The Big Thread of Historical Badasses

[AsenRG]

James Cook

One of the last great explorers of the Age of Sail, James Cook was a naval captain who gained a reputation as a skilled surveyor from work in Canada and other places. On the merits of this work he was given a mission to explore the South Pacific looking for a theorised Southern continent and to carry a scientific expedition to Tahiti in order to observe the predicted transit of Mercury across the Sun.

James Cook - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

He is a prominent figure in New Zealand history as he made the first detailed survey of the country and many places still retain the names he gave them in the survey. The expedition also carried out a lot of exploration around Australia and other parts of the pacific. He was also a pioneer in fighting scurvy, after having observed that Germans sailors never got it and starting to pack Sauerkraut in ships stores; he also started the practice of issuing limes to British sailors, from which the colloquial term Limeys ultimately arose. He was ultimately awarded a major gong from the Royal Society for his work on this.

Sadly, he was killed in a fight with the locals in Hawaii on a subsequent expedition. His maps of New Zealand were of such a quality that they were still being used up to the first half of the twentieth century.

James Cook's ship on the first South Pacific expedition was called the Endeavour and the name of the captain and ship bear a distinct resemblance to those in a certain well-known sci-fi franchise. Coincidence? I've never seen anybody write or comment about it, but who knows?

Coincidence? It's not certain?
Amusingly, he's pretty well-known here, there's been a book published on him and other sea explorers (intended for young adults), as well as a comic in a local zine, which went for a couple dozen issues.
So pretty much all geeks from my generation I've talked with seemed to assume that the Endeavour was an obvious reference to James Cook! The idea that it's not well-known...I don't know, it seems weird!

 

[Nobby-W]

Coincidence? It's not certain?
Amusingly, he's pretty well-known here, there's been a book published on him and other sea explorers (intended for young adults), as well as a comic in a local zine, which went for a couple dozen issues.
So pretty much all geeks from my generation I've talked with seemed to assume that the Endeavour was an obvious reference to James Cook! The idea that it's not well-known...I don't know, it seems weird!

It seems likely but I've never seen any reference to Rodenberry (or anybody else involved with Star Trek, for that matter) confirming or refuting it.

 

[AsenRG]

It seems likely but I've never seen any reference to Rodenberry (or anybody involved with Star Trek, for that matter) confirming or refuting it.

Well, it seems like too much of a coincidence...
(Other guys in this book were Jean-François de Galaup, comte de Lapérouse and the expedition of Ivan Kruzenshtern and Yury Lisyansky. Those were some good times, quite good for RPGs as well).

 

[Chaotic Wooster]

James Cook

One of the last great explorers of the Age of Sail, James Cook was a naval captain who gained a reputation as a skilled surveyor from work in Canada and other locations. On the merits of this work he was given a mission to explore the South Pacific looking for a theorised Southern continent ('Terra Australis') and to carry a scientific expedition to Tahiti in order to observe the predicted transit of Mercury across the Sun.

James Cook - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Captain Cook is a prominent figure in New Zealand history as he made the first detailed survey of the country and many places still bear the names he gave them in the initial survey. Sometimes he is mis-credited with discovering New Zealand but the first records of NZ from a European explorer were from a Dutch captain called Abel Tasman around a century earlier. New Zealand retains the name originally given to it by Tasman, named after island off the coast of Holland.

The expedition also carried out a lot of exploration around Australia and other parts of the pacific. Cook was also a pioneer in fighting scurvy, after having observed that German sailors never got it and starting to pack sauerkraut in ships stores; he also started the practice of carrying limes, from which the colloquial term Limeys ultimately arose. His work on scurvy was a major boon for the Navy and navigation in general, and ultimately led to him being awarded a major gong by the Royal Society.

Sadly, he was killed in a fight with the locals in Hawaii on a subsequent expedition. His maps of New Zealand were of such a quality that they were still being used up to the first half of the twentieth century.

James Cook's ship on the first South Pacific expedition was called the Endeavour and one can't help but notice that the name of the captain and ship bear a resemblance to those in a certain well-known sci-fi franchise. Coincidence? I've never seen anybody write or comment about it, but who knows?

Cook was a local lad, loads of stuff in the surrounding area is named for him, including our museum. While I think it's different these days, you couldn't get through school when I was young without learning about him and visiting the museum.

 

[chuckdee]

Still one of my favorites - From Badass of the Week as I couldn't say it any better:

Christopher Lee

"I've seen many men die right in front of me - so many in fact that I've become almost hardened to it. Having seen the worst that human beings can do to each other, the results of torture, mutilation and seeing someone blown to pieces by a bomb, you develop a kind of shell. But you had to. You had to. Otherwise we would never have won." -Christopher Lee, discussing his service in World War II

For me, Halloween has always been about two things – choking down so much goddamned candy that my intestines harden into a supersaturated congealed sugar sausage, and hanging out on the couch with a pretty girl and a bag of fun-sized Mega Caramel Deluxe Choco-Bomb Diabetes Bars watching Dracula movies and waiting/praying for the opportunity to run outside and blast the punk kids in my neighborhood in the face with either a fire hose or an Airsoft rifle. I may be alone in this, seeing as how for some inexplicable reason apparently nobody else on the planet seems to be even a little bit burned out on goddamned zombies yet (yes, I got really into them from 2004, when I saw the remake of Dawn of the Dead, but the zombie genre peaked with World War Z in 2006 and I haven't given a shit about them since), but for me it just does not get any better than the original gangsta of flesh-ripping, babeage-macking vampires running around in a crypt being creepy as fuck and spraying around more carotid arterial blood spray than Maximilien Robespierre with a gas-powered chainsaw and supreme uncontested judicial power over the Revolutionary Tribunal (am I right here, all you 18th-century French Revolution buffs? Hello? This thing on?).

And, to that end, Christopher Frank Carandini Mothafuckin' Lee WAS Dracula. He played the bloodsucking impaling-happy non-sparkling Wallachian Count in the most perfect Dracula movie ever made, Horror of Dracula, then reprised the role in seven sequels over the next 15 years – giving an entire generation of humanity nightmares for life, coating himself in a swimming pool's worth of fake movie blood, and somehow managing to constantly surround himself with ridiculous concentrations of hot babes with twin puncture wounds on the sides of their necks and borderline-pornographic amounts of blood-stained cleavage.

