The Mammoth Book of Losers Read online

  There was, however, one dangerous flaw – Andrée’s silk balloon was leaking hydrogen. The worst leakage came from the stitching holes along the seams – eight million of them. Strips of silk had been glued on top of them and varnish had been used to seal the whole balloon, but it wasn’t enough. For every day in the air, the balloon would lose about 150 lbs of lift force. Ekholm, the only man on the crew with Arctic experience, had warned Andrée about the leaks a year earlier during the very first trial. By his estimations, at the rate it was losing hydrogen the balloon could only stay aloft for seventeen days. But Andrée already knew about the leaks. In fact, he had been secretly topping up the hydrogen in the balloon to hide the fact that it was losing gas so rapidly.

  At this point just about everyone, including the balloon maker himself, was advising him to postpone and have the bag rebuilt. But Andrée remembered the embarrassment of having to postpone a year before. The sponsors and the media had followed every delay and reported on every setback and were clamouring for results. He had become the prisoner of his own successful funding campaign. Andrée gave the order to set off.

  By this time, Ekholm, the only crew member with the sense to bale out of the project, had been replaced by Knut Fraenkel, a twenty-seven-year-old civil engineer. The three-man team made headlines across the globe when, on 11 July 1897, their ridiculously over-heavy balloon lifted, very, very slowly, into the Arctic blue, never to be seen again.

  Andrée’s plan was to communicate with the outside world via homing pigeons, bred in Norway in the hope that they might fly back there. The pigeons were to carry messages written in Norwegian, with instructions to deliver them to Sweden. He released at least four pigeons, but only one was ever retrieved, by a Norwegian steamer, on which the pigeon had landed only to be promptly shot.

  The fate of the Örnen remained a mystery until thirty-three years later, when a boat carrying geologists and seal hunters landed on uninhabited White Island, now called Kvitoya. Amid the ruins of a camp they found a skull, bleached by the Sun and diaries and tins of film that picked up the story.

  Within minutes of the launch, the mission was in trouble. The drag ropes pulled the balloon down so far that the basket actually dragged on the water, no matter how much cargo they ditched over the side. At the same time, the ropes became tangled and pulled free from their holds. In all, 1,630 lbs of weight was lost. With the loss of weight, the balloon soared 2,300 feet into the air and the lower air pressure made the hydrogen leak even faster. With no steering and having drifted hopelessly off course, after ten-and-a-half hours the balloon crashed for the first time, then bumped along the surface for another forty-one hours before finally coming to rest.

  The crew started to walk south towards Spitzbergen but the ice floe took them east. After three months in the Arctic, the team found themselves on Kvitoya Island. All three men were dead within a couple of weeks, cause unknown. This in itself was unusual because they had packed enough provisions to keep them going for much longer.

  One possible cause of death was carbon monoxide poisoning from a faulty stove. It has also been speculated that they had committed suicide. Among their unlikely cargo was a large stash of opium, certainly enough to do the trick. According to another theory, they perished from a combination of exposure and severe food poisoning after dining on undercooked polar bear.

  Least Successful Surveyor

  Unlike his contemporary American explorers Lewis and Clark, the name of Zebulon Montgomery Pike is relatively unsung, save for its use on a mountain he never actually climbed.

  Pike first came to public attention in 1805 when he was sent by the US Army commander General James Wilkinson to explore the recently acquired lands from France under the Louisiana Purchase. Pike’s job was to find the source of the Mississippi River – which he failed to do – but when he returned to base he incorrectly identified it as Cass Lake.

  Although it was obvious Pike couldn’t explore his way out of a paper bag, in 1806 Wilkinson mysteriously chose him to lead another expedition, this time to find the northern boundary of Spanish possessions in the American south-west. Pike set off from St Louis and, after travelling around in circles for weeks, he ended up in Colorado where he discovered the mountain today bearing his name – Pike’s Peak. He attempted to climb it, but gave up. Irked by his inability to judge the height of a mountain at distance, he wrote in his journal, “No man will ever climb Pike’s Peak.”

