As well as looting art, the British killed thousands and set the city of Benin ablaze during the 1897 expedition, which led to the annexation of the kingdom.
The story of the expedition – which led to the deaths in 1912 of Scott and his four colleagues after they discovered they had been beaten to the pole by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen – is one of the most poignant episodes in the history of British exploration and forms the focus of The Great White Silence, a film made by Herbert Ponting, the expedition's official photographer.
There were three British expeditions to Everest in the 1920s, culminating in the 1924 expedition which led to the deaths of Mallory and Irvine.
The next big step occurred just this winter when I was invited to be part of the Antarctica Meteorite Expedition 2002, which led us from the Patriot Hills to the South Pole Station and the Pecora Escarpment.
The BBC's Ros Atkins was joined by Joe Walston, director of the Wildlife Conservation Society Asia Program which led the expedition, and Stanley Johnson, ambassador of the UN convention on migratory species.
Mawson's plan, which led to the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, envisaged three bases on the Antarctic continent, collectively surveying much of the coast directly south of Australia.
Schwatka discovered gold near Nome and Boyce reported this success in his newspapers, which led him to finance other Schwatka expeditions as well as those of other adventurers, including a failed expedition to the Yukon River in 1898.
Several expeditions charted the Colorado in the mid-19th century, one of which, led by John Wesley Powell in 1869, was the first to run the rapids of the Grand Canyon.
The inspiration for Footstep Safaris, which leads Christian expeditions through Kenya and other parts of East Africa, comes from the doctrine of theophany, defined in the dictionary as "a visible manifestation to humankind of God or a god".
