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High Adventure & Derring Do

Ive got that book, 7 little sisters.

He was one tough guy.

At one point, he runs low on water and so continues on brackish.
 
This entry belongs part way between a thread on derring-do and one on insanity but remains one of the funniest autobiographical articles on Wikipedia. It's too long to post in its entirety, but I've cut the core part out to post here:

Alfred Wintle
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Daniel Wintle MC, better known as A.D. Wintle, (30 September 1897–11 May 1966) was a British military officer in the 1st The Royal Dragoons who served in the First and Second World Wars. He was the first non-lawyer to achieve a unanimous verdict in his favour in the House of Lords, and is considered one of London's greatest eccentrics.

Early life

The son of a diplomat, Alfred Daniel Wintle was born in Mariopoul, South Russia. In 1901, the family went to live in Dunkirk; he was subsequently educated in France and Germany, becoming fluent in French and German.
World War I

At the outbreak of war, 16-year-old Wintle was in Dunkirk and claimed to have "irregularly attached" himself to Commander Samson’s armoured-car unit, witnessing Uhlans being shot on one occasion in Belgium.

Wintle wished to see military action. In summer 1915, his father agreed to his son’s early entry into the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, from which he was commissioned in less than four months. Less than a week later, he was at the front. On his first night a shell burst near him, splashing over him the entrails of his sergeant (to whom he had just been introduced). Wintle later admitted to being petrified. As the bombardment continued, he dealt with his fear by standing at attention and saluting. As he later wrote, "Within thirty seconds I was able to become again an Englishman of action and to carry out calmly the duties I had been trained to perform".

The incident was typical, both of a series of amazing escapes and his pride at being an Englishman (as opposed to being born "a chimpanzee or a flea, or a Frenchman or a German"). He saw action at Ypres, the Somme, La Bassée and Festubert, supposedly capturing the village of Vesle single-handedly before handing it over to the New Zealanders (who were about to attack it in force). His luck ran out during Third Ypres in 1917 as he helped manhandle an 18pdr across a "crater-swamp". The gun-carriage wheel hit an unexploded shell; he woke up in a field hospital without his left eye, one kneecap and several fingers. At age 19, Wintle's right eye was so damaged that he had to wear a monocle for the rest of his life.

He was sent back to England to convalesce by the "infernal quacks"; it appeared that his war was over, but Wintle had other ideas. He was soon planning his escape from the Southern General Hospital back to the front, attending a nurses-only dance in their billets (disguised as a nurse) before finally making his escape. He recorded, however, that his monocle was a dead give-away and the particularly unpleasant matron was unimpressed with his antics.

Wintle entrained for France with a warrant signed by a friend of his father’s; he had a "moderately successful year of action" with the 119th Battery, 22nd Brigade, RFA. His MC was gazetted in the London Gazette of 2 April 1919, and the citation was published on 10 December. According to his obituary, he received his MC in the mail the same day it was announced in the London Gazette. The citation read:

"For marked gallantry and initiative on 4th Nov. 1918 near Jolimentz. He went forward with the infantry to obtain information and personally accounted for 35 prisoners. On 9th Nov. he took forward his section well in front of the infantry and throughout the day he showed initiative of a very high order and did excellent work."

Wintle later recalled that he could not remember anything about either incident. He is said to have regarded the period between the First and Second World Wars as "intensely boring".
World War II

When World War II began in September 1939, Wintle tried everything to persuade his superiors to allow him to go to France. When they refused, he planned to resign his commission and form his own army "to take the war to the Hun".

In his book '‘Most Secret War'’, Reginald Victor Jones recalls encountering Wintle on matters of air intelligence. He was impressed by an army officer with enough technical knowledge to distinguish a spectroscope from a spectrograph, and who noted details in intelligence reports which might have indicated their authenticity (or otherwise). After chatting with Wintle on Horse Guards Parade one morning, he recorded that he was surprised to see a news headline a few days later: "Cavalry Officer in the Tower".

