Explorers This webpage will be about all the cool explorers. Stuff like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the Spanish Expedition down the Amazon River in the 1600s. Trips down the Nile, Erik the Red, Japanese and Phonecian sailors. Marco Polo, Francis Drake and Capt Cooks trips around the world, when they didnt know what was out there, or maybe sail right off the end of the world. Father Samuel Fritz 1686 travels down the Amazon ------------------------------------------------- Father Fritz was a Jesuit in 1686 decided to explore the Amazon River. He journyed alone by canoe from the Atlantic Ocean to the Andes mountains. He left his manuscript called the Evora and it was only discovered as recently as 1902. One time while deep in the Amazon, at a village, the flood waters kept rising. Crocodiles and rats all around. The rats even tried to eat his silverware. Later it was found at his atopsy, that he had all kinds of weird insect bites. He didn't want to harm any living thing, even an insect. How can one journey alone down the Amazon River alone in 1686, and survive? And let the insects bite you, never hurting a one? He was superhuman. He and Isabella Godin must be made of the same stuff. It was either that, or he had no mosquito net and the insects drivew him crazy. My vote is for the latter. The again, im pessimisitic when it comes to strange stories. Lacondamine 1735 ---------------- The French Academy of Sciences were arguing about the shape of the earth. Issac Newton said is was not a perfect sphere, but bulged at the equator and flatten at the poles. The French scientific community thought otherwise. So the French sent off explorers to do some exact measurements at the poles and equator. The equator project was LaCondamines task. LaCondamine was the first trained scientist to do an actual survey of the entire Amazon. He and his small French group, travelled the entire length of the Amazon, doing all kinds of scientific and geological surveys. Then they found out Issac Newton was right all along. If Issac Newton told me the moon was made out of green cheese, I'd believe him. Lacondamine returned to France after 10 years of exploring the Amazon. Pretty cool! The ill fated Godin Expedition down the Amazon ----------------------------------------------- Well after Lacondamine returned, John Godin de Odonais decided to lead another expedition down the Amazon. He amassed a expedition of about a dozen, and then added about 30 more Indians for about 40 or 50 persons. Johns wife, Isabella Godin, eventually joined the large expedition. The Godin Expedition travelled 2 weeks deep down into the Amazon, but found the supplies were not there and deserted. A smallpox epidemic broke out in the expedition, and all the Indians fled into the Amazon jungle. Now there was only 12 French left. It was only another 2 weeks deeper into the Amazon to their next supply stop. Should they abort the expedition, or risk everything and go for it? They decided to go for it. One thing, those people sure were gutsy. I admire that. So they build a canoe and paddled down deeper into the Amazon. In the next two weeks, their best paddler drowned, and their only craft capsized. The 11 had to swim for shore and try to salvage whatever they could. They lost almost everything. They decided that only a few men should try and canoe down the river to the next supply and get help. The 8 remaining members of the Godin Expedition waited 25 days in the Amazon Jungle for a rescue. Isabella Godin was one of those 8 who waited for rescuers. The remaining members had to do something. 25 days was 10 days overdue. Isabella Godin and the 7 others started walking down the riverbanks of the Amazon! Amazing! Walking down the Amazon River banks, through muck and mud through swamps as large as Texas, black as night, predators in the river and in the jungle, and god knows what else, to a supply depot a hundred miles away? They found the riverbanks too difficult to travel, so they started trailblazing through the Amazon Jungle, staying near the river. But you know the rest. The got lost in the Amazon Jungle and no idea where the river was. Everyone but Isabella Godin perished. With no idea where she was going, lost in the middle of the Amazon, she kept on going. Eating roots and insects. Nine days later she found the Amazon river again. Two Indians in a canoe picked her up and was reunited with her husband John. Now that my friends, is what I call living on the edge.
