I.

Introduction

Geographical Exploration, process of conscious discovery by human beings of the world around them. The human species is highly mobile, migrating and travelling to every corner of the globe. In this human beings are not unique. What sets human beings apart from other animals is the ability to discover. Other creatures share humankind’s curiosity; but human beings alone can communicate their discoveries. Human societies acquire a collective awareness of their known world, and the most adventurous have the urge to discover what lies beyond and to return to describe their findings: these are the explorers.

II.

To Explore or Not To Explore?

The exploration of the Earth, and now the space around it, has proceeded from many different sources and perspectives. Chinese, Europeans, Africans, Polynesians, and Native Americans all explored the frontiers of the regions they knew. The pace of this exploration has been uneven, extraordinarily quick in some periods, with long intervals when little has happened. Some cultures have felt the need to explore, others appear to have deliberately turned inward. Still other cultures made great bursts of exploration, and then abandoned the quest. Such was the case in China, where in the first quarter of the 15th century, the emperor Chengzu sent out his courtier Zheng He in charge of the largest and best-equipped exploring fleets then known, over 60 ships at a time. Zheng He is recorded as making seven successive voyages into the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean between 1405 and 1434, reaching as far as the coast of eastern Africa. It was one of the most comprehensive feats of exploration in history. However, when Zheng He finally returned home, the Chinese administration abruptly cancelled all further trips, and the country reverted to its traditional policy of seclusion. The heavy cost was probably one reason, but so too was the traditional Chinese attitude that China was already the self-sufficient centre of the world, and had no need to look outside its boundaries. This notion was symbolized by the Great Wall, begun in the 3rd century bc and built to protect the “civilized” Chinese from the “barbarian” nomads outside. Sixty-four years after Zheng He’s seventh expedition European ships, led by the Portuguese, began entering the Indian Ocean from the opposite direction, around the Cape of Good Hope, and the tidal flow of exploration reversed.

Societies which it seems did not explore may not have been as static as thought. Some perhaps did explore but never recorded their findings. Others certainly lacked the necessary technology. Many island cultures of the Pacific eventually lost the ability to construct vessels capable of the transoceanic travel that must originally have brought their ancestors there, and thus became confined to their islands. Several cultures seem to have been so highly adapted to their environment that they remained within it—for example, the forest-dwelling peoples of tropical central Africa do not appear to have travelled widely. An unusual case of a “non-exploring” society was Japan. Early contact with the outside world was limited to an occasional embassy to China and trips by pilgrims to the mainland. As late as 1500 the Japanese had not yet fully explored the island of Hokkaido, part of the main archipelago. The reasons for this lack of interest are not clear, but as time passed the closed attitude became formalized when Japanese were forbidden to travel abroad, and by government edict Japanese ships were limited in size and had to be built to designs only suitable to sail close inshore.

III.

Motives of Exploration

A.

Migration by Land and Sea

The driving forces for exploration are complex, and have changed in response to social and historical circumstance, as well as the advances of enabling technology. It can only be surmised that the very earliest explorations by preliterate peoples were driven by the need to tap new resources such as hunting and fishing grounds or pastures when the old ones became inadequate or exhausted, or in response to social pressures. To these early peoples climatic change could have opened up new regions or closed off others. A severe drought in a desert margin might cause people to move; or a very cold winter might create strong enough sea ice for people to cross a hitherto unbridgeable gulf. These early motives can be characterized as primarily of necessity and, less often, of opportunity. If it is accepted that the human race had a single place of origin then this original exploration distributed people into different corners of the Earth, rather than joined them. It is the reverse process, when the settled and different cultures began to get in touch again, or find uninhabited lands, that is now thought of as exploration.

The furthest journeys of exploration have been by sea, as water was the easiest medium for long-distance travel and water covers most of the globe. Maritime cultures thus had an inherent advantage in having an “open” horizon towards the sea. The earliest known long-distance sailor-explorers are, not surprisingly, associated with the greatest body of water, the Pacific Ocean. By 1000 bc the ancestors of the Polynesian navigators had reached Tonga and Samoa from south-eastern Asia. Their descendants then made voyages of exploration surpassing anything achieved in the West until modern times and, sailing probably from the Society Islands, had reached New Zealand by ad 1000. One motive for the great Polynesian voyages was the need to find new land for settlement. Original settlers of an island might also be forced to move on by later arrivals. To set out into the Pacific required superb boats—which the Polynesians had in their double-hulled voyaging canoes—but above all it needed self-confidence in seafaring and navigation, and an outward-looking view of their environment. The Polynesians were able to postulate the existence of other islands based on observation of natural phenomena such as clouds, currents, and the migration paths of birds, and they had the confidence to launch upon the ocean.

