"History’s Greatest Journeys"

My podcast partner Maqz and I talked recently about this article that appeared in “Good Magazine” an internet site. This is what Good Magazine says about themselves:

“GOOD is the integrated media platform for people who want to live well and do good. We are a company and community for the people, businesses, and NGOs moving the world forward. GOOD's mission is to provide content, experiences, and utilities to serve this community. GOOD currently produces a website, videos, live events, and a print magazine. Launched in September 2006, the company has garnered praise for its unique editorial perspective and fresh visual aesthetic and is quickly positioning itself as a significant new voice in our culture.”

They do many interesting articles about the world, complete with eye popping, cutting edge graphics. Recently they listed these 20 journeys as some of the greatest ever undertaken. There are actual journeys, paths as journeys that anyone can travel, and fictional mythic journeys found in literature. It was a great list and generated some interesting discussion about the relative values of some. I have included the list with a summary of each for readers to look at.

from Good Magazine
Lewis and Clark - to find an overland water route to the Pacific coast
Amelia Earhart -twice attempted (unsuccessfully) to circumnavigate the globe.
Lindberg -first person to complete a nonstop flight between New York and Paris
Desoto - Spanish conquistador, landed on the coast of Florida to discover and secure American Indian gold
Captain James Cook and the crew of his ship, the Endeavour - undertook the first complete mapping of the coast of New Zealand, Tasmania and the eastern coast of Australia.
Columbus - the most famous exploration in Western history.
Livingstone -Scottish-born missionary and explorer who spent the majority of his adult life making inroads into unexplored regions of central and southern Africa
Marco Polo -The Venetian explorer Marco Polo is most famous for his travels in the 13th century as one of the first Westerners along the Silk Road to China.
Henry Hudson - The English explorer Henry Hudson hoped to find the mythologized Northwest Passage from England to China.
Magellan’s circumnavigation - Ferdinand Magellan in 1519 made an attempt to reach Asia by sailing west. His expedition discovered the straits below South America that now bear his name, and crossed the Pacific
Pizzaro - Spanish conquistador who spent much of his life trying to find El Dorado in South America. He did topple the Inca Empire, loot its substantial coffers, and establish the city now known as Lima.

Pan-Am Highway - The “World’s longest motorable road” according to Guinness World Records. it stretches from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to several claimed endpoints in South America.
Trans Siberian Railroad - The Trans-Siberian Railroad is a legendary rail route that connects Moscow to the Pacific Ocean
Northwest Passage - explorers like John Cabot, Henry Hudson, and Jacques Cartier tried in vain to find a westward trading route to Asia
Union Pacific Transcontinental Railroad - a line of track that connected Sacramento, California, to Council Bluffs, Iowa.
Orient Express - The most famous route ran between Paris and Istanbul from 1889 to 1977 the line remains a symbol of rail travel at its most romantic.

Around the word in 80 days - Jules Verne’s 1873 novel Around the World in Eighty Days Written at a time when new rail lines and canals made such a journey realistic, the story captured the popular imagination
Journey to the center of the earth - At a time when cartographers had mapped most of the globe, Verne looked into an Icelandic volcano and saw a secret world of alchemy, prehistoric monsters, and adventure.
Pequod and Moby Dick - Herman Melville’s using the whaling ship as a microcosm for an expanding world are an indelible part of America’s literary tradition.
Jack Kerouac - On the Road speaks to all that is contemplative and nomadic in us. His characters hitched, train-hopped, and drove their way across the United States and into the uncharted regions of their own interiors.

Interesting list don’t you think?

Well part of our discussion in Countless Screaming Argonauts, the podcast (Episode 60), was about the journeys that were missing and we began to compile a list of journeys that were at least as historic as those already mentioned. This is the list of additional journeys we came up with:

Man’s landing on the moon
Christ carrying the cross to his crucifixion
Hilary climbing Mt. Everest
Perry’s journey to the North Pole
The Boston Marathon
Star Trek’s journey into space, the final frontier
The Lord of the Rings journey to middle earth

And finally a few more of my own that were not included in the podcast:
The Oregon Trail
Hannibal crossing the Alps
Breaking the Land Speed record on the Bonneville Salt Flats
Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier
Swimming the English Channel
The Wright brothers flight at Kitty Hawk
The California Gold rush
The first SST flight across the Atlantic Ocean
Skylab and the current International Space Station

I’m sure that readers can come up with others that could merit placement on the list. If you have one (or several!) feel free to add them as a comment and I will update this posting sometime in the near future.