He's also a 6'5" tall world champion fencer, speaks six languages, does all of his own stunts, has participated in more on-screen sword fights than any actor in history, served for five years defending democracy from global fascism as a British Commando blowing the shit out of Nazi asses in World War II, and became the oldest person to ever record lead vocals on a heavy metal track when, at the age of 88, he wrote, performed on, and released a progressive symphonic power metal EP about the life of Charlemagne (because why the fuck not?).

The most prolific actor in motion picture history, Christopher Lee was born somewhere in England in 1922. His mother was an Italian Countess who was actually descended from the line of Charlemagne, and she was so important that she was allowed to wear the royal seal of Frederich Barbarossa and so MILF-y she had her portrait painted by something like a half-dozen famous Italian artists. One of Lee's ancestors on that side was the Papal Secretary of State who refused to attend the coronation of Napoleon and is buried in the Pantheon in Rome next to Raphael (the painter not the ninja turtle), which seems like kind of a big deal. Lee's father, meanwhile, was a distant relative of Robert E. Lee and was multi-decorated war hero who'd served as a Colonel in the 60th King's Royal Rifle Corps during World War I and the Boer War. Growing up, Lee studied Classics at Wellington College, where he was also a champion squash player, a ridiculously-badass fencer, and spent his spare time playing on the school hockey and rugby. After college, Lee took a bullshit job working as an office clerk (that's a Classics major for you), where his pay was one pound a week – and by one pound a week I think it means his entire compensation for busting his ass 8 hours a day was that every Friday around 4:30 a really cool guy would walk by, fist bump him, and say something like, "Hey, nice job man! Hang in there bro!"

Shit got real in 1939 when Christopher Lee quit his day job, caught a boat to Finland, and decided to enlist in the Finnish Army to help them fight off the Soviet invasion of Finland. Lee got geared up to kick some commie asses up and down the frozen wastes of mid-Winter Finland, but didn't see much action, returning home in 1940 to deal with a much bigger and more England-centric problem: Nazis.

Christopher Lee enlisted in the Royal Air Force in 1940, where he worked as an intelligence officer specializing in cracking German ciphers and skulls and any other Nazi bullshit he came in contact with. In North Africa he was attached to the Long Range Desert Patrol, the forerunner of the SAS, where he would jump in a badass fucking four-wheel-drive jeep with a gigantic machine gun mounted in the back, drive hundreds of miles behind enemy lines, survive the scorching heat of the Sahara Desert, then sneak-attack Luftwaffe airfields by rolling up on them at sixty miles an hour with his .50-caliber machine guns blazing out curtains of white-hot Nazi-smiting justice, planting dynamite on their airplanes, then peeling ass out of there leaving nothing but bullet-riddled corpses and gigantic explosions in his wake. After working with the LRDP, Lee was assigned to the Special Operations Executive – better known as Winston Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare – a group that did shit like lead a twelve-man assault that destroyed the German top secret nuclear weapons development facility in Norway and assist brave Eastern European partisans and rebels sabotage Nazi supply lines to prevent them from bringing reinforcements up to fight the Soviets. His service records are sealed and Lee doesn't talk much about his service (when pressed on the subject, he reportedly asks his interviewer, "Can you keep a secret?". When they excitedly say yes, he leans in close and says, "So can I."), but we do know that by the time he retired as a Flight Lieutenant in 1945 he'd been personally decorated for battlefield bravery by the Czech, Yugoslavian, English, and Polish governments and was good friends with Josip Broz Tito, so draw your own conclusions.

A Nazi train derailed by partisans in Yugoslavia.

The Long Range Desert Patrol.

Christopher Lee went into acting in 1948, before myself and roughly 95% of my readership was born, and persevered through a tough 10-year stretch of bit parts and minor roles. He finally got a big break in 1957, when he got paid id="mce_marker",300 to play Frankenstein's Monster for Hammer Films – a part he easily earned if for no other reason than just because at six foot five he was – and still is! – the tallest actor in Hollywood. He took the Dracula role the next year, spent the next decade ingesting gallons of fake blood (probably preferable to wading through knee-deep piles of real-life dead Germans while Nazi tanks fire 88mm cannons and spray machine gun bullets at you), and his career kind of blew up from there.

In addition to his iconic, definitive role as Dracula, Christopher Lee has also portrayed some of the most memorable villains of all time. Sure, everyone knows him as Sauroman the White from Lord of the Hobbits: Return to Fellowship Towers and Darth Tyranus from those otherwise-terrible Star Wars prequels (which is notable in itself because Tyranus was supposed to have been Qui-Gon's mentor, and Liam Neeson, between being Zeus, Aslan, Hannibal, Qui-Gon, Ducard, Oskar Schindler, and your dad in Fallout 3 is basically the mentor character in every work of fiction since 1993), but for my money it doesn't get any better than when he played the ultimate Bond Villain in The Man with The Golden Gun -- a role he got thanks in no small part to the fact that Bond creator Ian Fleming was not only Lee's cousin, but the two men had fought together in the SOE during WWII. So Lee was basically part of the team that inspired James Bond, then he went on to play a fucking Bond Villain who lives on an island surrounded by hot babes and Tattoo from Fantasy Island, drives a car that turns into an airplane, uses renewable solar energy to try and destroy the world, and revolutionizes the badassitude of carrying pimped-out firearms. So Awesome.