After the French surrender, Wintle demanded an aircraft (with which he intended to rally the French Air Force to fly their planes to Britain and continue fighting Germany from British air bases); when refused, he threatened an RAF officer (Air Commodore A.R. Boyle) with a gun. It was alleged that he had threatened to shoot himself and Boyle, and for this he was imprisoned in the Tower of London. On the way to his prison, the lieutenant colonel was escorted by a young soldier via train. The soldier is reported to have lost the arrest warrant; disgusted by this, Wintle declared the man incompetent, told him to wait where he was and went to get a new warrant. Since there was no other officer of higher rank at the warrant office, he signed the paper himself. Of his time in the Tower, he wrote:

"My life in the Tower had begun. How different it was from what I had expected. Officers at first cut me dead, thinking that I was some kind of traitor; but when news of my doings leaked out they could not do enough for me. My cell became the most popular meeting place in the garrison and I was as well cared for as if I had been at the Ritz. I would have a stroll in the (dry) moat after breakfast for exercise. Then sharp at eleven Guardsman McKie, detailed as my servant, would arrive from the officers' mess with a large whisky and ginger ale. He would find me already spick and span, for though I have a great regard for the Guards, they have not the gift to look after a cavalry officer's equipment. The morning would pass pleasantly. By noon visitors would begin to arrive. One or two always stayed to lunch. They always brought something with them. I remember one particularly succulent duck in aspic - it gave me indigestion - and a fine box of cigars brought by my family doctor. Tea time was elastic and informal. Visitors dropped in at intervals, usually bringing along bottles which were uncorked on the spot. I don't recall that any of them contained any tea. Dinner, on the other hand, was strictly formal. I dined sharp at eight and entertained only such guests as had been invited beforehand. After a few days of settling in, I was surprised to find that - as a way of life- being a prisoner in the Tower of London had its points."

When his case was heard, Wintle was read the three charges against him. The first was that he had feigned defective eyesight (and infirmity, to avoid active duty). This charge was dismissed after Wintle's defence provided medical evidence.

The second charge was assaulting Air Commodore Boyle, and the third was conduct contrary to (and to the prejudice of) good order and military discipline. To the latter was added the claim that he had drawn a gun in the presence of the RAF officer, and stated that "people like you ought to be shot". Jones recalled that far from denying this, Wintle admitted the act and produced a list of people whom he felt should likewise be shot as a patriotic gesture. The list must have been a topical one; after he had read out the sixth name upon it (Hore-Belisha, then Secretary of State for War), that charge was also dropped. The government, embarrassed by his accusations, upheld the court decision to drop all charges bar one: the assault on Commodore Boyle (for which Wintle received a formal reprimand). Jones went on to add that Wintle was in the relatively safe position of being tried by an Army court on charges brought by the RAF.

Wintle was then sent abroad to rejoin his old regiment (The 1st Royal Dragoons), and went into action gathering intelligence and coordinating raids on the Vichy French in Syria. After the Allied victory in Syria, Wintle was asked to go to Vichy France in disguise to determine the condition of British POWs held there. While waiting to make contact with sympathetic elements of the Vichy French government Wintle was betrayed, arrested as a spy and imprisoned by Vichy.

During his captivity, he informed his guards that it was his duty as an English officer to escape; he successfully did so once by quickly unhinging his cell door and hiding in a sentry box before slipping out quietly, but was betrayed and recaptured within a week. Wintle's guard was doubled from this point on. He responded by going on a 13-day hunger strike in protest against the "slovenly appearance of the guards who are not fit to guard an English officer!" He also informed anyone who would listen (including Maurice Molia, the camp commandant) exactly how he felt about their cowardice and treachery to their country. He informed them that he still intended to escape, and that anyone who called himself a Frenchman would come with him. Shortly after, he sawed through the iron bars of his cell, hid in a garbage cart, and slipped over the wall of the castle, making his way back to Britain via Spain. Molia later claimed on Wintle's This Is Your Life programme in 1959 that shortly after the escape, "because of Wintle's dauntless determination to maintain English standards and his constant challenge to our authority" the entire garrison of 280 men had gone over to the Resistance.

