Many an military expedition has go out into the bully Unknown seek Adventure . And who knows ? They may even have ground it .
Many jaunt are lost only , or all of their members died . And since nobody come back , there ’s no tell how their adventure turned out , or what they found . So these substantial - spirit stories are cry out for a novelist to make them well , by append zombies or strange forgoten realms to the mixture . Here are 10 veridical - life journeying that would make howling skill fable or fantasy Word of God .
Top image:~Yanimator on Deviant Art .
10 . Henry Every
This tilt is full of tragedy and so it should get out with a somebody who ends up happy . Or should it ? Henry Every was a infamous pirate , in the decidedly uncomedic and unromantic sense of the word . Inside one year of plagiarism , Every ruled the seas around The Cape of Good Hope , with a pirate fleet of as many as five boat . His biggest catch was the Gang - i - Sawai , part of the Grand Mogul of India ’s convoy . Every ’s ship push for half a day , before the other watercraft give up . Henry ’s crowd then come on board and did various frightful things to the passengers , including torturing them for information about where the loot lay away around the ship were . In the end , Every and his gang sailed aside with 600,000 Lebanese pound worth of for - real , Au - and - silver treasure . They bribed governor and seek to barter for free pardon , and a few were caught and hanged . In the end , despite a huge bounty put on their heads , Every and many of his crew disappeared . Some say they set up their own country somewhere . Some say they hold out as fake aristocrats . Some say Every break , penniless , a year after . Whatever their actual fate , what we have is a sociopath with a wad of ill - gotten gold .
This could rig the phase for a morality play , in which the Devil amount to get his due , or a sour , fantastical drama in which Every tries to bribe his way into heaven , or stock cursed gold fancy menu .
9 . Lawrence Oates
If you think ‘ Keep Calm and Carry On , ’ was the best example of Brits stiffening their upper lips , you have never take heed Lawrence Oates ’ last recorded words . He was part of Captain Robert Scott ’s ill - fatten out race to the South Pole . They found that Roald Amundsen ’s squad made it there first , and on the direction back encountered one difficulty after another . The squad and their dog-iron died off one by one , until at last four men were in a tent , in a blizzard , with dwindle away imagination . Oates had weakened severely , and recognized that his weakened province was take up the other men in their attempt to extend to a supply station . They refused to go away him , so he decide to leave them .
Seeing the blizzard out of doors , he got up from his sleeping bag , did n’t bother with his boot , since his feet were too frost - bitten to be able-bodied to put them on without pain , and walk out of the collapsible shelter with the intelligence , “ I am just blend outside , and may be some time . ” I will have a few selection intelligence about the Scott expedition further down , but even I have to recognise that , if there were an honour for dying nonchalantly , Oates would have won it twice . Once for the give-and-take he emit when he leave the collapsible shelter , and once for the fact that his consistency was never found . No doubt he felt it would have been ‘ carrying on about it too much , ’ to have his body turn up month after the fact . Fantasy is too florid for this guy wire . He had to have walked into a crack in reality and disappeared into some other kingdom . He was suit for that . I cerebrate , no matter what weirdness the universe threw at him , he would have considered it ‘ a bother ’ to get riled up about it , and would have just cool his way around spacetime , exploring thing and being nonchalantly heroic .
8 . Ninth Legion
The 4,000 men in the host were raised near Pompeii to fight for Rome . The Ninth Legion was a well - sort out and well - traveled group that went up from Pompeii , that fight across Europe , and that terminate up in Scotland , where it disappeared in 109 AD . Although the Ninth Legion had been ceaselessly in records from 65 BC , suddenly all mention of it vanished . This legion ’s story has been think many time , but unremarkably , it ’s little more than the Picts wipe out most of the men while the last subsister finds honey with a comely Scotch adult female who displays remarkably small body haircloth during the sexual love tantrum .
This taradiddle cries out for an foreign abduction , a clip buckle , a wormhole which leads to New Rome being established on an alien world , or any other type of crazy scientific discipline fable tailspin . I ’d even take them being debunk to some early form of asteroid , mutating , live subterraneous , and running an underground imperium that lasts to this twenty-four hour period . Just not another comely Scottish love story , please .
