The Explorers’ Table

1874–1922 · Britain & Ireland

Anglo-Irish polar explorer whose 1914 Endurance expedition became the greatest survival story in the history of exploration: after his ship was crushed by Antarctic ice, he led all 27 men to safety over 20 months without a single loss, through open-boat voyages and impossible mountain crossings.

1371–1433 · Ming China

Chinese mariner, diplomat, and admiral of the Ming dynasty who commanded seven epic treasure-fleet voyages across the Indian Ocean to Arabia and East Africa — decades before the European age of exploration — with hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of crew, projecting Chinese power through diplomacy and trade.

1897–1937 · United States

American aviation pioneer and the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. A record-setter and tireless advocate for women in flight, she disappeared over the Pacific in 1937 attempting to circumnavigate the globe — leaving a legacy of courage and possibility.

1872–1928 · Norway

The first man to reach the South Pole, on 14 December 1911, thirty-four days ahead of Scott — and the first to sail the Northwest Passage, in a fishing boat with a crew of six. His advantage was not courage but method: he learned from the Netsilik Inuit how to dress in furs rather than wool, how to drive dogs, how to build snow shelters, and he planned his depots and rations to a margin that assumed things would go wrong. He slept in the snow outside his childhood home with the windows open to harden himself, and read polar literature obsessively for the mistakes. He died in 1928 flying a rescue mission for a rival, Umberto Nobile, whose airship had gone down; Nobile survived and Amundsen was never found.