Postwar years

After the war, Wintle stood as a Liberal Party candidate for the 1945 General Election at Norwood. The seat had little in terms of a Liberal voting tradition, and he finished third with about 11 percent of the vote.

He was once so furious about the lack of first-class carriages on a train that he commandeered the engine and refused to move until more carriages appeared. Wintle made legal history when he brought a legal action against a dishonest solicitor named Nye, whom he accused of appropriating £44,000 from the estate of Wintle's deceased cousin, by inveigling her into leaving the residue of her estate to Nye in her will. To publicise the case, in 1955 Wintle served time in prison after forcing Nye to remove his trousers and submit to being photographed. He pursued Nye through the courts over the next three years, losing his case on two occasions. By 1958, Wintle ran out of money and had to present the case himself. On 26 November 1958 the Lords announced that they had found for Wintle, the reasons for judgment being reserved. In its subsequent written reasons, the House of Lords held that the burden was on the solicitor Nye to establish that the gift of the residue of the deceased cousin's estate to the solicitor in the will that he had drawn was not the result of his fraud, and that he had failed to discharge this exceptionally heavy burden so that the trial jury's validation of the gift to Nye could not be allowed to stand. Wintle thus became the first non-lawyer to achieve a unanimous verdict in his favour in the House of Lords (Wintle v Nye [1959] 1 WLR 284; [1959] 1 All ER 552). He also appeared in 1960 before the Disciplinary Committee of the Law Society, where he succeeded in having Nye removed from the roll of solicitors.

The editor of The Times preserved a letter that Wintle sent him in 1946:

"Sir,
I have just written you a long letter.
On reading it over, I have thrown it into the waste paper basket.
Hoping this will meet with your approval,
I am, Sir,
Your obedient Servant,
AD Wintle"

Wintle died in May 1966 and was cremated at Maidstone Crematorium, although he had wanted a funeral at Canterbury Cathedral with a full church service and the royals on parade playing "My Old Tarpaulin Jacket".

An encounter with Wintle in the El Vino wine bar on Fleet Street is related in a letter to the editor of the Spectator published 8 May 1999.[8] The heading was "Bower’s bans" (Letters to the Editor, The Spectator, 8 May 1999):

From Mr Tom Pocock

Sir:
Frank Bower was not always able to eject unwanted patrons from El Vino (Letters, 1 May). One morning in the late Fifties, a West Indian workman entered what he thought was a pub and asked the proprietor for a pint of bitter. Empurpled with rage, embroidered waistcoat at bursting point, Bower was hustling him into Fleet Street when interrupted by a crisp military command from the back of the bar: `That gentleman is a friend of mine. I have been expecting him. Kindly show him to my table.' Colonel Wintle - celebrated for inspecting the turn out of his German guards when a prisoner of war and for debagging a solicitor - had spoken.

Rising to greet his guest, Wintle trained his monocle on Bower and ordered, `Pray bring us two small glasses of white wine.' When this had been drunk and a convivial conversation concluded, the Colonel and his new friend rose, shook hands and went their separate ways.
Tom Pocock
22 Lawrence Street, London SW3

