With this column, I continue my romp through history, looking for
the top travel newsmakers of the last two millennia.
In the Age of Discovery, three achievements were key: rounding
the tip of Africa, crossing the Atlantic and circling the
globe.If you are stunned by your clients' stumbles, get a load of our
heroes.
A huge storm blew explorer Bartholomeu Dias around the Cape of
Good Hope in 1488. After making landfall, he figured out where he
was, but it was someone else (Vasco da Gama) who got the trip to
India and got rich.
As for Columbus, I like Newsweek's take: He "got a little lost
on the way to India but discovered the Caribbean vacation."
The world's first RTW sailing took three years and was led by
Magellan, an excellent navigator who encountered an atypically calm
ocean. So he named it the Pacific. Sadly, he joined a tribal fray
in the Philippines in 1521 and was killed.
For centuries, the pilgrimage was the biggest trip anyone would
ever make. For Tangier-born Ibn Battuta, Mecca was just a start.
The 14th century "Muslim Marco Polo" traveled farther than any man
on record by his day, 75,000 miles, ranging from the Niger River to
China.In 20 years, he braved bandits, pirates, the Black Death and
lethal despots, and I cannot shake thoughts of what his travel
insurance would have cost!
Like Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta was not into travel writing. He
dictated his tales.
The 19th century Sir Richard Burton was another story: This
scholar/explorer/government agent immersed himself in cultures from
India to West Africa, from Arabia to Brazil, learning 29 languages;
wrote more than 50 books; translated others ("Arabian Nights" and
"Kama Sutra"); shocked Victorians in his homeland, and found time
to coin the term ESP.Charles Darwin's five-year stint as a shipboard naturalist was
a newsmaker of another sort: It underlay "Origin of Species," his
1859 treatise on natural selection.Burton wasn't the only one to upset people with what he learned
while traveling.
Lindbergh was first to fly the Atlantic solo, in 1927, but I
prefer Beryl Markham. Hailing from Kenya, in 1936 she was first to
fly solo westbound over the Atlantic.In a storm, she flew blind for 19 hours. Her engine died several
times; when it died for good, she was over Nova Scotia, dove into
mud and walked away from the wreck.
When he walked on the moon in 1969, Neil Armstrong may have,
like Columbus, "discovered" a promising travel product. Uniquely,
though, he knew where he was every waking moment.