I won't get too much into it, but Christopher Lee has basically been in every movie ever, from billion-dollar Academy Award winners to the sort of shit that Elvira pimps on Channel 875 at four in the morning on a Tuesday. He's almost always the villain, and as such has probably died on camera more times than anyone ever. He's been Fu Manchu five times. He was the definitive Count de Rochefort in a couple Three Musketeers movies. He's been The Mummy, Frankenstein's Monster, Willy Wonka's Dad, the Emperor of China, the Grim Reaper, Lucifer, Grigory Rasputin, Charles Marlow, Ramses, Tiresias the Blind Prophet of Thebes, Vlad the Impaler, one role where he's simply credited as "Ship's Vampire", and another where he's "Resurrection Joe." He's hosted SNL and been in Police Academy, the Last Unicorn, Charlie's Angels, Season of the Witch, Gremlins II, a Polish Tales from the Crypt-style TV series and a softcore porn based on the works of Marquis de Sade, but he was also in Lord of the Rings, Shaka Zulu, A Tale of Two Cities, The Wicker Man, Moby-Dick and the Hamlet with Lawrence Olivier. He's worked with Peter Cushing, Jimmy Stewart, Charlton Heston, Errol Flynn, Patrick Stewart, Stephen Spielberg, Orson Welles, Vincent Price, Christopher Walken, Sam Eliot, Jeff Bridges and Jayne Mansfield, but also Nicholas Cage, Heather Graham, Sacha Baron Cohen, Tom Arnold, Casper Van Dien and Armand Assante, and he once appeared in a movie called "Howling II: Werewolf Bitch" with the dude from Space Mutiny.

He's the only person to play both Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes (he was also Sir Henry Baskerville). His characters have executed both Charles the First of England and Louis the Sixteenth of France (and, as a badass side note, Lee is so into the idea of public executions that in real life he can recite every official executioner in England since the 15th century). He's portrayed Englishmen, Egyptians, Spaniards, Transylvanians, Frenchmen, Greeks, Poles, Chinese, Indians, Italians, Wallachians, Romans, Germans, Arabs, Gypsies, and Russians, played the lead role in the biography of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, speaks English, German, Russian, Swedish, Italian, and French, can do any English accent he wants, and sings everything from opera and death metal in a hardcore bass voice. IMDB credits him with 274 acting roles, Guiness says he's appeared in more films than anyone ever, and the Oracle of Bacon lists him as the Center of the Hollywood Universe because anyone in history links to him in 2.59 steps (he links to Bacon in 1). If that's not enough, Lee's movies have grossed more than any actor ever – his top five alone grossed $4.4B (number two is Harrison ford with $3B) and that doesn't even include the new Hobbit stuff and whatever the fuck else he's got in the works. He's such a veteran pro that he filmed every single scene in Star Wars 3 in a single day, and even though he's never received a Best Actor nomination he's been in 4 movies nominated for Best Picture and he can rest assured that even the shittiest movie of his career is probably a fuck of a lot more entertaining than The English Patient.
He's also developed something of a reputation for being a dick to fans and for having a seething contemptuous disdain for fajitas, which makes him even more badass in some ways.

"I gave you the chance of aiding me willingly but with these fajitas you have elected the way of pain."

Lee also belongs to three stuntman unions, does all of his own stunts, once busted his face smashing head-first through an actual plate glass window for a scene, injured himself falling into an open grave while portraying Dracula, and once had his hand slashed open during a drunken sword fight with Errol Flynn.

Oh, and while we're on the subject of swordfights, Lee has appeared in more on-screen sword duels than any other actor ever. A masterful fencer, he's been in everything from cutlass fights on the decks of waterlogged pirate ships to rapier duels in seventeenth-century France to taking on a couple guys one-third of his age with a lightsabers and a fistful of force lightning on the deck of whatever the fuck they called Imperial Star Destroyers in the prequel movies.

CHRISTOPHER LEE FUCKING LOVES THIS SHIT

A classically trained singer, Christopher Lee also released a heavy metal hardcore symphonic power metal concept album about Charlemagne when he was 88 years old. He's played with Rhapsody and Manowar, and on his 90th birthday he released a metal single called "Let Legend Mark Me as the King" with music written by some of the guys from Judas Priest.

No, I am not joking about this. I am actually streaming a track about Pepin the Short off his MySpace page as I type and it's actually pretty good.

"One should try anything he can in his career, except folkdance and incest."

Christopher Lee is also a master golfer who once played with Jack Nicklaus and is the only actor to be a member of the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, the most prestigious country club in the world. He's been married to the same Danish supermodel for 44 years, is the Commander of the Order of St. John's of Jerusalem, a Knight Bachelor of the Order of the British Empire, and once received a medal from Mikael Gorbachev.
He's still acting at 90 years old.

"When you're involved in a war it's the old saying 'if your name's written on the bullet, there's nothing you can do about it'. So you just banished it from your mind. Of course I was scared on some occasions and anyone who says they aren't scared during an operation probably isn't telling the truth. I know about six people who had no fear. Literally none. Whether that was due to a lack of imagination or because they'd conquered it, I don't know. In fact one was Iain Duncan Smith's father, who was one of my closest friends. But during a war, people are taught to kill and they have the blessings of the authorities to do so, so if it's your life or somebody else's, you want to be quite sure it's not yours."

 

[Nobby-W]

I'm not sure whether badass is quite the right description or not, but this chap was an interim governor in a province in Iraq, along with many other things. Here's a video of a lecture he did on aid to failed states. It's quite an interesting lecture.

 

[TristramEvans]

 

[Brock Savage]

I was recently reading and watching videos about the Guadacanal campaign when I came across the story of Sergeant Major Sir Jacob Charles Vouza (that's right, he was made an honorary Sergeant Major in the Corps and knighted). Frankly, the Wikipedia article understates his sheer courage and toughness. The Marine Corps Association has a better article for download on pdf that does justice to this extraordinary badass.

 

[mostlylurking]

From here: "Just before dawn on May 13, 1862, Robert Smalls and a crew composed of fellow slaves, in the absence of the white captain and his two mates, slipped a cotton steamer off the dock, picked up family members at a rendezvous point, then slowly navigated their way through the harbor. Smalls, doubling as the captain, even donning the captain’s wide-brimmed straw hat to help to hide his face, responded with the proper coded signals at two Confederate checkpoints, including at Fort Sumter itself, and other defense positions. Cleared, Smalls sailed into the open seas. Once outside of Confederate waters, he had his crew raise a white flag and surrendered his ship to the blockading Union fleet."

After this action-adventure, Smalls' life becomes a war epic:

"According to the 1883 Naval Affairs Committee report, Smalls was engaged in approximately 17 military actions, including the April 7, 1863, assault on Fort Sumter and the attack at Folly Island Creek, S.C., two months later, where he assumed command of the Planter when, under “very hot fire,” its white captain became so “demoralized” he hid in the “coal-bunker.” For his valiancy, Smalls was promoted to the rank of captain himself, and from December 1863 on, earned $150 a month, making him one of the highest paid black soldiers of the war."

