exploration

noun

The act or an instance of exploring or investigating: investigation, probe, reconnaissance. See investigate.

1. an examination by touch, either with or without instruments. For example, a carious lesion is explored with a special explorer, but the mucobuccal fold may be explored with the finger. n 2. the process of examination of a surface, with or without the use of instruments, to determine the condition or the surface depth of a defect or other similar diagnostic parameters.

The notion of Europeans discovering other peoples and telling them who they were and where they lived is now suspect. Exploration has been linked with the exercise of political and economic power and sometimes religious evangelism. Britain's increasing domination of exploration broadly accompanied the rise of the English and then the British state to world power after 1500.

Explorers became the pattern for heroes of boys' adventure stories and subjects for numerous biographers. Hakluyt began with his Principall Navigations … of 1589. The great 18th-cent. travel collections continued the tradition and in 1846 William Desborough Cooley founded the Hakluyt Society to publish historical accounts of voyages.

Despite Hakluyt, the English contribution to primary exploration in the great age of maritime discovery was modest. John and Sebastian Cabot, English by adoption, contributed to the discovery of the Americas in 1497 and 1509, but most English maritime adventurers in the Tudor period merely followed the Portuguese and Spanish and attempted to steal some of their treasures. This was true of Drake although his circumnavigation of 1577-8 involved the discovery of California. But the English did try to open up new routes to the Orient—the North-East and North-West Passages with the voyages of Willoughby and Chancellor to Russia in 1558 and the contemporary travels in central Asia of Jenkinson matched by the voyages to the west of Frobisher in 1576 and Davis in 1585-7. Hudson reached the bay bearing his name in 1607-11.

The Pacific attracted much British attention in the 18th cent. with Dampier's New Voyage round the World of 1697 and the circumnavigations of Anson in 1740-4. Cook's first voyage of 1768-71 revealed New Zealand and eastern Australia but the second voyage of 1772-5 effectively disproved the existence of a southern continent. Cook's third voyage was to the northern Pacific, so completing the greatest series of scientific expeditions ever undertaken. Banks had been on the first voyage and then came to dominate British exploratory activity, being instrumental in founding the African Association in 1788. This aimed to do for the interior of Africa what Cook had done for the Pacific. Mungo Park reached the upper Niger in 1795-6. Government took over the organization of expeditions by Clapperton and others and in 1830 Lander solved the vexed question of where the Niger debouched into the sea. The mantle of the African Association was taken on by the Royal Geographical Society, founded in 1830, which sent explorers especially to eastern and central Africa and to the Polar regions. Livingstone, Burton, Speke—who reached the source of the Nile— Cameron, Stanley, and Thomson were the great African explorers, while the old obsession with the North-West Passage led to the expeditions of Parry, and especially of Franklin whose disappearance after 1845 led to no fewer than 40 search expeditions. In the south polar region, Ross, Bruce, Shackleton, and Scott are the great names.

The general activity undertaken to identify and classify the elements of which a soil mass is constituted.

The early modern period, in European usage, defined the centuries in which Europeans explored the rest of the world. The motivations of individual explorers and their sponsors varied, but taken collectively, their efforts greatly increased European knowledge about the world's lands and peoples and brought vast continents and their inhabitants into contact with Europe, for both good and ill.

Renaissance Beginnings of Exploration

The so-called Age of Discovery began in the late fifteenth century, but Europeans had been probing the known areas and boundaries of their world for several centuries before that, motivated by tales of fabulous riches in distant kingdoms in Africa and Asia. Christian missionaries and leaders of the Catholic Church in Rome had also sent emissaries into Asia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, seeking to fulfill the biblical mandate to spread the message of Christianity. Later they sought allies against the growing power of Muslim rulers in the Middle East. Developments in the mid-fifteenth century added momentum to those efforts. Western Europe showed unmistakable signs of economic growth by 1450, as population and the economy recovered from the century of crisis that began in the early fourteenth century and was worsened by waves of epidemic disease from 1348 on. In 1453 the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople, the heir to ancient Rome and capital of Orthodox Christianity, and brought it within the Muslim world. At about the same time, the invention of movable type (associated with Johannes Gutenberg) made it possible to reproduce written materials more cheaply and quickly. Reports on great events such as the fall of Constantinople, plus ancient treatises about geography and real or fanciful books about travel, inspired many Europeans to seek new venues for trade, spread the message of Christianity, and search for allies against Ottoman expansion.