B.

Faith and Chance

A similar outlook was found among two Atlantic peoples—the early Irish and the Norse, usually known as Vikings. Irish sailors of the 4th to 8th century, many of them monks, were prepared to launch into the difficult waters of the North Atlantic in very small boats, sometimes made of leather. Setting out in such fragile craft was an act of trust in their God, and they travelled in anticipation of seeing the wonders of a divinely created world. Their attitude, which might be described as fatalistic, brought them to the islands of Scotland, to the Faroes, and to Iceland. Here their field of exploration overlapped with the Norse who, using more sophisticated seagoing vessels, also had a risk-taking attitude to seafaring and exploration. Viking exploration went even further into the Atlantic and reached North America around the end of the 10th century. They too had confidence in their own seamanship and considered that successful exploration brought honour, as well as worldly wealth.

Chance has also played its part in the story of exploration. It was a prolonged gale at sea in 986 that drove Bjarni Herjólfsson off his course for Greenland until he accidentally glimpsed the coast of North America, the first Norseman to do so. The Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca was obliged by a catastrophic shipwreck on the Texas coast in 1528 to walk, with three other survivors, across what is now the southern United States to reach his compatriots in Spanish Mexico. Many of the “explorers” from the closed society of 19th-century Japan were shipwrecked fishermen picked up by foreign vessels, who subsequently found their way home.

C.

Commerce, Religion, and Myth

The commercial reason for exploration has been a consistent driving force, most notably among Western societies in the so-called Great Age of Exploration that began in the late 15th century. Columbus sailed west across the Atlantic seeking a new, shorter, cheaper route to reach the riches of the Orient, and da Gama circumnavigated Africa for much the same reason. Yet similar investigations of the profitable eastern trade had already been made by Arab sailors. Arab trading ships were sailing from the Arabian Gulf to south-eastern Asia probably as early as the 7th century, and had reached China by the 9th century. Both Columbus and da Gama acknowledged the priority of the Arabs. Columbus set out with Arabic-speaking interpreters on board, expecting this to be the trade language of the Orient; and on the eastern coast of Africa da Gama hired an Arab pilot, believing the navigator’s claim that he could guide the Portuguese flotilla to the coast of India.

The religion of Islam, with its idea of the hajj or pilgrimage, helped to shape the Arab attitude towards travel and exploration as a normal activity. Other religions played a role in encouraging exploration, both as quest and as commitment. In the 7th century the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang journeyed to India to find the sacred sites of Buddhism, and the very few medieval Japanese travellers known about today were pilgrims seeking the wellsprings of their faith. Another role of religion as a reason for exploration was the missionary journey. In the 13th century this motivated the Franciscans Giovanni de Piano Carpini and Willem van Ruysbroeck to seek an audience with Mongolian khans, while the zeal of the Jesuits in the 16th century sent Matteo Ricci to China and St Francis Xavier to Japan. The proselytizing urge of Christianity was epitomized by the travels of the missionary explorer David Livingstone in Africa in the 19th century, but was also found in a much more aggressive form in the medieval Crusades, when Europeans attempted to regain control of the Holy Land, and among the Spanish conquistadors who explored the Americas in the 16th century. Many conquistadors were motivated by a combination of religious zeal, the desire for plunder, and a wish for fame, aptly summarized by the phrase “God, Gold, and Glory”.

The quest for a particular object of desire—often mythical—has also led many cultures to send out explorers, and in this case the motive lies deep within the cultural fabric of the society. In the 3rd century bc the emperor Shi Huangdi sent the courtier Hsu Fu with a fleet into the Pacific to find the islands where legend said grew the drug of immortality. His quest was echoed in 1513 by the expedition of the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León who sailed to Florida to look for the Fountain of Youth. Myths have a long lifespan, and the search for the partly mythical Christian potentate known as Prester John took European explorers first to central Asia in the 13th century, then to China, and finally to Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in the 16th century. In every case their travels increased geographical knowledge.

D.

Control and Conquest

The political organization of a society had several roles to play. A highly organized society could arrange state-sponsored exploration, pay the heavy cost, and have a need for information about countries, far and near, for reasons of state. The rulers of the enormously extended Inca Empire of South America, which spread over 4,000 km (2,500 mi) north to south by the early 16th century, had to build up a geographical concept of their own territories for administrative reasons, and sent embassies to contact and evaluate their neighbours. Further north the Maya Empire in the 4th to 8th century established a trading network across Central America, and the militaristic Aztec Empire of Mexico, which grew to dominance in the 14th and 15th centuries, must have sent scouts to prepare the way for its conquering armies, just as Roman soldiers were sent up the River Nile by the emperor Nero when he planned to invade the Sudan. As late as the 19th century, British explorers were mapping in the Himalaya and Afghanistan for strategic reasons, to learn more about the frontiers of the British Empire, the better to defend them. The journey of Lewis and Clark across what would later become the United States of America was performed for political and strategic reasons, linked with the Louisiana Purchase, as well as to find a route to the Pacific coast.

