I Used to Know That_ Stuff You Forgot From School - Caroline Taggart [44]
Ferdinand Magellan (c. 1480-1521, Portuguese): leader of the first expedition to sail around the world, although he was murdered in the East Indies. Like Columbus, he was trying to reach the East by sailing west, and this took him through the Straits of Magellan at the southern tip of South America.
Hernán Cortés (1485-1547, Spanish): did for the Aztecs in Mexico (whose emperor was Montezuma) much the same as Pizarro had done in Peru.
Francis Drake (1540-96, English): best known of the Elizabethan seafarers who were in constant battle with the Spaniards over control of the Caribbean (the Spanish Main) and its riches. Drake—in a ship called the Pelican, later renamed the Golden Hind—was the first Englishman to sail around the world. He was also pivotal in the English defeat of the Spanish Armada.
James Cook (1728-79, British): one of the great navigators of all time, made three expeditions to the Pacific in an attempt to discover the supposed great southern continent. He became the first European to land in New Zealand and also charted parts of Australia and Antarctica. His famous ships were the Endeavour and the Resolution. He is also remembered for devising a diet of limes—high in vitamin C, which protected his men against scurvy (the source of the nickname “limey” for the British). He was murdered in Hawaii.
Robert Falcon Scott (1868-1912, British): failed by a matter of days to become the first person to reach the South Pole, and died, with the rest of his party, in the course of the return journey. One of his companions was Captain Oates, who—knowing that his weakness was endangering the lives of the others—went out into the blizzard saying, “I may be some time.”
Roald Amundsen (1872-1928, Norwegian): the one who made it to the South Pole—and back again. He was also the first to sail through the Northwest Passage, the sea route from Pacific to Atlantic along the north coast of North America.
GEOGRAPHY
“Geography is about maps,” said E. Clerihew Bentley, and although geographers would take offense to that definition, a lot of what we learned as a kid was about the stuff that filled maps. The last section of this chapter should really be classed as paleontology, but nobody told us that at the time.
The Countries of the World
The world is divided into seven continents: Europe, Asia, North America, South America, Africa, Australia, and Antarctica. It’s a matter of debate to which continent you assign various island nations, because a continent is by definition a continuous landmass. The islands of the Pacific are usually grouped together as Oceania, so for the purpose of this list, I am going to use that convention and place Australia under that heading, too. And I’m going to create a continent called Central America and include in it all the islands of the Caribbean, as well as the stretch of mainland south of Mexico.
Antarctica contains no countries—instead, it is a stateless territory protected from exploitation by an international treaty.
The countries listed here (with their capitals, continents, and any change of name since 1945) are the 192 members of the United Nations, the most recent being Montenegro, which split from Serbia in 2006; Switzerland, that long-term bastion of neutrality, finally succumbed in 2002. And they are given in the alphabetical order used by the United Nations, which provides such delights as The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, coming under T. SU or Y after a country’s name means that it was formerly part of the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia.
The 50 United States of America
Listed below are the 50 states with their nicknames, their capitals, and the date they entered the Union. Those marked with an asterisk are the original 13 colonies that declared themselves independent from British rule in 1776. Those marked with two asterisks seceded from the Union during the Civil War and formed the Confederate States of America; all had been readmitted by 1870.