Do you think you are a well-rounded individual?

 

Frederick Gustavus Burnaby (1842-1885) was more of a well-rounded individual than you, I or anybody else will ever be. Here’s why.

– He was said to be the strongest man in the British army, which he joined in 1859.

– He regularly wrote for The Times, Vanity Fair, and numerous other journals.

– He could break a horseshoe with his hands.

– He crossed the Channel in a balloon.

– He claimed to be descended from Edward I.

– He could hold a billiard cue horizontally and steady, gripping only the tip, with his arm outstretched.

– He could also vault over a billiard table using only his left hand.

– He travelled a thousand miles by sleigh, from Orenburg to Khiva, with only two other people, in one of the coldest winters then on record. His servant was ‘a […] salacious […] Tartar dwarf named Nazar’.

– Though married, Nazar ‘lost his heart to an Ursk siren’.

– While on this journey across Asia, his beard snapped off due to frostbite.

– He wrote several bestselling books.

– At the age of 13, he rowed from Windsor to Shrewsbury and back again (600 miles) in a one-pair skiff.

– He once carried two ponies under his arms, ‘as if they had been cats’.

– His wife, Elizabeth Hawkins-Whitshed, was a mountaineer and also probably the first ever female film-maker.

– He once twisted a kitchen poker around a friend’s neck, as a joke, in the presence of the future King Edward VII.

– He inspired Prince Charles’s 60th birthday portrait.

– He was fluent in English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, and Arabic. And was also proficient in Italian.

– He became extremely famous and you could buy Burnaby crockery and playing cards.

– Queen Victoria reportedly fainted on hearing of his death.

– He could also play the cornet.

These facts are all here and/or here and/or in Peter Hopkirk’s The Great Game.