Potential explorers sought out investors among wealthy merchant communities, and asked for sponsorship from the various national monarchies emerging in the climate of economic recovery that marked the late fifteenth century. Portuguese explorers such as Gil Eanes, Nuno Tristão, and Alvise da Cada Mosto had explored down the western coast of Africa in the 1430s, 1440s, and 1450s, respectively. After 1479 and a treaty with Castile that gave them exclusive rights to African exploration, Portuguese expeditions continued their search for trade opportunities and a sea route to India. The voyages of Diogo Cão, Bartolomeu Dias, and Vasco da Gama (1498) established that route by 1500. Castilian expeditions after 1479 explored westward in search of fabled islands, conquering the Canary Islands in the process. Isabella of Castile and her husband Ferdinand of Aragón also sponsored the four voyages of Christopher Columbus between 1492 and 1504 to search westward for Asia, as well as sponsoring voyages by other explorers in the same period.

By the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, Portugal and Castile agreed upon spheres of influence in lands discovered across the Ocean Sea (the Atlantic Ocean). Probing the treaty's limits, the Portuguese brothers Gaspar and Miguel Corte-Real explored a northern route across the Atlantic, staking a claim to rich fishing grounds near Labrador; Pedro Álvares Cabral touched the northeast coast of Brazil in 1500 on the way to India. The Italian father and son John and Sebastian Cabot and their associates aimed above all to find a northwest passage to Asia—an aim that would continue to inspire explorers thereafter. Henry VII of England (ruled 1485–1509) sponsored expeditions by the Cabots in the 1490s to explore toward the northwest, following up on presumed voyages from Bristol in the 1480s that left little or no trace in the records.

The Sixteenth Century

In terms of sea and overland routes established and coastlines and hinterlands explored and mapped, Europeans probably accomplished more in the early sixteenth century than in any other half-century in history. In 1513 the Spaniard Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama and saw the great western ocean that would be named the Pacific. That same year his compatriot Juan Ponce de León cruised around the southern tip of Florida. In 1519 the Portuguese Ferdinand Magellan, having quarreled with the king of Portugal, sailed under Spanish auspices to find a westward route to Asia that would challenge the south and eastward route pioneered by the Portuguese. Sailing south beyond the known coastlines of America, Magellan explored the treacherous strait that would bear his name and crossed the vast Pacific Ocean to the islands of East Asia, where the Portuguese were already established. Anxious to spread the Christian Gospel and support local allies, Magellan was killed in a skirmish in the islands later known as the Philippines. The remnant of his expedition finally made it back to Spain in 1522 under the leadership of Juan Sebastián de Elcano (del Cano), sailing ever westward around Africa and accomplishing the first voyage around the world.

From the 1520s through the 1540s, Spaniards, Portuguese, and a few Germans, Frenchmen, and others probed the interior of the Americas, from the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains of North America to the great river and mountain systems of South America, mapping lands of stunning natural beauty and awesome physical challenges. In the process, Hernán Cortés (1485–1547) conquered the Aztec empire, Francisco Pizarro (c. 1475–1541) conquered the Inca empire, and numerous other explorers, conquerors, clerics, and officials working for the crown established the administrative structure of a Spanish empire in the Americas.

Francis I of France, the great rival of Spanish King and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, supported several expeditions to North America. Among others, he sponsored the Italian Giovanni da Verrazano's discovery (1524) of New York Bay and Jacques Cartier's exploration (1534–1541) of the Gulf and river of St. Lawrence. Wherever Europeans went, they inadvertently brought with them the whole array of diseases that Europeans, Africans, and Asians had long endured, but which the native populations of the Americas had never experienced. The result was a demographic catastrophe for native populations. Many scholars argue that syphilis was transferred from the Americas to the Old World, with serious but not devastating effect.

