Your favorite failed Victorian-era explorer

They thought they knew everything, they'd probably even been in the same area before, but they failed and mostly died miserably. Then the predominant power of the age put up memorials to them and made their stories into tales of moral indoctrination. An apt lesson for our times, to be sure.

Anyway, celebrate (?) your favorite or complain at a choice made, or both. For a long time I would have voted for Scott but after reading Dan Simmons's great new novel The Terror and doing some more general research I'd have to say John Franklin might fit the bill. He died before most of the expedition came to complete grief but any group with the mindset that they had to carry with them such things as 'crockery from the ships, utensils, carpet slippers, sheet-lead, and numerous books' while they were fighting for survival, weakening and dying from a combination of scurvy and lead poisoning probably had the wrong idea about things. There's a good chance they turned cannibal as well, based on findings and interviews with Inuit tribespeople, a prospect that led Dickens to say things like:

Heaven forbid that we, sheltered and fed, and considering this question at our own warm hearth, should audaciously set limits to any extremity of desperate distress! It is in reverence for the brave and enterprising, in admiration for the great spirits who can endure even unto the end, in love for their names, and in tenderness for their memory, that we think of the specks, once ardent men, "scattered about in different directions" on the waste of ice and snow, and plead for their lightest ashes. Our last claim in their behalf and honour, against the vague babble of savages, is, that the instances in which this "last resource" so easily received, has been permitted to interpose between life death, are few and exceptional; whereas the instances in which the sufferings of hunger have been borne until the pain was past, are very many. Also, and as the citadel of the position, that the better educated the man, the better disciplined the habits, more reflective and religious the tone of thought, the more gigantically improbable the "last resource" becomes.

Well, perhaps.