100 Fun Facts About Explorers

Marco Polo dictated his travels in prison after being captured in Venice's war with which rival city?

Genoa. In a Genoese prison Polo told his stories to a fellow inmate, Rustichello da Pisa, a professional writer of romances who shaped them into the book that made him famous.

Ibn Battuta spent years as a judge for the sultan of which city?

Delhi. Its sultan, Muhammad bin Tughluq, later sent him to China as an envoy, but bandits attacked the party on the road and a storm then wrecked the mission in port before he had boarded.

Ibn Battuta came from which present-day country?

Morocco. He left his home city of Tangier at 21 to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, and did not come back for 24 years.

Zheng He's fleet brought home which African animal, hailed at court as a qilin?

Giraffe. The qilin stood for good fortune, so the long-necked arrival was read at court as a sign of heaven's favour; Zheng He led seven such voyages, reaching as far as East Africa.

The monk Xuanzang, whose pilgrimage inspired Journey to the West, sought Buddhist scriptures in which land?

India. Xuanzang came home with 657 Buddhist texts and spent the rest of his life translating them; the novel later gave him the Monkey King as a travelling companion.

Around 325 BC the Greek explorer Pytheas reported which land, six days' sail north of Britain?

Thule. Nobody has settled where Pytheas meant, with Iceland and Norway the leading guesses, so 'Ultima Thule' came to mean any place beyond the edge of the known world.

The Norse site at L'Anse aux Meadows, possibly Leif Erikson's Vinland, is on which Canadian island?

Newfoundland. A burst of cosmic rays in 993 left a marker in tree rings worldwide, which let scientists date wood the Norse cut there to exactly 1021, long before Columbus.

What did Bartolomeu Dias reportedly first call the headland later named Good Hope?

Cape of Storms, or Cabo das Tormentas. Tradition says King John II of Portugal renamed it Good Hope because rounding it promised a sea route to the East.

Vasco da Gama reached the coast of which modern Indian state in May 1498?

Kerala. Da Gama landed near Calicut, where his royal gifts of cloth, hats, sugar and honey failed to impress a court that had expected gold.

Columbus's first landfall in 1492, on Guanahani, was in which present-day country?

The Bahamas. Columbus renamed the Lucayan island of Guanahani San Salvador, but scholars still disagree over which island it actually was.

Which institution now owns the 1507 map that first printed the name 'America'?

The Library of Congress. Its copy of Martin Waldseemüller's map, the only one known to survive from a printing of about 1,000, lay unnoticed in a German castle until 1901.

Which explorer crossed Panama in 1513 to become the first European to see the Pacific from the Americas?

Vasco Núñez de Balboa. He waded in to claim the whole 'South Sea' for Spain, but a few years later a rival governor had him arrested by Francisco Pizarro, tried for treason and beheaded.

Who captained the Victoria home to complete the first circumnavigation after Magellan was killed?

Juan Sebastián Elcano. His was the last of the fleet's five ships, and it reached Spain in 1522 with a hold full of spices and only a handful of the men who had set out.

In which present-day country was Magellan killed in 1521?

The Philippines. Magellan landed on the island of Mactan to fight the chief Lapulapu on behalf of a local ally, was hit by a poisoned arrow and was then overwhelmed by Lapulapu's warriors.

In 1542 Francisco de Orellana became the first European to sail the length of which river?

The Amazon. Sent ahead by boat to find food for Gonzalo Pizarro's cinnamon-hunting expedition, Orellana never turned back and reached the Atlantic in August 1542.

Juan Ponce de León led the first known European expedition to which future US state in 1513?

Florida. He never mentioned a Fountain of Youth in his surviving letters to the king; a Spanish chronicler pinned the tale on him in 1535, years after his death.

Coronado's expedition made the first European sightings of which natural wonder?

The Grand Canyon. Coronado sent García López de Cárdenas to look for a great river in 1540, and his scouts reached the rim while the main force hunted the fabled Seven Cities of Cíbola.

Jacques Cartier took the name 'Canada' from a word used by which people?

