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Ed Stafford 1999.
Brought up by adoptive parents in the legal profession, Edward James Stafford was born in Peterborough on 26th December 1975. Educated at Uppingham School, he completed a degree course in geography at Newcastle University. After training at Sandhurst, he was commissioned into the Devonshire and Dorsetshire Regiment in August 1999. Having completed a tour of duty in Northern Ireland, he left the army as a captain at the end of his three-year short service commission.
Between April 2008 and August 2010, Stafford became the first person to walk the entire length of the Amazon River. Halfway through the trek he ran out of money, so hit upon the idea of highlighting his progress by making short YouTube films with PayPal links asking for support. He later described this as ‘Crowdfunding before it had even been invented’. During the epic trek, he was held up at gunpoint, mugged by a man with a bow-and-arrow and was wrongly arrested twice, once for drug smuggling and the second time for murder, after arriving at a village where someone had disappeared the day before. The explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes described the adventure as ‘truly extraordinary...in the top league of expeditions, past and present’. A film of the trip was commissioned by Channel 5, and Walking the Amazon showed the potential of Stafford as a presenter. The same year, he was recognised by the Guinness Book of Records as the first person to complete the walk and awarded the Royal Geographical Society’s Mungo Park Medal for outstanding contribution to geographical knowledge.
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