Thereafter, Smalls' life becomes a political suspense plot with a tragic ending: "Following the war, Smalls continued to push the boundaries of freedom as a first-generation black politician, serving in the South Carolina state assembly and senate, and for five nonconsecutive terms in the U.S. House of Representatives (1874-1886) before watching his state roll back Reconstruction in a revised 1895 constitution that stripped blacks of their voting rights. He died in Beaufort on February 22, 1915, in the same house behind which he had been born a slave[.]"

 

[AsenRG]

From here: "Just before dawn on May 13, 1862, Robert Smalls and a crew composed of fellow slaves, in the absence of the white captain and his two mates, slipped a cotton steamer off the dock, picked up family members at a rendezvous point, then slowly navigated their way through the harbor. Smalls, doubling as the captain, even donning the captain’s wide-brimmed straw hat to help to hide his face, responded with the proper coded signals at two Confederate checkpoints, including at Fort Sumter itself, and other defense positions. Cleared, Smalls sailed into the open seas. Once outside of Confederate waters, he had his crew raise a white flag and surrendered his ship to the blockading Union fleet."

After this action-adventure, Smalls' life becomes a war epic:

"According to the 1883 Naval Affairs Committee report, Smalls was engaged in approximately 17 military actions, including the April 7, 1863, assault on Fort Sumter and the attack at Folly Island Creek, S.C., two months later, where he assumed command of the Planter when, under “very hot fire,” its white captain became so “demoralized” he hid in the “coal-bunker.” For his valiancy, Smalls was promoted to the rank of captain himself, and from December 1863 on, earned $150 a month, making him one of the highest paid black soldiers of the war."

Thereafter, Smalls' life becomes a political suspense plot with a tragic ending: "Following the war, Smalls continued to push the boundaries of freedom as a first-generation black politician, serving in the South Carolina state assembly and senate, and for five nonconsecutive terms in the U.S. House of Representatives (1874-1886) before watching his state roll back Reconstruction in a revised 1895 constitution that stripped blacks of their voting rights. He died in Beaufort on February 22, 1915, in the same house behind which he had been born a slave[.]"

I had never heard of this guy, but I just love that account!

And sure, he couldn't reverse the march of national-level events, but he had obviously managed to obtain the house of the people who owned him at his birth. I'd say that's a moral win worthy of a PC!

 

[mostlylurking]

And sure, he couldn't reverse the march of national-level events, but he had obviously managed to obtain the house of the people who owned him at his birth.

True. 'Tragic' is the wrong word. Maybe 'bitter-sweet' is better, even if (to my non-native ears) too frivolous, considering that the topic is chattel slavery.

 

[AsenRG]

True. 'Tragic' is the wrong word. Maybe 'bitter-sweet' is better, even if (to my non-native ears) too frivolous, considering that the topic is chattel slavery.

Well, he got out of the slavery, became a soldier/sailor, a captain (!) and a politician - and obviously a man with sufficient means to purchase the house of his former masters. I'd say "bittersweet" fits my ears, though admittedly they're just as non-native as yours!

 

[chuckdee]

True. 'Tragic' is the wrong word. Maybe 'bitter-sweet' is better, even if (to my non-native ears) too frivolous, considering that the topic is chattel slavery.

Yeah, that's why I didn't know how to emoji that one. Stripping Blacks of their ability to vote (which, I'm sure, he wouldn't have even won his political successes) seems a bit more than bitter-sweet, definitely bordering on tragic.

 

[Chris Brady]

Leo Major
Leo Major’s story is so preposterous that Hollywood still hasn’t made a movie about it. A French-Canadian who saw action in the Normandy landings, Leo began his military career by capturing an armoured vehicle full of communications equipment, providing the Allies with invaluable intelligence. He then single-handedly took out a group of elite Nazi SS troops but lost his left eye after a dying enemy managed to ignite a phosphorus grenade. When a doctor tried to send him home, Leo reportedly replied that he only needed one eye to aim. He later broke several bones in his back, but again refused to be evacuated, returning to the battlefield to participate in the liberation of Holland.

During an early-morning reconnaissance mission at the Battle of the Scheldt, he spotted a German contingent in a village, most of them asleep. A typical soldier would have returned to report to a superior, but for a guy like Leo, this was an opportunity. He captured the German commander, and after killing a few soldiers, the entire company of 93 men surrendered to him. He then escorted them back to the Allied lines. Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up.

But Leo’s greatest feat was still to come. In April 1945, the Canadians were tasked with liberating the Dutch city of Zwolle. They planned to bombard the German positions with artillery until they surrendered. Leo was once again sent on a reconnaissance mission, this time with a friend. His superiors really should’ve known better. Realizing that an artillery barrage would also kill innocent civilians, Leo and his buddy Willie decided to liberate the city all by themselves. Unfortunately, around midnight, Willie was shot and killed. Enraged, Leo grabbed his friend’s weapon and gunned down two Germans, with the others fleeing in terror. He then proceeded to capture a different German vehicle and forced the driver to bring him to an enemy officer at a nearby tavern. Leo then informed the surprised officer that the town was surrounded by an overwhelming Canadian force and that an attack was imminent, before strolling out of the tavern and disappearing into the night.

The next step was to convince the Germans that what he had told the officer was true. Leo spent the rest of the night racing around the town, gunning down Nazis and throwing grenades like a one-man army. After seeing their comrades gunned down by a mad Canadian in an eyepatch, most enemy soldiers made the smart choice and surrendered. As the night wore on, Leo kept appearing at the Allied lines with groups of confused German prisoners—before returning to the city. His final feat was to clear out the local SS headquarters. By 4:00 AM, the Germans had abandoned the town. The artillery attack was cancelled, the city saved by a single man.

Leo received numerous medals for his deeds in World War II and earned even more in Korea. Leo Major died in 2008, but his memory lives on in Zwolle, where he is regarded as a hero.

 

[chuckdee]

Only that last link works- the first one gives warning through two different blockers and I'm not ignoring both and the second is a 404.

