Vocation : Travel : Explorer

John Melchior Bosco, SDB (Italian: Giovanni Melchiorre Bosco; Piedmontese: Gioann Melchior Bòsch; 16 August 1815 – 31 January 1888), popularly known as Don Bosco (IPA: [ˈdɔm ˈbɔsko, bo-]), was an Italian Catholic priest, educator and writer of the 19th century. While working in Turin, where the population suffered many of the ill effects of industrialization and urbanization, he dedicated his life to the betterment and education of street children, juvenile delinquents, and other disadvantaged youth. He developed teaching methods based on love rather than punishment, a method that became known as the Salesian Preventive System.A follower of the spirituality and philosophy of Francis de Sales, Bosco was an ardent devotee of the Virgin Mary under the title Mary Help of Christians. He later dedicated his works to de Sales when he founded the Salesians of Don Bosco, based in Turin. Together with Maria Domenica Mazzarello, he founded the Institute of the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians, now commonly known as the Salesian Sisters of Don Bosco, a religious congregation of nuns dedicated to the care and education of poor girls. He taught Dominic Savio, of whom he wrote a biography that helped the young boy be canonized. He is one of the pioneers of mutual aid societies that were initiated as collaborative financial support to young migrant Catholic workers in the city of Turin. In 1850, he drew up regulations to assist apprentices and their companions when any of them was involuntarily without work or fell ill.On 18 April 1869, one year after the construction of the Basilica of Mary Help of Christians in Turin, Bosco established the Association of Mary Help of Christians (ADMA) connecting it with commitments easily fulfilled by most common people, to the spirituality and the mission of the Salesian Congregation (CG 24 SDB, 1996, NR. 80). The ADMA was founded to promote the veneration of the Most Holy Sacrament and Mary Help of Christians (Don Bosco, Association of the Devotees of Mary Help of Christians, San Benigno Canavese, 1890, page 33).In 1875, Bosco began to publish the Salesian Bulletin. The Bulletin has remained in continuous publication, and is currently published in 50 different editions and 30 languages. In 1876, he founded a movement of laity, the Association of Salesian Cooperators, with the same educational mission to the poor. Bosco established a network of organizations and centres to carry on his work.
Bosco's sainthood cause was opened after his death, and following his beatification in 1929, he was canonized by Pope Pius XI in 1934.

Dame Freya Madeline Stark (31 January 1893 – 9 May 1993) was a British-Italian explorer and travel writer. She wrote more than two dozen books on her travels in the Middle East and Afghanistan as well as several autobiographical works and essays. She was one of the first non-Arabs known to travel through the southern Arabian Desert in modern times.

Paul-Henri Nargeolet (French pronunciation: [pɔl ɑ̃ʁi naʁʒɔlɛ]; 2 March 1946 – 18 June 2023): 1  was a French deep sea explorer and Titanic expert. Known as "Mr. Titanic", Nargeolet was one of five people who died aboard the submersible Titan when it imploded on 18 June 2023 near the wreck of the Titanic.

Børge Ousland (born 31 May 1962) is a Norwegian polar explorer. He was the first person to cross Antarctica solo.He started his career as a Norwegian Navy Special Forces Officer with Marinejegerkommandoen, and he also spent several years working as a deep sea diver for the oil industry in the North Sea.
On 4 May 1990 Ousland and Erling Kagge became the first explorers ever to reach the North Pole unsupported, after a 58-day ski trek from Ellesmere Island in Canada, a distance of 800 km.In 1994, he made the first solo and unsupported journey to the North Pole from Arctic Cape in Russia.Between 15 November 1996 and 17 January 1997, he became the first in the world to do an unsupported solo crossing of the Antarctic: 1,864 miles from the edge of the Ronne Ice Shelf to the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf. The ski journey was made with kite assistance, and also holds the record for the fastest unsupported journey to the South Pole, taking just 34 days.On 22 January 2006, together with Mike Horn he began a journey to the North Pole in full Arctic night, successfully concluded on 23 March.In September 2010, Ousland's team aboard the trimaran sailboat The Northern Passage completed the circumnavigation of the North Pole. A Russian team aboard the Peter I achieved the same feat in that season. These were the first recorded instances of the circumnavigation of the North Pole without an icebreaker.
In December 2011 he traversed Antarctica to the South Pole for the centennial celebration of the first expedition to reach the Pole.
Ousland married at the North Pole in 2012 having been flown in by helicopter with "20 or 30 people".

