Mensen Ernst
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Mensen Ernst.
Mensen Ernst (1795-1843) was born as Mons Monsen Øyri, in the summer of 1795 in Fresvik by Sognefjorden in Norway. He was a road runner and ultramarathonist and one of the first sport professionals. He made his living running, mainly through placing bets on himself being able to run a certain distance within a period of time.
Among his trips are the ca. 2500 km from Paris to Moscow, which he ran in 14 days starting on June 11, 1832. His last trip started in Moscow, went through Jerusalem and Cairo, from where he intended to run by the Nile until he found its source. He died in January 1843 from dysentery, close to the border between Egypt and Sudan, where he was buried a few days after his death. The place of his death is now buried by the Aswan Dam.
Among his trips are the ca. 2500 km from Paris to Moscow, which he ran in 14 days starting on June 11, 1832. His last trip started in Moscow, went through Jerusalem and Cairo, from where he intended to run by the Nile until he found its source. He died in January 1843 from dysentery, close to the border between Egypt and Sudan, where he was buried a few days after his death. The place of his death is now buried by the Aswan Dam.
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KNUT STRØMSØEPublicado el 2002 en AO Diaologue.In the front of his book “The Treatment of Fractures by Massage and Mobilisation”, Lucas-Championnière wrote in 1895 “Le mouvement c’est la vie”. This clarion call was adopted by AO as “Life is movement, movement is life”. Fascinatingly, in an even earlier 19th century publication on Ernst Mensen, Norwegian ultra-athlete, is found the motto “Bewegung ist Leben und Stillstand der Tod” -to move is to live and standstill is death!
Mensen was a long-distance runner— or “pedestrianist”—of legendary endurance and prodigious feats. A prime source of information about his life is a biography, written in 1838-39 by Gustav Rieck after his meeting with Mensen. Myth had it that Ernst was raised in Bergen, the son of an English sea captain and a Norwegian mother descended from Viking chieftain Eric the Red.
In a Danish newspaper of November 17, 1828, one Arnfind Monsen Øyri sought news of his brother, “the famous runner Mensen Ernst”. It turns out that Ernst’s real name was Mons Monsen Øyri, born 1795 or 1799 in Fresvik on Sognefiord. As it turned out, the family was poor; his father dying the year Mons was born – census of 1801 notes that “the family lives on charity”. He probably went to Bergen as a blacksmith, then attended the Royal Navigation School in Copenhagen as a youth, where he acquired navigational skills that would stand him in good stead later on his long distance runs. He then went to sea and never returned to Norway. On shore leave in the Cape Town in 1817 he ran, and won, for the first time. His fame as a “pedestrian” started in England when he ran London–Portsmouth (116 Centurion Footnotes – Volume 10 Number 6 Page 8 of 14 km) in 9 hours and later London–Liverpool (241 km) in 32 hours.
On a visit to a castle near Mülhausen in 1821, he met Countess von Bedemeyer, who almost persuaded him to settle down. He stayed with her for three years, but by 1824 he was restless again, and took off for Italy. He revisited the Countess many times during the rest of his life, between his running feats and wanderings – ever the athlete!
Mensen ran some 100 races. Many were public solo performances, the distances varying, perhaps from just 2 or 3 km to 13 or 14 km. He would announce that he would run a certain distance in a certain time. People then placed bets and cheered him on, and usually he kept his promise. Large crowds gathered in Paris in September 1826, May 1827, and June 1830, in Istanbul in 1828, in Rome and Venice in 1831. References to some of these races have been found, mostly indirect. In 1826 in Oslo reported that people in Rendsburg “have in large numbers been lured out through the gates to see a runner by the name of Ernst from Bergen”. The paper reports that Ernst would compete, from Rendsburg to Schleswig, with a horseman who will have a fresh horse for the last half. In Copenhagen in February and March 1826, closely reported by the newspapers, the crowds grow so big that he was almost prevented from running.
In 1827 Ernst took a break from running, joined a British Navy frigate, took part in the battle of Navarino against the Turkish-Egyptian fleet, and performed a clandestine operation for British Intelligence. In 1832 he ran from Paris to Moscow (2,500 km) in 14 days, a race organized by Count Gustaf Löwenhielm, the Swedish- Norwegian consul in Paris. According to a wager, he was to receive 3,800 francs if he covered the distance in 15 days. He left the Place Vendôme at 4AM on the 11th of June. Despite having to run over poor roads in all weathers and having to swim 13 rivers, he reached the Kremlin at 10AM on the 25th of June. The commander there had been expecting him but because he arrived early and in rags, he was mistaken for a beggar.