Here's a wikipedia link -

Léo Major - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

And that second link expanded

The legendary liberator of Zwolle - Excerpt » The Windmill news articles » goDutch

www.godutch.com

 

[Chris Brady]

Only that last link works- the first one gives warning through two different blockers and I'm not ignoring both and the second is a 404.

Here's a wikipedia link -

Léo Major - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

And that second link expanded

The legendary liberator of Zwolle - Excerpt » The Windmill news articles » goDutch

www.godutch.com

I copied it from another site. I haven't clicked the links, and given what you've just warned us about, NO ONE CLICK THE LINKS, PLEASE! I'm going to disable them,

 

[Giganotosaurus]

Only that last link works- the first one gives warning through two different blockers and I'm not ignoring both and the second is a 404.

Here's a wikipedia link -

Léo Major - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

And that second link expanded

The legendary liberator of Zwolle - Excerpt » The Windmill news articles » goDutch

www.godutch.com

Oh yeah, the guy who walked into a deserted town and had his legend get blown up to becoming Rambo.

 

[chuckdee]

Oh yeah, the guy who walked into a deserted town and had his legend get blown up to becoming Rambo.

Any references to the alternate take?

 

[Giganotosaurus]

Any references to the alternate take?

I mean I'm just reading the wikipedia article. According to it the events surrounding the liberation are hazy. The Dutch resistance was involved, he might have burnt down the local Gestapo office, etc.
Edit: Maybe some of our Dutch Pubbers can shed some light on the matter?

 

[ChalkLine]

Two-Gun Cohen (Warlord Era, China)

The real estate market in Edmonton experienced a decline with the advent of World War I. Without any income, Cohen joined the 218th Battalion, CEF. He became a sergeant and moved to Camp Sarcee in Calgary for training. He became known by local newspapers for his regular clashes with the law. On one occasion in October 1916, he was among thirteen soldiers who were charged with disturbing the peace after an altercation with the Calgary City Police. He was acquitted after serving as his own defence, and the Calgary Herald noted his "surprising knowledge of court procedures."

Cohen fought with the Canadian Railway Troops in Europe during World War I where part of his job involved supervising the Chinese Labour Corps. He also saw some fierce fighting at the Western Front, especially during the Third Battle of Ypres. After the war, he resettled in Canada. But the economy had declined and the days of the real estate boom were long over. Cohen looked for something new to do, and in 1922 he headed to China to help close a railway deal for Sun Yat-sen with Northern Construction and JW Stewart Ltd. After disembarking in Shanghai, Cohen went to see George Sokolsky, the New-York born journalist who worked for Sun's English-language Shanghai Gazette. Sokolsky arranged an interview for him with Eugene Chen, Sun's English language secretary. Cohen was hired, and soon ensconced himself at Sun’s home at 29 Rue Molière in the city’s French Concession. He then got right to work.

In Shanghai and Canton (Guangzhou), Cohen trained Sun's small armed forces to box and shoot, and told people that he was an aide-de-camp and an acting colonel in Sun Yat-sen's army. Fortunately for Cohen, his lack of proficiency in Chinese – he spoke a pidgin form of Cantonese at best – was not a problem since Sun, his wife Soong Ching-ling and many of their associates were Western-educated and spoke English. Cohen's colleagues started calling him Ma Kun (馬坤), and he soon became one of Sun's main protectors, shadowing the Chinese leader to conferences and war zones.

After one battle where he was nicked by a bullet, Cohen wondered what he would do if one of his arms were injured. He started carrying a second revolver, and found he was ambidextrous. The western community were intrigued by Sun's gun-toting protector and began calling him "Two-Gun Cohen."

Sun died of cancer in 1925, and Cohen went to work for a series of Southern Chinese Kuomintang leaders, from Sun's son, Sun Fo, and Sun's brother-in-law, the banker T. V. Soong, to such warlords as Li Jishen and Chen Jitang. He was also acquainted with Chiang Kai-shek, whom he knew from when Chiang was commandant of the Whampoa Military Academy, which was located outside of Canton. His dealings with Chiang, though, were minimal since Cohen was allied with southern leaders who were generally opposed to Chiang. Cohen ran security for his bosses and acquired weapons and gunboats. Eventually he earned the rank of acting general, though he never led any troops.

Cohen spent time in Hong Kong, including at the Hong Kong Jewish Club where he played poker and performed magic tricks. When the Japanese invaded China in 1937, Cohen eagerly joined the fight. He rounded up weapons for the Chinese and even did work for the British intelligence agency, Special Operations Executive (SOE). Cohen was able to prove that the Japanese were using poison gas to exterminate the Chinese masses. Cohen was in Hong Kong when the Japanese attacked in December 1941. He placed Soong Ching-ling and her sister Ai-ling onto one of the last planes out of the British colony.

Cohen stayed behind to fight, and when Hong Kong fell later that month, the Japanese imprisoned him at Stanley Internment Camp. There the Japanese badly beat him and he languished in Stanley until he was part of a rare prisoner exchange in late 1943.

Two-Gun Cohen - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[TristramEvans]

Peter Freuchen



The shortlist of Peter Freuchen’s accomplishments includes escaping an ice cave armed with his bare hands and frozen feces, escaping a death warrant issued by Third Reich officers, and being the fifth person to win the jackpot on the game show The $64,000 Question.

However, the life of adventurer/explorer/author/anthropologist Peter Freuchen can hardly be contained in a short list.

Freuchen was born in Denmark in 1886. His father was a businessman and wanted nothing more than a stable life for his son. So, at his father’s behest, Freuchen enrolled at the University of Copenhagen and began to study medicine. However, before long Freuchen realized that a life indoors was not for him. Where his father craved order and stability, Freuchen craved exploration and danger.

So naturally, he dropped out of the University of Copenhagen and began a life of exploration.



In 1906, he made his first expedition to Greenland. He and his friend Knud Rasmussen sailed from Denmark as far north as possible before leaving their ship and continuing by dogsled for over 600 miles. On their travels, they met and traded with the Inuit people while learning the language and accompanying them on hunting expeditions.

