› added 5 years ago

73

TIL Jeanne Barret, expert botanist, was the first woman to have completed a voyage of circumnavigation of the globe. She enlisted in Bougainville expedition (1766-1769) disguised as a man and supposedly as her boyfriend's valet, the botanist Philibert Commerson

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

eoEE TIL of Tom Crean, an Irish Antartic explorer who along with Ernest Shackleton and two other men, sailed 1,500km in a life boat across Drake passage to save the lives of 22 men stranded on Elephant island. Known as one of the most extraordinary feats of seamanship and navigation in recorded history.
KAla TIL that Walt Disney originally planned to continually release Fantasia while replacing old segments with new ones, so that viewers would never see the same film twice.
wLeVo TIL of Tsujigiri or 'crossroad killing' the practice whereby a Samurai would test the sharpness of a new katana by attacking a random passerby.
oRDKA TIL that Neptune was discovered in 1846 not by accident, but because astronomers noticed Uranus was wobbling off course. Mathematicians used Newton’s laws to predict where a hidden planet should be and when they pointed a telescope there, Neptune was right where the math said it would be.
MeeyK TIL that the Mandate of Heaven, which legitimized the rule of Chinese Emperors, differed from the Divine Right of Kings in that natural disasters and revolts were seen as a sign from Heaven that the Emperor had lost the mandate and therefore deserved to be overthrown.