In 1841 Mensen became a mail runner for Count Hermann von Pückler-Muskan. The count was interested in anthropology and geography, writing books about his journeys in North Africa and the Near East. Encouraged by the Count, he started on his endeavour to run the length of Africa, and to find the source of the Nile. In the spring of 1842, he crossed Asian Turkey, and via Jerusalem arrived in Cairo. After having run the first 1,000 km of the Nile he gained Aswan, where he perished of cholera.
Count von Puckler-Muskan, his sponsor, had carved on a stone above Ernst’s desert grave: “Swift as the deer, restless as the swallow. Earth, his arena, never saw his like.” Legend? Mythology? Supreme athlete? We shall never know – but for him movement was life..
KNUT STRØMSØE
Original Norwegian globetrotter BY GLENN OSTLING
Open any newspaper and sports news covers page after page. Television has long been bitten by the same bug. We could fritter away our lives viewing others schussing down mountain slopes, skating round after round on tracks, or playing various team sports involving balls and uniformed enemies. Unfortunately, the one Norwegian athlete who really merits a sports interview lies beneath the Nile River – the incredible runner known as Mensen Ernst.Ernst was the first professional Norwegian athlete, and probably the greatest to date. In the first half of the 19th century he was recognized across Europe for his long-distance running feats. Like the best-paid professionals of the 1990s, he was also a master crowd-pleaser with an aptitude for promotion and raising prize money. Name change He was born in 1795 on a west coast fjord at Leikanger and christened Mons Monsen Øyri. His father died in the same year and the Øyri family scraped by on a tiny farm with financial help from the local community. As a teenager he moved to Bergen where he soon shipped out as a seaman. In the British merchant marine his name was semi-anglicised to Mensen Ernst. That was the name he used on shore-leave when he ran and won his first race, in Cape Province, South Africa in 1813. In 1818 he left the sea and went ashore in London.There were always bets on in pubs and he found that he could make a living running races. For the next few years in England he continued to run in his blue sailor suit, and the only known portrait of him (above) shows him as a mate, sextant in hand, against an exotic background. Pedestrianism In the course of history, as agriculture replaced hunting, and horses took over for human legs, running became a sport rather than a necessity – except perhaps in times of war. From the late 1600s to the mid-1800s a phenomenon called pedestrianism took hold in Europe, particularly in England. In its contemporary connotation, a pedestrian was a professional runner. Noblemen not only raced their horses, they also raced their footmen, or even their sons. Pedestrianism evolved into organized games such as the annual athletics contests that started in 1864 between Oxford and Cambridge. Had college athletic scholarships existed in his day, Mensen Ernst would have topped the recruiters’ lists. He was a true globetrotter, curious about foreign cultures and quick-witted as well as fleet-footed. He never forgot his native Norwegian, but he grew fluent in English, German and French, and could also converse in Italian and Turkish. He probably learned how to ask directions in many more. Like a long-distance runner today, Ernst was slightly built. He was known to sleep just four hours a day, preferably outdoors. He drank wine but ate only bread, fruit and cold food, seldom any meat. The British Isles couldn’t satisfy Ernst’s wanderlust and he moved his talents to the Continent. In the summer of 1832 he became the talk of Paris when he spread rumours about a prospective 15-day jaunt to Moscow. By then Ernst was well known for running incredible stretches in Germany, France, the Iberian peninsula and elsewhere. But the Paris-Moscow run roused the popular spirit because he chose much the same route taken two decades earlier by Napoleon. Even today, the agony of running such a distance seems prohibitive. But any overland travel was hazardous in those days, with epidemics, international and regional political hostilities, and definitiely no Michelin guidebooks. Border guards and others were understandably suspicious about a “mad” Norwegian running like the devil across their territory. 100,000 francs Wagers for and against his success totalling 100,000 francs were made by the time he left Place de Vendôme in Paris. He arrived at the gates of the Kremlin, 2,500 km as the crow flies, two weeks later. His clothes were in tatters and he was a day ahead of schedule so it took a few hours before Russian nobles realized that he had arrived. The stunt secured his reputation and he made the rounds from city to city across Europe, a one-man circus and folk hero. In 1836 the East India Company paid him £250 to run from Constantinople to Calcutta. He did it in four weeks. After a three-day rest in India, he ran back again – 8,900 km in 59 days. Final stagnation According to a contemporary German biographer, Ernst’s motto was “Motion is life, stagnation is death.” In the spring of 1842 he ran from Muskau in Prussia down through the Ottoman Empire to Jerusalem in 30 days. He continued to Cairo, intent on following the Nile to its source, 30 years before Stanley and Livingstone arrived on the scene. By January 1843 he was close to the present border between Egypt and Sudan when he succumbed to dysentery. Mensen Ernst was found dead in the sand a few days later and buried under some stones at a spot now submerged by the Aswan Dam.
