99 Fun Facts About Adventure

Which two men were the first confirmed to reach Everest's summit, in May 1953?

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.

What happened to Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance in the Weddell Sea in 1915?

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.

What was the name of the lifeboat Shackleton and five men sailed 800 miles to South Georgia?

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.

Roald Amundsen led the first expedition to traverse which sea route, in 1903–06, aboard the sloop Gjøa?

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.

Which animals hauled Roald Amundsen's sledges to the South Pole, helping him beat Scott by five weeks?

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.

Which member of Scott's party left the tent saying 'I am just going outside and may be some time'?

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.

Juan Sebastián Elcano completed the first circumnavigation of the Earth in 1522 after which commander died in the Philippines?

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.

Marco Polo dictated the story of his travels while imprisoned by which rival of Venice?

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.

Which 14th-century Moroccan set out for Mecca in 1325 and kept travelling for nearly 30 years?

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.

Which African animal, brought home by Zheng He's treasure fleet, did the Ming court hail as a qilin?

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.

Which US president commissioned the Lewis and Clark Expedition?

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.

Which teenage Shoshone woman traveled with Lewis and Clark from North Dakota to the Pacific?

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.

Which waterfall on the Zambezi did David Livingstone become the first European to see, in 1855?

Victoria Falls. He named them for his queen, though the people living nearby already called them Mosi-oa-Tunya, 'the smoke that thunders'.

Percy Fawcett vanished in the Amazon in 1925 while searching for what?

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.

Which Black explorer, Peary's companion on seven Arctic voyages, said he reached the North Pole first?

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.

The $25,000 Orteig Prize, for the first nonstop flight between New York and Paris, went to which pilot in 1927?

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.

Amelia Earhart disappeared over the Pacific in 1937 while attempting what?

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.

What was Thor Heyerdahl's raft Kon-Tiki made from?

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.

Thor Heyerdahl's raft, launched from Peru, took its name Kon-Tiki from a god of which civilization?

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.

Jacques Cousteau co-invented which piece of diving equipment during the Second World War?

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.

In 1960 the bathyscaphe Trieste reached the seabed's deepest point in which ocean feature?

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.

Reinhold Messner was the first person to climb all 14 of what?

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.

Who was the first woman to reach the summit of Everest, in 1975?

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.

Which British explorer led the Transglobe Expedition, the first surface journey to circle the world by way of both poles?

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.

Aron Ralston freed himself from a boulder in a Utah canyon in 2003 by doing what?

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.

Which 3,000-foot Yosemite wall did Alex Honnold climb alone without a rope in June 2017?

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.

Which spacecraft carried Yuri Gagarin once around Earth on the first human spaceflight, in 1961?

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.

Which Apollo 11 astronaut stayed in lunar orbit while Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the Moon?

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.

Phileas Fogg's wager to circle the globe in 80 days is made with his friends at which London institution?

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.

What is the name of Phileas Fogg's valet in Around the World in Eighty Days?

Passepartout. Fogg hires him on the very day of the bet, having just sacked his predecessor for bringing shaving water two degrees too cool.

Which New York World reporter circled the globe in 72 days in 1889–90, beating Phileas Fogg's fictional 80?

Nellie Bly. She travelled with a single handbag, found time to call on Jules Verne at his home in France, and still got back days ahead of her own target.

Which Robert Louis Stevenson novel first ran as a serial in the children's magazine Young Folks, signed 'Captain George North'?

Treasure Island. Stevenson spun it around a treasure map to amuse his stepson on a rain-soaked holiday, and his working title was The Sea Cook.

At which inn does young Jim Hawkins first meet the old sailor Billy Bones?

The Admiral Benbow. Bones promises Jim a silver fourpenny a month there to keep his 'weather-eye open for a seafaring man with one leg', and often stalls before he pays up.

Which author's castaway Robinson Crusoe spends 28 years on his island?

Daniel Defoe. He left his own name off the 1719 first edition and presented the story on its title page as the castaway's memoir, 'written by himself'.

Which real castaway is Robinson Crusoe thought to be based on?

Alexander Selkirk. He asked to be put ashore on a Pacific island because he thought his ship unfit to sail; he was right, it sank, but he waited more than four years for rescue.

What is Indiana Jones's academic profession?

Professor of archaeology. Even the famous name is borrowed: The Last Crusade reveals that he was born Henry Jones Jr. and took 'Indiana' from the family dog.

Which Indiana Jones film, released in 1984, is a prequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark?

Temple of Doom. Complaints about its violence under a PG rating led Spielberg himself to propose a new category, and PG-13 arrived that same summer.

