Bravery, bloodshed and brutality: seven tales of famous explorers

seven tales of famous explorers

The feats, bravery and fortitude of our forebears never fails but to leave me in awe at their exploits. It’s almost as if there were a couple of Bear Grylls hanging around on every street corner, just waiting for their next adventure.

Humans have had a deep passion for exploration and adventure ever since the creatures that we would recognise as being like us walked out of Africa around 60,000 years ago

Each epoch broadened the horizons of humankind. Our reach on land expanded as we migrated on foot, invented the wheel and domesticated animals like cattle and horses. Then the seas were mastered, with ancient mariners reaching other continents and eventually mapping and circumnavigating our planet. When the skies were conquered, humans reached places more quickly and in greater numbers than ever before. When science made space travel possible, we went to the moon and dreamed of trips to distant planets.

While this wanderlust has undoubtedly fuelled advances in human civilisation and created today’s interconnected world, it has been a journey drenched in blood and brutality. Small wonder that the word travel originates from travail, to engage in painful or laborious effort, which in turn comes from the medieval Latin trepalium, an “instrument of torture”.

So it is with so many of the stories we at Blue Magpie Books have pulled together for our book Explorers, the eyewitness accounts of pioneering journeys undertaken by famous adventurers and conquerors, stretching across almost 600 years.

While it’s difficult to choose between them, here are seven which made my hair - the little that’s left of it - stand on end.

How an African-American became the first man to reach the North Pole

The little-known story of Matthew Henson, the African-American who rose from being a dishwasher to plant the Stars and Stripes at the Arctic. Was Robert Peary beaten to the North Pole by the African-American he had originally hired as his valet? Thirty years after he was re-interred at Arlington National Cemetery and finally recognised as a hero, read Henson’s own account.

The intrepid adventures of 19th-century female explorer Isabella Bird

She was the first European woman to travel up the Yangtze River, she witnessed the assassination of a Korean queen, and became friends with a one-eyed outlaw called ‘Rocky Mountain’ Jim, who wanted her for his bride.

500 years on, the bloody eyewitness account of the slaughter of the Aztecs

A compelling conquistador’s story of Spain’s occupation of Mexico:  ‘The streets and courtyards were covered with dead bodies; we could not step without treading on them, and the stench was intolerable. Never since creation had a people suffered so much from hunger, thirst, and warfare.’

Slaves, smallpox, sex and a spear thrown through both cheeks

The extraordinary exploits of sex-obsessed Victorian explorer Richard Burton, who traversed Africa and the Middle East, while finding time to translate the Kama Sutra into English.

Searching for gold with Columbus

A physician’s remarkable eyewitness account of the great explorer’s 1493 journey that transformed the world, and caused death and destruction on a gigantic scale: within five years, two-thirds of the indigenous population of the Caribbean region would be wiped out.

A female traveller’s journey through the slave markets of 1850s New Orleans

Ida Pfeiffer, an Austrian woman who only began travelling after her two sons grew up, was almost 60 when she took a trip around the slave plantations and markets of Louisiana. She wrote: ‘One can’t help wishing the unfortunate slaves might one day combine and take vengeance on their oppressors... The crime of torturing a [non-white] human to death is thought less heinous than drinking an irregular glass of beer on a Sunday.’

Pirate or patriot? Plundering treasure with Drake off South America

The swashbuckling tale of hunting for gold and silver with Francis Drake off the coast of South America, a trip that left his Golden Hind ship so laden with booty it almost sank on its return to England in 1580.

You can read all these accounts - and many more - in full by buying a copy of our Explorers book here, as an e-book or in paperback. Or if you are an Amazon Prime subscriber, it’s free!