Marathon Man
LONG-DISTANCE running has enjoyed a popular revival in recent years, and runners such as Paavo Nurmi, Emil Zatopek, Abebe Bikila and Grethe Waitz are household names. But it was 150 years ago that the greatest runner of all time was at the peak of his career. He was a Norwegian named Mensen Ernst. His real name was Mons Monsen Oyri.He was the son of a poor tenant farmer from Leikanger on the Sognefjord where he was born in 1795. He lived there until he was about fifteen years old, when he moved to the town of Bergen. He went to sea, and won his first competitive run in Cape Province in 1813. As a seaman and adventurer he visitedthe American, African, Asian and Australian continents, acquiring along the was survival skills that were later to help him navigate, wheedle and bluff his way through his extraordinary journeys. The only surviving contemporary portrait of the “Running King’, as he was known in Norwegian, shows him cradling a sextant. In 1818 he arrived in London. It is herethat he officially became a “pedestrian’, a runner or walker who covered long distances in return for money. Here he also took his professional name, Mensen Ernst. His subsequent career was to last for twenty-five years. His first important run was in the springof 1819, from London to Portsmouth (116 kilometres) in nine hours. His popularity was assured when he then covered the 240 kilometres from London to Liverpool in thirty-two hours. After a time he began to long for theContinent, however, and in 1820 crossed the Channel again, travelling on foot to Annenrode manor in Muhlhausen (in what is now the German Democratic Republic), where he made a number of life-long friends. From then on he lived as a professional runner, and his fame as the greatest runner of all time spread quickly as he ran from city to city–Berlin, Prague, Rome–across the Continent. In 1826 he put on a demonstration in Copenhagen, where the high fees he earned included 100 “daler’ from the Danish King Frederick VI. Ironically, his native Norway was one of the few countries through which he never ran. After some years Mensen Ernst cameto see himself as something of an internationalist. He became a genuine traveller, curious about foreign cultures and customs; he learned to speak French, English and German well, and knew some Italian and Turkish. In 1832, aged thirty-seven, Ernst wentto Paris in order to plan an audacious run to Moscow. Among those who helped him organize the stakes was a Swedish diplomat, Count Lowenhielm. Ernst was to receive 3,800 francs if he covered the distance in fifteen days. He left Paris on 11 June, arriving in Kaiserlantern two days later. “I felt I was sailing . . . on my two unique frigates,’ he was quoted later, in a German book about him written in 1838. “Those who witnessed my running considered me eccentric, or else a fool, or possessed by the devil.’ On 18 June he crossed the Polish riverVistula and next day was in Russia. He actually reached Moscow a day earlier than expected. The commander there had prepared to greet him, but because of Ernst’s early arrival and the ragged state of his clothing he was taken at first for a beggar. He had covered about 2,500 kilometres, or more than 170 kilometres daily. How did Ernst adapt to the extremeconditions encountered on his journeys, the burning sun, cold winds, pouring rain? We know that he had a strict set of rules that he followed all his life. He stuck to a simple diet, for example: mostly bread and cheese, a few vegetables, less frequently cold meat; but he never ate warm food. He also preferred to sleep outdoors, believing that lying on hard ground kept the body supple. If he did sleep indoors it was always on a hard bench, never a soft bed. His only weakness was for wine, which he used to drink by the bottle even on his runs, but with no apparent ill effects. By the time he returned to Paris fromhis Moscow run, Mensen Ernst was a hero. He had become a living legend who attracted rapturous audiences of thousands. In 1833, he set out from Munich forNauplion, then the capital of the newly founded state of Greece. He suggested to King Ludwig I and Queen Therese that he carry documents for their son, Otto I of Greece, and after a delay of some months his offer was accepted. His departure on 6 June was cheered by a crowd of 20,000 outside Nymphenburg Palace. This was a particularly dramatic journey,partly because of the rugged landscape, partly because of some unusually severe problems Ernst encountered along the way. In Montenegro he was set upon by five robbers wielding pistols and swords; as well as his money, they took his maps, compass and quadrant, but fortunately not the letters. He managed to find his way to the town of Cattaro, where he got food and drink, new maps and compass, and started out again–only to be arrested as a spy. He spent three days in jail before he was freed by the Pasha of Janina, who “looked more like a Western general than an Oriental Pasha’, as Ernst later said.