7 . Roald Amundsen
I ’m put Roald Amundsen at seven and Lawrence Oates at nine because there just have to be some lists , somewhere , in which the bozo who really made it to the South Pole outranks the guys who did n’t make it to the South Pole . Amundsen ’s team was the first to make it to the South Pole . He is always overshadowed by Scott ’s squad because a tragical last often is more interesting than actual achievement . ( I suspect that he ’s also overshadow because if you ’re able to read this language , you apportion a cultural link to a land that has an interest in Scott over Amundsen . )
But if you want a tragical fib , hear this one on for size . Amundsen made it back from the South Pole . He spent his life hear charge that it was n’t fair that he did n’t let Scott cognise that he was speed him to the Pole ( and you’re able to bet that if he had permit Scott make love , ‘ the challenger drove Scott to his decease , ’ would have been the storey of the twenty-four hours ) . In June of 1928 , a team of different explorers went missing near the North Pole . Amundsen could have shrugged and gone back to his tea leaf . Those guys were his competition , after all . Instead he grabbed a plane and aviate off to see them and bring them back safely . He was n’t envision again . Since then , debris thought to be from his voyage has been regain in the area . A map with a mark evidence where the missing team was stand for to have been . A individual board . Nothing more . A novel should be written about Roald , perchance , flying off to somewhere where they could value his accomplishment . Valhalla , perhaps ?
6 . Felix Moncla and Robert Wilson
In 1953 , Lieutenants Moncla and Wilson were sent off in a F-89 - C Scorpio to dog after an unknown aircraft descend down from the Canadian edge . They were over Lake Michigan . Wilson was the radar manipulator , and tried to give chase the UFO , but was unable to . radiolocation operators at Truax Air Force Base near Madison , Wisconsin tried to direct the Scorpio the Scorpion to the flying objective . The two dots on the radio detection and ranging CRT screen merged , and both faded away . Other planes were dispatched , but no tracing could be ground of anything . The Air Force ’s statement was that Moncla got vertigo and crash , and that the airplane he was after was a Canadian Air Force plane . Canada denied that any planer of theirs was in the area . What really happened , whether it ’s in the sky or under Lake Michigan , is up to the novelist .
5 . Antoine de Saint - Exupéry
Well , this one just flat - out writes itself . He ’s the source of The Little Prince , a narrative about an intergalactic traveler who mysteriously appear and disappear into the stars . The total point of this book is that the reality depends almost entirely on how you choose to face at it . And on July 31 , 1944 , the fly Allied Command Europe took off on a spy missionary post for the Allies and was never see again . They take to have found the wreckage of his plane , sixty age later , but even if that is the airplane , they do n’t sleep with why it went down , nor why there was no attempt at communicating before it did . And of course there ’s no body . What happened ? face at the asterisk , reckon out if they ’re Bell or tear , and settle what you believe . Then write it down .
4 . Glenn Miller
This , being one of the more modern disappearances , deserve a more modern , science fabricated coming . Glenn Miller was a band drawing card and wind instrumentalist . His most far-famed recordings , like In the Mood , Chattanooga Choo - Choo , and Pennsylvania 6 - 5000 , have been find out by people in every generation , if only in the trailer for movies of a sure time menstruum . And that time period was draw to a close at the end of World War II , when Glenn Miller was flying , along with a few other mass , in a aeroplane from England to the recently liberated France to think about the troops . He never arrived in France .
There were many rumor . One was that confederative planer , unload their turkey at a certain country accidentally caused so much gentle wind to-do that they dash Miller ’s planing machine . Another tale claims he died in a Gallic house of prostitution and the military machine made it wait like a mysterious plane crash to report it up . Whatever it was , his plane was never found . This would be an fantabulous clock time - change of location novel , with Miller continue in an era that call for him , brighten spirits , righting wrong , and fighting Nazis . Alternately , he could shoot around time to every era , look the conflict in the way society work over meter , and bringing the proficient ( or worst ) of the wartime spirit to each time period he visited .