Quotes

"I am never bored when I am present." (on being asked on his release from prison if he had found it boring)
"It may have escaped your attention, but there is no fighting to be done in England." (on being told he was being removed from active duty against his will following an injury)
"No true gentleman would ever unfurl one." (his umbrella)
"This umbrella was stolen from Col. A.D. Wintle" (note left in his permanently furled umbrella)
"Time spent dismounted can never be regained."
"No true gentleman would ever leave home without one." (his monocle)
"Guy Fawkes was the last man to enter Parliament with good intentions. You need another like me to carry on his good work."
"I get down on my knees every night and thank God for making me an Englishman. It is the greatest honour He could bestow. After all, he might have made me a chimpanzee, or a flea, a Frenchman or a German!"
"What I like about Isherwood's paintings is that there is no doubt about which way they hang." (on art)
"Attend a German school sir? I would rather cut my hands off and blind myself in one eye. Only an English school is good enough for me." (young Wintle, on being told by his father that he was to attend a German school)
"Stop dying at once and when you get up, get your bloody hair cut." (to Trooper Cedric Mays, Royal Dragoons, who recovered and lived to the age of 95)
"Great War peace signed at last." (diary, 19 June 1919)
"I declare private war on Germany." (diary, 20 June 1919)
"It was not until I got to the Lords was I dealing with my intellectual equals." (explaining his legal victory in the House of Lords after losing at trial and before the Court of Appeal)

A brief biography can be found in the Spring 1989 Victorian Bar News.[9] A full-length autobiography, compiled after his death by his friend Alastair Revie from more than a million words left by Wintle, was published in 1968 by Michael Joseph as The Last Englishman. Another short biography of Wintle can be found in chapter 13 ("Colonel 'Debag' rides again", pp 143–153) of Robert Littell's It takes all kinds published by Reynal & Co, New York, 1961.[10] J.D. Casswell, KC represented Wintle at his World War II court-martial and devotes pages 152–159 to Wintle in his 1961 autobiography, A Lance For Liberty.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Wintle
 
Almost too good to be true - Beachcomber with machine guns. There's got to be a film in there. The letter to the Times is priceless.
 
Spookdaddy said:
Almost too good to be true - Beachcomber with machine guns. There's got to be a film in there. The letter to the Times is priceless.

There was a TV film some years ago.
 
"Stop dying at once and when you get up, get your bloody hair cut." (to Trooper Cedric Mays, Royal Dragoons, who recovered and lived to the age of 95)

This reminds me of some officer in WW2 - either at Normandy or Arnhem, I think - who, during a fierce mortar bombardment, refused to take cover and threatened to put any man who got blown up on a charge. (Bugger, I'm going to spend the rest of the day trying to find the source for that now.)
 
I like him, he is very English.

He could not be anything else, -except maybe Japanese.
 
Rare book auction: Shelves that are full of adventures
Franklin Brooke-Hitching's library is the best collection of books about British explorers, and it is being auctioned next week. We took the chance to leaf through it
By Tom Rowley
7:28PM GMT 18 Mar 2014

Spend half an hour in Franklin Brooke-Hitching’s library and you’ll go around the world twice. The titles that line the bookshelves of his Berkshire home are wonderfully evocative: Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque; The Sperm Whale and the South Sea Voyage. And my favourite, if only for the image it conjures: Through Persia By Caravan.

Brooke-Hitching has spent the past 46 years collecting these volumes and others chronicling the exploits of British explorers. By last year, he had amassed 1,400 books charting the voyages of adventurers such as Charles Darwin, Francis Drake and David Livingstone.

Among his collection is the first map of Australia, commissioned by the botanist Sir Joseph Banks in 1772. Then there is the first book to be printed in the Antarctic (its jacket fashioned from a tea chest), specimens of cloth collected by Captain Cook in Tahiti, and a signed copy of Ernest Shackleton’s The Heart of the Antarctic.

Remarkably, he claims only half a dozen people have seen his collection. “If you want a real conversation killer,” he says, “you tell people you buy and sell old books.”
Next week , however, anyone who wants to will be able to inspect the tomes when the library goes up for sale at Sotheby’s. Every volume will go under the hammer in a series of four auctions, which are expected to raise £5 million.
Brooke-Hitching, 72, says he wants others to have the pleasure of owning the books, but he does not want them to end up in museums, which he fears would not keep them in good condition.