Military conquest, once achieved, then brought increased knowledge of foreign lands as well as creating safer conditions for civilian travel. The astonishing overland campaign of Alexander the Great that took him to the borders of India in the 4th century bc added hugely to European knowledge of Asia; and the great Mongol Empire, which at its peak in the late 13th century was the largest land empire in history, opened up the paths along which travellers like Marco Polo could move with comparative safety.

E.

Technology and Science

In the past 200 years, exploration on a global scale has received its main impetus from the advance of technology, and this in turn has meant that technologically developing societies have been at the forefront of exploration. At the same time, the improvements in ships, weapons, clothing, navigation techniques, and now rocketry and underwater techniques, have opened up previously inaccessible regions. With exploration and science inextricably linked, the motives for exploration took on new forms, though they sometimes cloaked the older reasons.

In fact a “scientific” approach to exploration dates back to the curiosity of Classical Greek geographers such as Eratosthenes, who was interested in establishing the circumference of the Earth, or the labours of early Chinese surveyors making maps of the great silt plains of northern China. The Age of Enlightenment in 18th-century Europe took this approach one step further, and might almost be called the Age of Curiosity. The theme, embodied in the work of the greatest of Enlightenment explorers, James Cook, was to find new lands and examine their peoples and products, and to put them on the map for the greater increase of knowledge available to all human beings. It was politically convenient that discovery also led to territorial claims for the new-found lands and their contents. The history of cartography thus shows how one of the greatest achievements of science has had profound political, economic, and social results.

F.

National Prestige and Personal Challenge

Successful exploration came increasingly to be driven by a sense of national rivalry, and colonial ambition. Although this had been apparent since the Spanish-Portuguese rivalry of the late 15th century, it intensified during the 19th century when, in the “Scramble for Africa”, the continent was carved up into European colonies. This process was often headed by explorers, such as Fernand Foureau, who marched forward under the flag of their nation, and planted it to stake a claim. When there was no more “new” land to discover, the sense of rivalry continued in the form of competition for prestige rather than territorial gain. Thus Robert Scott, an Englishman, “raced” Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian, to the South Pole; Robert Peary attempted the North Pole on behalf of the United States; and there was much pride in the coronation year of Queen Elizabeth II, head of the Commonwealth, that Edmund Hillary, a New Zealander, became the first to reach the summit of Mount Everest supported by a largely British team.

The same drive for national prestige, combined with the age-old strategic imperative, helped fuel early space flights and the race for the Moon. In the latter only the two most technologically advanced countries, the United States and the Soviet Union, had the resources to compete. Then, as the cost of space exploration continued to increase and the economic balance between nations changed, so the importance of the Soviet Union and, more recently, Russia in space exploration has dwindled in comparison to the efforts of the increasingly wealthy European Union, and to a lesser extent Japan, while the United States retains its dominance. However, the cost of space exploration continues to soar, so now a pooling of international effort is seen as the only way forward with multinational collaboration in space. Thus, a small step for a man has indeed become a big step for all mankind.

A similar pattern can be seen in deep-sea exploration, where only the wealthiest nations can afford the large sums needed to maintain research fleets. An example of how scientific exploration relocates in response to economic resources is the career of Professor Auguste Piccard. This brilliant Swiss pioneer of deep-sea diving, using pressurized submersibles, was originally funded by the French after World War II, but by 1960 he had teamed up with the US Navy for the necessary technical and financial support when his son Jacques Piccard made the deepest dive, nearly 11 km (7 mi) down in the Pacific Ocean south of Guam. The trench itself was the Challenger Trench, named after the great British oceanographic survey commanded by Sir George Nares in the early 1870s, and paid for by the British Empire, then at the height of its economic and military power.