My race in Africa
Marc Buhl’s novel about Mensen Ernst, the king of 19th century long-distance runners Emil Zátopek could have left it at that: he had already bagged the gold medals for the 5,000 and 10,000 metres. But he went in for the marathon too at the 1952 Helsinki Games. It was his first marathon. He kept up with the favourite, Jim Peters. When he asked the Englishman if he had the right rhythm, Peters must have felt he was being mocked. No, gasped Peters, his pace was too slow, he’d never reach the stadium like that. The Czech, now worried, thanked him kindly and ran off—to win the marathon.Amazing runners like Emil Zátopek, the Finn Paavo Nurmi and the Ethiopian Haile Gebrselassie won’t be forgotten quickly. But the names of Peter Bajus, Fritz Käpernick and Mensen Ernst are known to almost nobody today. Yet it was these men whose fast distance running played a part in writing the first chapters of modern sporting history. And that in a century in which the relaxed flâneur appeared in the arcades of Paris, an idler who, according to Walter Benjamin, walked as slowly as a turtle in protest at capitalism’s intoxication with speed.
Mensen Ernst is an opposite ideal to that of the Baudelairean stroller. He was born in 1795 in the Norwegian town of Fresvik. As a young man he went to sea, before entering service in London as a courier. A little later he ended up on the Continent. He found a home—in as much as he ever did—on the estate of Baron von Wedemeyr, in Anrode, Thuringia. He continued to run: in Germany, France, Spain, Holland and Portugal. He ran as a messenger—the communications system of optical telegraphy was still in its infancy—and in so-called ‘productions’, exhibition races for the public. On 11 June 1832 he started his most spectacular race with a great fanfare of publicity. He marched from Paris to Moscow, via Saarbrücken, Chemnitz, Cracow Smolensk and Borodino. He crossed forests and marshes in a journey of over 1,500 miles as the crow flies. When he reached Moscow fourteen days later, he had covered over 110 miles per day. He can’t have slept much. Moscow fêted him, ‘Vive le Coureur de l’Europe!’ He carried on running, like other people breathe in and out: from Munichto Nauplion in the Peloponnese, and from Constantinople to Calcutta. Africa was on his itinerary too. It appears that he died in Syene, Egypt, in 1843. In his last years he ran for Prince von Pückler-Muskau, the landscape artist, gourmet and world traveller who—in front of Ernst’s eyes no less—introduced the concept of sport into German in 1828.
What a flying start for a novel! Marc Buhl, himself a seasoned traveller in Asia and Africa, has taken up the baton. And it seems surprising that he’s the first. The fact that Mensen Ernst’s adventurous life has only been documented in its crude outlines is a gift for the fiction writer. The author’s imagination can be given free rein. Buhl does indeed take advantage of this. He gives his protagonist a longing to see Egypt that he has had since his childhood. At school Ernst had heard of the heroic deeds of Lord Nelson. He had destroyed Napoleon’s reinforcements at the Battle of Aboukir Bay during Napoleon’s 1798 Egyptian expedition, and so been given the title of Baron of the Nile. Ernst’s father, a French seaman, had fought for Napoleon before falling in love with a Norwegian, fathering two children, and then disappearing. He had returned to Egypt, to the sources of the Nile. He left his son a sea-chest with a quadrant, sextant, and a map that desert sand trickled out of. It showed exotic locations such as Luxor and Khartoum. Ernst is drawn to Egypt too, to the legendary sources of the Nile that have robbed so many explorers of their sleep, both before and after him. The ancient world, in the form of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, had already dreamt of the hidden ‘caput Nili’. The cartographer Ptolemy and the historian Herodotus reported that snow covered ‘moon mountains’ fed the river. Yet it was only in 1858 that the Englishmen Burton and Speke discovered Lake Tanganyika and Lake Victoria. John Hanning Speke thought on a second expedition that he had reached the source of the world’s longest river. He telegraphed the Royal Geographical Society in London, trumpeting ‘The Nile is settled!’ That turned out to be a little premature. It was only later that the Nile’s tributaries in Rwanda and Burundi were found.