Even before he began his collection, a young Brooke-Hitching had fallen for adventure. In his early twenties, he rode a motorbike across the world. He lived in a beer factory in Australia and learnt Arabic in Lebanon. At 26, he decided to buy his first book, searching for a first edition of the first collection of voyages to be written in English, published with a fold-out world map by Richard Hakluyt in 1589. He found it in a bookshop off St Martin’s Lane in London.
“I said: 'I’m interested in English voyages,’?” he recalls. “The shop owner said, 'How about this?’ I gulped. That was £900 then, which was a lot of money in 1968. I just said, 'OK.’?” 8)

And so it began. Over the years, he kept strict criteria: each book had to be about a British explorer, and it had to be in mint condition: “God’s copy,” in his words. So, most are centuries old, but their covers gleam.
He had a precise definition of “exploration”, too. “It could not be mere travel, so Europe was out,” he explains. “It had to have some sort of exotic flavour. They were going into strange lands. The countries might have been visited a few times before but they were bringing back new information.”

Brooke-Hitching soon became so taken with these dusty old books that he gave up his lucrative job at an American investment bank to work full-time as a second-hand book dealer, much to the bemusement of former colleagues.
“Years later, I got a call from my senior vice-president at the bank. He said: 'You’ve no idea how much trouble you caused. You were doing very well but you left, not to go to another bank, but to sell books. We had to reassess our management training programme: clearly you’d had a total mental breakdown.’?” :shock:

His search raised eyebrows at home, too. He describes his wife, Emma, as “supportive” of his quest but one gets the impression she will not be too dismayed to no longer have her holidays interrupted when he discovers an auction is afoot. His latest fascination is with antique clocks, but he is only “allowed” four at a time. “I’ve said that I won’t buy another clock unless I sell one – and my wife heartily agrees.”

His four children are also well versed in the collection, and brought up to revere books. “I remember being at school when I was about eight,” says his eldest, Edmund. “A classmate threw a paperback across the room and I just yelled at him.”

Brooke-Hitching’s global hunt would make a page-turner itself. Once, he discovered that a rare book by John Harrison, who invented a device to measure longitude at sea, had recently been auctioned in Birmingham.
[A device? A DEVICE?! That was only Harrison's famous Chronometer, later famously sold by Del Trotter... ;) ]
He immediately telephoned the dealer who had bought it, who told him he had already sold it to another in London. The latter dealer, it transpired, had dispatched the book to America.
“So I called up this dealer in New England. 'You must be joking,’ he said, 'if you think I’m going to sell you that at a reasonable price.’ OK, we’ll make it an unreasonable price. And that’s how I got it.” :D

Another time, he flew to Australia to buy one small volume, only to be outbid. Unsurprisingly, he has also attracted the attention of con-men. One dragged him to Uruguay, claiming to have unearthed Hitler’s library. “I soon realised it wasn’t going to work. But he was the most entertaining human being I have ever met. It was a laugh a minute.”

But it was not about the thrill of the chase. He treasured each book on its own merits, not merely as another title checked off the list.
“It was never, 'This will do.’ It was always, 'This is it, this is the one.’ When I got a new book, I’d have a really good read, then I’d come back a couple of years later and have another good read. A few months would go by and I would say, 'I haven’t seen that one recently,’ and I’d begin to get excited again.”

His favourite explorer? Cook. “It was not that he just went to an area and explored – he was on a voyage around the world and never met another white man. He had no idea of food, dangers, customs. The Spanish had already been to the Pacific but they didn’t dare stop at an island. Cook was willing to take the risk.”

Now, however, Brooke-Hitching’s own exploration is at an end. He has added just a couple of tomes to his bookshelves in the past five years, and believes he owns a copy of almost every book on British exploration. This is largely because he dismisses any book published after 1939, which he claims is when exploration stopped. “There was the Antarctic; shipping lines and train lines went everywhere else. It became more and more travel rather than exploration.”

