Despite its great success and being considered a classic today, the film adaptation of King Solomon’s Mines garnered some criticism because one of the characters, Sir Henry Curtis, the man who hires hunter Alan Quatermain to search for his missing brother in Africa, was turned into his wife, Elizabeth Curtis, on screen. A woman, in […]
Explorers
John Cabot, the Navigator Who Discovered North America for England
The name Sebastian Cabot won’t sound strange to history enthusiasts, especially those interested in the Age of Exploration. He was a navigator and cartographer who alternated between serving England and Spain (he also offered his services to his native Venice) when these countries were not yet enemies and became chief pilot of the Casa de […]
Peter Freuchen, the Explorer who Survived by Making a Knife from his Own Frozen Feces
The history of explorations features a roster of people who, evidently, are out of the ordinary. They have very special, peculiar personalities, often difficult to categorize and always with a common denominator of bomb-proof determination. A good example of this was Peter Freuchen, who is not very well known because his field of action was […]
A Sailor’s Mistake: Martin Frobisher and the Pyrite Pirates Who Duped England
Francis Drake was a magnificent sailor elevated to the status of a legend in England for circumnavigating the globe (fifty-nine years after Spanish Juan Sebastian Elcano did it) and for his encounters with the Spaniards, some successful and others not so much. But he was not the only one. That 16th-century England opened up to […]
Carsten Niebuhr, the scientist who crossed the Middle East disguised as an Arab as the only survivor of the Royal Danish Expedition
Scientific travel became widespread among European countries from the mid-18th century following the establishment of the Enlightenment. And although the most famous were led by the great powers of the time (United Kingdom, France, Spain …), there were other nations that joined the trend. One of them was Denmark, which in 1761 organized an expedition […]