The Iroquoians. The usual account is that in 1535 locals used their word kanata, meaning village, to direct Cartier to Stadacona, and he applied it to the whole region.

Samuel de Champlain founded which city on 3 July 1608?

Quebec. Champlain built his fort where the Saint Lawrence River tightens beneath a cliff, and the name comes from an Algonquian word for 'narrows'.

What happened to Henry Hudson after his crew mutinied in 1611?

He was cast adrift in a small boat. After a winter trapped in the ice Hudson wanted to keep exploring, so the crew put him, his teenage son and a few loyal or sick men over the side and sailed home.

The Englishman Henry Hudson explored the Hudson River in 1609 while sailing for which nation?

The Dutch. Their East India Company hired Hudson to find a northeast route to Asia; when that failed he took the Halve Maen (Half Moon) west instead and sailed up the river.

Francis Drake received his knighthood in 1581 aboard which ship?

Golden Hind. Drake had renamed the Pelican mid-voyage in honour of his patron Sir Christopher Hatton, whose family crest showed a golden hind, and he was knighted on her deck at Deptford.

After reaching Tasmania in 1642, Abel Tasman became the first European to sight which country?

New Zealand. Tasman's first meeting with Māori ended with four of his sailors dead, so he named the anchorage Murderers' Bay and sailed away.

Which ship carried James Cook on his first voyage of 1768-71?

Endeavour. She ran onto the Great Barrier Reef in 1770, and Cook had to beach her for weeks of repairs before the voyage could go on.

Which navigator, the first to sail right around the continent, popularised the name 'Australia'?

Matthew Flinders. He found 'Australia' 'more agreeable to the ear' than Terra Australis and pushed for it from 1804; the governor of New South Wales took it up in his despatches in 1817, three years after his death.

Which imported animals carried supplies for the Burke and Wills crossing of Australia in 1860–61?

Camels. Two dozen were shipped in with their handlers; Burke and Wills got within reach of the Gulf of Carpentaria, then struggled back to their depot to find the support party had left only hours earlier.

Which president commissioned the Lewis and Clark Expedition?

Thomas Jefferson. He asked Congress for the money in a secret message in January 1803, months before the Louisiana Purchase, and had Lewis study botany, medicine and astronomy first.

Sacagawea, who helped Lewis and Clark, belonged to which people?

Shoshone. The expedition's journals say Hidatsa raiders had kidnapped her as a girl, and that the chief of the band Lewis and Clark needed horses from proved to be her brother, Cameahwait.

Which naturalist climbed higher than any European before him on Ecuador's Chimborazo in 1802?

Humboldt. The Prussian naturalist turned back a few hundred metres short of a summit that, thanks to Earth's equatorial bulge, is the farthest point on the surface from the planet's centre.

Victoria Falls, which David Livingstone named in 1855, lies on which river?

The Zambezi. The Lozi name for the falls, Mosi-oa-Tunya, means 'the smoke that thunders', for the roar and the veil of mist; Livingstone renamed them after his queen.

Which newspaper sent Henry Morton Stanley to find Livingstone?

The New York Herald. Its publisher, James Gordon Bennett Jr., paid for the search as a story for his paper, and Stanley found Livingstone at Ujiji in 1871, greeting him, by his own account, with 'Dr Livingstone, I presume?'

Henry Morton Stanley spent five years building a road and launching steamers to found which colony?

The Congo Free State. Stanley was working for Belgium's King Leopold II, who wanted the region for himself and went on to rule it as a private colony notorious for forced labour.

Which explorer, said to have mastered more than two dozen languages, made the Hajj to Mecca in disguise?

Richard Francis Burton. He reached Mecca in 1853 passing as an Afghan Muslim, and later published the Kama Sutra in English and an unexpurgated translation of The Arabian Nights.

Which body of water did John Hanning Speke reach in 1858 and declare the source of the Nile?

Lake Victoria. Speke renamed it after his queen and announced that it fed the Nile before he had seen any river flowing out of it, and he turned out to be right.

