Different from traditional centralized control, one major challenge of distributed consensus tracking control lies in the constraint that the desired reference trajectory is only accessible by part of the subsystems. Currently, most existing schemes require the availability of partial knowledge of the reference trajectories to all of the subsystems or information exchange of local control inputs. In this paper, we investigate distributed adaptive consensus tracking control without such requirements for nonlinear high-order multi-agent systems subjected to mismatched unknown parameters and uncertain external disturbances. By introducing compensating terms in a smooth function form of consensus errors and certain positive integrable functions in each step of virtual control design, a new backstepping based distributed adaptive control protocol is proposed. An extra estimator is designed in each subsystem to handle the parametric uncertainties involved in its neighbors' dynamics, which avoids information exchange of local neighborhood consensus errors among connected subsystems. It is shown that global uniform boundedness of all the closed-loop signals and asymptotically output consensus tracking can be achieved. Simulation results are provided to verify the effectiveness of our scheme. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.