The Portuguese established a basic administrative structure in Brazil, but their overseas efforts focused largely on Asia in the sixteenth century. Portuguese mariners learned how to navigate the trade routes of the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the South China Sea—routes that were well known to local peoples but were new to Europeans. A Dutch expedition would find its way to East Asia in 1595, challenging the Portuguese thereafter. Although several expeditions sailed westward to Asia from America in the decades after Magellan, Spaniards did not discover the eastward route back across the Pacific until the voyage of Andrés de Urdaneta in 1565. Thereafter, they established a trading base at Manila, with regular voyages between New Spain (Mexico) and the Philippines, and discovered various other island groups in the South Pacific.

At the same time, English expeditions under Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancellor (1553), and Arthur Pet and Charles Jackman (1580), plus a Dutch expedition under Willem Barents (1594–1597), tried to find a viable northeast route through the Arctic Ocean to Asia in the late sixteenth century. Russian fur-trading expeditions probed the area as well; one of these expeditions, under the Cossack Ermak Timofeevich (1581–1582), began the exploration of Siberia. The continuing search for a northern passage to Asia inspired English efforts under Martin Frobisher (1576–1578) and John Davis (1585–1587), who sailed eastward, and Francis Drake (1577–1580), who sailed westward. By the late sixteenth century, some European mapmakers showed a clear understanding of the world's major coastlines and oceans, but others replicated antiquated or misleading information. Similarly, Europeans still knew little about the vast interior spaces of Africa, Asia, North America, and parts of South America.

The Seventeenth Century

By the early seventeenth century, Europeans competed for trade and colonies in the areas already discovered and explored the boundaries of a known world that was already much larger than it had been at the start of the early modern period. The Portuguese António Fernandes (1613) and the Spanish Jesuit Pedro Paez (1618) explored the interior of East Africa, while Dutch expeditions under Willem Schouten and Isaac Le Maire (1615–1616) discovered Cape Horn, and Frederik de Houtman (1619) traced the western coast of Australia. Expeditions under Franz Thyssen (1627) and Abel Janszoon Tasman (1640s) explored and charted other parts of Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, and nearby island groups, but never found the legendary great southern continent (Terra Australis) that had graced many early maps.

In North America, Henry Hudson (1610) discovered the bay later named for him, thinking it was the great western ocean at the end of the Northwest Passage. Other expeditions proved him wrong, but the search at least increased geographical knowledge. The vast lands south of Hudson's Bay and north of New Spain remained largely unknown to Europeans in the early seventeenth century, apart from a few Spanish settlements in the southeast and a few English and Dutch settlements in the northeast. During the century, France sponsored a series of expeditions that challenged the English presence in the north and sought a route through the continent. Samuel de Champlain (1603–1615) explored the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes. Jean Nicolet (1634) and Pierre Esprit Radisson and Médard Chomart, Sieur des Groseillers (1658–1659), continued French exploration of the Great Lakes region. In the last few decades of the century, King Louis XIV sponsored a series of expeditions that explored from the Great Lakes to the network of river systems in central North America, aiming to establish a French empire between the English in the north and the Spanish in the south. The most famous expeditions were led by Réné-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle (1673–1687), Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet (1673), and Louis Hennepin (1679–1680). Approaching from the Gulf of Mexico, Pierre le Moyne d'Iberville (1699) discovered the mouth of the Mississippi River. By the time Louis XIV died in 1715, France had a chain of settlements from Quebec to the Gulf of Mexico, though they remained small and vulnerable to hostile local peoples and international rivals alike.

In South America, expeditions from the 1630s to the 1660s traced the awesome extent of the Orinoco and Amazon River systems, as Spain and Portugal struggled to grasp the true extent of their colonial dominions. The discovery in the 1690s of gold and gem deposits in Brazil gave added impetus to exploration of the interior, within the structure of settled colonial regimes run by Spain and Portugal. Nonetheless, huge areas would remain unknown to Europeans until well beyond the early modern period.

European exploration in the eighteenth century, as in earlier times, was motivated in large part by political rivalries as well as by enduring goals such as oceanic passages northwest and northeast from Europe to Asia and the search for the elusive great southern continent. Vitus Bering, a Dane in the service of Tsar Peter I ("the Great") of Russia, made two major voyages (1728 and 1733–1741) in search of a northeast passage, in the process mapping much of coastal Siberia and discovering the strait later named for him between Asia and Alaska. In the Americas, the French founded New Orleans in 1718 and sponsored expeditions in the 1720s and 1730s to continue exploration in the middle of North America, even as they faced increasing pressure from England in the northeast. In the Seven Years' War (1756–1763) they lost most of the territory they claimed in North America to England. Nonetheless, French exploration continued, driven by the increased interest in scientific endeavors that was part of the Enlightenment.