The often colourful story of exploration has left it with a very romantic image. This image leads to continuing efforts by individuals or small teams to penetrate into truly remote places, whether on land, beneath it, or below water. Efforts to cross, climb, or descend difficult terrain by arduous methods are often called “exploration” but have more to do with surmounting physical challenges. These efforts are heirs to a great tradition where the role of the individual has been crucial. Many of the most famous travellers and explorers created their own success, not just in the field but in the preparation of their journeys. Columbus spent years researching his ideas, and then badgered the Spanish Crown for financial support. Sir Henry Morton Stanley, the American explorer of central Africa who met David Livingstone with the immortal phrase “Dr Livingstone, I presume” was a man of prodigious energy and drive who personally led small armies of porters, scouts, and scientists on huge marches through appallingly difficult equatorial jungle. The combination of perseverance, wanderlust, and curiosity that characterized the individual throughout exploration was summed up by Ibn Batuta, the greatest traveller of the Arab tradition. In 1325, at the age of 21, he resolved to travel “throughout the Earth” and spent the rest of his life doing so, journeying from western Africa to China. At his death in around 1369 he was reputed to be the most travelled person in the world.

IV.

Exploration in the Ancient World

From beginnings in eastern Africa, early human beings settled first in the warm and fertile valleys of the Nile and Mesopotamia, and probably moved north into the harsher climes of northern Europe and Siberia in search of game. The settlement of the Americas during successive ice ages over perhaps the past 20,000 years almost certainly occurred as a result of migrations across the frozen land bridge linking Siberia and Alaska. There is virtually no climatic region in the world that has not been inhabited or crossed since the earliest times. The settlement of the Pacific was carried out by Polynesians who navigated to some of the most remote Pacific islands, and even settled on Easter Island, thousands of kilometres from the nearest land.

Explorers have often been described as those who filled in the blanks on the map; or perhaps more properly the blanks in their own society’s perception, because the places they discovered were usually already inhabited. Although simple maps were produced by preliterate societies, it was not until Ptolemy, often called the “father of modern geography”, established the conventions that enabled the features of a spherical globe to be displayed as a flat map, that the foundations of map-making (see Cartography) were in place. Although his discoveries were forgotten in Europe in the following centuries, they were preserved by Islamic scholars in Arabic translations and survived to be rediscovered in the West because Ptolemy had recorded them.

The early explorers left no written record of their discoveries, or it has not survived, and reliance has to be placed on the evidence uncovered by archaeologists, or preserved by others who recorded them, often long after the event, to build up a picture of their movements. Egyptian hieroglyphics record an expedition in about 3000 bc to the Land of Punt (probably the coast of modern-day Eritrea or Somalia). The extraordinary circumnavigation of Africa by Phoenician explorers is only known from a single reference by the Greek historian Herodotus, while the voyage of Pytheas, who left Marseille in about 325 bc to make the first circumnavigation of Britain, and possibly visited the Orkneys and Norway, is only recorded by the historian Polybius. Nothing is known from written records about the bold feats of seafaring that must have brought settlers from Indonesia westward to the island of Madagascar some 2,000 years ago, yet today some 40 per cent of that country’s population is of Indonesian descent.

During the Middle Ages, Christians in Europe believed that Jerusalem was the centre of the universe, and the findings of the ancient geographers were suppressed. Although European sailors and navigators continued to chart the Mediterranean and surrounding seas, it was the Chinese and Arab traders in luxury goods who made the greatest contribution to exploration at this time with their fine cartographic skills. The 13th-century Venetian traveller Marco Polo used Chinese and Arab trade routes, both overland and by sea, to visit the great Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, while Ibn Batuta a century later used trading dhows to visit India and most places in the Indian Ocean. To demonstrate the might of the Chinese Empire, Zheng He captained a series of seven voyages between 1405 and 1434, involving a total of 317 ships and 37,000 men that visited all the major ports in the China Sea and Indian Ocean. The only important European effort in this period were the voyages of the Vikings. Sailing from Iceland, Eric the Red settled Greenland in the late 10th century, and his son Leif Ericson attempted to colonize Newfoundland a few years later.

V.

European Expansion

In Europe, the so-called Great Age of Exploration is often said to have begun with the Renaissance, when scholars rediscovered the works of the Greek and Latin geographers. Christianity was in the ascendant: the Moors were driven from their last stronghold in Spain in 1492, the same year that Christopher Columbus first sailed to the Caribbean. In the following years Columbus made three more voyages, and many other Spaniards explored the Caribbean islands and mainland, establishing the Spanish presence that has had such a profound impact on the Americas in the centuries since. The Portuguese made their way down the western coast of Africa and eventually around the Cape of Good Hope in search of a sea route to the spices of India. When the ships led by Vasco da Gama made the return journey from his second voyage to India in 1503, their cargo of pepper, ginger, cinnamon, and cloves was worth a fortune, while the 1497 voyage of John Cabot had opened up rich new fishing grounds off the North American coast.

