Glory to them, who were not afraid to leave warm and comfortable dwellings, hospitable tables and went into the unknown, risking their lives, with only one purpose - to discover the secret or bring others closer to its solution.
However, not all trips ended successfully. Many expeditions were incomprehensibly lost. Some could not be found, the found remains of others do not shed light on the causes of their death, giving more riddles than answers to questions.
Many missing expeditions are still the subject of investigation today, since the curious minds are haunted by the strange circumstances of their disappearance.
In the wake of the missing Arctic expedition
One of the first in the sad list of the missing is Franklin's expedition. Exploration of the Arctic was the primary cause of the equipment of this expedition in 1845. It was supposed to examine an unknown section of the Northwest Passage, lying between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in the zone of temperate latitudes, approximately 1670 km long, and complete the discovery of unknown Arctic regions. The expedition was led by an officer of the English fleet - 59-year-old John Franklin. By this time, he was already a member of three expeditions to the Arctic, two of which he led. John Franklin, whose expedition was carefully prepared, already had the experience of a polar explorer. Together with the crew, he sailed from the English port of Greenheit on May 19 on the Erebus and Terror ships (with a displacement of approximately 378 tons and 331 tons, respectively).
The story of the missing expedition of Franklin
Both ships were well equipped and adapted for navigation in ice, much was provided for the convenience and comfort of the crew. A large supply of provisions for three years was loaded into the holds. Biscuits, flour, salted pork and beef, canned meat, stocks of lemon juice against scurvy - all this was measured in tons. But, as it turned out later, the canned goods that the unscrupulous producer Stephen Goldner made cheap on the expedition turned out to be of poor quality and, according to some researchers, served as one of the reasons for the death of many sailors from the Franklin expedition.
In the summer of 1845, the relatives of the crew members received a few letters. The letter sent by Osmer, the housekeeper from Erebus, said that they were waiting for their return to their homeland in 1846. In 1845, captains of whalers Robert Martin and Dannett spoke of a meeting with two expedition ships waiting for suitable conditions to cross the Lancaster Strait. The captains were the last Europeans to see John Franklin and his expedition alive. In the following 1846 and 1847, no further news was received from the expedition; 129 of its members disappeared forever.
Search
The first search group on the trail of the missing ships was sent at the insistence of the wife of John Franklin only in 1848. In addition to the Admiralty ships, thirteen third-party ships joined the search for the famous navigator in 1850: eleven of them belonged to Britain and two belonged to America.
As a result of long persistent searches, the troops managed to find some traces of the expedition: three graves of deceased sailors, tin cans with the Goldner brand. Later, in 1854, John Re, an English doctor and traveler, discovered traces of the expedition members staying in the territory of the current Canadian province of Nunavut. According to the Eskimos, people who came to the mouth of the Bak River were starving to death, and there were cases of cannibalism among them.
In 1857, Franklin’s widow, after futile attempts to persuade the government to send another search team herself, sends an expedition to find at least some traces of her missing husband. A total of 39 polar expeditions participated in the searches for John Franklin and his team, some of which were sent at the expense of his wife. In 1859, members of the next expedition led by officer William Hobson find a written message about the death of John Franklin on June 11, 1847 in a pyramid made of stones.
The causes of the death of the Franklin expedition
For 150 long years, it remained unknown that the Erebus and Terror were ice-covered, and the crew, forced to abandon the ships, tried to reach the Canadian coast, but the harsh Arctic nature left no chance to survive.
Today, the courageous John Franklin and his expedition inspire artists, writers, screenwriters to create works that tell about the lives of heroes.
Mysteries of the Siberian taiga
The secrets of the missing expeditions do not cease to stir the minds of our contemporaries. In today's progressive time, when a man stepped into space, looked into the depths of the sea, revealed the secret of the atomic nucleus, many mysterious events that happen to humans on earth remain inexplicable. Such mysteries include some of the missing expeditions to the USSR, the most mysterious of which is the Dyatlov tourist group.
The vast territory of our country with its mysterious Siberian taiga, the ancient Ural mountains, dividing the mainland into two parts of the world, stories about the numerous treasures hidden in the bowels of the earth, always attracted the inquisitive minds of researchers. Missing expeditions in the taiga are a tragic part of our history. No matter how the Soviet authorities tried to hide and hush up the tragedies, information about the disappeared entire teams, growing in rumors and implausible legends, reached the people.
Inexplicable circumstances of the death of Igor Dyatlov and his expedition
The name of the Kholat-Syakhyl mountain (which translates as “the mountain of the dead”), located in the northern part of the Urals, has one unsolved mystery related to the missing expeditions to the USSR. It’s not for nothing that the Mansi people living in these places gave the ridge such an ominous name: here many times people or groups of people disappeared or died for unknown reasons (usually consisting of 9 people). An inexplicable tragedy happened on this mountain at night from February 1 to 2 in 1959.