Scientific voyages of exploration are traditionally associated with the eighteenth century, although the scientific urge to discover, classify, and understand lands, peoples, animals, and plants characterized European exploration throughout the early modern period. Eighteenth-century voyages concentrated on the Pacific Ocean, one of the last great spaces on Earth that remained largely unexplored. The Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen (1722) is credited with discovering Easter Island and some of the Samoan islands in the South Pacific, though he claimed to have sighted the great southern continent as well. Pacific voyages in the last half of the century reflected the rivalry between England and France, while at the same time searching for that elusive continent and other new lands and observing various natural phenomena. Samuel Wallis of England, while circumnavigating the globe from 1766 to 1768, discovered the Society Islands (Tahiti), while Philip Carteret on another ship in the expedition sailed farther south looking for Terra Australis. A French expedition under Louis Antoine de Bougainville also reached Tahiti in 1768. The greatest of the eighteenth-century voyages were those of the Englishman James Cook. In three major expeditions (1768–1771, 1772–1775, and 1776–1779), Cook probed and tested most of the legends and lore about the vast Pacific Ocean. With superb mapmaking skills, and aided on the second and third voyages by the most accurate timepiece yet developed and other modern navigational aids, Cook was able to chart the Pacific and its islands with unprecedented accuracy. He confirmed the existence of and mapped numerous islands, explored the northwest coast of North America, and proved to all but the most diehard believers in Terra Australis that whatever land existed in the far south was not habitable. His reports and maps became best-sellers among the literate public in Enlightenment Europe. On his third voyage, Cook's expedition became the first documented European arrival at the Hawaiian Islands. Although some of the officers who accompanied him assumed that some Spanish voyage or other must have preceded them, Cook dismissed those assumptions. He died in a skirmish with local islanders in 1779, on a return visit to the islands. A French expedition under Jean-François de Galaup, Count of la Pérouse (1785–1788) and a Spanish expedition under the Italian Alessandro Malaspina (1789–1795) carried out their own extensive Pacific voyages. Their agendas reflected European political rivalries as well as a search for scientific knowledge.

In North America as well, exploration by Daniel Boone into Kentucky (1769–1775), Alexander Mackenzie across the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific (1789–1793), and George Vancouver along the northwest coast (1792–1794) established an English presence in an area long claimed by Spain but hardly settled or defended by her. Belatedly, Spain dispatched expeditions along the coast from Mexico that established a chain of presidios (garrisons) and missions along the length of California, exploring and mapping as they went. By land José Ortega discovered San Francisco Bay in 1769, and by sea Juan Pérez and Bruno Heceta discovered Nootka Sound (1774–1775). The far northwest corner of North America thus became a focus of rivalry for England, Russia, Spain, and—after 1783—the fledgling United States, which sponsored Robert Gray's expedition along the northwest coast (1787–1793).

At the very end of the early modern period, English expeditions into the African interior (Mungo Park to the Gambia and Niger Rivers in 1795–1805 and Sir John Barrow northward from the Cape of Good Hope in 1797–1798), foreshadowed a major focus for European exploration in the nineteenth century. During the early modern centuries, Europeans had explored and mapped much of the world, driven by a combination of motives that ranged from religious zeal and scientific curiosity to commercial and political rivalries and personal ambitions. In their travels, they had not only explored the world; they had changed it forever.

Bibliography

Baker, Daniel B., ed. Explorers and Discoverers of the World. Detroit, 1993.

Fernández-Armesto, Felipe. Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonization from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229–1492. Philadelphia, 1987.

Fernández-Armesto, Felipe, ed. The Times Atlas of World Exploration. London, 1991.

Goetzmann, William, and Glydwr Williams. The Atlas of North American Exploration: From the Norse Voyages to the Race to the Pole. New York, 1992.