Such profit inspired Pedro Álvares Cabral, whose fleet of 13 ships and 1,200 men sailed from Lisbon in 1500 and came upon the shores of Brazil on its way to India, just as Columbus had set off westward across the Atlantic hoping to reach China and Japan, and ended up in Cuba. Columbus established the first European settlement in the Americas, and promised to bring back great riches to the Spanish monarchy, which sponsored his voyages. In later decades Hernán Cortés in Mexico, Francisco Pizarro in Peru, and other conquerors were lured to the Americas by the promise of gold and silver. Ferdinand Magellan was searching for a route to the Orient as he rounded the tip of South America during a voyage that became the first circumnavigation of the world.

Jacques Cartier, the first of the great French explorers of North America, died in disgrace after returning with quartz instead of diamonds from his three voyages between 1534 and 1542, but over the next 80 years his successors, with the help of their indigenous guides, mapped all the great waterways of the eastern coast of Canada and the tributaries of its great river, the St Lawrence. Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec on its bank. Henry Hudson, sailing for the Dutch East India Company, established the first fur-trading post on Manhattan; on his last voyage, for England, he sailed into the huge bay that now bears his name. Missionaries and fur traders followed: the Hudson’s Bay Company was established in 1670, and by the late 18th century competition from the rival North West Company led both to make pioneering explorations of the waterways of the vast Canadian interior. Sir Alexander Mackenzie navigated to the Arctic on what is now the Mackenzie River, one of the greatest of North America; four years later, in 1793, he made the first overland crossing of the continent when he found a route through the Rockies to the Pacific. Further south, La Salle had sailed down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, taking possession of the river’s basin for France in 1682 and naming it Louisiana. When these lands were sold to the United States in 1803, Thomas Jefferson sent the Lewis and Clark expedition to explore the new territory. Their overland journey to the Pacific opened up the territory to the imagination of the young country.

Trade soon required permanent trading posts, and these in turn led to colonial occupation. The rare luxuries of the early explorers gave way to commodities that, to be equally profitable, required a large amount of cheap labour: sugar and cotton; gold, silver, diamonds, and emeralds from their respective mines, or pearls brought up by indigenous divers; and later coffee, cocoa, tea, and tobacco. Thus arose the slavery associated with European colonization: beginning with the forced labour of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, and later, when inadvertently introduced diseases caused massive depopulation, the infamous Atlantic slave trade in people taken forcibly from Africa. Explorers were active in all these operations, often pushing beyond the colonial frontier in search of gold, silver, furs, or slaves.

By the 18th century scientific and political concerns led to exploration into territories beyond the Old World and the Americas. Captain James Cook, arguably the greatest explorer of them all, returned from his first circumnavigation in 1771. He had observed a transit of Venus across the Sun on Tahiti, charted both the North Island and the South Island of New Zealand and the eastern coast of Australia, and brought back a shipload of new botanical and zoological specimens. On his second voyage Cook sailed further south than any previous explorer and into the Antarctic pack ice, laying to rest the notion of a habitable continent south of Australia.

A few years after Cook’s death on his third voyage, scientifically curious gentlemen in London established the African Association, dedicated to exploring the heart of Africa. This later became the Royal Geographical Society. The African Association first focused its attention on western Africa. Mungo Park, a young Scottish doctor, died in his attempt to establish the course of the River Niger. It was not until 1830 that the brothers John and Richard Lander established the Niger to be navigable and a potential route to the interior both for commercial gain and for possible action to eradicate slavery. Heinrich Barth, the sole survivor of the 1849 expedition sponsored by the Anti-Slavery Society, travelled some 16,000 km (10,000 mi) across the Sahara from Tripoli to Lake Chad and down the Niger, providing a painstaking account of its geography.

However, still the mystery of the source of the River Nile remained. In 1856 Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke set out to investigate Lake Tanganyika. On the way back Speke sighted Lake Victoria and correctly surmised this to be the source. It led to an acrimonious difference of opinion between the two explorers, and it was not until a second expedition of 1860-1863 that Speke and James Grant were able to confirm that “the Nile is settled”—an announcement that greatly disappointed Samuel Baker and his wife Florence, who had to be content with the location of another of the Rift Valley lakes which they named Albert Nyanza, and the magnificent Murchison Falls.

In southern Africa, it was the most famous of the Victorian explorers, Scottish missionary David Livingstone, who made his mark on uncharted territory by crossing the Kalahari, and mapping much of the area from Angola to the mouth of the River Zambezi in Mozambique. The British government and the Royal Geographical Society supplied a steamboat for Livingstone to investigate the navigability of the lower Zambezi, but it ended in failure, and so in 1867 Livingstone turned his attention to the River Nile sources and Lake Tanganyika. When he failed to report back in 1871, a number of search expeditions were mounted, among them one by the New York Herald journalist Sir Henry Morton Stanley, who found Livingstone at Ujiji. When he died two years later, Livingstone’s faithful servants carried his embalmed body back to Zanzibar, from where it was sent back to England for burial in Westminster Abbey.