Mary Kingsley's 1897 bestseller described canoeing and fish-collecting journeys in which part of Africa?

West Africa. Kingsley canoed up Gabon's Ogooué River collecting fish for the British Museum, and three species new to science were later named after her.

Which future Nobel Peace Prize winner led the first crossing of Greenland's interior, on skis, in 1888?

Fridtjof Nansen. He later froze his ship Fram into the Arctic ice on purpose to drift toward the Pole, then left it with one companion and got closer to the Pole than anyone before him.

Four men of which Arctic people stood with Robert Peary at his claimed North Pole?

Inuit. Peary had studied how they survived in the Arctic and relied on their help in his later expeditions, though studies of his records since the 1980s cast doubt on whether his party truly reached the Pole.

Robert Peary first met which future polar partner working as a store clerk in Washington in 1887?

Matthew Henson. Peary hired him as a valet for a survey trip to Nicaragua, was impressed, and took him on seven Arctic expeditions over the next two decades.

Roald Amundsen's party beat Scott to the South Pole in 1911 relying on which form of transport?

Sled dogs. Amundsen planned from the start to kill dogs along the way to feed the rest of the teams and his men, while Scott's motor sledges broke down and his ponies had to be shot.

Amundsen's 1903-06 expedition was the first to traverse which route, on the sloop Gjøa?

The Northwest Passage. Amundsen and a crew of six set out in a small fishing sloop in 1903, sat out three Arctic winters on the way and reached Alaska in 1906.

Scott's fatal 1910-13 Antarctic expedition is named after which ship?

Terra Nova. Scott's party of five reached the Pole in January 1912 to find that Amundsen had beaten them by about a month, and all of them died on the march back.

Which explorer's ship Endurance was crushed by Antarctic ice in 1915 and found on the seabed in 2022?

Ernest Shackleton. Every man survived the loss of the ship in the Weddell Sea: they camped on drifting ice, rowed to Elephant Island, and Shackleton sailed a lifeboat to South Georgia for help.

News of which feat broke on Elizabeth II's coronation morning?

The first ascent of Everest. Hillary and Tenzing reached the top on 29 May, and a coded message from the Times correspondent Jan Morris got the news home in time for coronation day.

Jacques Cousteau co-invented which piece of underwater equipment in 1943?

The Aqua-Lung. Cousteau and the engineer Émile Gagnan built a regulator that fed a diver compressed air on demand, the principle modern scuba gear still works on.

Thor Heyerdahl's balsa raft Kon-Tiki set out across the Pacific in 1947 from which country?

Peru. Heyerdahl wanted to show that South Americans could have settled Polynesia; after 101 days the raft smashed onto a reef in the Tuamotus, some 6,900 km from where it started.

Nellie Bly's 72-day trip around the world beat which fictional traveller?

Phileas Fogg. Bly beat his eighty days by eight, and her newspaper, the New York World, turned the race into a daily serial that readers followed from start to finish.

The French explorer Alexandra David-Néel reached which forbidden city in 1924, disguised as a beggar?

Lhasa. She hid a revolver and a purse of gold under her rags, slipped in among pilgrims arriving for a festival, and spent two months exploring the city.

Isabella Bird was the first woman elected a fellow of which body?

The Royal Geographical Society. Bird first went to sea on medical advice as a cure for poor health, and by her election in 1892 her books on the Rockies, Japan and Persia had made her famous.

Gagarin's single orbit of Earth in 1961 was aboard which spacecraft?

Vostok 1. The capsule flew under automatic control, and Gagarin ejected about 7 km up to land under his own parachute, apart from his spacecraft.

Which Dutch navigator was stopped by ice at Novaya Zemlya while seeking a northeast passage?

Willem Barentsz. Trapped in 1596, his crew built a cabin from driftwood and ship's timbers and saw out the Arctic winter, but Barentsz died a week into the journey home.

Which of Christopher Columbus's ships ran aground off present-day Haiti on Christmas Day 1492?

The Santa María was beyond repair, so Columbus had her timbers stripped to build a fort on the shore, which he named La Navidad, Spanish for Christmas.