The Inuit people hunted walruses, whales, seals, and even polar bears, but Freuchen found himself right at home. After all, his 6’7 stature made him uniquely qualified to handle taking down a polar bear, and before long he had made himself a coat out of a polar bear he’d killed himself.

In 1910, Peter Freuchen and Rasmussen established a trading post, in Cape York, Greenland, naming it Thule. The name came from the term “Ultima Thule,” which to a medieval cartographer meant a place “beyond the borders of the known world.”

The post would serve as a base for seven expeditions, known as the Thule Expeditions, that would take place between 1912 and 1933.

Between 1910 and 1924, Freuchen lectured visitors to Thule on Inuit culture, and traveled around Greenland, exploring the previously unexplored Arctic. One of his first expeditions, part of the Thule Expeditions, was embarked upon to test a theory that claimed a channel divided Greenland and Peary Land. The expedition involved a 620-mile trek across the icy Greenland wasteland that culminated in Freuchen’s famous ice cave escape.

During the trip, which Freuchen claimed in his autobiography Vagrant Viking was the first successful trip across Greenland, the crew got caught in a blizzard. Freuchen attempted to take cover under a dogsled, but ultimately found himself completely buried in snow that quickly turned to ice. At the time, he hadn’t been carrying his usual assortment of daggers and spears, so he was forced to improvise — he fashioned himself a dagger out of his own feces and dug himself out of the cave.

His improvisation continued when he returned to camp, and found that his toes had become gangrenous and his leg had been taken over by frostbite. Doing what any hardened explorer would do, he amputated the gangrenous toes himself (sans anesthesia) and had his leg replaced with a peg.

From time to time, Freuchen would return home to his native Denmark. In the late 1920s, he joined the Social Democrats movement and became a regular contributor to Politiken, a political newspaper.

He also became the editor-in-chief of Ude of Hjemme, a magazine owned by the family of his second wife. He even became involved in the film industry, contributing to the Oscar-winning film Eskimo/Mala the Magnificent, which was based on a book written by him.

During World War II, Peter Freuchen found himself in the center of political drama. Freuchen never tolerated discrimination of any kind, and any time he heard someone express anti-Semitic views, he would approach them and, in all his 6’7″ glory, claim to be Jewish.

He was also actively involved with the Danish resistance and fought Nazi occupation in Denmark. In fact, he was so boldly anti-Nazi that Hitler himself saw him as a threat, and ordered him arrested and sentenced to death. Freuchen was arrested in France, but ultimately escaped the Nazis and fled to Sweden.

During his busy and exciting lifetime, Peter Freuchen managed to settle down three times.



He met his first wife while living in Greenland with the Inuit people. In 1911, Freuchen married an Inuit woman named Mequpaluk and had two children with her, a son named Mequsaq Avataq Igimaqssusuktoranguapaluk and a daughter named Pipaluk Jette Tukuminguaq Kasaluk Palika Hager.

After Mequpaluk succumbed to the Spanish Flu in 1921, Freuchen married a Danish woman named Magdalene Vang Lauridsen in 1924. Her father was the director of Denmark’s national bank and her family owned the Ude of Hjemme magazine that Freuchen would ultimately run. Freuchen and Lauridsen’s marriage would last 20 years before the pair split.

In 1945, after fleeing the Third Reich, Freuchen met Danish-Jewish fashion illustrator Dagmar Cohn. The pair moved to New York City to escape Nazi persecution, where Cohn had a job working for Vogue.

After he moved to New York, Peter Freuchen joined the New York Explorer’s Club, where a painting of him still hangs on the wall amongst the taxidermied heads of exotic wildlife. He lived out the rest of his days in relative quiet (for him) and eventually passed away at the age of 71 in 1957, three days after completing his final book Book of the Seven Seas.

His ashes were scattered over Thule, Greenland, where his life as an adventurer began.

 

[Gringnr]

+3 Dagger of Feces

 

[chuckdee]

+3 Dagger of Feces

And peg leg of fleeing (I mean, how do you escape captivity on a peg leg?)

 

[Nobohom]

This seemed vaguely appropriate.

 

[TristramEvans]

The main character in WW1? Wasn't that the Furry that assisted in the assassination of Ferdinand?

 

[Giganotosaurus]

The main character in WW1? Wasn't that the Furry that assisted in the assassination of Ferdinand?

This thread took a weird turn.

 

[TristramEvans]

This thread took a weird turn.

 

[AsenRG]

After he moved to New York, Peter Freuchen joined the New York Explorer’s Club, where a painting of him still hangs on the wall amongst the taxidermied heads of exotic wildlife.

...the rumours that they wanted his taxidermied head instead, but 1) it was seen as a possible sign of poor taste and 2) nobody dared to try getting the trophy, are totally unsubstantiated conjecture!

 

[Giganotosaurus]

Yeah, I'm not clicking that. I don't want to catch whatever's dwelling in the depths of the internet that this crawled out of.

 

[AsenRG]

Yeah, I'm not clicking that. I don't want to catch whatever's dwelling in the depths of the internet that this crawled out of.

Like, fleas?

 

[TristramEvans]

This submission is a bit of a twist, as in this case it is a village rather than an individual.

Our story begins in the Ethiopian city of Harar...



Also known as The City of Saints, Harar is an ancient walled city that was once an important stop on a major trade route in the ancient world, but now stands like it's been crystalized in Time. Their mountainous location that afforded them the protection to persist throughout history, prevented them getting connected to modernization when trains were introduced. The city now is only accessible by an eleven hour bus ride from the closest city or a propeller plane .

Centuries as a major commercial center connecting trade routes with the entire Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and Asia gave Harar a vibrant and eclectic culture that persists. And one of their most unique eccentricities is the city's relationships with a deadly predator.



We don't think much about Hyenas here in the Western World. I think many simply have a vague impression of a canine-like creature with a creepy laugh. The comic relief in The Lion King. A suprising number of people think they are simply scavangers and carcase-eaters, when they are actually simply opportunistic.

In reality Hyenas are related to cats, and they are also horrific murder machines. Like bears, Hyenas are some of the few animals left that view humans as a potential food source. And also like bears, they will generally avoid human contact (well, groups of healthy-looking men anyways) and stay away from civilization. But not to the part of starvation (or any easy opportunities when prey strays away from civilization).

