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The Great Explorers
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 –or
even the Phoenicians – beat him to America by hundreds of years. 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 and 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 15th 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. Go here for our article
on it: http://www.crossculturedtraveler.com/Museums/Archives/Kennedy_Space.htm#
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, and 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. Link to our
previous articles on the Great Basin and Grand Canyon here:
http://www.crossculturedtraveler.com/Parks/Archives/Grand_Canyon.htm
http://www.crossculturedtraveler.com/Parks/Archives/Great_Basin.htm
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 18th-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