  He and his group turned south and set up camp on what he thought was the Red River, which was on US territory. At this point, a troop of Spanish cavalry arrived and assured him that he was actually camping on the Rio Grande. Pike was arrested for unwittingly invading Spanish territory and escorted to Santa Fe. He was eventually released when his captors realized that he genuinely had had no idea where he was.

  Back home, Pike’s meandering expedition aroused suspicions. Surely no one could be that clueless; there had to be some shadowy plan. There was speculation that he had been sent on a secret mission to provoke a war with Spain. Either way, he failed.

  Instead of returning as a heroic explorer, the luckless Pike was forced to clear his name. He got the opportunity to repair his tarnished reputation when war was declared on Great Britain in 1812. He led an attack at the Battle of York but was fatally wounded when a powder magazine exploded and a flying rock hit him on the head.

  Most Futile Attempt to Find a Lost Tribe

  According to Welsh legend, the discovery of the New World was accomplished not by Christopher Columbus or Amerigo Vespucci, but by Madoc, the son of a twelfth-century Welsh prince called Owen Gwynedd. The story goes that Madoc sailed from Wales for America in 1170 with 300 men and landed in Mobile, Alabama. These plucky pioneers were never heard of again but, according to the legend, they settled and became the progenitors of a tribe of pale-skinned Welsh-speaking Indians.

  The origin of the legend of Madoc is obscure. Owen Gwynedd certainly had several sons but none called Madoc, although a seafarer named Madoc, unrelated and possibly mythical, crops up in medieval Welsh literature; one story has him colonizing an unspecified island paradise.

  In 1580, a Welshman – John Dee – revived the legend of Madoc in an attempt to trump Spanish claims on the New World. Dee claimed that, as a Briton had landed in America long before Columbus, Elizabeth, not the King of Spain, had ownership of all American territories.

  The story of the lost tribe of Welsh-speaking Indians grew down the years, as reports of Madogwys (Madoc’s people) were brought back to Britain from travellers all over America. All told there were sightings of at least twenty tribes of Welsh-speaking Indians ranging from Peru to Canada, nearly always in areas inaccessible to white settlers.

  John Thomas Evans was born in 1770, the son of a Methodist preacher from Waunfawr, a village near Caernarvon in north Wales. He had grown up with the legend of Madoc and came to believe that he had been chosen by God to find the Welsh Indians. When he was twenty-one, he went to London and met a group of Welsh nationalists, including an eccentric poet and laudanum addict called Iolo Morganwg. While on one his drug-induced highs, Morganwg announced he was off to America to find the Madogwys and settle the issue once and for all.

  Evans couldn’t believe his luck and immediately volunteered to go with him. Morganwg, who everyone knew as a fantasist (not to mention a criminal forger), soon forgot about the whole thing, but Evans decided to go it alone. In 1792, at the age of twenty-two, he set sail for Baltimore to begin his quest, taking with him a Welsh Bible so that he could pray with his long-lost kinsmen in their ancestral language.

  He also carried letters of introduction to several worthy Welshmen in Philadelphia and elsewhere, including a Dr Samuel Jones. He received little encouragement from the Welsh settlers, who urged him to go home. The American settlers had been warring with native Americans for years and, if you were white and valued your scalp, it wasn’t a great idea to go wandering off into the American wilderness. But Evans, propelled by his sense of destiny
, marched westwards alone.

  Informed opinion had it that the wilds of North Dakota would be a good place for Evans to start looking. It was rumoured that the local Indian tribe, the Mandan people, had very pale skin and spoke a language that sounded very much like Welsh. Mandan women were also very talkative even in bed – conclusive evidence of Welshness, apparently – although there was no word as to whether the Mandan menfolk played rugby or had a choir.