Which TV survival expert became the UK's youngest-ever Chief Scout in 2009, aged 35?

Bear Grylls. He had stood on the summit of Everest at 23, yet called leading the Scout movement a bigger privilege than that climb.

Having turned back 97 miles from the South Pole, Shackleton reportedly told his wife: better a live donkey than a dead what?

Lion. His four-man party was running out of food, and he judged that reaching the pole would mean dying on the way back; turning round got all of them home alive.

On which ship did Amundsen sail to Antarctica for his South Pole expedition?

Fram. She had been lent to him for an Arctic voyage; only at Madeira did he tell his crew they were going south instead, and send Scott a telegram to say so.

Where did the Lewis and Clark Expedition spend the winter of 1805–06 before starting home?

Fort Clatsop, Oregon. They built it within reach of the Pacific and named it for the local Clatsop people, then spent a wet, flea-ridden winter there, sick and short of food.

Which Indiana university, where Amelia Earhart worked, funded her Lockheed Electra?

Purdue. She joined its faculty in 1935 to counsel women students on careers, and the university's research foundation paid for the plane she called her 'Flying Laboratory'.

Which newspaper sent Henry Morton Stanley to find Livingstone in 1869?

The New York Herald. Its owner told Stanley to spend whatever it took, on one condition: 'find Livingstone', a man whom most people by then believed dead.

Which skydiver jumped from a balloon 24 miles above New Mexico in 2012, breaking the sound barrier in freefall?

Felix Baumgartner. The voice guiding him from mission control was Joseph Kittinger, whose own record for the highest jump had stood since 1960 until that day.

Who was the first person to sail single-handedly around the world, aboard the sloop Spray?

Joshua Slocum. A friend's promised 'ship' turned out to be a rotting sloop propped up in a field; he rebuilt her himself, and in 1909 he sailed off in her and was never seen again.

Steve Fossett was the first to fly solo nonstop around the world in a balloon and in what else?

A fixed-wing aircraft. He circled the globe alone in the purpose-built GlobalFlyer, then vanished on a short solo flight in 2007; the wreckage was not found for a year.

Robyn Davidson's 1980 book Tracks recounts a 2,700 km Australian desert trek using what?

Camels. She moved to Alice Springs and spent two years learning to train them before setting out on the nine-month walk across the desert.

In which balloon did Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones first fly non-stop around the globe?

Breitling Orbiter 3. Launched from a Swiss Alpine village in March 1999, it first drifted south-west to find the right winds, then circled the globe and landed in the Egyptian desert nearly 20 days later.

Which Portuguese navigator opened the sea route from Europe to India, reaching Calicut in May 1498?

Vasco da Gama. A guide taken on in East Africa saw him across the Indian Ocean, but the cheap goods he offered Calicut's ruler as gifts soured the welcome.

In Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, what is the name of Captain Nemo's submarine?

Nautilus was borrowed from a real submarine built in 1800 by Robert Fulton, the steamboat pioneer, who had named his craft after a shelled sea mollusc.

In Yann Martel's Life of Pi, which animal called Richard Parker shares the boy's lifeboat for 227 days?

A Bengal tiger got the name Richard Parker through a clerical error that swapped the animal's name with that of the man who captured him.

Which creatures does Indiana Jones fear, a phobia The Last Crusade traces to a boyhood chase aboard a circus train?

Snakes became his phobia in a prologue set in 1912, which also explains where the hero got his bullwhip, the scar on his chin and his hat.

In J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, which creature hunts Captain Hook with a ticking clock inside its stomach?

A crocodile was fed Hook's severed hand by Peter Pan and liked the taste so much that it has trailed the pirate ever since.

In J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, the wizard Gandalf recruits Bilbo Baggins to serve Thorin's dwarves as what?

A burglar is the job Gandalf proposes as he unveils a map showing a secret door into the Lonely Mountain, leaving Bilbo dumbfounded.

In Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, the explorers climb down into a volcano in which country?

Iceland's Snæfellsjökull is the way in, and the travellers finally come back up by being spewed out of Stromboli, an erupting volcano off Sicily.

Which one-legged ship's cook, owner of a parrot named Captain Flint, leads the mutineers aboard the Hispaniola?

Long John Silver was partly inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson's friend William Henley, a big, red-bearded editor who got about on a crutch.

In Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck and the runaway Jim drift on a raft down which river?

The Mississippi was meant to carry them only as far as Cairo, Illinois, on the edge of the free states, but the pair drift past the town after losing each other in a fog.

In Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, which island is home to people less than six inches tall?

