John Leake writes:
Christopher Nolan’s recent film, The Odyssey, reminded me of Heinrich Schliemann (the man who is credited with discovering the ancient city of Troy in 1873. I’d always heard he was an enterprising man, but I had no idea—until I read his biography today—about the extraordinary life he led. Everything about it strikes me as so wildly improbable that no writer of fiction would dare make it up.
Schliemann was born in Neubukow, Mecklenburg in 1822, the son of an impoverished Lutheran pastor. According to his autobiographical accounts, when he was a boy of eight, he read Homer’s Iliad. When his father told him that the city of Troy might have actually existed in ancient times, he resolved to find it when he grew up.
When he was a teenager, his mother died and his father ran off with another woman, leaving him to fend for himself. For years he worked as a laborer and then as a grocer’s apprentice before seeking his fortune abroad.
In 1841, he boarded a ship bound for Venezuela, but the vessel was wrecked off the Dutch coast. He survived and made his way to Amsterdam, where he learned to speak Dutch with astonishing speed and got a job in a trading house. He spent all his spare time studying foreign languages, never going to the pub, socializing with friends, or pursuing girls. He eventually acquiring proficiency in Russian, French, English, Spanish, and several other languages, including ancient Greek.
Finish reading: https://open.substack.com/pub/petermcculloughmd/p/the-greatest-adventurer-in-history