The Dictionary of Irish Biography

With so many holiday plans on hold this summer, the DIB has compiled a selection of intrepid explorers we can accompany on their exciting travels. We start the series with Lady Heath, the first woman to complete a solo flight from South Africa to England.

We continue our series of intrepid explorers with celebrated astronomer Annie Scott Dill Maunder who travelled the world observing and recording celestial phenomena and is known for her work on sunspot activity and solar eclipses.

Our series of explorers continues with Thomas Heazle Parke, the first Irishman known to have crossed the continent of Africa. He once saved a man’s life by sucking arrow poison into his own mouth.

Our next DIB explorer is William Lamport, who worked as a spy in Italy and Catalonia and plotted to seize control of Mexico City with a militia of indigenous mine workers.

A medical doctor, naturalist and explorer, the intrepid Arthur Montagu Gwynn was described by one of his granddaughters as ‘having a gun under his bed, a bullet hole in his arm and crocodile skins under his stairs’.

The last explorer in our series is Beatrice Ethel Grimshaw, who started her career as a sports journalist and long-distance cyclist before travelling extensively in the South Seas and Australasia and settling in Papua New Guinea to write exotic novels and grow tobacco.