New Explorers on the OurPluto Ballot, April 2

We have added three new historic explorers to the OurPluto ballot today. Keep those great ideas coming in! I have been learning so much.

Several people nominated the renowned 10th-century explorer and cartographer Muhammad al-Idrisi. He traveled as far west as Ireland and as far east as China, mapping much of the known world in the process. His exquisite maps were still being used centuries later. The title of his compendium of geographic information roughly translates from the Arabic as The Pleasure of Him Who Longs to Cross the Horizons. How appropriate it will be for a spacecraft named New Horizons to memorialize his work!

We also learned about for Hyecho, a Korean Buddhist monk who lived in the 8th century. The nomination from East Asia reads as follows: Hyecho was the first man to travel across the Asian continent, from far east to far west, by sea and land and to record his journey. He wrote a travelogue, consisting of originally 11,300 characters, called Memoir of the pilgrimage to the five kingdoms of India during his journey. The work of Hyecho offers a full account of a long journey that lasted four years spanning 9,000 kilometers in distance by ship, and 11,000 kilometers by land. To this day, It is praised as a valuable archeological and anthropological reference for its unprecedentedly comprehensive scope and depth.

Looking back to the way home under the reflection of moonlight
I see only the clouds floating
Though a letter was sent on a cloud
a gusty wind blows away its answer
-Hyecho (704-787 CE)

Finally, this is the nomination for a remarkable woman named Isabella Bird: Born in Yorkshire England in 1831 she holds a special place in history. Isabella was the first woman to be elected Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Isabella battled with ill health all her life. However this did not stop her traveling the world and writing many incredible books about her travels. She visited Australia, Hawaii, America (where she traveled over 800 miles on horseback and met some very interesting characters including one-eyed outlaw Jim Nugent “Rocky Mountain Jim”). Battling ill health she went traveling to Asia: Japan, China, Vietnam, Singapore and Malaysia. At nearly 60 years of age she set off for India covering Ladakh on the borders of Tibet, and then travelled in Persia, Kurdistan and Turkey. In India, she worked with Fanny Jane Butler to found the John Bishop Memorial Hospital in memory of her recently deceased husband. The following year she joined a group of British soldiers traveling between Baghdad and Tehran. She remained with the unit’s commanding officer during his survey work in the region, armed with her revolver and a medicine chest supplied – in possibly an early example of corporate sponsorship – by Henry Wellcome’s company in London. By now Isabella was a household name in the Royal Geographical Society. Her final great journey took place in 1897 where she travelled up the Yangtze and Han rivers which are in China and Korea, respectively. Later still, she went to Morocco, where she travelled among the Berbers and had to use a ladder to mount her black stallion, a gift from the Sultan. She died in Edinburgh within a few months of her return in 1904, just shy of her seventy-third birthday. She was still planning another trip to China. What an amazing achievement for a person who battled with severe illness her entire life. Horizons exploration of Pluto should give credit to this amazing explorer by having a piece of Pluto named after her.

We agree.