A framework to my journey was provided by the exploits of the great Andean adventurers of the past, one of the most influential of whom was the German scientist Alexander von Humboldt.
And the image of drunk, depressive adventurers was old hat, Heitman argued.
With his friend and fellow poet Théophile Gautier, Baudelaire was a founder member of the Club des Hachichins – an elite group of intellectuals and spiritual adventurers (the club also included the painter Eugène Delacroix and the poet Gérard de Nerval).
If we can take off our health-and-safety blinkers for a moment, we may also realise that the photos, videos and stories produced by rooftoppers – many of them highly experienced adventurers – make the city a richer place to live.
On my mother's side I had ancestors who hailed from the Italian Alps, where so many of the great Andean climbers and adventurers originated.
He can justly be compared with British adventurers such as Robert Byron, the interwar traveller who wrote the "Road to Oxiana".
None more so than the country's businessmen, whose exuberant expansionism has led to them being dubbed, the "new conquistadores"—the heirs to adventurers like Hernán Cortés, who built the Spanish Empire.The purchase of the British Airport Authority (BAA) may, admittedly, not rank quite as high in the annals of history as the conquest of Mexico.
A group of rich adventurers, among them James Cameron, a film director with a penchant for science fiction, announced that they planned to boldly go into the void to mine asteroids for precious metals.
Land-hungry Russian peasants followed, as well as religious sectarians and Lithuanian and Swedish mercenaries.The adventurers did not themselves hunt the fur-bearing animals, hunting the natives instead.
These were "homebodies", "adventurers", "colonisers", "conquistadors" and "citizens of the world".
Hedge funds, those bold adventurers of the financial markets, have lost pots of money as markets have fallen sharply, which is bad enough.
