Who were the greatest adventurers of all time?
Not politicians, generals or entrepreneurs, but adventurers. Traveling the world, discovering new places, meeting outstanding people, putting themselves at risk, facing foreign cultures, contributing to our appreciation of the world, making a name for themselves. The real people whose daring undertakings make for stories to rival those of fiction.
What were their names and what did they do?
Adventurers
Sebastian Butler
Josiah Scott
Alexander von Humboldt
>traveled a still largely unexplored continent
>catalogued stunning amounts of plant and animal life
>took tremendous personal risk in his travels
>broke the world record for mountain climbing
>met and became friends with the president of the United States (Jefferson)
>met Simon Bolivar
>was the most famous scientist of his day before Darwin published his seminal work
>genius-level writer
>handsome as fuck
>boned several hot latinas
>became a highly praised orator and lecturer
>wrote a brilliant, massive collection of books on the natural world
Ryan Thomas
>In three voyages Cook sailed thousands of miles across largely uncharted areas of the globe. He mapped lands from New Zealand to Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean in greater detail and on a scale not previously achieved. As he progressed on his voyages of discovery he surveyed and named features, and recorded islands and coastlines on European maps for the first time. He displayed a combination of seamanship, superior surveying and cartographic skills, physical courage and an ability to lead men in adverse conditions.
James Richardson
en.wikipedia.org
>The Great Tang Records on the Western Regions is a narrative of Xuanzang's nineteen-year journey from Chang'an in central China to the Western Regions of Chinese historiography. The Buddhist scholar traveled through the silk road regions of Xinjiang in northwest China, as well as neighboring areas in Central Asia and south China.
Lucas Rodriguez
Thor Heyerdahl was a Norwegian adventurer and ethnographer with a background in zoology, botany, and geography. He became notable for his Kon-Tiki expedition in 1947, in which he sailed 8,000 km (5,000 mi) across the Pacific Ocean in a hand-built raft from South America to the Tuamotu Islands. The expedition was designed to demonstrate that ancient people could have made long sea voyages, creating contacts between separate cultures. This was linked to a diffusionist model of cultural development. Heyerdahl subsequently made other voyages designed to demonstrate the possibility of contact between widely separated ancient people, notably the Ra II expedition of 1970, when he sailed from the west coast of Africa to Barbados in a papyrus reed boat.
Liam Phillips
out of my way
>Pettersson was one of the six children of Carl Wilhelm and Johanna Pettersson. His father left the family, and Carl went to sea around 1892, at about the age of 17. Later, around 1898, he ended up in the Bismarck Archipelago of German New Guinea, where he worked for the German trading house Neuguinea-Compagnie that had its headquarters in Kokopo. He was shipwrecked in the Pacific Ocean.
>During a recruiting trip in the Pacific, Pettersson's vessel, the Herzog Johan Albrecht (Duke Johan Albrecht) sank on Christmas Day of 1904, outside the Tabar Island in New Ireland Province. He was washed ashore near a village and landed in a hibiscus hedge, where he was immediately surrounded by islanders. Cannibalism was not uncommon in those times and although Pettersson was uncommonly strong, he would not have been a match for them, but the islanders carried him to their king, and the king's daughter fell in love with him. In 1907 he married Princess Singdo, the daughter of the local king, Lamy. He got a start in the copra trade and managed to create his own coconut plantation that he called Teripax. He became king after the death of his father in law. His nickname among the locals was "Strong Charley", and he was indeed famed for his physical strength. Swedish newspapers printed a series of stories about Pettersson and his adventures.
Nathaniel Gonzalez
Marco Polo
Lewis and Clark
Daniel Boone
Ponce de Leon
Magellan
Parker Hall
My favorites
Heroic Age of Antarctic Expeditions (1897-1917/1922)
Golden Age of Everest Expeditions (1921-1953)
Groups 1-5 of NASA space programs (1961-1975)
Journey through Africa's interior (1856-1876)
And some more like the journeys through the Northwest Passage. Really fantastic stories that I wish were as popular as war stories (they deserve it). But all threads about it get almost no replies.
Jeremiah Ward
is it still possible to be am adventurer in modern age? in what forms?
Easton Myers
>"i am the cook"
>*gets cooked and served*
Noah Wood
Probably most like post related
Ian Nguyen
Ahem.
Michael Collins
David Livingstone
Zachary Green
Livingstone, Stanley, Burton, Speke, Barker.
An interesting bunch. One reason why stories of exploration are so fascinating is that the human element doesn't get lost in the story. Instead it's the essence. It's all about great personalities and human element.
Nicholas Campbell
I assume you mean Baker. Good list.
Samuel Adams
Would love to see a movie on Stanley.
Parker Rivera
Well there's one called Livingstone and Stanley from the 30s but it's quite boring. Some documentaries. If you made a movie about them or just Stanley you should be prepared for controversies becauase today Stanley is basically considered a villain.
On the other hand there's Mountains of the Moon about Burton and Speke which is ok. I like movies about adventures of whites in colonial Africa but there aren't many of them.
Wyatt Parker
I find it sad that adventurers serve little to no purpose in the modern age due to the entire world having been discovered. It's sad that most "travellers" nowadays tend to be people who visit tourist traps for the purposes of bragging on social media.
The space age can't come soon enough.
Dylan Edwards
There's also a distinct lack of movies about journeys like that or i just don't know them
Justin Evans
Probably far from the greatest, but La Pérouse deserves a spot.
Noah Adams
Scott of the Antarctic (1948) (though it skips a lot of the adventures I recommend Cherry-Garrard's book)
Shackleton (2002) with Kenneth Brannagh.
Both are pretty good.
Juan Parker
Journey to the Center of the Earth is good. Not based on a true story obviously, but it really captures the feeling of reading about a lot of these real adventures. The movie is mostly about the difficulty of a small group of people traveling through underground caves for months and being isolated from the rest of the world.
Isaac Myers
The greatest of all times.
en.wikipedia.org
Christian Gonzalez
John
fucking
Muir
Jeremiah Lee
Verne wrote about polar regions too back when it was seen as equally remote as the Moon.