Sorry, nitpick but this is the Dope, right? “Cabeza de Vaca” is the whole lastname; it literally means Cow’s Head (usually Something de Something would be Commonlastname de Townname, but not in this case). Yes, I know, Spanish lastnames can be a bitch.
Yeah, from an ancestor who supposedly used a cow’s skull to mark a path that was used to defeat the Moops…
You must be tons o’ fun at parties! 
I will always be wholly impressed by the story of the Shackleton expedition, but the story that really invokes the spirit of human endurance to me is that of Bill Callahan, who spent 76 days adrift on the Atlantic Ocean, in a five-foot lifeboat. The book Adrift, his own recounting of his journey, is an amazing tale of survival in unimaginable conditions. He was incredibly resourceful – and had no one to rely upon but himself.
The human migration out of south east Asia in to the Pacific islands is the most incredible human journey.
I was going to mention this trek because I saw this when it first came out. Absolutely mesmerising. Well worth the rental fee.
I elect John Colter, a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition that went on to become the true definition of a “mountain man.”
This website gives a good overview.
This website provides a little more detail of his first escape.
I don’t know if is the same group, but I’ve read a book called “The Long Walk” that told the story of some gulag escapees crossing the Gobi. It was a fascinating story.
The tale of Anson’s expedition to the Pacific (as recorded fictionally in Patrick O’Brian’s “The Golden Ocean” and “The Unknown Shore” is pretty amazing. Anson sailed from England to the Pacific (losing several ships in the process and having just a horrible time of it) with the goal of intercepting a Spanish treasure galleon. Despite having lost almost all his flotilla and having a skeleton crew,he managed to pull it off.
Even more desperate is the tale of the Wager, a store ship that went down off the coast of Patagonia. The crew broke up into two groups, one group of 80 of which sailed through the straits of Magellan in a small open boat and only 12 survived. The other group headed north towards Chile – all but four died of starvation and exposure.
Or Apollo 13, when everything went to hell and they still made it back to Earth.
I’m not sure if this exactly qualifies as what you’re looking for, but I’ll mention it anyway. Dr. Spencer Wells wrote a book that was also made into a PBS documentary about the journey the human race has made to populate the Earth, as traced by the genetic evidence of present populations. Covered is the likely route, diversions, durations, unlikely deviations, environmental mutations, etc. He even comes up with an “original” race and interviews their probable “pure” decendants, the rest of us being amalgams thereof.
It’s called The Journey of Man and while I’ve not read the book, the documentary was really quite excellent.
Similar to this is the Peking-to-Paris race in 1907. The competitors had to arrange to have gasoline waiting for them at various points because gas stations were so few and far between. One of the teams crossed the Gobi Desert by means of following the telegraph lines. At one of the telegraph offices, they stopped to send a wire to their sponsor, and noticed that it was numbered 1. “The first today?” No, the first ever, from that office. Further on, in the Ural Mountains, they reached a signpost.
<—EUROPE
ASIA —>
Too bad they didn’t have cameras.
Edward John Eyre. He and his Aboriginal companion Wylie were the first to walk across the Nullarbor plain in Australia, in 1840-1841. They only survived because they met whalers at Albany: the difficulty is indicated by the fact that the next person to make the crossing, John Forrest, walked across 30 years later in 1870.
(Both had later political careers: Eyre as Governor of Jamaica, and Forrest in various federal ministries in Australia.)
John Wesley Powell’s three-month river trip down thru the Grand Canyon of the Colorado in 1869. They didn’t know it was doable. Could have dropped over an unknown waterfall and never be heard from again. The only deaths were 3 fellows who gave up and tried walking out 2 days before exiting the main canyon.
Plus it was scientific. Not just some rich goofball trying to become famous.
The explorer’s full name was Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Per Spanish custom, Núñez came from his father’s side of the family, Cabeza de Vaca from his mother’s. Núñez would have been the “short form” of his name, but he preferred to use Cabeza de Vaca. (Who wouldn’t?) Wikipedia uses Aluar Nuñez Cabeça de Vaca as the older version of the name. (Pedant to pedant!)
I’ve read Cyclone Covey’s translation of La Relacion & will look into The Brutal Journey. This was definitely an epic journey & Cabeza de Vaca’s descriptions of life in the old Southwest are quite valuable.
The Wikipedia article has links to several translations.
There was a time,long,long ago, when travel of more than a day was a trip into the unknown. Anyone who left in the morning and didn’t come back that same night must have been considered very brave, very foolish, or very dead. Now, those were some incredible journeys.
For a grimmer point of view (arr, ye can always count on old Ran for that!)…
It’s not exactly a happy-ending, inspiring story, but what I’ve read of the Andrée’s Arctic balloon expedition is pretty incredible. As in a Chernobyl Disaster Timeline/“Cavalcade of Horrors” kind of way.
Same with the last Franklin Expedition, and Soyuz 1.
Hey, as “fans” of Ed Wood know, even a complete screwup can be incredible if it’s spectacular enough.
The -ez lastnames originally meant “Son of”; in very old names it’s meant that way: for example, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (El Cid) was “Rodrigo, son of Diego, from Vivar” - no family name yet for him. Núñez is Son of Nuño. These lastnames are pretty common, so it would be normal to have two “Núñez” in the same group. Therefore, if you’re going to call people by lastname, people called Pérez or Martínez or… often get stuck with the maternal instead.
I has in my class two guys called (name change to protect the innocent) José María Martínez Díaz, both nicknamed Chema by their relatives, from the same village and born within days of each other. Thank God they had different hair color!
I remembered another travelogue that I used to love as a kid: the trips of Marco Polo. While a lot of it sounds fantastic, he actually was pretty careful to distinguish between “this I was told” (which is usually the fantastic stuff, but often if you wash off the ‘bad reporting’ you can place what was it he’d been told about) and “this I saw”.
Coincidentally, a BBC radio documentary this week debunks this book.
For me, it’s Bligh for sheer intelligence, and Shackleton for endurance. Though for insanity, there’s the one where some explorers were trying to find the northeast package with the idea of building a railroad from Paris to New York via Siberia, who ended up eating their own shoes. Amazingly they all survived. Can’t remember their names alas.