  In March 1793, shortly after St David’s Day, Evans set out for North Dakota, through the Allegheny Mountains and then by boat up the Mississippi to the small frontier town St Louis. Although most people in the area spoke French, Louisiana was under the flag of Spain and King Charles IV, who was very hostile to the British. Instead of recognizing Evans as a harmless crank, he arrested him as a spy and threw him in jail. Evans of course protested that he was not in fact an agent of the British Government, he was simply on a mission to find some lost Welsh Indians, but for some reason the Spanish didn’t believe him.

  After a couple of years in prison, Evans was able to persuade his captors that he was a crank after all, but he just might be useful to them. At the time, Spain was looking find a route across the Rocky Mountains to its territories on the Pacific coast. The route was thought to be infested with extremely hostile natives, but it would also take Evans close to the Mandan settlement about 1,800 miles from St Louis. Evans was released, on condition that he agreed to assist a Scot called John Mackay to lead a Spanish expedition to find a route through the Rocky Mountains to California.

  Evans had no idea what dangers lay ahead and his grasp of the local geography was sketchy. He thought that the area was populated with woolly mammoths and had mountains made of salt. In July 1795, he and Mackay set off accompanied by thirty Spanish soldiers and four large boats loaded with blankets and tobacco for trading. A Methodist preacher, working for a Scot in the service of Roman Catholic Spain, was now looking for Welsh-speaking Indians on the edge of the known world.

  About halfway to the Rockies, the party was frozen in for the winter at Fort Charles in Nebraska. In February, Evans set out with a few men to find the Mandan settlement. Mackay gave him instructions to claim all of the lands he passed through for the king of Spain and to make notes of everything they saw. In particular, he was to keep special watch for a one-eyed monster said to live in the area. After about 300 miles, the party was attacked by marauding Sioux and they fled back to camp.

  Undaunted, Evans tried again in June and this time actually reached the Mandan village in North Dakota – his great moment of triumph. He had crossed a continent, braving subzero temperatures, bears, snakes and dangerous Sioux Indians, and survived. The legend of Madoc was about to be proved as fact. Evans was going to be a hero.

  The Mandans, Evans was immensely relieved to find, were not at all like the Sioux and received their guest very warmly.9 He got to know their chiefs, Big White Man and Black Cat, quite well, living with them in their large beehive-shaped dwelling through the bitterest of winters. He made himself at home, learning all about their culture, now and then entertaining them by playing his little flute. He spent a total of seven months in their village, but in all that time Evans heard not a word of Welsh.

  With a heavy heart, Evans said hwyl to his hosts and returned to civilization after a two-year absence. In 1797, he reported the bad news back to his friends, saying, “I am able to inform you there is no such people as the Welsh Indians.”

  His spirit crushed, Evans drank himself to death in a St Louis bar two years later, aged twenty-eight.

  As for the Mandan tribe, the story was similarly bleak. Contact with Europeans, and smallpox, wiped most of them out a couple of generations later.

  Least Convincing Denial over Eating One’s Crew

  The Greely Expedition of 1881 was commissioned by the US Government to collect meteorological data from the North Pole and was billed as the most ambitious scientific research mission ever sent into the Arctic.

  The omens were not good from the start – Polar exploration was usually the province of naval personnel or other seafarers. Adolphus W. Greely was a Civil War veteran whose seafaring experience was limited to a two-way crossing of the Atlantic and the passage up from New York to St John’s. On the very morning after departure, Greely was so seasick that he hid in his cabin and failed to appear on deck until that afternoon. Of his expedition team, mainly ex-Civil War soldiers, not one could sail a boat and few even knew how to row. But Greely, notorious as a strict disciplinarian, kept order on ship with an iron fist. One morning, he sacked his second-in-command, Frederick Kislingbury, because he was late for breakfast.10

  Greely and his party made it further north than any preceding expedition. But during the severe winter of 1882, relief parties carrying provisions twice failed to reach him. The following year, Greely’s ship hit an iceberg and sank. With no food, he and his crew began to starve.