I'm going to quote Adam Yves here, when asked if an unarmed human could win a fight with a Hyena:

"Ok first off, how I pity the unlucky soul that runs afoul of a marauding hyena. Trust me, you're in for the most miserable 90 to 120 seconds of your life. That's how long you have to discourage a hyena bent on attacking you. Two minutes, tops, and if the wild animal is still around then either you've killed it or it knows it will kill you.

Now let's look at the details. Ever seen those posts on survivalist forums about how to fight off a similarly determined wolf or dog? Notice how most of them tell you to resign yourself to getting bit and even recommend you offer a leg as bait so you can punish it with your arms? Yeah, that won't work here. Pound for pound, the hyena packs the nastiest bite of all mammals. Which means whatever part it bites, you will lose.

And it will bite you. People love to tell stories of human dexterity, of a select few who can outmaneuver a wild animal. I say we've started believing our own bedtime stories. Anyone who's seen a domestic dog at play knows our reflexes are simply no match for theirs. And a hyena is neither domestic nor a dog; it's a cat — adjacent. More cat than dog, anyway. Point is, you cannot escape its jaws.

But say you somehow do. Say you pull a Beowulf and grab it by the neck. You've gained control of the situation, right? Wrong.

[That neck is burlier than any] dude's considerable biceps. And it's on a wild animal used to raw physical battle...the neck of a 70kg creature accustomed to holding 300kg zebras in place with its jaws. Good luck trying to outwrestle it. I give you… 5-10 seconds before you get bit.

Your best bet would be to go for the eyes. Once you've somehow latched onto its neck, jam your fingers into those beady blacks hard. If you do it right, the pain will drive the hyena off.

That's if things go your way. But we both know they hardly do in these situations. So, let's talk about what happens when you get bit.

Aside from the blinding pain and the horrible, horrible sensation of bones breaking, this asshole will tug, hard. That's how they roll, just like wolves and dogs. Again, they wrestle on the regular with zebras and wildebeest, so you will lose your balance.

Even then she — because of course it's a she — won't stop tugging till something gives way. Her goal is to inflict a gaping wound so that blood loss weakens you. So she will bite hard, pull to tear, all the while watching you keenly to avoid counter blows. At the least sign of danger she will leap back nimbly, circle you for a bit, then dash in again for a lightning fast bite. Rinse and repeat till you're too weak and disoriented to fight back. That's when she'll go for your genitals.

All this changes if you have some sort of weapon, a stick or a knife. Then maybe you stand a chance. May the odds be ever in your favor."

All this, mind you, is against a single Hyena. Hyenas hunt in packs. In fact the size of the prey they're most likely to go after is determined by pack size, meaning a human is most likely to get attacked by a large pack.



Throughout history, Hyenas were long associated with witches. "'Their loud, staccato "giggles" are like those of a mad person, and they are mixed with deep growls and howls, all together the cacophony of a very aggressive orgy…for a frightened human in the dark, many such sounds together are hauntingly human, supernatural, a witches Sabbath (Hans Kruuk, The Spotted Hyena: A Study of Predation and Social Behaviour, 2014). They were linked to the afterlife in Bronze Age myths. They were labelled as foul, unclean, and grave-robbers, and shunned by mankind.

Then, in the 19th century, a famine lead a large pack of Hyenas that made their homes in the mountains surrounding Harar to begin targeting the livestock at night. Local folklore states it was a farmer who first had the idea to placate the hyenas by feeding them porridge, to dissuade them from attacking the farm animals. Other legends suggest some group of saints on a mountaintop came up with the idea. However it originated, it was successfully put it into widespread practice and was the origin of a symbiotic relationship between Harar and this pack of Hyenas that developed and continues to this day (even passed into city law in the 1960s).

Every night, packs of Hyenas enter the city and everyone from butchers to tradesmen leaves out scraps and remains for them, and they are given the run of the streets. The Hyenas have in response established smaller territorial packs that cover certain neighbourhoods of the the city, and terrifying turf battles occasionally occur.

But during the day the Hyenas have become ...well, not domesticated by any stretch of the imagination, but content to coexist peacefully with humans. A tourist spectacle developed in Harar where "Hyena Men" will feed Hyenas from meat held in their mouths for a crowd.



They are an accepted part of the city and it's environs and even children will feed and befriend the wild co-habitants. Ameliorated by a safe and consistent food source, the Hyenas have shown capable to adapting their nature to maintain peaceful relations with the Harar peoples.



The origin of this symbiotic relationship between men and their natural enemies is celebrated annually each year in Harar's Day of Ashura festival, wherein the hyenas are provided with porridge prepared with pure butter. The hyenas seem to have developed their own curious parallel tradition where in this instance the Hyena "clan leaders" taste the porridge before the others. Moreover, the Hyena's manner of eating this porridge is ascribed oracular significance.

 

[CRKrueger]

Extorted an entire town to feed them nightly - yep, more cat than dog.

 

[Brock Savage]

This was actually pretty funny - I thought the the fursona was pathetic and cringe but the weird pedantic Reddit losers who commented on it were even worse!

 

[AsenRG]

This was actually pretty funny - I thought the the fursona was pathetic and cringe but the weird pedantic Reddit losers who commented on it were even worse!

...what the fuck is a fursona? A fancy word for "furry"?



BTW, it seems there's a new vogue as well: therians!

• A therian identifies as a species of non-human animal on every level except physical. They often engage in their animal identity's behaviors.
• You may be a therian if you notice yourself shifting (getting impulses to behave as a non-human animal) or if you remember a past life as a specific animal.
• There are other unique types of therians, such as polytherians (who identify as multiple species) and paleotherians (who identify as extinct animals).

 

[AsenRG]

This submission is a bit of a twist, as in this case it is a village rather than an individual.

Our story begins in the Ethiopian city of Harar...

View attachment 72178View attachment 72179

Also known as The City of Saints, Harar is an ancient walled city that was once an important stop on a major trade route in the ancient world, but now stands like it's been crystalized in Time. Their mountainous location that afforded them the protection to persist throughout history, prevented them getting connected to modernization when trains were introduced. The city now is only accessible by an eleven hour bus ride from the closest city or a propeller plane .

