The Great Explorers
Five all time greats and 10 (or so) others people should hear more about

by Patrick Totty

Since exploration is the theme of this month’s issue, we thought we’d stick our foot in it and try to name the five greatest explorers who ever lived. We know that such a list invites trouble, because you can certainly make a case for many of the other explorers we didn’t put in our top five.

So, just to show you how hard it was to select our Fab Five, we’ve listed 10 other explorers or groups of explorers whom we think rank right up there.

Our criteria were pretty straightforward: How important were the discoveries and how much of an effect did they have on the people who followed. Or, in the case of an exception like Marco Polo, how much did his stories inspire other men to undertake explorations?

The Five All-Time Greats

James Cook – The greatest ocean explorer ever and the prototype of the scientific explorer. His three voyages of discovery, the first starting in 1769, explored the Pacific Ocean. Covering one-third of the earth’s surface, it was an area that, with the exception of a few trade routes, was largely unknown to Europeans. Cook’s methodical explorations, along with his courage and ability to motivate men incredibly far from home, made him probably the most capable explorer of all time.

Travel in his footsteps: Hawaii, Tonga, Queensland, Indonesia

Christopher Columbus – Love him or hate him, his persistence changed the world forever. Columbus persuaded Ferdinand and Isabella, fresh from a decisive victory over the Moors, to establish Spanish ascendancy and equality with Portugal by taking a shortcut west to reach the East’s fabled riches. Even though the Vikings, and possibly the Chinese – and maybe even the Phoenicians – beat him to America by hundreds of years. But Columbus’s voyages were the ones that took.

Travel in his footsteps: Cuba, the Bahamas

Admiral Zheng – Between 1405 and 1433, Chinese Admiral Zheng He, under orders of the Ming Emperor, led seven expeditions into the Indian Ocean, visiting 30 nations in Asia and Africa, sailing 35,000 miles total. His great fleet of junks, huge ships that were easily bigger than any European vessel, introduced the Chinese civilization to Indians, Arabs and Africans. (Some accounts claim that Zheng’s largest ships were 600 feet long. A more plausible length would have been 400 feet – an astounding measurement given the era.). Political intrigue at home stopped the expeditions after 1433. The Chinese, had they continued Zheng’s voyages of discovery, may well have found their way round Africa and into the Atlantic.

Travel in his footsteps: India, Sri Lanka, Yemen, East Africa

Marco Polo – This medieval traveler’s story of his journey across Asia into China doesn’t really hold up under scrutiny. He never mentions the Great Wall or foot binding, two obvious and important aspects of Chinese civilization, and a host of other details read suspiciously like contemporary accounts from the Persians. "Nevertheless," as Eleanor Roosevelt once said when somebody insulted Franklin, Polo’s accounts, however tainted, planted seeds of speculation in Europe and helped spark that continent’s great age of discovery. Had Polo not lived, Europe might have delayed her explorations, with untold consequences for the course of history after the 15^th century.

(The Chinese had their own Marco Polo, a Buddhist monk by the name of Xuanzang, who crossed the Himalayas into India in 639 A.D. and explored the ancient homeland of Buddhism. Xuanzang returned six years later, laden with Buddhist artifacts and stories of the great subcontinent, acquainting the Chinese in the first substantial way with their great southwestern neighbor.)

Travel in his footsteps: Turkey, Central Asia, China

Ferdinand Magellan – It’s almost impossible for modern people to imagine the bravery of this Portuguese mariner and his sailors. Setting sail from Spain in 1519 with a fleet of five small ships, his expedition, reduced to a single ship at the end, discovered the Philippines for Spain and completed the first circumnavigation of the globe in 1521. He faced hunger, privation, mutiny and loss along the way, including his own death at the hands of angry Filipinos who resented his efforts to convert them to Christianity. Even today, almost 500 years later with ships that are almost infinitely bigger, faster, safer and more powerful, circumnavigation of the earth is a rarity.

Travel in his footsteps: No vessels, pleasure or commercial, currently circumnavigate the globe, let alone along Magellan’s perilous route around Cape Horn.

And a Dozen (or So) Other Greats

Jason and the Argonauts – Ancient miners in the Black Sea region used to run gold-laden sediments over sheep pelts, trapping flakes in the wool. Thus was born the legend of the Golden Fleece. Almost certainly, sometime around 1500 B.C. or before, a man from Asia Minor took a crew and sailed into the Black Sea – the edge of the world by their lights – in search of golden fleeces. Whoever “Jason” was, it took incredible courage to sail into the unknown. The legend that arose from that journey inspired the West for thousands of years to come.

Travel in their footsteps: Turkey, the Black Sea, the Crimea, Bulgaria, Romania

NASA and the Astronauts – For 45 years, using men, women and robots, NASA has explored the solar system. Its discoveries have completely redrawn our maps of eight planets (only Pluto has yet to be visited by a robot explorer). The Hubble Telescope has given humanity a brilliantly sharp, colorful view of the universe, and Voyager 1, launched in 1977, has journeyed 7 billion miles, about the twice the distance from the sun as the outermost planet, Pluto. Even now, two robot explorers launched in June are on their way to Mars to continue NASA’s exploration for water and signs of ancient life on the red planet.

Travel in their footsteps: You must qualify as an astronaut to fly into space or become an engineer or scientist to work on robot explorers. However, a visit to the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, FL, might be just the thing. Click here here for our Kennedy Space Center article.

