I thought your comment was backhandedly pointing out that having Pike’s Peak named after you is a singular achievement for an explorer.
I have a great liking for Fawcett: he was weird, but came out with much highly fascinating stuff. Heaven forgive me, I occasionally entertain the odd doubt as to the truth of everything which he tells of experiencing. In my childhood, our house had the book Exploration Fawcett, a compilation of PF’s accounts of his expeditions and inspirations for fresh ones. As a kid, I read it and found it riveting; it was the origin of my lifelong affection for the guy.
Not meaning to hijack but here’s an interesting read about the country Boone explored with some references. I’ve hiked to this site and live a few miles from Fort Boonesborough.
Vasco Núñez de Balboa. Another one who’d rather trade and talk than fight (although if the fight went to him he had no problems drawing), at one point he was based on what is now the Caribbean coast of Panama. The local garrison had heard that there was another sea over the mountains, but details were vague; some of the expeditions organized to search for it were along lines that make one wonder what were they thinking (“let’s follow this river which ends here, see if we find a different sea that way”… uhm… I know the concept of “water basins” might not even have had a name at the time, but come on, “slopes” had already been invented). Balboa discovered his South Sea (later renamed Pacific by Magalhaes); in a later expedition he repeated the trip carrying the structures for a couple of ships, loaded them on mules and a team which included several guys with experience as ship carpenters (enough to assemble the frames and get the rest of the materials from any half-decent trees).
Got killed by the governor that replaced him in the area shortly after the discovery expedition, talk about cutthroat politics.
I enjoyed the account of the Burke and Wills expedition in Cooper’s Creek by Alan Moorehead.
Another interesting explorer of Australia was the Prussian Ludwig Leichhardt, whose disappearance on his last expedition remains a mystery. He inspired the novel Voss by Patrick White.
I have a copy of that. It has some amazingly cheesy illustrations like this one of an anaconda and this of a confrontation with bestial natives.
Balboa is also interesting because he arrived in Panama as a stowaway, and soon became leader of the remnants of two colonizing expeditions by sheer force of personality. His problem was that he had no royal authority so Pedrarias (Pedro Arias Davila) was sent to take over the colony. He had Balboa executed on trumped up charges.
Ironically, although Pedrarias founded Panama City there is not one single street or monument named after him in the entire country. (There is a small bust at the museum at Panama Viejo, the ruins of the city he founded.) Instead, everything from major streets to the currency to the most popular beer are named after his victim.
My choice as well.
Most of what I read are more the primary sources, pulling pieces here and there, but for Dan’l I always recommend “Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer” by John Mack Faragher and “Frontiersman-Daniel Boone And The Making Of America” by Meredith Mason Brown. The latter uses a lot of the early books and newly-found sources as a base and then fills in from newer research.
Can’t argue with any of the above, and I would add Captain Cook, who while doing a lot for navigation and cartography, also did his share of exploring.
I’ve always held a soft spot for John Colter, John Colter - Wikipedia , since as a young kid I remember a Disney song (sung by Fess Parker, IIRC) about him and especially about his “Colter’s Run” (the song was Disney-fied, but it’s still a dramatic story either way).
And son-of-a-gun, the song is actually on You Tube!! THE BALLAD OF JOHN COULTER by Fess Parker - 1956 Disneyland Record - YouTube
Captain James Cook. Australia and the South Pacific are fascinating places to me.
Vitus Bering. His expeditions give us some mysterious creatures for cryptozoologists to wonder about.
Again I say, Shackleton! Most hated: Richard Byrd
Cassini-Huygens, although Voyager 2 is a close second. New Horizons is still in the running, and of course Juno is still en route. I’m still hoping for a Jupiter Icy Moons mission and something like the proposed Titan Saturn System Mission.
Stranger
Alan Moorehead is a god. His two books about Africa exploration, White Nile and Blue Nile, are fascinatingly informative; they read like an Indiana Jones adventure.
Both complete and utter incompetents who killed their own men thru poor leadership and planning.
Scott was hardly a “noble failure”.
Yes, and of the two Blue Nile is the better.
The “bestial natives” picture is indeed a gem. I wonder whether it represents the (if my memory serves correctly) Maricoxi tribe. Again IIRC, he was somewhere in the forest in the Brazil / Bolivia borderlands: stayed for a spell with the Maxubi tribe, who were nice, hospitable, gentle types. They warned him against the neighbouring Maricoxi, whom they described as vicious, ape-like, cannibalistic and, well, thoroughly bestial. Fawcett and his party of course insisted on pushing on and encountering – fleetingly at least – the Maricoxi, who indeed proved to be just as described. Perhaps fortunately (whether for preservation of their lives, or to save Fawcett from needing to make up further “stretchers”) the expeditionaries learned around this time, of the outbreak of World War I, so felt duty-bound to head immediately for civilisation and thence to Europe.
Percy Fawcett, a favourite of mine as per other posts here, also provides some cryptozoology-fodder in his writings. As per the Wiki link in Chefguy’s post, some snakes of prodigious size; and “a small cat-like dog the size of a foxhound”, the mitla. He also reports a couple of very strange and, I think, as yet unrecognised-by-science birds. No mention by him that I recall, however, of Amazonia’s seeming Bigfoot / Yeti eqivalents(s): the terrifying and ferocious mapinguary, suggested as having characteristics of a giant ape-man, and/or a relict giant ground sloth.
Yes, Fawcett is great as well, I just wanted to add someone to the thread who had not yet been mentioned.
By far. I haven’t read them in a number of years, but I seem to recall that White Nile was somewhat dedicated to Gordon and the Sud, while Blue Nile covered the exhausting search for the headwaters.
I agree on Franklin, although many very good explorers met with a similar fate. Vilhjalmur Steffanson was worse, IMO; a man who should have known better, yet who sent the Karluk crew to its doom in the Arctic. The only survivor, an Inuit woman named Ada Blackjack, managed to survive on her own for two years on Wrangell Island before finally being rescued.
Cook and Burton. Everybody else is a lesser actor.
Agreed. A couple of my other favorite explorers involved in the search for the source of the Nile were the team of Sir Samuel Baker and his wife Florence, a Hungarian orphan who became a slave, explored the Nile and died an English Lady.