greatest feats

the South Pole explorers traveled about 1600 MILES to get to the South Pole and back in about 3 months...without GPS...Amundsen used dogs and Scott used dogs and ponies for the first part of journey, but man hauled the rest......Scott and his men died [without enough food/slowly starved ] not far from a base depot...and in the worst weather imaginable!....are there any other feats comparable to this? months in frigid weather, dead on navigation, etc?

 

The Confederate Raider Shenandoah made their last landfall exiting the Bering sea in June (July?), 1865. She met a British vessel in the Pacific in August who told them that the war was over. Not wanting to surrender to US authorities since she had been capturing and burning American ships well after the surrender (nobody knew the war was over off the coast of Alaska!). Shenandoah then sailed the length of the Pacific north to south, east into the Atlantic and then north through most of the Atlantic to make a perfect landfall at the mouth of the Mersey river at Liverpool. That's a distance of over 9000 miles in 3 months, without once sighting land to confirm their course. Nobody. No vessel in the days before satellites and GPS ever sailed such a distance without sighting land. Waddel, the skipper, knew that US Naval vessels would be hovering at every standard landfall (and they were) and so he avoided them all to get to England where his crew would be safe.

It was a brilliant piece of navigation that was ignored in the furor over the Shenandoah's surrender in Great Britain. The Americans wanted Shenandoah's crew turned over for piracy and the British told Washington kiss their ass.

 

Nothing beats Willem Barents and his 3rd expedition (North East Passage)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willem_Barentsz

Stranded, the 16-man crew was forced to spend the winter on the ice, along with their young cabin boy.[5] After a failed attempt to melt thepermafrost, the crew used lumber from their ship to build a 7.8x5.5 metre lodge[2] they called Het Behouden Huys (The Saved House).




Het Behouden Huys on Novaya Zemlya


Dealing with extreme cold, the crew realised that their socks would burn before their feet could even feel the warmth of a fire – and took to sleeping with warmed stones and cannonballs. In addition, they used the merchant fabrics aboard the ship to make additional blankets and clothing.[6]

When June arrived, and the ice had still not loosened its grip on the ship, the scurvy-ridden survivors took two small boats out into the sea on 13 June. Barentsz died at sea on 20 June 1597, while studying charts[14] only seven days after starting out. It is not known whether Barentsz was buried on the northern island of Novaya Zemlya, or at sea.[15] It took seven more weeks for the boats to reach the Kola Peninsula where they were rescued by a Russian merchant vessel, and by that time only 12 crewmen remained. Ultimately, they did not reach Amsterdam until 1 November.[16] Sources differ on whether two men died on the ice floe and three in the boats,[2] or three on the ice floe and two in the boats.[7] The young cabin boy had died during the winter months in the shelter.[5]

 

yes, amazing how they did navigate back then...so, did they make good time?? or did they do some re-routing due to errors?..did the Brits keep the ship?......I take it there are not too many instances on record of 'lost' groups that made nav errors....

 

makes it seem like it was 'common' to be stranded??? there are many instances of survival in Antarctic exploration....

 

If it were "just" surviving maybe, but this was 1597 and going from Holland to the Spitzbergen (the expedition dicovered the area and no-one had been further north before) , then Murmanks Nova Zembla and survivors to Moscow and then back to Amsterdam by land was a first. It's a mix of dicoveries, surviving in extreme conditions and traveling huge distances when transportation was primitive.

 

The Greek democracy. Although it ended up being a system of corruption towards the end of the ancient Greece and was marred by the failure to unify the numerous city states, this formation of government by the Greeks in Athens would later become the basis of democracy today. Under the leadership of Pericles, the Athenian government is considered to be an example of pure democracy where all citizens had an equal voice in public affairs, and officials were chosen by the people by vote. And all matters of interest were discussed and decided by a assembly of the citizens. This form of government would become an example for the formation of democracy in the US and other countries.

 

I am going to the island of Madeira at the beginning on February. As usual, I search for books related to my holiday destination to read whilst there. Minutes after reading this post I went into website www.setin.com and after typing in 'Madeira' up comes 'The Last Shot' Lynn Schooler. It is about the Confederate ship Shenandoah. How is that for a co-incidence? Go my book then.

 

Nope, no errors - they basically went from the Aleutian Islands to the mouth of the Mersey totally on what was called "dead reckoning." An incredible feat of seamanship. Normally a vessel would sail from landfall to landfall. You know your latitude because a sextant gives you that, but longitude is just an educated guess based on estimated vessel speed, known currents, movement to leeward from the wind and so on.

 

Wow!

 

The Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley became the first submarine to successfully sink a ship in 1864 by sinking the Union ship Housatonic.
http://www.history.com/news/the-hunleys-daring-submarine-mission-150-years-ago

 

Id google Douglas Mawson...i walked through an exact replica of his hut last year...

 

I'm quite impressed by the Shackelton crew too . The saddest is that when the survivors returned, they were blamed for having avoided being sent to the WW1 trenches......

 

Another candidate could be Cavelier de La Salle for discovernig huge amounts of the USA and Canada.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9-Robert_Cavelier,_Sieur_de_La_Salle

 

I read about him many years ago...is that the one where he cut the sledge in 'half', and lost his partners??

 

I mix both these guys up, sorry..one of the books I've read was Mawson's Will.....

 

no iphones, PCs,TV, Inet, ...I guess exploring kept them busy

 

a lot of them were 'stranded' for days on small ice floes, that could and did break up...1 group for 12 days......what did they do beside fix gear for 12 days?....talk, sleep, eat, etc..no media, etc

 

What happens on the ice, stays on the ice...