Lilliput has suffered six rebellions over whether a boiled egg should be cracked at the big end or the little end.

Which author spent a year in the Klondike gold rush before writing The Call of the Wild and White Fang?

Jack London came home from the goldfields ill with scurvy, but what he had seen in the Yukon supplied much of the material for the first of those novels.

In Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers, which young Gascon travels to Paris hoping to join the king's guard?

D'Artagnan was loosely based on a real soldier, Charles de Batz-Castelmore, and manages to arrange duels with all three musketeers before befriending them.

In The Count of Monte Cristo, the sailor Edmond Dantès is jailed without trial in which island fortress off Marseille?

Château d'If is where a fellow prisoner, the priest Abbé Faria, tunnels into the wrong cell and then spends eight years teaching Dantès languages and science.

In Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Captain Ahab hunts the white whale aboard which Nantucket whaling ship?

The Pequod was named for a Native American tribe of New England, and all three of its masts are replacements for ones lost in a gale off Japan.

Which author's 1912 novel The Lost World sends Professor Challenger to a plateau of living dinosaurs?

Arthur Conan Doyle, better known for Sherlock Holmes, used the tale to poke fun at academic rivalries and sensational journalism.

Which Durban-based hunter leads the expedition across unexplored Africa in H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines?

Allan Quatermain was modelled largely on Frederick Selous, a real British hunter and explorer of Africa, and went on to star in thirteen more novels.

In Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, which enemy of the man-cub Mowgli is finally trampled by stampeding buffalo?

Shere Khan was born with a crippled leg, which earned him the mocking nickname Lungri, the Lame One, from his own mother.

In Homer's Odyssey, the hero Odysseus spends ten years after the Trojan War sailing home to which island?

Ithaca is his kingdom, and by the time Odysseus finally reaches it every one of his crewmates has been killed along the way.

In William Golding's Lord of the Flies, what does Ralph blow like a horn to gather the stranded boys?

A conch shell gives Ralph his authority and gets him elected chief, until a boulder dropped by Roger kills Piggy and smashes it.

Which 1812 novel by Johann David Wyss shipwrecks a couple and their sons in the East Indies on the way to Australia?

The Swiss Family Robinson was written to teach the author's own four sons about self-reliance, good farming and the uses of the natural world.

In Rick Riordan's The Lightning Thief, the demigod Percy Jackson is claimed as the son of which Greek god?

Poseidon had sworn an oath with his two brothers to father no more children, so Percy's very birth broke a pact between the gods.

In C. S. Lewis's first Narnia story, Lucy Pevensie stumbles into the snowy kingdom through which piece of furniture?

A wardrobe in a spare room carries Lucy, the youngest of the four children, into Narnia on three separate visits.

Which Gary Paulsen novel leaves 13-year-old Brian Robeson alone in a vast forest after a plane crash?

Hatchet takes its title from a parting gift from Brian's mother, the one tool he has for making fire and finding food all summer.

Which Louis Sachar novel sends the wrongly convicted Stanley Yelnats to Camp Green Lake, a Texas desert boot camp?

Holes won the Newbery Medal, and the digging its young inmates do each day is really the Warden's search for an outlaw's hidden loot.

In the Magic Tree House books, which siblings from Frog Creek, Pennsylvania, run missions for Morgan le Fay?

Jack and Annie take their orders from the enchantress for 28 books, after which the wizard Merlin starts handing out the quests.

The Choose Your Own Adventure gamebooks, which sold over 250 million copies, are told from which grammatical viewpoint?

Second person narration casts the reader as the hero who makes every choice, and the series began life in 1976 under the name Adventures of You.

Scott O'Dell's Island of the Blue Dolphins retells a real woman's 18 years alone on an island off which US state?

California's San Nicolas Island was home to Juana Maria, a Nicoleño woman left behind when a ship carried the rest of her people away.

Which journalist's bestseller Into Thin Air recounts the 1996 Everest storm that killed eight climbers?

Jon Krakauer had joined the climb on assignment for Outside magazine, having mostly given up mountaineering years earlier.

Which Belgian cartoonist created the boy reporter Tintin, whose adventures have sold over 200 million copies?

Hergé launched the series in 1929 in the children's supplement of a Brussels newspaper, and it has since appeared in more than 70 languages.

Michael Crichton's novel Jurassic Park puts its dinosaur theme park on Isla Nublar, an island off which country?

Costa Rica lies 120 miles east of the fictional island, though the film versions were shot on the Hawaiian islands of Kauai and Oahu.

In Jean Craighead George's My Side of the Mountain, runaway Sam Gribley makes a Catskills home inside what?