Centuries as a major commercial center connecting trade routes with the entire Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and Asia gave Harar a vibrant and eclectic culture that persists. And one of their most unique eccentricities is the city's relationships with a deadly predator.

View attachment 72181

We don't think much about Hyenas here in the Western World. I think many simply have a vague impression of a canine-like creature with a creepy laugh. The comic relief in The Lion King. A suprising number of people think they are simply scavangers and carcase-eaters, when they are actually simply opportunistic.

In reality Hyenas are related to cats, and they are also horrific murder machines. Like bears, Hyenas are some of the few animals left that view humans as a potential food source. And also like bears, they will generally avoid human contact (well, groups of healthy-looking men anyways) and stay away from civilization. But not to the part of starvation (or any easy opportunities when prey strays away from civilization).

I'm going to quote Adam Yves here, when asked if an unarmed human could win a fight with a Hyena:

"Ok first off, how I pity the unlucky soul that runs afoul of a marauding hyena. Trust me, you're in for the most miserable 90 to 120 seconds of your life. That's how long you have to discourage a hyena bent on attacking you. Two minutes, tops, and if the wild animal is still around then either you've killed it or it knows it will kill you.

Now let's look at the details. Ever seen those posts on survivalist forums about how to fight off a similarly determined wolf or dog? Notice how most of them tell you to resign yourself to getting bit and even recommend you offer a leg as bait so you can punish it with your arms? Yeah, that won't work here. Pound for pound, the hyena packs the nastiest bite of all mammals. Which means whatever part it bites, you will lose.

And it will bite you. People love to tell stories of human dexterity, of a select few who can outmaneuver a wild animal. I say we've started believing our own bedtime stories. Anyone who's seen a domestic dog at play knows our reflexes are simply no match for theirs. And a hyena is neither domestic nor a dog; it's a cat — adjacent. More cat than dog, anyway. Point is, you cannot escape its jaws.

But say you somehow do. Say you pull a Beowulf and grab it by the neck. You've gained control of the situation, right? Wrong.

[That neck is burlier than any] dude's considerable biceps. And it's on a wild animal used to raw physical battle...the neck of a 70kg creature accustomed to holding 300kg zebras in place with its jaws. Good luck trying to outwrestle it. I give you… 5-10 seconds before you get bit.

Your best bet would be to go for the eyes. Once you've somehow latched onto its neck, jam your fingers into those beady blacks hard. If you do it right, the pain will drive the hyena off.

That's if things go your way. But we both know they hardly do in these situations. So, let's talk about what happens when you get bit.

Aside from the blinding pain and the horrible, horrible sensation of bones breaking, this asshole will tug, hard. That's how they roll, just like wolves and dogs. Again, they wrestle on the regular with zebras and wildebeest, so you will lose your balance.

Even then she — because of course it's a she — won't stop tugging till something gives way. Her goal is to inflict a gaping wound so that blood loss weakens you. So she will bite hard, pull to tear, all the while watching you keenly to avoid counter blows. At the least sign of danger she will leap back nimbly, circle you for a bit, then dash in again for a lightning fast bite. Rinse and repeat till you're too weak and disoriented to fight back. That's when she'll go for your genitals.

All this changes if you have some sort of weapon, a stick or a knife. Then maybe you stand a chance. May the odds be ever in your favor."

All this, mind you, is against a single Hyena. Hyenas hunt in packs. In fact the size of the prey they're most likely to go after is determined by pack size, meaning a human is most likely to get attacked by a large pack.

View attachment 72180

Throughout history, Hyenas were long associated with witches. "'Their loud, staccato "giggles" are like those of a mad person, and they are mixed with deep growls and howls, all together the cacophony of a very aggressive orgy…for a frightened human in the dark, many such sounds together are hauntingly human, supernatural, a witches Sabbath (Hans Kruuk, The Spotted Hyena: A Study of Predation and Social Behaviour, 2014). They were linked to the afterlife in Bronze Age myths. They were labelled as foul, unclean, and grave-robbers, and shunned by mankind.

Then, in the 19th century, a famine lead a large pack of Hyenas that made their homes in the mountains surrounding Harar to begin targeting the livestock at night. Local folklore states it was a farmer who first had the idea to placate the hyenas by feeding them porridge, to dissuade them from attacking the farm animals. Other legends suggest some group of saints on a mountaintop came up with the idea. However it originated, it was successfully put it into widespread practice and was the origin of a symbiotic relationship between Harar and this pack of Hyenas that developed and continues to this day (even passed into city law in the 1960s).

Every night, packs of Hyenas enter the city and everyone from butchers to tradesmen leaves out scraps and remains for them, and they are given the run of the streets. The Hyenas have in response established smaller territorial packs that cover certain neighbourhoods of the the city, and terrifying turf battles occasionally occur.

But during the day the Hyenas have become ...well, not domesticated by any stretch of the imagination, but content to coexist peacefully with humans. A tourist spectacle developed in Harar where "Hyena Men" will feed Hyenas from meat held in their mouths for a crowd.

View attachment 72182

They are an accepted part of the city and it's environs and even children will feed and befriend the wild co-habitants. Ameliorated by a safe and consistent food source, the Hyenas have shown capable to adapting their nature to maintain peaceful relations with the Harar peoples.

View attachment 72183View attachment 72184

The origin of this symbiotic relationship between men and their natural enemies is celebrated annually each year in Harar's Day of Ashura festival, wherein the hyenas are provided with porridge prepared with pure butter. The hyenas seem to have developed their own curious parallel tradition where in this instance the Hyena "clan leaders" taste the porridge before the others. Moreover, the Hyena's manner of eating this porridge is ascribed oracular significance.

View attachment 72185

I just love this story!

Now, I don't think that hyenas are as dangerous as presented in the article - I've played with guard dogs and they didn't manage to get my hand when I was giving it to them, despite me being 30 kgs over my ideal weight (and 20 kgs over current) - but managing to co-exist with a dangerous species and turning the animals into a sort of friends?
Cooperation>conflict, especially with animals.
So, yeah, my deepest, heartfelt, sincere congratulations go to the people of Harar!