Reading a biography of the Scottish Arctic explorer John Rae, who also had a badass native name of Aglooka, “long strider”. He’s had a bit of a bum deal in the history of exploration due to reporting unpleasant truths, he went to find what happened to the Franklin Expedition to find the Northwest Passage. When he reported accounts of cannibalism he was shitlisted for daring to suggest that Englishmen would resort to such barbarity, Franklin’s widow recruiting Charles Dickins to express outrage. Now, we know they boiled human bones and ate the marrow.
Going back a bit I’ve always liked the tale of the Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca, who was shipwrecked in what’s now Texas in the 16th Century and walked to Mexico City, studying the ways of the Natives as he went for the sake of anthropology.
More recently there’s Fridtjof Nansen, a man who looks as badass as his name suggests, who as well as exploring the bleak interior of Greenland later took time to help clear up the aftermath of World War I, on behalf of its myriad refugees.
Bernard Hubbard, S.J., also known as The Glacier Priest. Glacier climber in Europe and renowned Alaska explorer. He hiked and flew into places nobody had visited, and that few dared.
Percy Fawcett, British explorer obsessed with South America and the fabled gold city of El Dorado. Impervious to diseases that killed explorers by the drove, the man finally fell victim to one of the jungle tribes.
Ernest Shackleton, renowned British Antarctic explorer and captain of the Endurance. When the ship became icebound, he and a handful of others made their way in a lifeboat to South Georgia Island, some 720 miles away, hiked across the rugged island to a settlement, secured a ship, and sailed back to rescue his crew.
There are many more, including Muir, Livingston, Alexander Laing, Speke, Gordon and Stanley. It’s a reading genre that I’m very fond of.
One you will recognize and one probably not: Daniel Boone and Pierre-Joseph Céloron de Blainville. I may just throw in Simon Kenton although he was more an “accidental explorer”. My interest is more in the colonial expansion and early frontier.
I am also an admirer of Daniel Boone, he walked out into true unknown wilderness. often alone, and survived with minimal technology for months at a time. He respected the natives, charted the Cumberland Gap, founded a settlement, and offered his services as a guide for later pioneers. That he was often alone makes him different from most other explorers.
My impression of Simon Kenton is that he was a mountain man and trapper, also independent, but mostly out to provide for his family, without the education to take advantage of his opportunities.
Juan Bautista de Anza was one of the better Conquistadores, who behaved himself in a civil fashion. He made friends with the Indians through whose lands he went. He learned their languages, and respected their ways. He helped warring tribes end age-old feuds, mediating and peacemaking between them.
He was well enough liked by the Indians, they saved his life a few times when he had wandered out of range of water.
Alas, the governors of the region who followed him were in a more traditional mold, and destroyed the good-will that de Anza had built up.
Yes to Cabeza de Vaca. What an amazing journey.
Another of my favorites is William Dampier. He circumnavigated the globe 3 times in an era when a single Atlantic crossing was a lifetime achievement. The book **A Pirate of Exquisite Mind **is an excellent account of his life and voyages.
I get nervous with the term “mountain man” outside the Rocky Mountain trade and more the 1820s and afterwards; more as Eckert named him – frontiersman. OK; Allan Eckert took some liberties but I think he captured the spirit of the man pretty well. I believe what attracted me to his explorations was that they were as much an accident as anything. If we’re talking his initial escape from the law or his later escapes from the Natives, it was of necessity more than curiosity.
(You could also say the same of that famous explorer, soldier and counterfeiter Robert Rogers but ------ lots of people know him. )
I believe Ponce de Leon was the first European to set foot on dry land in what is now the United States. That is not a very well known piece of trivia. Somebody correct me if I’m wrong.
He wasn’t exactly a good guy- notably, he rode along with a brutal slave raid just to watch. But he also took the time to learn several African languages. He took a scholarly approach to the history and cultures of the regions he travelled, and exhibited real respect for the people he met and cultures he encountered.
His writings are pure gold. His travels were pure adventure- he was going into often unstable areas where he had no idea what to expect, with very little money, receiving the needed protection through friendships and placing a lot of trust in people he just met. He made it through a LOT of very hairy situations, including those that killed his European companions.
But through it all, he is studious and extremely focused. An avid botanist, he’ll spend one page describing an exotic kingdom of a pitched battle, and the next page describing how he’s quite worked up about a tree he saw. It’s amusing to read his very observant, very detailed, very Victorian take on being raided by bandits or offered the company of a King’s daughters for the night.
Emin Pasha, aka Edouard Schnitzer, a German physician and naturalist who became governor of the Sudanese province of Equatoria. Cut off by the revolt of the Mahdi, he was “rescued” by Henry Morton Stanley at the cost of two thirds of Stanley’s expedition. He didn’t want to be rescued and was virtually dragged off by Stanley. At a celebration of his rescue, he accidentally walked out of a window and was injured so that Stanley was unable to return in triumph with him to Europe.
Sir Richard Francis Burton, who visited Mecca in disguise when it was prohibited to non-Muslims under pain of death, explored the sources of the Nile, and translated the Kama Sutra and Thousand and One Nights.
Mary Kingsley, an Englishwoman who explored parts of West Africa in the 1890s largely on her own.
I second Burke and Wills. Their story is sort of the opposite of Shakleton’s. They repeatedly missed being rescued by the worst of luck.
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