I ask because for many years after the loss of the Franklin Arctic Expedition (ca. 1843)many people believed that some of the survivors were alive and living among the Inuit. Indeed, the famous American arctic explorer, Elisha Kent Kane, believed (as late as the 1870’s) that some survivors were still alive.
Is there any instance of survivors of one of these lost expeditions turning up, years later?
Doctor Livingstone, I presume.
OK, not decades, but he was out of contact for six years until Stanley found him.
Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, a survivor of a Spanish exploring party to Florida in 1527, wandered for 8 years across much of what is now the southern US before finally meeting Spanish colonists in Mexico in 1536.
List of lost expeditions
May when they got back home, decades later, no one believed their story … 
Guillaume Le Gentil was a French astronomer who was away from home eleven years in the eighteenth century on a failed expedition to the Indian Ocean to observe two transits of Venus. When he finally returned, he discovered he had been declared dead and his purported widow had remarried.
The crew of the Bounty?
Thanks for the link; I notice it did not include two:
-the Crew of the ship “Griffon”(Lasalle)
-the "Jeanette"Expedition (lost in the Russian Arctic), ca. 1880’s
And what happened to Michael Rockefeller…did he wind up as some cannibal’s lunch?
It was 18 years before a ship landed at Pitcairn Island, although several had passed by. Only one of the mutineers, John Adams, was still alive. The American ship passed word to the British but they didn’t get there until 1814.
Geronimo de Aguilar was shipwrecked in Mexico in 1511. He lived as a slave for 8 years until rediscovered in 1519 by the Hernan Cortes expedition.
Others think he ended up as a cannibal instead.
Well, it runs in the family.
This was in a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not book I had as a kid.
There’s this case, which isn’t quite the same thing:
A man goes off to war. Eight years later, he (or someone who looks like him) returns, and his wife accepts him. Four years later the real person returns.
The Talon Children (whose parents were members of the LaSalle expedition) were captured by Karankawa Indians on the Texas coast in 1688, presumed lost, and were found alive and well nine years later, and returned to France.
But he doesn’t count as a lost explorer, he knew where he was the whole time !.
He was not in a shipwreck.
He intentionally waited around for most of that time… he added an extra 8 years onto his trip without telling anyone - well his mail home may have got lost due to war(s) and other troubles.
This was one dedicated and patient scientist:
Watching the transit didn’t work out the first time round, but what the heck, might as will stick around and wait 8 years for the next opportunity.