Notable Members

Isaac Newton was made an honorary noble fellow of the Society for his contributions to the understanding of the physical world and his desire to explore this realm further.

While not alive when the Society was founded, Henry Hudson was posthumously awarded an honorary fellowship by majority vote of the Society for his contributions to exploration and his strong personal character.

British explorer, navigator, cartographer, and captain in the British Royal Navy. He succeeded in circumnavigating the world on his first voyage without losing a single man to scurvy, an unusual accomplishment at the time. He tested several preventive measures, most importantly the frequent replenishment of fresh food. For presenting a paper on this aspect of the voyage to the Royal Society he was presented with the Copley Medal in 1776.

An English explorer, fur-trader, author, and naturalist. He was the first European to make an overland excursion across northern Canada to the Arctic Ocean. Mr. Hearne provided several inputs to the Society charter documents based on his extensive experience of land survival.

Scottish explorer and the first European to reach Timbuktu, arriving there via the north-to-south route. He became the first European to cross the Sahara from north to south. He was awarded the Gold Medal of the Society in 1830.

St. George Littledale and his wife Teresa Harris were known in their time as the greatest British Central Asia travelers of the nineteenth century. Littledale is also considered by many hunters to be one of the greatest big game hunters of all time.

British Royal Navy officer and polar explorer known for his explorations of the Arctic in the early 1800’s and the antarctic from 1839 to 1843.

George Mallory was an English mountaineer who took part in the first three British expeditions to Mount Everest in the early 1920s. Fellowship awarded posthumously.

Sir Douglas Mawson was an Australian geologist, Antarctic explorer, and academic. He was a key expedition leader during the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. Mawson was born in England and was brought to Australia as a baby.

American geographer, cartographer, explorer, travel writer, and mountaineer, notably in the Himalayas. She was one of the first female professional mountaineers; she not only explored but also wrote about her adventures. She set several women’s altitude records, and published eight travel books with her husband.

Richard Mohun  was an American explorer, diplomat, mineral prospector and mercenary. His most ambitious undertaking was a three-year expedition, beginning in 1898, that laid a telegraph line from Lake Tanganyika to Stanley Falls.

Robert Peary was an American explorer and United States Naval officer who made several expeditions to the Arctic in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is best known for claiming to have reached the geographic North Pole with his expedition on April 6, 1909.

Joseph Dewey Soper was a widely traveled Canadian Arctic ornithologist, explorer, zoologist, and prolific author. Soper’s biggest accomplishment, was the successful six-year, 50,000 km search on Baffin Island for the blue goose nesting grounds on Bluegoose Plain near Bowman Bay in the Foxe Basin in the spring of 1929.

Major Harold William Tilman was an English mountaineer and explorer, renowned for his Himalayan climbs and sailing voyages. His contributions have helped to shape the modern charter of the Society.

Sir Edmund Hillary with his climbing partner, the Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay, became the first climbers confirmed to have reached the summit of Mount Everest