  Thanks to the persistence of Greely’s wife Henrietta, the search was never abandoned. Three years later, of the original party of twenty-five, Greely and six emaciated colleagues were found still alive. The rest had perished from starvation, drowning, hypothermia, suicide, and in one case, gunshot wounds from an execution ordered by Greely for stealing food.

  According to the dramatic authorized narrative of events, when Greely’s rescuers found him he gasped, heroically, “Yes, seven of us left, here we are, dying like men. Did what I came to do – beat the best record!”

  Other members of the party recalled the meeting differently. One reported that Greely told his rescuers, “If we’ve got to starve, we can starve without your help . . . we were dying peacefully until you came.” Another remembered Greely’s words as “Give us something to eat!”

  When he returned home with the surviving crew in 1884, Greely became a celebrity. But then more grim details of the Greely party’s denouement began to emerge, including the crew member who hacked off his own feet to avoid gangrene. There was also one, big, nagging question about the surprisingly healthy state of the survivors. Given the length of time they had spent on the frozen barren ice without any food, just how, exactly, had they stayed alive?

  Shockingly, it all pointed to one conclusion – cannibalism. The survivors denied the charge, but what about the half-eaten remains of the deceased crew members, they were asked? Greely explained that they had been used as “bait” for capturing shrimp.

  Worst Survival Skills

  The English botanist Thomas Nuttall is remembered eponymously in Nuttall’s woodpecker, Nuttall’s blister beetle, Nuttall’s sunflower, Nuttall’s evening primrose and Pica nuttalli, the yellow-billed magpie.

  In 1811, he joined an expedition with John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company, travelling 1,500 miles along the Missouri River to study the local flora and fauna. Nuttall’s lack of skills as a frontiersman made him a legend among his fellow French-Canadian travellers. He couldn’t hunt, shoot, swim, light a fire or cook and had little sense of direction. They christened him le fou, the madman, after an encounter with some Sioux Indians. While checking their guns, they discovered that Nuttall’s rifle was completely plugged with mud. He had been using it to dig up plants and thought the mud in the barrel was a handy place to store seeds.

  Nuttall spent most of his time completely lost. He kept wandering away from his group while collecting plants and couldn’t find his way back. One night when he failed to return, a search party was sent out to look for him. Nuttall saw them approach him in the dark and, mistaking them for Indians, ran off into the bush. The annoyed rescuers chased him for three days without success, until he accidentally wandered back into the camp unassisted.

  In North Dakota, Nuttall somehow managed to stray 100 miles away from his group. Lost and exhausted, he collapsed and lost consciousness. A passing Indian took pity on him and carried him three miles to the river and paddled him home in a canoe. Amazingly, Nuttall somehow found his way back to England where he spent the next few years studying the hundreds of plan
t specimens he had brought home with him at the British Museum of Natural History and came to be regarded as the world’s leading authority on the flora and fauna of north-west America.

  As Nuttall rarely knew where he was at any given moment, his notes on the locations of some of his discoveries have since been found to be less than trustworthy. For example, he claims to have encountered the Willamette daisy in the “Rocky Mountains toward Oregon”; however, it is now known that he must have found the plant in the Willamette Valley since it has never been known to grow anywhere else.

  Most Predictable Outcome of Plucky British Amateurism

  Robert Falcon Scott had the key characteristic that was expected of any British hero – he was capable of extraordinary fortitude in the face of insurmountable adversity. He was the quintessential British loser, the enigmatic underdog who strove against hopeless odds but whose efforts resulted in valiant, but ultimately tragic, failure. A less generous historian, however, would point out that his 1911 race with Roald Amundsen to the South Pole was not so much heroic as just plain dumb.

  Unlike his great rival, Robert Falcon Scott didn’t set out to be an explorer; the driving force in his life was money. When he was young, his brewery-owning father went broke, then died, leaving the family in financial crisis and their fate on Scott’s shoulders. He joined the Royal Navy and rose through the ranks to become an officer. As Britain was between wars and the opportunities for a young naval officer to advance himself were limited, he thought he could skip a few rungs of the promotion ladder by reinventing himself as an explorer.