Stanley set out in 1874 on one of the largest and most ambitious overland journeys across Africa, following up the discoveries of his predecessors. His navigation of Lake Tanganyika finally proved it had no connection with the Nile, and he followed the River Congo to the sea on a terrible journey lasting 999 days and costing the lives of 242 of his men. Stanley later went into the service of the Belgian king Leopold II, and was one of the key players in the “Scramble for Africa” in which the European powers set about systematic colonization.

In 1818 the British Admiralty decided to resume the search for the long-sought North West Passage through the Canadian archipelago, which English navigators had begun to seek in the 16th century. In 1845 the Royal Navy mounted its most lavish expedition: two polar ships, the Erebus and the Terror, which had just returned from an Antarctic expedition under Sir James Clark Ross, were sent out under the command of Sir John Franklin. Years passed without word of the expedition, and some 40 search expeditions were mounted, the majority at the instigation of Franklin’s widow. Only in 1854 did John Rae of the Hudson’s Bay Company, perhaps the most thoroughly professional British explorer of the 19th century, hear reports from the Inuit of northern Canada of the demise of Franklin and his 137 men, and recover some relics from the ships. In 1859 another expedition finally found a single written report left by the expedition in a cairn. The massive exploratory effort of the Franklin search had, however, succeeded in filling in most of the remaining blanks on the map of the tortuous maze of islands and ice-choked channels that make up the archipelago.

On the other side of the world, explorers were searching the Australian interior for an inland sea or lake that would solve that country’s problems of drought. Edward Eyre was a sheep farmer who travelled into the outback and discovered the intermittent salt lake that is named after him. The German scientist Ludwig Leichhardt explored northern Australia, but died in 1848 trying to cross it from east to west.

Meanwhile Charles Sturt, and later John Stuart, moved from the southern settlements into the barren interior. In 1860 and 1861 the tough, experienced Stuart twice almost traversed Australia, from Adelaide across the dusty outback to the northern territories. In 1862 he finally succeeded in making the 3,250-km (2,020-mi) crossing using horses and camels; he returned to Adelaide at the same time that the bodies of Robert O’Hara Burke and William Wills were brought back into the city. Burke and Wills had left Melbourne in a large expedition hoping to track Stuart across Australia. They came within sight of the northern coast, turned back, and were more than halfway to Melbourne before they died of thirst and starvation at Cooper Creek.

Other explorers, often guided by Aborigines whose ancestors had been crossing Australia for thousands of years, mapped the remaining parts of the vast land: the Gregory brothers across the Northern Territory, John Forrest in Western Australia, Ernest Giles who became the first European to sight Ayers Rock (Uluru) in 1872, and Gibson and Simpson in the deserts that are named after them.

The Great Trigonometrical Survey of India was probably the greatest geographical project undertaken anywhere in the 19th century. It began as a number of independent surveys from 1767 onward but did not become a single national surveying project until 1817. The systematic trigonometrical survey started in 1800 under William Lambton and lasted for 70 years, with teams of surveyors measuring every inch of the subcontinent with chains, triangulations, and theodolites. They started at Madras, on the eastern coast, fanning out north and south and finally reaching the Himalaya, under the directorship of George Everest and his successor, Andrew Waugh.

To the British in India the most intriguing uncharted areas lay north of the Himalaya. There was no single expedition to explore this heart of central Asia, but throughout the century brave individuals plunged deep into the unknown, often disguised as Muslim or Buddhist traders and occasionally being killed by local peoples or suspicious rulers. Many of these intrepid explorers were army officers spying out the land for the “Great Game”, the race by Britain and Russia to gain control of central Asia and the overland approaches to India. The Russians sent equally daring explorers such as P. P. Semenov in the Tian Mountains and Count Nikolai Przhevalski. On the British side, the Royal Geographical Society honoured many, including H. H. Godwin-Austen (after whom the world’s second-highest mountain, also known as K2, is unofficially named), George Hayward for his work in the Karakorum Range, and Ney Elias for his work in China and Turkistan.

