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Anne Bonny

Benjamin Harrison

Henry Ford

Frances Shand Kydd, the mother of Diana, Princess of Wales.

Kevin Bacon, American actor

Bing Crosby, a singer of my parents' generation, who sang his way through lots of movies.

Charles Dickens

Daniel Defoe who wrote the story of Robinson Crusoe, based on the true story of Alexander Selkirk, marooned in the Juan Fernández archipelago, off the coast of Chile, by William Dampier, the English buccaneer who visited Australia three times, a century before Sydney was founded in 1788.

(I saw Defoe's grave in London yesterday!)

Darcey Bussel, a retired English ballerina

Bruce Kardashian, famous years ago but now called something else.

coracle wrote:(I saw Defoe's grave in London yesterday!)

Ooh! Hi, Coracle, Wow! Where exactly? I've heard Matthew Flinders' statue is at Euston station, isn't it?

Karlmann I, (or Carloman) , king of the Franks 751-771.

(Special thanks to Wikipedia.)

@wagga: Interestingly, the man who rescued Selkirk, Captain Woodes Rogers, later went on a near-successful mission to wipe out piracy in the Caribbean. Marooned by a pirate, rescued by a pirate hunter!

Ken Done, an Australian painter.

Cleander wrote:@wagga: Interestingly, the man who rescued Selkirk, Captain Woodes Rogers, later went on a near-successful mission to wipe out piracy in the Caribbean. Marooned by a pirate, rescued by a pirate hunter!

It gets even funnier. Did you know that William Dampier, a sometimes member of the British Navy, & otherwise a privateer, actually was a navigator of that expedition to rescue Selkirk? And that William Dampier's published journals of his journeys contributed to technological discoveries such as the measurement of longitude?

David Livingstone -famous for being a jungle missionary who was "presumed" upon.

waggawerewolf27 wrote:It gets even funnier. Did you know that William Dampier, a sometimes member of the British Navy, & otherwise a privateer, actually was a navigator of that expedition to rescue Selkirk? And that William Dampier's published journals of his journeys contributed to technological discoveries such as the measurement of longitude?

I'd totally forgot that about him being Rogers' navigator! But yes, I was aware of his book's existence, although I haven't read it.
Other fun fact: Selkirk was actually in great health when his rescuers found him. After he got off his fish-and-goat's-meat diet, and on to their salt-beef and hardtack, his health noticeably declined, much to the befuddlement of the sailors!

Lord Louis Mountbatten, a very famous British navy type, the uncle of the current British Monarch's consort, who presided over the partition of India & Pakistan in 1947, & who was assassinated in Sligo, in 1979, by the IRA (Irish Republican Army).

Cleander wrote:I'd totally forgot that about him being Rogers' navigator! But yes, I was aware of his book's existence, although I haven't read it.

It isn't the sort of book that would be freely available in your local library. More like the sort of book that would take half of the library's budget to buy, even on Amazon, would be on permanent loan to some research institute or other, or on some sort of long lost overdue book list, or only available in state, university & college libraries where they study such matters. Or if the library has any sense, it might possibly be in the reference section of your library. Or else put into a restricted lending special collection called "Australiana", "Famous maritime explorers" or whatever suits the occasion, including Pirates of the Caribbean. If you go to the Western Australian Maritime Museum, at any rate, at any time in your life, you will find heaps about this famous man, in the adjoining bookshop.

Matthew C. Perry

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