Which kind of bed did Christopher Columbus's journal record Caribbean islanders paddling out to trade in 1492?

Hammocks were new to Europeans when Columbus wrote of islanders bartering the cotton nets they slept in. By the 1590s sailors were slinging them aboard ship.

On which Pacific island was Captain James Cook killed in 1779 while trying to take a chief hostage?

Hawaii turned deadly after a ship's cutter was stolen: Cook tried to hold the ruling chief Kalaniʻōpuʻu until it was returned, and a crowd at Kealakekua Bay beat and stabbed him to death.

What name did René-Robert de La Salle give the Mississippi basin when he claimed it for France in 1682?

Louisiana honoured King Louis XIV, and La Salle's claim was far bigger than the modern state: he had canoed down to the Gulf of Mexico and claimed the whole river basin behind him.

Which ruined site did Yale's Hiram Bingham make world-famous in 1911 after local farmers led him there?

Machu Picchu had been abandoned around the time of the Spanish conquest, and only people in the neighbouring valley remembered it when Melchor Arteaga led Bingham up the mountain.

Which Mongol ruler of China did Marco Polo serve as an envoy during his 17 years in the emperor's lands?

Kublai Khan was impressed by the young Venetian's intelligence and sent him on missions across the empire, and the Polos did not see home again for 24 years.

Which Norse outlaw, exiled from Iceland around 982, founded the first European settlement on Greenland?

Erik the Red also picked the island's inviting name, reasoning that people would be drawn to a land with a favourable one, and he returned in 985 with a large party of colonists.

Roald Amundsen, first to the South Pole, and Thor Heyerdahl of the Kon-Tiki raft both came from which country?

Norway produced both men: Amundsen was born into a family of shipowners and captains at Borge, and Heyerdahl in the coastal town of Larvik, which houses an institute in his name.

Which Florentine navigator's first name did the mapmaker Martin Waldseemüller give to the New World in 1507?

Amerigo Vespucci claimed to have grasped in 1501 that the coast he was sailing belonged to a fourth continent unknown to Europeans, and the mapmaker Latinised his name to honour that.

Which 1494 agreement split newly found lands between Spain and Portugal along an Atlantic meridian?

The Treaty of Tordesillas ran its line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands, a shift from an earlier papal line that handed Portugal the eastern bulge of South America.

Which land did Pedro Álvares Cabral claim for Portugal in 1500 after his fleet swung far out into the Atlantic?

Brazil was at first taken for a large island, which Cabral named the Island of the True Cross before sailing on round Africa toward the spice ports he had been sent to reach.

Which islands, the source of Europe's cloves, was Magellan's fleet trying to reach by sailing west in 1519?

The Moluccas, the Spice Islands of modern Indonesia, were reached in November 1521 without Magellan, and the one ship that got home carried 26 tons of cloves and cinnamon.

Which light, nimble type of ship did Prince Henry the Navigator's captains use to explore the African coast?

The caravel was noted for its speed and for sailing well to windward, and Columbus later took two of them, the Niña and the Pinta, across the Atlantic beside his larger flagship.

Which disease was the main killer of Vasco da Gama's crew, about two-thirds of whom died on his first voyage to India?

Scurvy went on emptying ships for centuries: it was 1747 before the naval surgeon James Lind showed, in one of the first controlled trials, that citrus fruit could treat it.

Which explorer, sailing for France in 1524, has a bridge linking Brooklyn and Staten Island named after him?

Giovanni da Verrazzano was the first European to explore the harbour, yet he was so forgotten that it took decades of campaigning by Italian Americans to get the Narrows bridge named for him.

Which river did Jacques Cartier sail up in 1535 as far as the rapids near the site of modern Montreal?

The St Lawrence took him to the town of Hochelaga, where a crowd of more than a thousand came to the water's edge to greet the Frenchmen before rapids barred the way upstream.

Vitus Bering, the Danish-born namesake of a strait and a sea, explored the North Pacific for which country?