In other words, Ernst was long dead by the time geographers could add the sources of the Nile to their maps. For Marc Buhl to let him run from the Nile Delta near Alexandria, via Luxor, Esna and Khartoum, all the way to the sources, is a daring coup, and absolutely fitting in a novel. Buhl takes other wonderful liberties too.
In the early nineteenth century people were used to runners who served a lord and provided amusement for the people, much as a fire-breather or a clown. The tradition had come to Europe from the East, where runners prepared the way for lordly ceremonial carriages. A fairy tale from the era by Wilhelm Hauff sees the protagonist become an oriental king’s chief runner, thanks to his magic slippers. Buhl’s Ernst fits his century. His mobility and breath-taking speed seem destined for the age of modern production methods. He is the living embodiment of the ‘economy of time’ that Marx writes about. One of his masters, the Duke of Queensbury, has rather utilitarian praise for him: ‘If everyone was like you, I could produce twice as much.’ Baron von Wedemeyr wants to make money too. He pushes Ernst from one race to another, the length and breadth of Europe. Following the logic of the market, he is forced to top each previous effort: he runs backwards, then in a knight’s armour, then dressed as a Chinese or reciting poems. Yet Buhl also sends Ernst through the political intrigues of the 1820s and 1830s at the time of Metternich’s reactionary politics. Through the teacher that he respects highly, the (fictional) social revolutionary Skulberg in Norway, he meets Friedrich Ludwig Weidig, a Protestant vicar who publishes the illegal ‘Hessischer Landbote’ newspaper with the playwright Georg Büchner. They are all obsessed with the idea of an earthly paradise. ‘If anything can help in our age,’ wrote the (real) Büchner, ‘then it’s violence.’ Ernst runs for the revolution, distributing the newspapers throughout the grand duchy of Hessen-Darmstadt, until the group around Büchner and Weidig is betrayed in 1834, (as official history also records). The ‘subversives’ who can’t flee end up being tortured in dungeons, including Mensen Ernst. It is here, almost rubbed out between market forces and ideology, that he remembers his childhood dream: the sources of the Nile. Luckily, Prince von Pückler-Muskau, who has always admired him, hasn’t forgotten him. He manages to free him some years later. Pückler, who once volunteered to fight against Napoleon in the wars of liberation, speaks with the voice of German colonial greed. The discovery of the sources of the Nile, he says, ‘would do Germany good, because there are far too many of the British in Africa’. And so, working for Pückler, Mensen Ernst finally reaches Egyptfor his biggest race. Even at the end of the nineteenth century messengers were no rarity in Africa-especially in the German colonies. In contrast to the English colonies, German East Africa had no reliable telegraph lines. Runners had to be hired again and again. They delivered the despatches, equipped with a muzzle-loader, ammunition, a pass, and a leather sign that stated their number and was decorated with the imperial eagle. In Buhl’s story, Mensen Ernst starts by running for his prince. In Luxor, however, he falls for the enchanting dancer Rashida. When she disappears, apparently having been sold upriver as a slave, his race takes a new course. Faster than he has ever run before, he follows the felucca carrying his kidnapped beloved. ‘He tried to increase his speed with every step. He had to force his heels to the ground more quickly, to roll his feet forwards more speedily and then to wrench the balls of his feet upwards. If he gained half a second with every step, after 10,000 steps that would make 83 minutes . . . Maybe his steps should be longer, half a metre was possible. He just had to spring forwards a little more powerfully, tilt his head and shoot his arms up with every step.’ This is a runner’s interior landscape, and it deserves its place next to the classics of such literature, like Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, or the German running author Günter Herburger’s books, such as Lauf und Wahn and Traum und Bahn. Marc Buhl, however, is obviously not just aiming to create a wonderful book about the physical experience of running. The drama of German social movements, and the history of revolutions as a struggle between standstill and change, is not the centre of the novel either. Nor did he, it seems, plan to write a novel that brings to life known spaces, while still breathing in the wider spaces beyond. Buhl’s main interest is the inner world of a unique historical figure, an obsessive eccentric who only had one skill, of which he had complete mastery. In the end, Mensen Ernst is an empty husk reduced to his corporeality, in which neither ideological or commercial ideas can take hold. This reduction makes him a distant relative of Alessandro Baricco’s ocean pianist, of the amazing organist in Robert Schneider’s Brother of Sleep and of the olfactory hero Grenouille in Patrick Süskind’s Perfume. by Steffen Richter All rights reserved © Die Welt