Newby, Eric. The Rand Mc Nally World Atlas of Exploration. Chicago, 1975.

Penrose, Boies. Travel and Discovery in the Renaissance, 1420–1620. Cambridge, Mass., 1952.

Phillips, William D., Jr., and Carla Rahn Phillips. The Worlds of Christopher Columbus. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1992.

Williams, Glyn. Voyages of Delusion: The Northwest Passage in the Age of Reason. London, 2002.

—CARLA RAHN PHILLIPS

Investigation or examination for diagnostic purposes.

• Platform: IBM PC Compatible
• Release Date: 1995
• Genre: Strategy
• Style: Empire-Building

Quotes:

"It is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone. It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar." - Henry David Thoreau

"We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started... and know the place for the first time." - T. S. Eliot

"The American experience stirred mankind from discovery to exploration. From the cautious quest for what they knew (or thought they knew) was out there, into an enthusiastic reaching to the unknown. These are two substantially different kinds of human enterprise." - Daniel J. Boorstin

"Explorer" redirects here. For other uses, see Explorer (disambiguation).

Explorer Kazimierz Nowak

Exploration is the act of searching or traveling a terrain for the purpose of discovery, e.g. of unknown people, including space (space exploration), for oil, gas, coal, ores, caves, water, (Mineral exploration, botanical exploration, or prospecting), or information.

Although exploration has existed as long as human beings, its peak is seen as being during the Age of Discovery for Europe's contact with the rest of the world, and Major explorations after the Age of Discovery for scientific exploration in the modern era.

Contents 1 Other uses 2 Notable explorers 3 See also 3.1 Lists 3.2 Types of exploration 4 References 5 External links

Other uses

The term may also be used metaphorically, for example persons may speak of exploring the internet, sexuality, etc.

In scientific research, exploration is one of three purposes of empirical research (the other two being description and explanation). Exploration is the attempt to develop an initial, rough understanding of some phenomenon.

