On October 27, 1915, Ernest Shackleton gave the order to abandon ship. He was stranded on the ice of Antarctica's Weddell Sea, with 27 men, and nobody in the world knew where they were. His ship, Endurance, had been trapped in pack ice for months. Now the ice was crushing her. The men climbed down onto the frozen sea with lifeboats, tents and whatever food they could carry. A few weeks later, on November 21, Endurance slipped beneath the ice. They camped on drifting floes for months. When the ice finally broke up, they rowed three small boats to Elephant Island, a bare rock nobody would ever search. So Shackleton went for help himself. He and five men sailed a 22-foot lifeboat, the James Caird, about 800 miles across the Southern Ocean, one of the roughest seas on Earth, to South Georgia island. They landed on the wrong side. So they hiked across the island's unmapped mountains and glaciers to reach a whaling station. It took four attempts to get back through the ice to Elephant Island. On August 30, 1916, a ship finally reached them. Every single man was alive. In March 2022, explorers found Endurance about 3,000 meters down in the Weddell Sea, upright and so well preserved you can still read her name on the stern. He lost the ship, the mission and the expedition. He didn't lose one man. Disclaimer: Distances are approximate (the James Caird voyage is usually given as about 800 miles, roughly 1,300 km), and the wreck depth is given as about 3,008 meters. "Every single man was alive" refers to the 28-man Endurance party; three men from the expedition's separate Ross Sea party died on the other side of Antarctica. Photos: Frank Hurley (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons / State Library of New South Wales

A well-dressed man was found dead on an Australian beach in 1948. His labels were cut out of his clothes. In a hidden pocket was a scrap of paper with two words: "Tamám Shud." December 1, 1948. Somerton Beach, Adelaide. The man was propped against a seawall, neatly dressed, no ID, no wallet. Nobody ever came forward to claim him. The scrap of paper had been torn from the last page of a book of Persian poetry, the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. "Tamám Shud" means "it is ended" or "finished." Police later found the actual book it came from. In the back were faint pencil letters that looked like a code. No one has ever cracked it. A suitcase left at Adelaide Railway Station turned out to be his too. For decades, people argued: Spy? Heartbreak? Poison? He was buried under a headstone that said "the unknown man." In 2021, police exhumed him. In 2022, Professor Derek Abbott of the University of Adelaide announced that DNA from hairs caught in the man's plaster death mask matched a family tree. His name, Abbott said, was Carl "Charles" Webb, an electrical engineer from Melbourne whose wife later divorced him for desertion. As of this summer, South Australia Police still called their investigation "complex and ongoing," and the coroner hasn't made it official. And the biggest questions remain. Why did he go to Adelaide? Who tore out that page? How did he die? Abbott himself thinks we'll probably never know. We may finally know his name. Would you rather know who someone was, or how their story ended? Disclaimer: The identification as Carl "Charles" Webb comes from Professor Abbott and genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick; as of July 2026, police had not finished their report and the coroner had not confirmed it. The cause of death has never been determined. Some details, like the cut-out labels, come from the original 1948–49 police accounts. Photos: South Australia Police, 1948-49 (public domain); Bletchley (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons