Are you a proper adventurer if you haven’t lost a toe?

When Matthew Henson removed the boots and socks of his companion Robert Peary during an expedition to the Canadian Arctic in 1899, he found something unusual. First one, then another, and finally eight toes snapped away as he unpeeled the fabric. Henson was appalled, but Peary just said: “There’s no time to pamper sick men on the trail … a few toes aren’t much to give to achieve the pole.”

Do explorers feel it has not been a real adventure unless a part of you is left behind? Sir Ranulph Fiennes was on a solo expedition to the Arctic in 2000, when his supply sledge slipped beneath the ice, leaving him little choice but to reach into the water. As the wet, bare skin of his left hand touched the air, his fingers and thumb froze. Back in the UK, he was told he would have to wait five months before the dead portions could be amputated properly. This proved intolerable, not least for his late wife Ginny, an explorer herself, who found his constant complaints about the pain in his nerves really grated on hers. At last he retired to his shed, clamped the affected regions to his Black and Decker workbench and removed them with a saw, one by one. In a forthcoming film for the National Geographic channel, he explains the process, and shows the four pieces he keeps in a jar. (“I don’t know what’s happened to the other one.”)

Then consider the case of Aron Ralston. While hiking alone in the Canyonlands national park in Utah, US in April 2003, Ralston’s right arm became trapped beneath a dislodged boulder. For five days, he tried to extricate himself, then at last amputated the arm with a pocketknife and staggered to safety. The remains were later retrieved and cremated, and Ralston’s story was told by Danny Boyle in the film 127 Hours. More recently, Ross Edgley lost part of his tongue to a condition called salt mouth, while swimming around Britain. “I woke up with chunks of it on my pillow,” he says. “You’re just pulling strips off. You could see the tastebuds on it, it was that thick.” Naturally, Edgley didn’t stop the adventure over a few chunks of tongue.

Since 1973, the Downtown hotel in Dawson City, Yukon, Canada, has celebrated the tradition with the Sourtoe cocktail, an unusual but uncomplicated drink, which consists of a shrunken human toe in a shot of whisky. The bar has a permanent collection of 10 toes, acquired from various unlucky adventurers, and, last year, accepted a donation of three more from Nick Griffiths, who lost them during an ultramarathon in the Yukon territory. “You can drink it fast, you can drink it slow, but your lips must touch the toe,” customers are told.