Original Norwegian globetrotter
BY GLENN OSTLING
Open any newspaper and sports news covers page after page. Television has long been bitten by the same bug. We could fritter away our lives viewing others schussing down mountain slopes, skating round after round on tracks, or playing various team sports involving balls and uniformed enemies. Unfortunately, the one Norwegian athlete who really merits a sports interview lies beneath the Nile River – the incredible runner known as Mensen Ernst.Ernst was the first professional Norwegian athlete, and probably the greatest to date. In the first half of the 19th century he was recognized across Europe for his long-distance running feats. Like the best-paid professionals of the 1990s, he was also a master crowd-pleaser with an aptitude for promotion and raising prize money. Name change He was born in 1795 on a west coast fjord at Leikanger and christened Mons Monsen Øyri. His father died in the same year and the Øyri family scraped by on a tiny farm with financial help from the local community. As a teenager he moved to Bergen where he soon shipped out as a seaman. In the British merchant marine his name was semi-anglicised to Mensen Ernst. That was the name he used on shore-leave when he ran and won his first race, in Cape Province, South Africa in 1813. In 1818 he left the sea and went ashore in London.There were always bets on in pubs and he found that he could make a living running races. For the next few years in England he continued to run in his blue sailor suit, and the only known portrait of him (above) shows him as a mate, sextant in hand, against an exotic background. Pedestrianism In the course of history, as agriculture replaced hunting, and horses took over for human legs, running became a sport rather than a necessity – except perhaps in times of war. From the late 1600s to the mid-1800s a phenomenon called pedestrianism took hold in Europe, particularly in England. In its contemporary connotation, a pedestrian was a professional runner. Noblemen not only raced their horses, they also raced their footmen, or even their sons. Pedestrianism evolved into organized games such as the annual athletics contests that started in 1864 between Oxford and Cambridge. Had college athletic scholarships existed in his day, Mensen Ernst would have topped the recruiters’ lists. He was a true globetrotter, curious about foreign cultures and quick-witted as well as fleet-footed. He never forgot his native Norwegian, but he grew fluent in English, German and French, and could also converse in Italian and Turkish. He probably learned how to ask directions in many more. Like a long-distance runner today, Ernst was slightly built. He was known to sleep just four hours a day, preferably outdoors. He drank wine but ate only bread, fruit and cold food, seldom any meat. The British Isles couldn’t satisfy Ernst’s wanderlust and he moved his talents to the Continent. In the summer of 1832 he became the talk of Paris when he spread rumours about a prospective 15-day jaunt to Moscow. By then Ernst was well known for running incredible stretches in Germany, France, the Iberian peninsula and elsewhere. But the Paris-Moscow run roused the popular spirit because he chose much the same route taken two decades earlier by Napoleon. Even today, the agony of running such a distance seems prohibitive. But any overland travel was hazardous in those days, with epidemics, international and regional political hostilities, and definitiely no Michelin guidebooks. Border guards and others were understandably suspicious about a “mad” Norwegian running like the devil across their territory. 100,000 francs Wagers for and against his success totalling 100,000 francs were made by the time he left Place de Vendôme in Paris. He arrived at the gates of the Kremlin, 2,500 km as the crow flies, two weeks later. His clothes were in tatters and he was a day ahead of schedule so it took a few hours before Russian nobles realized that he had arrived. The stunt secured his reputation and he made the rounds from city to city across Europe, a one-man circus and folk hero. In 1836 the East India Company paid him £250 to run from Constantinople to Calcutta. He did it in four weeks. After a three-day rest in India, he ran back again – 8,900 km in 59 days. Final stagnation According to a contemporary German biographer, Ernst’s motto was “Motion is life, stagnation is death.” In the spring of 1842 he ran from Muskau in Prussia down through the Ottoman Empire to Jerusalem in 30 days. He continued to Cairo, intent on following the Nile to its source, 30 years before Stanley and Livingstone arrived on the scene. By January 1843 he was close to the present border between Egypt and Sudan when he succumbed to dysentery. Mensen Ernst was found dead in the sand a few days later and buried under some stones at a spot now submerged by the Aswan Dam.
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