My most recent favorite, which I read today, is "The Ice Balloon," by Alec Wilkinson. In one of the countless stories we've never heard, this is about S.A. Andree, a Swede who in 1896 had tried to float a balloon over the then undiscovered North Pole.
He brought along two fellow adventurers, although he beginning didn't auger well when just after taking off, the balloon sank into the water and the crew had to begin unloading ballast.
The three didn't come within three hundred miles of the north pole, ditching the balloon and beginning a wayward journey pulling their own 350-pound sleds filled with provisions, meager because they had intended on much more success.
They lived on the meat of polar bears and seals, all the while riding ice floes through the late fall and early winter of 1896.
Ultimately, they died from what Wilkinson suggests was exhaustion and the cold.
Their bodies weren't discovered until August 1920, when a Norwegian vessel on a scientific mission came across the remains -- along with their journals and a couple dozen photos that hadn't been ruined by the same weather that ruined the men.
I know we can't know all history but I'm forever amazed by what I don't know. I suppose, though, we rarely read the stories of the failures unless those are the spectacular failures like Robert Scott. He and five others finally reached the South Pole, only to find they'd been beaten their weeks earlier by Roald Amundsen. On Scott's attempted return, the entire party died from hunger, exhaustion and the cold.
And, in all honesty, it is the story of these people and those who settled the American West by literally walking the continent, who remind me never to complain about a close parking spot.
This is an actual photo taken by one of the mission members, Nils Strindberg (a distant relative of Swedish playwright August Strindberg). He took the photo shortly after they crashed. You can see more haunting photos on his Wikipedia entry
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