Notable explorers

• Pytheas (380 – c. 310 BC) – Greek explorer. First to circumnavigate Great Britain and to explore Germany. Reached Thule, most commonly thought to be the Shetland Islands or Iceland.
• Xu Fu (b. 255 BC) – Chinese court sorcerer who led two voyages to the Eastern Seas in 219 BC and 210 BC.
• Brendan the Navigator (c. 484 – 577) – Irish monk, allegedly found Iceland and America in the 6th century.
• Dicuil (born 8th century) – Irish monk and geographer, author of "De mensura Orbis terrae".
• The Papar – Irish monks who lived in Iceland, 8th-9th centuries, before the Vikings.
• Ahmad ibn Fadlan – 10th century Iraqi explorer.
• Erik the Red (950–1003) – Norwegian Viking explorer. After being cast out from Iceland, he sailed to Greenland and settled there.
• Leif Ericson (980–1020) – Icelandic explorer. Believed to have been the first European to land in North America.
• Friar Julian (traveled in 1235) – Hungarian Dominican friar.
• Marco Polo (1254–1324) – Venetian explorer.^[1]
• Ibn Battuta (1304–1377) – Moroccan explorer.^[2]
• Wang Dayuan (fl. 1311–1350) – Chinese explorer who made two major trips by ship. During 1328–1333, he sailed along the South China Sea and visited many places in Southeast Asia and reached as far as South Asia, landing in Sri Lanka and India. In 1334–1339 he visited North Africa and East Africa.
• James of Ireland (fl.1316–1330) – Irish companion of Odoric of Pordenone.
• Simon FitzSimon (fl.1323) – Irish author of a itenerum through Egypt and the Holy Land.
• Zheng He (1371–1433) – Chinese admiral made seven voyages to Arabia, East Africa, India, Indonesia and Thailand.
• João Fernandes Lavrador (1445? – 1501) – Portuguese explorer. First European reaching Labrador/Newfoundland. Fernandes charted the coasts of Southwestern Greenland and of adjacent Northeastern North America around 1498. In 1501, Fernandes set sail again in discovery of lands and was never heard from again.
• John Cabot (c. 1450 – 1499) – Italian explorer for England. Discovered Newfoundland and claimed it for the Kingdom of England.
• Bartolomeu Dias (c. 1450 – 1500) – Portuguese explorer. He sailed from Portugal and reached the Cape of Good Hope.
• Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) – Genoese explorer for Spain. Sailed in 1492 and discovered the "New World" of the Americas.
• Amerigo Vespucci (c. 1454 – 1512) – Italian explorer for Spain and Portugal . Sailed in 1499 and 1502. He explored the east coast of South America.
• Juan Ponce de León (c. 1460 – 1521) – Spanish explorer. He explored Florida while attempting to locate a Fountain of Youth.
• Piri Reis (c. 1465/1470 – 1554/1555) – Ottoman explorer.
• Pedro Álvares Cabral (c. 1467 – c. 1520) – Portuguese explorer, generally regarded as the European discoverer of Brazil.
• Vasco da Gama (c. 1469 – 1524) – Portuguese explorer. The first European to sail from Europe to India by rounding the Cape of Good Hope.
• Vasco Núñez de Balboa (c. 1475 – 1519) – Spanish explorer. The first European to cross the Isthmus of Panama and view the Pacific ocean from American shores.
• Francisco Pizarro (c. 1475 – 1541) – Spanish explorer. Conquered the Inca Empire.
• Juan Sebastián Elcano (1476–1526) – Spanish explorer. Completed the first circumnavigation of the globe in a single expedition after its captain, Magellan, was killed.
• Ferdinand Magellan (1480–1521) – Portuguese explorer for Spain. Initiated the first circumnavigation of the globe in a single expedition. Sailed through Strait of Magellan and named Pacific Ocean. Died in the Philippines after claiming them for Spain.
• Giovanni da Verrazzano (c. 1485 – 1528) – Italian explorer for France. Explored the northeast coast of America, from about present day South Carolina to Newfoundland.
• Hernán Cortés (1485–1545) – Spanish explorer. Conquered the Aztec Empire for Spain.
• Jacques Cartier (1491–1557) – French explorer. Discovered Canada.
• Hernando de Soto (c. 1496 – 1542) – Spanish explorer. Explored Florida, mainly northwest Florida, and discovered the Mississippi River.
• Francisco Vásquez de Coronado (c. 1510 – 1554) – Spanish explorer. Searched for the Seven Cities of Gold and discovered the Grand Canyon in the process.
• Francisco de Orellana (1511–1546) – Spanish explorer, in 1541–42 sailed the length of the Amazon River.
• Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa (1532–1592) – Spanish explorer of the Pacific.
• Sir Francis Drake (c. 1540 – 1596) – English explorer. The first English captain to sail around the world and survive.
• Alvaro de Mendaña de Neyra (1541–1596) – Spanish explorer of the Pacific.
• Willem Barentsz (1550–1597) – Dutch navigator and explorer, leader of early expeditions to the far north.
• Pedro Fernandes de Queirós (1565–1614) – Portuguese navigator. Explored the Pacific in the service of the Spanish Crown.
• Pedro Páez (1564–1622) – Spanish missionary was the first European who saw and described the source of the Blue Nile.
