Mensen ernst biography books

WHILE ON A HUNTING EXPEDITION in the Balkans in 1859, British explorer Samuel Baker made a stop — along with his travel companion, a maharaja from India — at a slave market town in what is now Bulgaria. Baker was looking for a bit of respite from the hunt, when he chanced to pass a young Hungarian slave girl about to be auctioned. He was completely taken by her. In one colorful version of the story, an elderly Ottoman governor outbid Baker for the girl. Determined to keep the woman out of the official’s hands, Baker secretly arranged for her escape and fled with her down the Danube to freedom.

“From these extraordinary beginnings,” writes author Robert Twigger, “began the greatest husband-and-wife exploring team the world has ever seen, or is likely to see.”

Within two years of that incident, Baker and his soon-to-be wife Florence launched an expedition to find the source of the Nile. And they did it in a way that no other expedition since ancient times was able to achieve: by ascending the length of the river — upstream. That epic four-year journey, which uncovered Lake Nzige near the Nile’s source, came at the price of adventures almost too grueling to be believed: no-holds-barred battles with murderous illnesses, a showdown of wiles against one King Kamrasi (the brutish local despot of Bonyoro), and involvement in a jungle war that repulsed an army of slave traders.

That remarkable story is just one in a blizzard of tales that make up Red Nile: A Biography of the World’s Greatest River. Spurning the conventional historical narrative, author and explorer Robert Twigger instead delivers a chronicle of the world’s longest river, a river with an uncanny penchant for stoking the passions of its admirers both near and far, from an altogether different perspective: by wa

I don't read Norwegian and this book is definitely in Norwegian. I don't know how to say the most basic things like hello or beer. My smartphone does though, and with a $10 OCR app called TextGrabber, I was able to read Bredo's words with only a slight delay. Not only could I read them, I saved digitized text files that scanned Bredo's words on paper into digital Norwegian and then translated that Norwegian into English. In about 2 seconds. I read 20 pages of a Norwegian book in half an hour.

Of course, anyone reading this after 2020 will think I'm quaint. Oh, those were the days before flawless instant translation of everything. Language barrier? Were you born in the 20th century or what? I had to let out several audible woooowws and gasps of amazement as paper Norwegian transformed into digital English before my eyes and I emailed myself pages of Bredo's book. It wasn't perfect, I had to retake the photos pretty often, and even then, the translation made his English pretty harsh. But it worked.

Løperkongen conquered, I then began to search for the rarest of them all, the 1844 biography about Mensen Ernst that Løperkongen is based on, the infamous German tome Des Steuermannes Mensen Ernst aus Bergen in Norwegen; See- Land- und Schnell-Reisen in allen fünf Welttheilen by Gustav Rieck. To pronounce that properly, it's very important to yell it loudly with a mouth full of sausage.

I had read a very insightful article by Tony O'Donnel about Mensen Ernst that said that only 2 copies of the book (whose title I won't repeat for brevity, we'll just call it Steuermannes) exist in the world. After some intense Googling, I found one in the Norwegian National Library and emailed them public contact number with the subject line, "book scan?". 

Greta Hysvær wrote me back with amazing news. They would put it in the scanning queue and it should be ready in a few weeks. Hopefully, the magic of OCR can crack this 1840s Germa

Norwegian sailor Mensen Ernst, a 19th century ultrarunner of great renown, was one of the world’s first professional athletes, and is said to have performed feats of endurance over incredible distances.  Tony O’Donnell looks at his extraordinary life, and considers what is fact and what may be fiction.

On a hot, dusty afternoon in June 1832, two peasants – let’s call them Gaston and Pierre – sat by the main road through the village of Ay, 200 miles east of Paris, enjoying an aperitif.  In this time between planting and harvest there was little else to do but watch the midsummer sun cross the sky.  A dog dozed on a doorstep nearby; the only sounds were the singing of the birds and the chirping of the crickets.  Gaston yawned, spat and scratched an armpit.  To his right, through the haze, something in the distance caught his eye.  A man?  He rubbed his eyes and squinted.  Yes, a man.  A lone figure, approaching at a pace that seemed entirely unnecessary in this heat.

Gaston nudged Pierre and gestured towards the approaching figure.  Pierre frowned into the distance.  Yes, the man was running.  By now he was close enough for Gaston and Pierre to take a good look at him.  He was compact and muscular, squat even.   His attire of white tunic and black trousers was topped by a hat accessorised with a large plume feather, which bobbed comically as he ran with a peculiarly long and loping gait.  The two men strained to see what chasing beast or robber might be bringing about his evident haste; but behind him the road was empty.

By now the stranger was almost upon them.  He did not acknowledge his small audience, if he was aware of their presence at all.  His eyes gazed into the middle distance along the road ahead.  The two men craned their necks and looked to the left; if the man wasn’t running away from something, then surely he must be running towards something.  But there wa

Mensen Ernst (1795 – 22 January 1843) was born as Mons Monsen Øyri, in the summer of 1795 in the village of Fresvik along the Sognefjord, in the municipality of Vik in Sogn og Fjordane county, Norway. He was a road runner and ultramarathonist and one of the first sport professionals and employed as a courier. He made his living running, mainly through placing bets on himself being able to run a certain distance within a period of time.

Trips

He was reputed to have run about 2,500 kilometres (1,600 mi) from Paris to Moscow. It took him 14 days starting on 11 June 1832—averaging over 200 kilometres (120 mi) a day. On a later trip, from Istanbul to Calcutta and back again, lasting 59 days, he ran 140 kilometres (87 mi) per day. On his trips he took very little rest and never slept on a bed. When he did rest it was short naps, between ten and fifteen minutes at a time, and he took them standing or leaning against a tree with a handkerchief over his face. His last trip started in Bad Muskau, and went through Jerusalem and Cairo, from where he intended to run along the Nile until he found its source. He died in January 1843 from dysentery, close to the border between Egypt and Sudan, where he was buried a few days later. The place of his death is now buried by the Aswan Dam.

Notes

External links