Russia gave Bering his naval commission under Peter the Great, and after sighting Alaska's coast in 1741 he died on an uninhabited island off Kamchatka that was later named after him.

Which astronomical event was James Cook's first Pacific voyage sent to Tahiti to observe in June 1769?

A transit of Venus was only the public half of the mission: once it was observed, Cook opened sealed orders to search the south Pacific for an unknown southern continent.

At which island group did Columbus stop in 1492 to replace the Pinta's broken rudder before heading west?

The Canaries were the fleet's last stop: the Pinta got a new rudder on Gran Canaria, and the Niña was re-rigged with square sails at La Gomera before the ships turned west.

Which survey ship carried the young Charles Darwin around the world under Captain Robert FitzRoy from 1831?

HMS Beagle had room for Darwin because FitzRoy wanted someone aboard who could investigate geology, and the voyage reached the Galápagos Islands in September 1835.

Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh rode the bathyscaphe Trieste down to the floor of which Pacific feature in 1960?

The Mariana Trench nearly ended the dive early: past 9,000 metres one of the outer window panes cracked and shook the whole vessel, yet the two men carried on to the bottom.

Which American oceanographer led the 1985 expedition that found the wreck of the Titanic on the Atlantic seabed?

Robert Ballard was at sea on a secret US Navy job, surveying the wrecks of two nuclear submarines lost in the 1960s, and looked for the liner in the time left over.

From which fabled Saharan trading city was the Frenchman René Caillié the first European to return alive, in 1828?

Timbuktu had been reached two years earlier by a British officer, Gordon Laing, but he was murdered on leaving, so Caillié took the 9,000-franc prize for bringing back a description.

Which ancient city did the Swiss traveller Johann Burckhardt reveal to Europe while posing as an Arab sheikh?

Petra was only the first of his finds: months later Burckhardt, travelling as Sheikh Ibrahim Ibn Abdallah, came across the sand-choked temple of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel.

Which cosmonaut became the first woman in space in June 1963, circling Earth 48 times on a solo flight?

Valentina Tereshkova was a textile-factory worker and amateur skydiver before the Soviet programme chose her, and she spent almost three days in orbit at the age of 26.

Which American aviator vanished in 1937 on the way to tiny Howland Island while trying to fly around the world?

Amelia Earhart had already become the first woman to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic, in 1932, and her navigator Fred Noonan disappeared with her.

On which lunar plain did Apollo 11's Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set down the lander Eagle in July 1969?

The Sea of Tranquility landing came only after Armstrong took semi-automatic control, because the computer was steering the lander toward a boulder-strewn area beside a crater.

Which frontiersman blazed the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky in 1775?

Daniel Boone cut the trail for a land company and founded Boonesborough at the end of it, one of the first English-speaking settlements beyond the Appalachian Mountains.

Which US naval officer led the 1929 expedition that made the first flight to the South Pole and back?

Richard Byrd left the flying to his chief pilot, Bernt Balchen, and three years earlier Congress had awarded him the Medal of Honor for his Arctic flight.

Which legendary city of riches drew Sir Walter Raleigh to the Orinoco River in 1595 and again in 1617?

El Dorado cost Raleigh his head: on the second trip his men attacked a Spanish outpost against his orders, and he was beheaded at Westminster in 1618.

Which measurement could sailors finally fix at sea thanks to clockmaker John Harrison's marine chronometer?

Longitude carried a reward of up to £20,000 from Parliament, and James Cook, who took a copy of Harrison's watch on his second voyage, filled his log with praise for it.

Which Asian trade network had its name popularised in 1877 by the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen?

The Silk Road is a translation of the German word Seidenstraße, a label Richthofen spread after making seven expeditions to China between 1868 and 1872.

In which future US state is the cove where Francis Drake landed in 1579 and claimed 'Nova Albion' for Elizabeth I?

California's Drakes Bay is where he found a protected cove on 17 June 1579, and since Albion is an archaic name for Great Britain, he was in effect declaring a new Britain.

Henry Morton Stanley, often taken for an American, was born John Rowlands and raised in a workhouse in which country?