What about the final frontier – space? “I’d better save money for my first book on it,” he chuckles. Until then, he says, he will be content to live a leisurely life, interrupted only by occasional games of tennis. Will he still look at sale catalogues? “Yes, probably. But there won’t be a feeling of loss. It’ll be: I remember that, that was fun.” Now it’s time for another adventure.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/book ... tures.html
 
During his legendary march from the coast, Cortés approached the Aztec capital by climbing the pass between Popcatépetl and Iztaccihuatl and the saddle, at an elevation of 12,000ft is now called Paso de Cortés. Two years later, in 1521, after his conquest of the Aztecs, the conquistador's army was running short of gunpowder and so Cortés dispatched Francisco Montano and four other men to climb Popocatépetl in an attempt to obtain sulphur from the crater. Unlike the earlier adventure, the story of this second expedition has been confirmed by historians and so must rank as the first known ascent of the mountain. With great publicity, Montano and his companions set out accompanied by Indians carrying supplies including ropes and blankets. A crowd of spectators gathered at the base of the volcano and waited with curiosity to see how matters would unfold. At the end of the first day, the expedition camped some distance above the snowline by digging a snow cave. However, during the night they were driven from their cave by sulphur fumes and the cold. Outside the night was black, the stars being obscured by the clouds and smoke. As they moved about to keep warm, one of the soldiers fell into a crevasse, from which he was lucky to be rescued unharmed.

At daylight they resumed their ascent only to be halted by a eruption that caused them to run for shelter from the falling debris. Though one soldier could not continue, the rest pressed on and eventually reached the crater at which moment another minor eruption took place. When the smoke cleared, they could see roiling pools of lava below. They cast lots to see who would venture down into the crater first and, appropriately, it fell to the leader, Montano, to be the trail-blazer. Thereupon, he was lowered by means of a makeshift rope, some 600ft down into the crater. Not only did he risk the possibility of failure of the rope, but also the very real hazard of asphyxiation, not to mention the risk of another explosive eruption. Apparently, he survived seven separate sorties into the inferno bringing back a load of sulphur each time. Another soldier then took over and, after six additional trips, they had accumulated some 60lbs of the sulphur that had motivated the expedition in the first place. This they hauled down the mountain to be greeted like conquering heroes. A triumphal procession accompanied them back to the capital where, it is said, that Cortés himself came out to greet them. However, this method of procuring sulphur was not the most efficacious and, in a later letter to the king, Cortés admits that it was easier to order shipments from Spain. However, Montano and his companions achieved immortality for the first documented ascent of Popocatépetl.

http://www.dankat.com/mstory/volcano.htm
 
This entry belongs part way between a thread on derring-do and one on insanity but remains one of the funniest autobiographical articles on Wikipedia. It's too long to post in its entirety, but I've cut the core part out to post here:

A double treat:

The Great Man Himself on Desert Island Discs

A Dramatisation of his Life: The Last Englishman:
 
It's only three feet, but at the same time it's a double-decker--over Tower Bridge!

__________________________________________________________________________________________

When it comes to courage and quick thinking, you have to hand it to Albert Gunton. In December 1952, the driver of the number 78 bus was trundling across Tower Bridge when he realised that it was being raised to allow a ship to pass on the Thames below.

Faced with the prospect of his double-decker toppling into the river, the terrified Albert hit the accelerator and shot across the widening gap between the bridge’s two halves before landing safely on the other side. This 3ft leap resulted in minor injuries for 12 of the 20 passengers, a £10 bravery award for Albert and, most likely, the dismissal of whoever forgot to give the warning signal.

From a longer article about Tower Bridge:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/architecture/8459219/Tower-Bridge-a-towering-boys-toy.html
 
It's only three feet, but at the same time it's a double-decker--over Tower Bridge!

__________________________________________________________________________________________

When it comes to courage and quick thinking, you have to hand it to Albert Gunton. In December 1952, the driver of the number 78 bus was trundling across Tower Bridge when he realised that it was being raised to allow a ship to pass on the Thames below.

Faced with the prospect of his double-decker toppling into the river, the terrified Albert hit the accelerator and shot across the widening gap between the bridge’s two halves before landing safely on the other side. This 3ft leap resulted in minor injuries for 12 of the 20 passengers, a £10 bravery award for Albert and, most likely, the dismissal of whoever forgot to give the warning signal.