• Luis Váez de Torres (born c. 1565; fl. 1607) – Spanish or Portuguese navigator. Explored the Pacific in the service of the Spanish Crown.
• Henry Hudson (1570–1611) – English explorer. Explored much of the North Atlantic, including Labrador, the coast of Greenland, and Hudson Bay. Presumed dead in a 1611 mutiny of his own crew.
• António de Andrade (1580–1634) – Portuguese explorer. First European reaching Tibet. His reports were the only account of the Tibet culture and geography until the second half of the 18^th century.
• Abel Tasman (1603–1659) – Dutch explorer. Discovered New Zealand and Tasmania.
• Evliya Çelebi (1611–1682) – Ottoman traveller.
• Vitus Bering (1681–1741) – Danish explorer. Explored the Siberian Far East and Alaska and claimed it for Russia.
• James Cook (1728–1779) – British naval captain. Explored much of the Pacific including New Zealand, Australia and Hawaii.
• Jean-François de La Pérouse (1741–1788) – French Navy officer and explorer whose expedition vanished in Oceania.
• Alessandro Malaspina (1754–1810) – Italian explorer. Explored the Pacific and the west coast of North America in the service of Spanish Crown.
• Alexander MacKenzie (1764–1820) – Scottish-Canadian explorer who in 1789, looking for the Northwest Passage, followed the river now named after him to the Arctic Ocean and then in 1793 crossed the Rockies and reached the Pacific in 1793, thus beating Lewis and Clark by 12 years.
• Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) – German explorer and scientist whose work was foundational to the field of biogeography.
• Mungo Park (1771–1806) – the first Westerner to discover the Niger River; he was the first Western explorer to reach Timbuktu, though he didn't live to share his discovery with the world.
• Captain Meriwether Lewis (1774–1809) – American explorer and field scientist who led the Lewis and Clark Expedition into the Louisiana Purchase and the Pacific Northwest in 1804–1806.
• Edward Sabine(October 14, 1788 – May 26, 1883) – Irish participant in the Ross and Perry Arctic expeditions.
• Thomas Coulter (1793–1843) – Irish botanist and explorer of Mexico and Arizona.
• Charles Wilkes (April 3, 1798 – February 8, 1877) – American naval officer and explorer who commanded the United States Exploring Expedition.
• George Fletcher Moore (10 December 1798 – 30 December 1886) – early Irish explorer of Australia.
• Pierre-Jean De Smet (1801–1873) – Belgian missionary and explorer in North America.
• David Livingstone (1813–1873) – Scottish missionary and explorer in central Africa. He was the first European to see Victoria Falls, which he named in honour of Queen Victoria.
• John Rae (1813–1893) – Scottish doctor in Northern Canada. He discovered the Northwest Passage and reported the fate of the Franklin Expedition.
• Robert O'Hara Burke (1821 – c. 28 June 1861) – Irish leader of the Burke and Wills expedition.
• Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890) – English explorer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, ethnologist, linguist, poet, hypnotist, fencer and diplomat; known for his travels and explorations within Asia and Africa as well as his extraordinary knowledge of languages and cultures; according to one count, he spoke 29 European, Asian, and African languages.
• Henry Morton Stanley (1841–1904) – Welsh journalist and explorer in central Africa best remembered for his search for David Livingstone, and upon finding him saying: "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?".
• George Comer (1858–1937) – American polar explorer. The Comer Strait of northern Southampton Island and the Gallinula comeri flightless bird of Gough Island were named in his honor.
• Fridtjof Nansen (1861–1930) – Norwegian explorer, scientist and diplomat. He was the first to cross the Greenland ice cap in 1888 and drifted across the Arctic ocean with the Fram in 1893–1896 where he attempted to reach the North Pole with Hjalmar Johansen.
• Otto Sverdrup (1854–1930) – Norwegian explorer. Joined Fridtjof Nansen acoss Greenland in 1888 and captain on the Fram on the polar drift in 1893–1896 and the 2nd Fram expedition in 1898–1902. Mapped the Northernmost part of Canada in 1898–1902.
• Harry De Windt (1856–1933) – British explorer and member of the Royal Geographical Society. Travelled overland from Paris to New York in 1901–1902. Writer of books about his many expeditions.
• Roald Amundsen (1872–1928) – Norwegian explorer. He led the first successful Antarctic expedition between 1910 and 1912. He was also the first ever person to successfully traverse the North West Passage.
• Ernest Shackleton (1874–1922) – Anglo-Irish Explorer, noted for his ill-fated Endurance expedition to Antarctica.
• Hiram Bingham III (1875–1956) – U.S. Senator from Connecticut and explorer best known for uncovering Machu Picchu.
• Robert Bartlett (1875–1946) – Newfoundland captain. Led over 40 expeditions to the Arctic, more than anyone before or since. Was the first to sail north of 88° N latitude.
