50 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.