Adventure Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
99 free Adventure trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Adventure is the story of people who went further than they had to: Shackleton rowing 800 miles of Southern Ocean to save his crew, Hillary and Tenzing on Everest the morning of a coronation, Thor Heyerdahl on a balsa raft, Alex Honnold on El Capitan without a rope. This adventure trivia quiz covers the great expeditions and the people who made them, from Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta to Amundsen and Scott, Lewis and Clark, Amelia Earhart, Lindbergh, the Trieste's dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench and Gagarin's single orbit. It also dips into adventure fiction and film: Phileas Fogg's 80 days and Nellie Bly's 72, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, Indiana Jones and 127 Hours. Questions run from easy ones anyone can answer (who first walked on the Moon) to expert-level detail about depots, raft names and forgotten first ascents. It works for a pub quiz, a classroom or a long car journey. Every answer was checked against expedition histories and encyclopaedic sources before publishing, and each question carries a citation.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which two men were the first confirmed to reach Everest's summit, in May 1953?
Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary
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.
Q 02What happened to Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance in the Weddell Sea in 1915?
Crushed by pack ice
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.
Q 03What was the name of the lifeboat Shackleton and five men sailed 800 miles to South Georgia?
James Caird
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.
Q 04Roald Amundsen led the first expedition to traverse which sea route, in 1903–06, aboard the sloop Gjøa?
The Northwest Passage
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.
Q 05Which animals hauled Roald Amundsen's sledges to the South Pole, helping him beat Scott by five weeks?
Dogs
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.
Q 06Which member of Scott's party left the tent saying 'I am just going outside and may be some time'?
Lawrence Oates
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.
Q 07Juan Sebastián Elcano completed the first circumnavigation of the Earth in 1522 after which commander died in the Philippines?
Ferdinand Magellan
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.
Q 08Marco Polo dictated the story of his travels while imprisoned by which rival of Venice?
Genoa
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.
Q 09Which 14th-century Moroccan set out for Mecca in 1325 and kept travelling for nearly 30 years?
Ibn Battuta
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.
Q 10Which African animal, brought home by Zheng He's treasure fleet, did the Ming court hail as a qilin?
Giraffe
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.
Q 11Which US president commissioned the Lewis and Clark Expedition?
Thomas Jefferson
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.
Q 12Which teenage Shoshone woman traveled with Lewis and Clark from North Dakota to the Pacific?
Sacagawea
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.
Q 13Which waterfall on the Zambezi did David Livingstone become the first European to see, in 1855?
Victoria Falls
Q 21In 1960 the bathyscaphe Trieste reached the seabed's deepest point in which ocean feature?
The Mariana Trench
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.
Q 22Reinhold Messner was the first person to climb all 14 of what?
Eight-thousanders
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.
Q 23Who was the first woman to reach the summit of Everest, in 1975?
Junko Tabei
Victoria Falls. He named them for his queen, though the people living nearby already called them Mosi-oa-Tunya, 'the smoke that thunders'.
Q 14Percy Fawcett vanished in the Amazon in 1925 while searching for what?
A lost city he called 'Z'
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.
Q 15Which Black explorer, Peary's companion on seven Arctic voyages, said he reached the North Pole first?
Matthew Henson
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.
Q 16The $25,000 Orteig Prize, for the first nonstop flight between New York and Paris, went to which pilot in 1927?
Charles Lindbergh
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.
Q 17Amelia Earhart disappeared over the Pacific in 1937 while attempting what?
A flight around the world
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.
Q 18What was Thor Heyerdahl's raft Kon-Tiki made from?
Balsa logs
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.
Q 19Thor Heyerdahl's raft, launched from Peru, took its name Kon-Tiki from a god of which civilization?
The Inca
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.
Q 20Jacques Cousteau co-invented which piece of diving equipment during the Second World War?
The Aqua-Lung
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.
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.
Q 24Which British explorer led the Transglobe Expedition, the first surface journey to circle the world by way of both poles?
Ranulph Fiennes
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.
Q 25Aron Ralston freed himself from a boulder in a Utah canyon in 2003 by doing what?
Amputating his own arm
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.
Q 26Which 3,000-foot Yosemite wall did Alex Honnold climb alone without a rope in June 2017?
El Capitan
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.
Q 27Which spacecraft carried Yuri Gagarin once around Earth on the first human spaceflight, in 1961?
Vostok 1
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.
Q 28Which Apollo 11 astronaut stayed in lunar orbit while Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the Moon?
Michael Collins
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.
Q 29Phileas Fogg's wager to circle the globe in 80 days is made with his friends at which London institution?
The Reform Club
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.
Q 30What is the name of Phileas Fogg's valet in Around the World in Eighty Days?
Passepartout
Passepartout. Fogg hires him on the very day of the bet, having just sacked his predecessor for bringing shaving water two degrees too cool.