Perhaps the bravest of all were the Pundits, the Hindu surveyors trained by the Survey of India, who penetrated Tibet disguised as Buddhist pilgrims. Trained to walk exactly 2,000 paces to the mile and equipped with surveying equipment hidden in prayer wheels, explorers such as Nain Singh, Kishen Singh, and Kintup secretly mapped the approaches to Lhasa at great personal danger. The era ended with the big expedition of Francis Younghusband who marched to Lhasa in 1904 but whose diplomatic intentions went awry and resulted in a battle that led to the deaths of many Tibetans. The ambitious Swede Sven Hedin and the Anglo-Hungarian Aurel Stein combined remarkable exploration of central Asia with the removal of its neglected ancient works of art.

With the mapping of the northern shores of North America and Russia, the last great prizes for explorers were the two poles. Norwegians and Americans were the heroes of attempts on the North Pole. During the 19th century the British expeditions of Admiral William Parry in 1827 and of Captain George Nares in 1875-1876 battled north to within some 645 km (400 mi) of the Pole. The outstanding feats of exploration were by the Norwegians. Fridtjof Nansen crossed Greenland in 1888 and then sailed and drifted his tough little ship Fram across the north of Russia, from Siberia to the Atlantic in 1893-1896. A few years later Roald Amundsen, who would be the first person to reach the South Pole, took three years to bring the tiny sailing ship Gjöa through the North West Passage, the first to do so in a single vessel.

Meanwhile the ambitious American commander Robert Peary was determined to reach the North Pole, which he claimed to have done in April 1909. Another American, Dr Frederick Cook, claimed to have reached it in April 1908. Both Peary and Cook may have exaggerated their claims or miscalculated their coordinates, although Peary certainly came very close to the Pole. The first reliably confirmed attainment of the North Pole on the surface was by Wally Herbert, who drifted across it on his British Trans-Arctic Expedition of 1968-1969.

In the Antarctic a series of endeavours by different European countries in the early 20th century included perhaps the most famous of all expeditions. Captain R. F. Scott commanded the Discovery expedition from 1901 to 1904 that did admirable scientific work; and the Nimrod expedition of 1907-1909, led by Ernest Shackleton, penetrated close to the South Pole. Shackleton’s second expedition in 1914 achieved a miracle of survival when its ship, the aptly named Endurance, sank after becoming trapped in the ice: the crew crossed the icy, storm-swept Antarctic Ocean in an open boat, then after gaining land a smaller group rowed to South Georgia and traversed the glaciers of the desolate island to summon help; all were eventually rescued.

Antarctic exploration culminated in the famous “race” of 1911-1912. Captain Scott’s small team man-hauled sledges to the Pole and had covered most of the return journey, hauling precious geological samples, when exhaustion and cold led to their deaths in a frozen tent not far from safety. Arriving at the South Pole, Scott’s men had been greeted by the Norwegian flag and a message from their rival Amundsen. He had reached the most southerly point on Earth some five weeks earlier, by an efficient plan using husky dogs, who pulled the sledges and were periodically killed and fed to the surviving animals.

VI.

Exploration in the Modern World

When Edward Whymper led a team of tweed-clad climbers in a successful attempt on the Matterhorn in 1865, he inaugurated the concept of exploration for sporting adventure. Whymper climbed in the Andes and the Rockies in the following decade, and throughout the 20th century mountaineers have been scaling peaks across the world. Pioneering attempts to climb Mount Everest were organized by the Alpine Club and the Royal Geographical Society. George Leigh Mallory and Andrew Irvine disappeared close to the highest point on Earth in 1924 (Mallory’s body was eventually found in 1999), and during the 1930s Bill Tilman and Eric Shipton penetrated many of the hidden valleys of the Himalaya that are now renowned climbing centres for serious mountaineers. Some experts claimed that it was physically impossible for human beings to climb Everest. They were confounded on May 29, 1953, when John Hunt’s expedition put Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norkay on to the summit.

Since 1953 mountaineers have achieved further prestigious feats. They have been helped in their objectives by easier communications, by vastly improved equipment, and by better training and techniques. There is a move away from big expeditions towards Alpine-style climbing by two or three people moving quickly and unsupported. Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler scaled Everest without bottled oxygen in 1978, and Alison Hargreaves became the first woman to do so in 1995, while Chris Bonington has made first ascents of many Himalayan peaks. Every ridge of Everest has now been climbed, photographed, or mapped.

Sporting expeditions have taken people into inaccessible crannies of the Earth—kayaking down the white water of river gorges; ballooning or hang-gliding into volcanic craters and forest canopies or across oceans; and venturing into deep unexplored caverns or fissures all over the world.