Wales put up a statue of him with an outstretched hand in Denbigh, his birthplace, in 2011, and as a young man he had fought at Shiloh in the American Civil War.

Which part of David Livingstone did his African attendants bury under a tree before carrying his body to the coast?

His heart stayed near the spot where he died in 1873, while Chuma and Susi led a 63-day march of more than 1,000 miles with the rest of his remains, bound for Westminster Abbey.

Which fossil find in the Gobi Desert in 1923 made the American museum explorer Roy Chapman Andrews famous?

Dinosaur eggs turned up in his party's dig on 13 July 1923, and the nests were long credited to Protoceratops until 1990s studies showed they belonged to the theropod Oviraptor and its kin.

Zheng He's seven treasure-fleet voyages, reaching as far as East Africa, sailed under which Chinese dynasty?

Ming ambition launched them: the Yongle Emperor ordered the fleet built in 1403 and sent six of the voyages, and the seventh sailed under the Xuande Emperor.

Which former Royal Navy minesweeper did Jacques Cousteau lease for one franc a year as his research ship?

Calypso belonged to the millionaire Loel Guinness, whose only conditions were that Cousteau never ask him for money and never reveal his identity; she had been a Maltese ferry first.

Which river carried the Lewis and Clark Expedition's canoes on the final stretch to the Pacific coast in late 1805?

The Columbia brought them to the ocean, and they wintered at Fort Clatsop on its south side before starting the six-month journey home in March 1806.

Which Venetian scholar, one of only 18 men to complete Magellan's voyage, kept the journal that records it?

Antonio Pigafetta sailed as Magellan's assistant, and his surviving account is the source for much of what is known about the expedition, which had set out with about 240 men.

Which ancient city sent Hanno the Navigator down Africa's Atlantic coast in the fifth century BC?

Carthage is reputed to have kept the skins of hairy people his interpreters called Gorillai, and that word from his account is where the name gorilla comes from.

To which romance writer from Pisa did Marco Polo tell his travel tales while the two shared a prison around 1298?

Rustichello had already written the earliest known Arthurian romance by an Italian author, and together the two prisoners produced the book known as The Travels of Marco Polo.

Which legendary Christian king of the East did Portuguese envoys set out overland to find in 1487?

Prester John had been placed in Asia by earlier tales, but Portuguese explorers came to assume the name meant the ruler of Ethiopia, an isolated Christian kingdom far from any other.

Which ship, first built to drift with the Arctic ice, carried Roald Amundsen south to conquer the South Pole?

Fram, meaning 'Forward', was given a diesel engine before the voyage, a first for a polar exploration vessel, and she is preserved as a museum ship in Oslo.

Which Antwerp mapmaker published the first modern atlas, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, in 1570?

Abraham Ortelius also noticed how the coasts of America and Europe-Africa mirror each other and proposed that the continents had drifted apart, centuries before the idea was proved.

Which Saharan headland, then the limit of the known world, did Gil Eanes finally sail past in 1434?

Cape Bojador was beaten by seamanship: Eanes, a squire of Prince Henry the Navigator, got home by swinging far out from the coast on a circular route known as the volta do mar.

Which nuclear submarine made the first submerged crossing of the North Pole in August 1958, in Operation Sunshine?

USS Nautilus, also the world's first nuclear-powered submarine, was sent under the ice as a technological showpiece after the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik.

Which craft did the Swedish engineer S. A. Andrée take toward the North Pole from Svalbard in 1897?

A hydrogen balloon named Eagle carried them, but it lost gas so quickly that it came down on the pack ice after two days, and their last camp was found by chance only in 1930.

Which French navigator, who set off around the world in 1766, has a tropical flowering vine named after him?

Louis de Bougainville was honoured by the expedition's botanist, whose valet was later revealed to be a woman, Jeanne Baret, the first woman known to have circled the globe.

Which star, almost fixed in the northern sky, told sailors their latitude by its height above the horizon?

Polaris lies less than one degree from the north celestial pole, so it barely moves through the night, and its elevation gives the approximate latitude of the observer.