhart worked, funded her Lockheed Electra?

Purdue. She joined its faculty in 1935 to counsel women students on careers, and the university's research foundation paid for the plane she called her 'Flying Laboratory'.

Which newspaper sent Henry Morton Stanley to find Livingstone in 1869?

The New York Herald. Its owner told Stanley to spend whatever it took, on one condition: 'find Livingstone', a man whom most people by then believed dead.

Which skydiver jumped from a balloon 24 miles above New Mexico in 2012, breaking the sound barrier in freefall?

Felix Baumgartner. The voice guiding him from mission control was Joseph Kittinger, whose own record for the highest jump had stood since 1960 until that day.

Who was the first person to sail single-handedly around the world, aboard the sloop Spray?

Joshua Slocum. A friend's promised 'ship' turned out to be a rotting sloop propped up in a field; he rebuilt her himself, and in 1909 he sailed off in her and was never seen again.

Steve Fossett was the first to fly solo nonstop around the world in a balloon and in what else?

A fixed-wing aircraft. He circled the globe alone in the purpose-built GlobalFlyer, then vanished on a short solo flight in 2007; the wreckage was not found for a year.

Robyn Davidson's 1980 book Tracks recounts a 2,700 km Australian desert trek using what?

Camels. She moved to Alice Springs and spent two years learning to train them before setting out on the nine-month walk across the desert.

In which balloon did Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones first fly non-stop around the globe?

Breitling Orbiter 3. Launched from a Swiss Alpine village in March 1999, it first drifted south-west to find the right winds, then circled the globe and landed in the Egyptian desert nearly 20 days later.

Which Portuguese navigator opened the sea route from Europe to India, reaching Calicut in May 1498?

Vasco da Gama. A guide taken on in East Africa saw him across the Indian Ocean, but the cheap goods he offered Calicut's ruler as gifts soured the welcome.