François Lenormant (17 January 1837 – 9 December 1883) was a 19th-century French Hellenist, Assyriologist and archaeologist.

Captain George Francis Kosco (1 April 1908 – 11 June 1985) was a United States Navy aerologist and polar explorer.
Kosco was born in Ramsaytown, Pennsylvania, on 1 April 1908. He was a Slovak American: his father had come from Oľšov, and his mother from Plavnica. His family name had been "Kvasnak", but this was changed to "Kosco" when his parents emigrated to the United States. Kosco graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1930, and earned a master's degree in weather aerology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1940. His dissertation, co-authored with John O. F. Dorsett, was called Winter weather types of the eastern North Pacific and adjacent coastal and island areas.Kosco spent much of the 1930s hurricane hunting in the Caribbean. In 1939 he married Bernadette Howley (1912–2013); the couple had three children. Bob Drury and Tom Clavin describe him as a "handsome, athletic six-footer", while Buckner F. Melton Jr. calls him "a slightly stout moon-faced officer".Kosco was assigned to Admiral William Halsey Jr.'s Third Fleet in early October 1944. In December, the fleet was struck by Typhoon Cobra, which destroyed three ships. Kosco, aboard the USS New Jersey, reported a "tropical disturbance" 600 miles (970 km) to the east, and moving away from the fleet, when in fact it was a full-blown typhoon 200 miles (320 km) away and coming towards the fleet. Kosco later admitted to a board of inquiry that he had underestimated Cobra's strength, "basing his prediction on historical data about regional storms rather than relying upon current local observations." He was "mildly reprimanded". In 1967, Kosco published an account of the incident coauthored with Hans Christian Adamson: Halsey's Typhoons: A Firsthand Account of How Two Typhoons, More Powerful than the Japanese, Dealt Death and Destruction to Admiral Halsey's Third Fleet.Kosco was present at the signing ceremony of the Japanese surrender on the USS Missouri at Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945. He took what is believed to be the only color film footage of the ceremony. This was only released publicly in 2010.In 1946 Kosco participated in Operation Nanook in the Arctic. He was then chief aerologist and chief scientist in Operation Highjump in the Antarctic with Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd Jr. in 1946–47. He also led several other polar expeditions, collecting specimens for the Smithsonian Institution. Kosco Glacier in Antarctica was named in his honor in 1962.Kosco retired from the Navy in 1960. He died on 11 June 1985 at Bethesda Naval Hospital, and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

Karl Gottlieb Mauch (7 May 1837 – 4 April 1875) was a German explorer and geographer of Africa. He reported on the archaeological ruins of Great Zimbabwe in 1871 during his search for the biblical land of Ophir.

Joseph Thomson (14 February 1858 – 2 August 1895) was a British geologist and explorer who played an important part in the Scramble for Africa. Thomson's gazelle and Thomson's Falls, Nyahururu, are named after him. Excelling as an explorer rather than an exact scientist, he avoided confrontations among his porters or with indigenous peoples, neither killing any native nor losing any of his men to violence. His motto is often quoted to be "He who goes gently, goes safely; he who goes safely, goes far."

Johannes Rebmann (January 16, 1820 – October 4, 1876) was a German missionary, linguist, and explorer credited with feats including being the first European, along with his colleague Johann Ludwig Krapf, to enter Africa from the Indian Ocean coast. In addition, he was the first European to find Kilimanjaro. News of Rebmann's discovery was published in the Church Missionary Intelligencer in May 1849, but disregarded as mere fantasy for the next twelve years. The Geographical Society of London held that snow could not possibly occur let alone persist in such latitudes and considered the report to be the hallucination of a malaria-stricken missionary. It was only in 1861 that researchers began their efforts to measure Kilimanjaro. Expeditions to Tanganyika between 1861 and 1865, led by the German Baron Karl Klaus von der Decken, confirmed Rebmann's report. Together with his colleague Johann Ludwig Krapf they were also the first Europeans to visit and report Mount Kenya. Their work there is also thought to have had effects on future African expeditions by Europeans, including the exploits of Sir Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, and David Livingstone. After losing most of his eyesight and entering into a brief marriage, he died of pneumonia.

Dee Molenaar (June 21, 1918 – January 19, 2020) was an American mountaineer, author and artist. He is best known as the author of The Challenge of Rainier, first published in 1971 and considered the definitive work on the climbing history of Mount Rainier.