Henry the Navigator – Columbus pointed to Henry’s success in finding a sea route to the Far East to persuade Ferdinand and Isabella to try a western approach. What Henry did was patiently probe the western coastline of Africa until he rounded the Cape Hope. Once he entered the Indian Ocean, he realized that he had a straight shot to India, the Spice Islands and the Arabian entrepôts of eastern Africa and the Red Sea. Henry’s discovery of a reliable route to East Africa, India and the Far East established tiny Portugal as a major power and goaded the Spanish into their own explorations – with world-changing consequences.

Travel in his footsteps: Azores, Canary Islands, the Ivory Coast, East Africa, India

The Australian Explorers – Europeans knew the dimensions of Australia long before they knew its interior. The island continent, about the size of the 48 United States, taunted early settlers with visions of an inland sea and a passage to China. After the continent’s fertile fringes were explored, Australians turned their sights to the continent’s interior. Imagining fertile plains, great mountain chains and vast waterways, explorers set off confidently to find them. What they found instead was the numbing heat, monotony and distances of the Outback. Theirs were stories of heartbreak and perseverance. Outside of Antarctica, Australia was the harshest and hardest of the continents to explore. There’s a very good web site at http://gutenberg.net.au/explorers.html about Australia’s great explorers.

Travel in their footsteps: Queensland, the coastlines of Victoria and South Australia, the Gibson Desert, the Ghan Railway from Adelaide to Alice Springs

John C. Fremont and Wesley Powell – After Lewis and Clark, Powell and Fremont were the U.S.’s greatest interior explorers. Fremont led the mid-1840s expedition that mapped America’s last great unknown, the Great Basin. His explorations were so well received by the American public that they catapulted him into a run for the presidency in 1856 as the new Republican Party’s first major candidate. Powell, a determined, one-armed Civil War veteran, led the expedition down the Colorado River that mapped the vastness of the Grand Canyon and provided detailed scientific descriptions of what had been a major blank on U.S. maps. He was the last of the great explorers of the American interior. Review our previous articles on the Great Basin and Grand Canyon.

Travel in their footsteps: The Grand Canyon, Great Basin National Park, Nevada, Great Salt Lake

Vitus Bering – Under orders from Czar Peter the Great, the Dane Vitus Bering undertook two expeditions across Siberia to learn if Asia and North America were one continent or two. On the First Kamchatka Expedition (1725-1730), Bering was able to prove that a strait separated Asia from North America, but fog prevented him from actually sighting the American coastline. The second expedition, from 1733 to 1743 saw Bering direct 10,000 men in a systematic exploration of Siberia and, later, the Bering Strait. Bering finally set foot on Alaska in 1741, giving the world a final answer to a mystery that had consumed politicians, merchants and cartographers since the journey of Columbus. Bering’s explorations were the greatest ever done on land. No other explorer faced such prodigious distances – the eastern end of Siberia lies 6,000 miles from Moscow.

Travel in his footsteps: Trans-Siberian Railroad, Kamchatka, Nome (Alaska), Big and Little Diomede Islands

Leif Ericsson – Under the law of primogeniture, second and third sons in Scandinavia could not inherit land. Thus they were forced to take to the sea and go viking, that is, making their way as raiders. These “Vikings” quickly added exploration to their looting sprees, ranging thousands of miles from their homes. The greatest of them was Leif Ericsson, probably the first European discoverer of North America. A storm that blew him off course as he attempted to return to Norway from Greenland helped him discover an unknown coast west of Greenland.

Following it south, Ericsson found a grassy, well wooded site that he thought would make an ideal settlement. So, sometime between 950 and 1000 A.D. the Vikings built a town at what is now known as L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland. But the rigors of life so far north, coupled with the Vikings’ long, tenuous supply lines and the hostility of the local people the Vikings called the “skraelings,” forced the settlement to disband. But thanks to Ericsson, Europeans settled – if only temporarily – in North America 500 years before Columbus sailed. 

Travel in his footsteps: Newfoundland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway

Lewis and Clark – You can’t overdo these guys, especially in their bicentennial year. They were America’s first Apollo Program – an almost flawlessly executed mission of discovery. L and C were the quintessential “can do” Americans. Be sure to read related articles about them in this issue.

Travel in their footsteps: Missouri, Snake and Columbia rivers

Coronado – Francisco Coronado didn’t cover the same distances and vast areas as Hernando De Soto, but the object of his exploration, the Seven Cities of Cibola, did much to distract Spanish attention from what would later become the eastern United States.

In the slanting rays of the morning and afternoon sun, the adobe walls of Indian villages in Arizona and New Mexico look as though they are made of gold. Travelers’ tales from those regions got back to the Spanish in Mexico and inspired Francisco Coronado’s three-year expedition in search of Cibola, as well as the legendary province of Quivira. Coronado found no golden cities, but his visits – and battles – with tribes in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas (as well as present day Oklahoma and Kansas) alerted the Spanish to the potential of rich ore deposits in the mountainous terrain there. This turned out to be far more attractive to the gold-obsessed Spaniards than the forests and fertile plains – suitable for agriculture, not mining –  that De Soto had reported in his expedition through what is now the American South. 

Travel in his footsteps: Highway 191 in eastern Arizona follows the expedition’s route fairly closely. In New Mexico, Interstate 40 follows the same general direction, but not the exact path.

Charles Marie de La Condamine – It took him 10 years (1735-1745), but this 18^th-century French physicist and explorer was the first man of any race to explore the Amazon Basin, starting in the Andes and sailing down to the Atlantic. While almost all other South American “explorers” merely touched down at various harbors then sailed on, de la Condamine was the genuine thing. We considered naming Pizarro as the first great explorer of South America, but his primary interest was in ransacking Peru – all exploration associated with that mission was purely serendipitous.

Travel in his footsteps: Peru, Brazil