The second half of the 20th century has witnessed a marvellous acceleration in discovery and exploration. Satellite imagery can plot every physical feature and translate it into digital form for computerized mapping. The emphasis is now on discovery of all the biological and physical wonders of our planet. Discoveries are coming thick and fast in every realm of science, transforming people’s understanding of the processes that govern the world and its amazing range of flora and fauna. However, these findings are now largely made by unpublicized teams rather than famous individuals. Their successes result from months or years of tough fieldwork, often followed by lengthy laboratory analysis. Every year an increasing number of expeditions go into the field.

More than 70 per cent of the Earth is covered by oceans, and yet it was only in 1943 that Jacques Yves Cousteau helped invent the aqualung that opened the submarine world to easy human exploration. There were primitive submersibles before World War I, but the greatest oceanographic expeditions have taken place in recent years. American, British, French, and other investigators are exploring the ocean floors and discovering how submarine currents and marine organisms affect the weather, atmosphere, and survival on Earth. It was the exploration of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge by scientists such as Robert Ballard that finally demonstrated the reality of plate tectonics—the most important breakthrough in geological thinking of recent decades. Other marine scientists are revealing the millions of species of fish that inhabit the waters. In 1960 Jacques Piccard dived in the Trieste to the lowest point of the sea floor ever reached, achieving the depth of 10,912 m (35,800 ft) below sea level in the Mariana Trench in the Pacific.

On the seas there have been epic voyages such as the first solo circumnavigation of the globe by Francis Chichester in 1967. Twenty years earlier Thor Heyerdahl and his crew thrilled the world by sailing his raft Kon-Tiki across the Pacific. Heyerdahl, and more recently Tim Severin with Brendan and other vessels, learnt much about ancient navigation by repeating legendary voyages in replicas of early craft.

In the deserts, Wilfred Thesiger followed the traditions of a line of famous desert explorers in his crossings of the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia’s Danakil Depression. Additionally, teams of scientists are working on many expeditions to discover the dynamics of dunes, the geological formations of desert regions, the palaeontological and archaeological evidence of early human beings, and the life cycles of desert creatures.

Most biological discoveries are being made in the tropical rainforests, the world’s richest ecosystem, containing perhaps half of the 10 million or more species with which people share the Earth. In the 19th century naturalists from many nations started to record this biological cornucopia, classifying plants, animals, and insects by the system devised by the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus.

The British scientists Henry Bates, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Richard Spruce were all active in the Amazon in the 1850s. Wallace went on to work in south-eastern Asia, and in 1858 the Linnean Society of London published two papers of seminal importance, the results of investigations of two indefatigable naturalists, Wallace and Charles Darwin, who had independently developed the theory of evolution by natural selection.

Amazonia contains a third of the world’s tropical forests, and its greatest explorers in the 20th century have been Brazilians, who have also championed that country’s indigenous peoples. In the first half of the century Candido Rondon discovered and surveyed more great rivers and contacted more isolated tribes than anyone before or since. His work of protection of the tribes he encountered was continued for 25 years by the Villas Boas brothers.

Botanists from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and many other institutions have penetrated isolated forests in search of plants, while entomologists are constantly discovering new insect species. Ecologists are studying the dynamics of the nutrient and water cycles that nourish tropical forests, and environmentalists have investigated the vital role those systems play in maintaining life on Earth.

Scientists are also working in the polar regions. Researchers from various nations regularly spend the winter in Antarctica and there is a permanent American base at the South Pole itself. Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey noticed the alarming hole in the Earth’s protective ozone layer, a discovery that has led to international initiatives to phase out CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons). There have been exciting expeditions in recent years to both poles. Vivian Fuchs led a Trans-Antarctic Expedition in the 1950s that used motorized sledges to make the first crossing of the southern continent; Ranulph Fiennes and Charles Burton were the first to traverse both poles in the 1979-1982 Transglobe Expedition and Robert Swan was the first to man-haul to both poles.

Little new seems to remain under the classic definition of “first discoveries” although there are still a few mountains unclimbed, rivers undescended, and caves unfathomed. Explorers seeking fame must now try to reach remote destinations by difficult or unusual means: by going “solo”, “unsupported”, running, hang-gliding, or by mountain bike. In 1986 Dick Rutan and Jeanna Yeager took nine days to fly around the world non-stop and without refuelling in their specially built aircraft Voyager, and in 1999 Bertrand Piccard (son of Jacques and grandson of Auguste) and Brian Jones made the first non-stop circumnavigation of the world by balloon (designed by Jones), crowning a decade of attempts by an array of international teams.

In scientific exploration, however, the amount to be discovered seems almost infinite. Possibly millions of species are as yet unrecorded, while many have received only basic recording or description, and people are still learning how the oceans and land habitats function. There is more than enough to discover for many generations to come.