From a longer article about Tower Bridge:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/architecture/8459219/Tower-Bridge-a-towering-boys-toy.html
"Fix the cigarette lighter."
 
It's only three feet, but at the same time it's a double-decker--over Tower Bridge!

__________________________________________________________________________________________

When it comes to courage and quick thinking, you have to hand it to Albert Gunton. In December 1952, the driver of the number 78 bus was trundling across Tower Bridge when he realised that it was being raised to allow a ship to pass on the Thames below.

Faced with the prospect of his double-decker toppling into the river, the terrified Albert hit the accelerator and shot across the widening gap between the bridge’s two halves before landing safely on the other side. This 3ft leap resulted in minor injuries for 12 of the 20 passengers, a £10 bravery award for Albert and, most likely, the dismissal of whoever forgot to give the warning signal.

Pff, John Wayne did a lot better than that.
 
Who'll be the first to snowboard it?

VIDEO: Polish daredevil becomes first to ski down K2 mountain
Jul 24, 2018
Andrzej Bargiel, 30, filmed zooming down the 28,000ft deadly peak in Pakistan

A Polish man has become the first person to ski from the summit of K2, the second highest mountain in the world and the most difficult to climb.

One in four people die attempting to summit the 28,251ft (8,611 metre) peak, nicknamed Savage Mountain. However, Andrzej Bargiel, 30, not only completed the gruelling climb to the top without the aid of supplementary oxygen - “a feat unto itself,” notes CNN - but then skied back down.

http://www.theweek.co.uk/95272/vide...letter&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter


 
Balls of steel.
 
A valiant attempt, thwarted only by damage to his support boat.

A French man has abandoned his bid to become the first person to swim across the Pacific Ocean after his support boat was damaged by a storm.

Ben Lecomte, 51, set off from the coast of Japan on 5 June and had covered more than 2,700 km (1,500 nautical miles) of the 9,100 km journey. But "irreparable" damage to a sail on the boat forced him to stop. Mr Lecomte had been trying to raise awareness of climate change and plastic pollution throughout the journey.

On average he swam eight hours a day in an effort to hit his target. It was not long after he reached the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch", a zone dominated by ocean plastic, that he was presented with typhoons and severe storms.

"I am very disappointed because I had not reached my mental and physical limits," he said in a statement.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46357309
 
No gimmicks here, in the tradition of Scott and Shackleton.


The final kilometres of a nearly two-month race across Antarctica ended on Wednesday with a sprint to the finish.

In an effort that could go down as one of the great feats in polar history, American Colin O’Brady (33) covered the final 125km of his 1,482 km journey across Antarctica in one last 32-hour burst, without sleeping a wink. In doing so, he became the first person ever to traverse Antarctica from coast to coast solo, unsupported, and unaided by wind.

O’Brady’s feat was remarkable enough, but to complete the final 125km in one shot – essentially tacking an ultramarathon onto the 53rd day of an already unprecedented journey – set an even higher bar for anyone who tries to surpass it.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/man-completes-historic-solo-trek-across-antarctica-1.3741876
 
In April of 1944, Joe Herman was the pilot of a Royal Australian Air Force Halifax on a mission to bomb munition factories at Bochum. After dropping its bombs, Herman's Halifax was struck by enemy fire. Herman ordered his crew to bail out. Before he could grab his parachute, the plane exploded and he was thrown into the night sky. He found himself falling amid airplane debris and wildly grabbed a piece of it. It wasn't debris though, he'd collided with John Vivash, the mid-upper gunner, and had grabbed onto Vivash's left leg around the same time as Vivash was opening his parachute. The parachute inflated slowly, which helped Herman maintain his grasp on Vivash. Herman hung on and, as a courtesy, hit the ground first, breaking the fall of Vivash and a mere two ribs of his own.
 
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