3 . Sir John Franklin
In 1845 Europeans were still await for room around that teasing continent acknowledge as North America . Looking for The North West Passage , Sir John Franklin head a crew of 128 men off through the Arctic . The first bodies were ascertain in 1854 . Over the next century and a one-half , other keepsake from the expedition were happen , but the net indication of what pass off to the crew was n’t discovered until the 1980s , when actual preserved bodies were found frozen in the ice . The largest intact find was a group of bodies beside a sled load with curtain rod , button polish , handkerchiefs , and a writing desk .
The most wide - guard hypothesis is that the jumper cable that had been used to solder the rump of food on the expedition leach lead into the food for thought supply . atomic number 82 toxic condition causes hallucination . That might explain the miscellany on the sledge . Another theory holds that the distilled body of water supply they used had been contaminated by some hallucinogenic drug . Either way , the men were not in their right brain when they loaded up a sled with button polish , and so they were see something . The intersection of folly , a rough environment , and the fact that most of the wreckage and crew were never reclaim could be wrench into a humdinger of a fantasy novel . What if , in their delirium , they were seeing things that other people could n’t ? What if they see thing that were expression of their personal truth , or their confidential religious convictions ? There are a XII ways this novel could go .
2 . Theodosia Burr Alston
Here ’s a heavy American secret in which pirates and curses intersect , but not quite in the traditional way . Pirates may have nobble Theodosia , but she was the one to institute the curse . She was the girl of Aaron Burr , the human who shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel . While being the Vice President . duel , by the way of life , was a crime in New York , the state both Hamilton and Burr were in at the time . Burr was charged , but fly the state , and eventually returned to Washington DC to fetch up his term as VP . Now that ’s the clobber that riles up a ghost . Theodosia was the Malus pumila of her male parent ’s center , and by all accounts something of an intellectual prognostication , learning many languages by years twelve . She was married to James Alston , but still very much acted as her father ’s agent and in his interests .
In 1812 she boarded The Patriot , a Mya arenaria going from South Carolina to New York . The boat , and everyone on it , disappeared . The hex angle is set out quite understandably . The plagiarizer angle ? Well , the possibility was that Theodosia became the schoolma’am of a pirate captain ( you have it off the open morals of those rational prodigies ) , whose ship also disappeared into the wild blue yonder . That ’s how amazing this level is . It has a someone on a ship that vanish going on to board another ship . . . that also disappears . Actually , forget pirate and curses . This is some Inception - score stuff and nonsense .
1 . Percy Fawcett
In 1925 , Colonel Percy Fawcett , who had research extensively in South America , went off into the Brazilian jungle to find The Lost City of Z. He did n’t make out exactly where it was , but he was certain , after studying old records and hear to legends , that it was in there somewhere . He was so trusted that he drive his Logos , Jack , along to help attend for it . At the last outpost that maintained contact with the westerly Earth , he write a letter to his married woman telling her they were moving into newfangled territory . They did n’t follow back .
Over the ensue decades , mass have search for the lost city , for Fawcett , and for both . Some claimed to have found them . There have been sightings of Fawcett , and some of his self-will were recovered from several unlike local tribe , which fueled rumors that he had been killed by them or had gotten amnesia and joined them . In 1996 an expedition go out to receive Fawcett ’s remain , only to run into a grouping of local who were n’t interested in hoi polloi exploring near them . The expeditiousness was held for week until they were allow go , minus decade of thousands of dollars deserving of equipment . One archaeologist , Michael Heckenberger , claimed to have find oneself the stiff of the city . Three other scientist , using Google Earth , claimed that they found the metropolis somewhere else . A reporter , David Grann , travelled into Brazil and found a person who claimed to be the last soul to see Fawcett . The person say him a simple tale about Fawcett : He went over the hill and never came back . Can you guess of a better first air for a novel ?
Oates Image : National Library of New Zealand
Amundsen Image : NOAA
Miller Image : Sweetlyrics.com
Burr - Alston Image : Yale Library
Fawcett Image : Wiki Commons
Percy Fawcett ikon : Wiki Commons
ViaCBS News , Straight Dope , Heritage Key , Travel Explorations , Aero - News , Royal Naval Museum , The way of life of Pirates , About.com , Unmuseumand theNY Times .
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