Lewis & Clark accomplished their mission and returned home to the east coast as heroes. It was a wonderful achievement involving a lot of nitty gritty hard work, good judgment, tenacity, and.... What was it? Luck? Pluck? Divine Intervention? A flip of the coin? Some other explorers have not fared so well.
Ferdinand Magellan, the first captain to circumnavigate the world (1521), ended up dead on a beach in the Western Pacific, after he offended the natives there. The same thing happened to Captain James Cook, probably the most famous sea explorer of all time. During his third voyage around the Pacific he died on the west coast of the Big Island in Hawaii. He, too, was involved in a beach fracas with the natives.
In 1845 Sir John Franklin (already a certified hero) was sent by the English Admiralty with a ship and over 200 men to "finally" find—after 300 years of on and off attempts—the Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans across the top of Canada. Franklin and his ship entered the maze of seaways, islands, and ice above Canada and was never seen or heard from again. Over ten years he was the subject of the biggest manhunt in history. (Side note: Franklin disappeared about the same time the Donner Party was trapped in snow at the top of the Sierra in 1846-7. Have of the party died.)
Englishman, Robert Falcon Scott, raced Norwegian Roald Amundsen to be the first man to reach the South Pole. Amundsen won (December 1911) and returned home a hero, like Lewis and Clark. Scott came in second to the Pole (in January 1912) and he and his entire party of five died on their return march across the polar plateau toward their ship anchored on the edge of Antarctica.
It's more than a little difficult to distill a lesson or two from these slices of history. The only thing for certain is that coins seldom, if ever, land on their edges.
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