And this story began with the fact that on January 23 a detachment of nine Sverdlovsk tourists, headed by Igor Dyatlov, went to the planned ski transition, the complexity of which belonged to the highest category, and its length was 330 kilometers. Nine again! What is it: an accidental coincidence or fatal inevitability? Indeed, 11 people were supposed to go on a 22-day hike, but one of them, for good reason, refused at the very beginning, and the other, Yuri Yudin, went on a hike, but fell ill on the way and was forced to return home. It saved his life.
The final composition of the group: five students, three graduates of the Ural Polytechnic Institute, instructor camp site. Of the nine members, two are girls. All tourists of the expedition were experienced skiers and had experience living in extreme conditions.
The aim of the detachment of skiers was the Otorten Ridge, which translates from the Mansi language in a warning “don't go there.” On the ill-fated February night, the detachment set up a camp on one of the slopes of Kholat-Syakhil; the top of the mountain was three hundred meters from it, and Mount Otorten was 10 km away. In the evening, when the group was preparing for dinner and engaged in the design of the newspaper “Evening Otorten”, something inexplicable and terrible happened. What could scare the guys so much and why they panicked scattered from the tent cut by them from the inside is not clear to this day. During the investigation, it was found that the tourists left the tent in a hurry, some did not even have time to put on shoes.
What happened to the expedition of Dyatlov?
At the appointed time, the group of skiers did not return and did not make itself felt. Native guys sounded the alarm. They began to turn to educational institutions, to a camp site and to the police, demanding that search work begin.
On February 20, when all the waiting periods expired, the leadership of the Polytechnic Institute sent the first detachment in search of the missing expedition of Dyatlov. Soon, other units will follow, police and military structures will be involved. Only the twenty-fifth day of the search yielded some results: a tent was found cut on the side, it contained untouched things, and not far from the place of spending the night, there were corpses of five people whose death occurred as a result of hypothermia. All the tourists were in postures curled up from the cold, one of them had a traumatic brain injury. Two have traces of nosebleeds. Why barefoot and half-dressed people who ran out of the tent could not or did not want to return to it? This question remains a mystery to this day.
After several months of searching, four more corpses of expedition members were found on the snowy banks of the Lozva River. Each of them showed fractures of the extremities and damage to internal organs, the skin had an orange and purple tint. The corpse of the girl was found in a strange pose - she was kneeling in the water and she did not have a tongue.
Subsequently, the whole group was buried in Sverdlovsk at the Mikhailovsky cemetery in a mass grave, and the place of their death is indicated by a memorial plaque with the names of the victims and with the screaming inscription "There were nine of them." The non-conquered group pass has since become known as the Dyatlov Pass.
Unanswered questions
What happened to the expedition of Dyatlov? So far, there are only numerous versions and assumptions. Some researchers blame the death of a UFO squad and as evidence cite eyewitnesses about the appearance of yellow fireballs at the Mountain of the Dead that night. The state weather station also recorded unknown "spherical objects" in the area of the death of a small detachment.
According to another version, the guys went to the ancient Aryan underground treasury, for which they were killed by its keepers.
There are versions according to which the missing expedition of Dyatlov died in connection with tests of various types of weapons (from atomic to vacuum), with alcohol poisoning, with a ball of lightning, with the attack of a bear and a snowman, with an avalanche.
Official version
In May 1959, an official opinion was issued on the death of the Dyatlov expedition. It indicated its reason: a certain elemental force, which the guys could not overcome. The culprits of the tragedy were not found. By decision of the first secretary, Kirilenko, the case was closed, strictly classified and transferred to the archive with the order not to destroy it until a special order.
After 25 years of storage, all closed criminal cases were destroyed. However, the Dyatlov Case, after the statute of limitations, remained lying on dusty shelves.
Missing schooner "Saint Anna"
In 1912, the schooner "St. Anna" set sail around the Scandinavian Peninsula and disappeared. Only after 2 years on foot did the navigator V.Albanov and sailor A.Kondar return to the Great Land. The latter became isolated, sharply changed the type of activity, and never once wished to discuss with anyone what happened to the schooner. Albanov, on the contrary, said that in the winter of 1912, "Saint Anna" froze in the ice and was carried to the Arctic Ocean. In January 1914, 14 people from the team received permission from Captain Brusilov to go ashore and make their own way to civilization. On the way, 12 died. Albanov developed a vigorous activity, trying to organize a search for the shabby ice of the schooner. However, Brusilov’s ship was never found.
