American explorer and travel writer Richard Halliburton was BOTD in 1900. Born in Brownsville, Tennessee, he studied at Princeton, taking a gap year in 1919 to travel aboard a freighter from New Orleans to Paris. Returning to America to finish his studies, he spent several years travelling through Europe, India and Southeast Asia. After developing a career as a travel writer and public speaker, he published an account of his travels The Royal Road to Romance in 1925. The book became an international bestseller. In his next book, The Glorious Adventure, he described retracing Ulysses’ adventures throughout the Classical Greek world, including a visit to the grave of war poet Rupert Brooke in Skyros, and emulated Lord Byron by swimming the Hellespont. He famously swam the length of the Panama Canal, recounted in New Worlds to Conquer. In 1930, undertook an 18 month air journey, circumnavigating the globe in an open cockpit plane named The Magic Carpet. His adventures included taking the first aerial photo of Mount Everest, living with the French Foreign Legion, being gifted shrunken heads in Borneo and performing aerobatics for the Maharajah of Nepal. He followed this by emulating Hannibal and crossing the Swiss Alps on an elephant. He became a national celebrity, publishing weekly feature stories for national newspapers, partying with Hollywood stars Douglas Fairbanks and commissioning a fabulous modernist house in Laguna Beach. Rampantly homosexual, he had affairs with actor Ramón Novarro and philanthropist Noël Sullivan and a longer relationship with journalist Paul Mooney. French police reports from the 1930s also noted his habit of cruising for gay sex in the streets of Paris. He disappeared at sea in 1938 while sailing a Chinese junk across the Pacific Ocean. His body was never found, and he was declared dead in 1939, aged 39.