A hollow tree, burned out wider with fire, becomes home to Sam, his trained peregrine falcon Frightful and a weasel he calls The Baron.

Which ship did Captain Jack Sparrow lose in a mutiny led by Barbossa, his own first mate, in Pirates of the Caribbean?

The Black Pearl is crewed by cursed pirates because the writers added a curse to tie the story to the Disney theme park ride that inspired the film.

In The Princess Bride, which swordsman hunts Count Rugen, the six-fingered nobleman who killed his father?

Inigo Montoya was played in the 1987 film by Mandy Patinkin, who drew on the death of his own father from cancer for the final duel.

Which English adventurer, first seen in a 1996 video game, was played on film by Angelina Jolie?

Lara Croft has earned six Guinness World Records, and locals nicknamed the Cambodian ruin of Ta Prohm after the star once the first film was shot there.

In Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda adventure games, what is the name of the sword-wielding hero the player controls?

Link got his name, creator Shigeru Miyamoto has explained, because the hero is the one who connects people together.

Colossal Cave Adventure, the 1976 text game behind the adventure genre, was mapped from a real cave in which US state?

Kentucky's Mammoth Cave, the longest cave system in the world, was explored by programmer Will Crowther, who wrote the game partly for his two daughters.

Which Egyptologist, funded for years by Lord Carnarvon, found the intact tomb of Tutankhamun in November 1922?

Howard Carter's breakthrough began on 4 November 1922, when a worker uncovered a single step cut into the rock of the Valley of the Kings.

Which Yale lecturer brought the mountaintop citadel of Machu Picchu to the world's attention in 1911?

Hiram Bingham was led to the largely forgotten ruins by a local man, Melchor Arteaga, and later served as governor of Connecticut for a single day.

Which Royal Navy ship carried the 22-year-old Charles Darwin on a survey voyage that lasted almost five years?

HMS Beagle was supposed to be away for two years, and Darwin spent most of the trip ashore: over three years on land against 18 months at sea.

Which Robert Louis Stevenson novel follows David Balfour and the Jacobite Alan Breck Stewart across the Highlands?

Kidnapped is built around real events in 18th-century Scotland, including the Appin Murder, and Alan Breck Stewart himself was a real person.

Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods recounts his attempt, alongside his old friend Stephen Katz, to hike what?

The Appalachian Trail beat the pair in the end, when they gave up in Maine's Hundred-Mile Wilderness, and Katz was really Bryson's friend Matt Angerer under a pseudonym.

Which Soviet cosmonaut, a former textile worker, became the first woman in space on a 1963 solo flight?

Valentina Tereshkova had trained in secret as a competitive parachutist, and she circled the Earth 48 times in almost three days.

Which British climber vanished near Everest's summit in 1924 with Sandy Irvine, his body lying unfound until 1999?

George Mallory was last seen 800 vertical feet from the top, and whether he and Irvine reached it before they died is still debated.

Which oceanographer is best known for finding the wreck of the Titanic in 1985 and the Bismarck in 1989?

Robert Ballard has said the hydrothermal vents he helped to find on the seabed mattered far more to him than the famous liner.

On which remote Pacific island did nine HMS Bounty mutineers settle in 1790 and set fire to their ship?

Pitcairn saw no visiting ship until an American sealer, the Topaz, called for ten hours in 1808, and its people still descend from the mutineers.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World recounts an Antarctic winter trek for which bird's eggs?

Emperor penguin embryos were thought to hold clues to how birds evolved from reptiles, and all three men got back barely alive with their specimens.

Which one-armed Civil War veteran led the 1869 boat expedition down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon?

John Wesley Powell had lost his right arm below the elbow at the Battle of Shiloh, yet spent three months running the Green and Colorado rivers.

Which Kenya-raised aviator wrote the memoir West with the Night after flying solo from England to North America in 1936?

Beryl Markham flew for 20 hours before ice starved her engine of fuel, forcing her down in Nova Scotia, well short of the Brooklyn airfield she was aiming for.

Anthony Hope's novel The Prisoner of Zenda is set in which fictional country, now a byword for quaint little states?

Ruritania gave its name to a whole genre, the Ruritanian romance, and lawyers still use it as a stand-in name for an unspecified country.

Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons, about children camping on an island in the summer of 1929, is set where?

The Lake District supplied every place in the story, Ransome said, and the tale grew out of a summer he spent teaching his friends' children to sail.

Which pair led the 1860–61 trek from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria, both dying on the return journey?

Burke and Wills got back to their Cooper Creek depot to find it abandoned only hours earlier, and just one man, John King, came home alive from the crossing.