​Conquering The World
​​​by Tomas Cironis
Inspirational people
Those are guys who really deserve their credit for what they did. In time of blanket maps and unknowed places they decided to explore and found amazing stuff. How many of them do you actually know ? Honestly.
Hiram Bingham III.
Archeologist, explorer, politician
He made public the existence of the Quechua citadel of Machu Picchu in 1911 with the guidance of local indigenous farmers. Later, Bingham served as a member of the United States Senate.
Bingham was not a trained archaeologist. Yet, it was during Bingham's time as a lecturer – later professor – in South American history at Yale that he discovered the largely forgotten Inca city of Machu Picchu.
Bingham published an account of this trip in Across South America; an account of a journey from Buenos Aires to Lima by way of PotosÃ, with notes on Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and Peru (1911)
Bingham returned to Peru in 1912, 1914 and 1915 with the support of Yale and the National Geographic Society.
Bingham has been cited as one possible basis for the "Indiana Jones" character. His book Lost City of the Incas became a bestseller upon its publication in 1948.
After carrer of a politician, Bingham died on June 6, 1956 at his Washington, D.C. home
David Livingstone
Scottish Congregationalist pioneer medical missionary with the London Missionary Society and an explorer in Africa.
His meeting with H. M. Stanley on 10 November 1871 gave rise to the popular quotation "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" Perhaps one of the most popular national heroes of the late 19th century in Victorian Britain. His fame as an explorer helped drive forward the obsession with discovering the sources of the River Nile.
Although Livingstone was wrong about the Nile, he discovered for Western science numerous geographical features, such as Lake Ngami, Lake Malawi, and Lake Bangweulu in
addition to Victoria Falls mentioned above. He filled in details of Lake Tanganyika, Lake Mweru and the course of many rivers, especially the upper Zambezi, and his observations enabled large regions to be mapped which previously had been blank.
Even so, the farthest north he reached, the north end of Lake Tanganyika, was still south of the Equator and he did not penetrate the rainforest of the River Congo any further downstream than Ntangwe near Misisi.
Livingstone died in that area in Chief Chitambo's village at Ilala southeast of Lake Bangweulu in present-day Zambia on 1 May 1873 from malaria and internal bleeding caused bydysentery.
Miloslav Stingl
Czech traveler, ethnographer and writer who has personally met numerous of indigenous cultures and wrote down his experiences in his books. He is an honorary chief of an Indian tribe named "Kikapú". Stingls Indian name is Okima - meaning "The one who leads".
During his life he worked in the czech Academy of Sciences, where he was responsible for research the "non-European inhabitants", their cultures and arts. Throughout his life Miloslav Stingl always traveled and led many expeditions, during which he visited 151 countries in all continents. His favorite countries are that with Indians, for example the Mayas, Polynesians, Australian Aborigenům, Inuits (Eskimos), etc.
The linguists experts made a research where they found that Mr. Stingl is able to communicate or partially speaks 17 languages! The most exotic one is the language of the Papuan tribe Kumu.
During his travels, he spent 19 years abroad. While travelling he also worked at foreign universities and scientific institutes, eg. In RISM in New York. Also, thanks to this participations, he was accepted into the Société des Américanistes at UNESCO in Paris and also to the Société des Océanistes at UNESCO.
It was an honor for me to mee this legend in person few months ago. We had a time to have a few words and he's still very active guy.
Hanzelka a Zikmund
They are known collectively as Hanzelka and Zikmund. They were a duo of Czech adventurers known for their travels in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania
in the 1940s and 1950s, and for the books, articles, and films they created about their journeys.
Hanzelka was born on 24 December 1920, Zikmund on 14 February 1919. Both were deeply interested in foreign countries, nature, travel writing, and adventure stories from childhood onward.
While waiting to graduate, they made detailed plans for travel, copying maps and studying their destinations from historical, meteorological, economic, and social perspectives. Both took university Russian lessons, but also studied to prepare for international travel: Hanzelka spoke German and French and studied Swahili, and Zikmund spoke English, studied Arabic, and had a basic understanding of Italian and Dutch.
In 1947, Hanzelka and Zikmund explained the "5" project to the automotive company Tatra. The company, impressed by the plan and seizing the opportunity to promote its vehicles, decided to sponsor the trip, and gave them a silver Tatra 87.
It was a continuous three-and-a-half-year voyage through Africa and Latin America, from April 1947 to November 1950 and covering 44 countries and 111,000 kilometers. They were able to launch a second trip, running five and a half years continuously from 1959 to 1964, taking them to Eastern Europe, Asia, and various Pacific islands with two prototypes of the Tatra 805 truck.
On this trip, the duo reported on Indonesia, Irian Jaya, Japan, and the Soviet Union. Throughout their travels, both captured still photographs and films as well as writing articles. Their works of travel literature include eleven full-length books full of photographs and descriptions of the economic and socio-political situations of the places they visited, four picture books, three children's books, and 150 short travel documentary films.
Hanzelka and Zikmund visited 83 countries in total. The original Tatra 87 they used on their first trip was added to the Czech national cultural heritage list in 2005, and is on display at the National Technical Museum in Prague.
Frederick Cook
He was an American explorer, physician, and ethnographer, noted for his claim of
having reached the North Pole on April 21, 1908. This was a year before April 6, 1909, the date claimed by American explorer Robert Peary, and the accounts were disputed for several years.
His expedition did discover Meighen Island, the only discovery of an island in the American Arctic by a United States expedition.
After reviewing Cook's limited records, a commission of the University of Copenhagen ruled in December 1909 that he had not proven that he reached the pole. In 1911 Cook published a memoir of his expedition, continuing to assert their success. His 1906 account of having reached the summit of Mount McKinley has also been discredited.
After the Mount McKinley expedition, Cook returned to the Arctic in 1907. He planned to attempt to reach the North Pole, although he did not announce his intention until August 1907, when he was already in the Arctic.
Cook claimed that he reached the pole on April 22, 1908 after traveling north from Axel Heiberg Island, taking with him only two Inuit men, Ahpellah and Etukishook. On the journey south, he claimed to have been cut off from his intended route to Annoatok by open water.
Cook and his two companions were gone from Annoatok for 14 months, and their whereabouts in that period is a matter of intense controversy.
Robert Peary
Peary was an American explorer who claimed to have reached the geographic North Pole with his expedition on April 6, 1909. Peary's claim was widely credited for most of the 20th century, rather than the competing claim by Frederick Cook, who said he got there a year earlier.
Both claims were widely debated in newspapers until 1913.
Modern historians generally think Cook did not reach the pole. Based on an evaluation of Peary's records, Wally Herbert (also a polar explorer) concluded in a 1989 book that Peary did not reach the pole, although he may have been as close as 60 miles (97 km).
His conclusions have been widely accepted. Peary made his first expedition to the Arctic in 1886, intending to cross Greenland by dog sled, taking the first of his own suggested paths. In 1891 Peary returned to Greenland, taking the second, more difficult route that he had laid out in 1886: traveling farther north to find out whether Greenland was a much larger landmass extending to the North Pole.
Peary found the 1,000-metre high view from Navy Cliff to be revealing: he saw Independence Fjord and concluded that Greenland was an island. The men trekked back to Red Cliff and got there on August 6, having traveled a total of 2,010 km.
SOURCE: Wikipedia.org