Lost Expeditions

Every year, someone walks into a wilderness and does not walk back out. This book tells the story of fifty who vanished - and what happened when the searching began.

From an entire Persian army swallowed by an Egyptian sandstorm in 524 BC to a modern airliner that disappeared over the Indian Ocean with 239 people aboard, Lost Expeditions spans four thousand years of exploration, ambition, and unanswered questions. Amelia Earhart and Mallory on Everest sit alongside cases almost no one remembers - a plutonium-powered surveillance device still lost somewhere on a Himalayan peak, an entire Australian expedition swallowed whole by the outback, and a French explorer murdered by his own men on the Texas prairie.
Some of these mysteries were solved decades or centuries later, often by technology or testimony that had been available all along. Others remain exactly as open today as the day the search began.

Inside you'll find:

• Fifty full-page illustrations, one per expedition
• Chronological entries grouped into nine thematic parts, from polar disasters to modern aviation mysteries
• The search that followed each disappearance - not just the vanishing itself
• The stories behind Franklin's lost expedition, Amelia Earhart, Percy Fawcett's search for a lost city, and the Roanoke Colony
• A dedicated closing section on the cases that were eventually solved - sometimes centuries later