• Tom Crean (20 July 1877 – 27 July 1938) – Irish Antarctic explorer.
• Knud Rasmussen (1879–1933) – Greenlandic polar explorer and anthropologist. Rasmussen was the first to cross the Northwest Passage via dog sled.
• Auguste Piccard (1884–1962) – physicist, balloonist, hydronaut. Explored the stratosphere and the deep sea.
• Ahmed Pasha Hassanein (1889–1946) – Egyptian explorer, diplomat, one of two non-European winners of Gold Medal of Royal Geographical Society in 1924, King's chamberlain, fencing participant to 1924 Olympics, photographer, author and discoverer of Jebel Uweinat, and writer of "The Lost Oases" book in three languages.
• Colonel Noel Andrew Croft (1906–1998) – held the record for the longest self-sustaining journey across the Arctic in the 1930s for 60 years.
• Sir Edmund Percival Hillary (1919–2008) – New Zealand explorer, together with Tenzing Norgay, the first to climb Mount Everest on May 29, 1953.
• Yuri Gagarin (March 9, 1934 – March 27, 1968) – Soviet cosmonaut who on April 12 1961 became the first man in space and the first human to orbit Earth.
• Neil Armstrong (b. August 5, 1930) – American astronaut – First human being to set foot on the Moon on July 20, 1969.
• Robert Ballard – born in 1942) – undersea explorer; discovered the shipwreck of the RMS Titanic'.
• Dr. E. Lee Spence (b. 1947) – undersea explorer and pioneer underwater archaeologist: discovered numerous shipwrecks including H.L. Hunley the first submarine in history to sink an enemy ship; and the Georgiana, said to have been the most powerful Confederate cruiser.
• Reinhold Messner (b. September 17, 1944) – Italian mountaineer, first man to climb all the 14 peaks higher than 8,000 meters.
• Frank Cole (1954–2000) – Canadian explorer, filmmaker and life extensionist. He was the first North American to cross the Sahara desert in 1990 alone on camel. He was murdered by bandits during a second crossing in 2000.
• Jeremy Curl (b. 1982) – British explorer; the youngest to traverse the Sahara on foot and the first non African to cross the desolate Tanezrouft area of the Sahara by camel.
• Michael Asher (b. 1953) – British explorer. In 1986–7 Michael Asher and his wife, Italian-born photographer and Arabist, Mariantonietta Peru, made the first ever west-east crossing of the Sahara desert by camel and on foot.
• Ranulph Fiennes (b. 1944) – British explorer. First journey around the world on its polar axis using surface transport only, covered 52,000 miles and visited both poles by land. First unsupported crossing of Antarctica.
• Sacagawea – accompanied and assisted Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804–1806), the first American overland expedition to the Pacific coast and back.
• Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (May 26, 1689 – August 21, 1762) – explored Turkey.
• Isabella Bird (October 15, 1831 – October 7, 1904) – the first woman inducted into the Royal Geographical Society; she travelled extensively, exploring the Far East, Central Asia, and the American West.
• Mary Kingsley (October 13, 1862 – June 3, 1900) – explored the Upper Ogawe River in Gabon and journeyed alone into unknown regions of the Congo jungle.
• Freya Stark (Januari 31, 1893, Paris, France – May 9, 1993) – not only one of the first Western women to travel through the Arabian deserts (Hadhramaut); she often traveled solo into areas where few Europeans, let alone women, had ever been.
• Robyn Davidson (b. September 6, 1950) – the first person to make a solo crossing of the Australian Outback by camel; she also explored the remote desert regions of India.^[3]
• Valentina Tereshkova (b. 1937) – one of the first people in space; first female cosmonaut.
• Kira Salak (b. September 4, 1971) – a National Geographic Emerging Explorer^[4], Salak was the first woman to cross the island of New Guinea; she was also the first person in the world to kayak 600 miles alone to Timbuktu. Salak has done solo exploration to regions such as Borneo, Libya, Iran, Madagascar, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.^[5]
• Mulford B. Foster (1888–1978) – American horticulturist known for extensive plant explorations of South America. Collected thousands of species of plants for the Gray Herbarium of Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institute. Discovered more new species of bromeliads than the previous plants explorers Andre and Glaziou.^[6][7]

See also

• Adventure
• Age of Discovery
• European exploration of Africa
• Expedition
• Exploration of Asia
• Explorer (newspaper)
• Explorers Grand Slam
• History of Antarctica

Lists

• List of explorations
• List of explorers
• List of Russian explorers
• List of maritime explorers

Types of exploration

• Arctic exploration
• Cave exploration
• Desert exploration
• Mineral exploration
• Space exploration
• Urban exploration

References

Robert Young Pelton

1. ^ Ancient Silk Road Travellers
2. ^ Battuta's Travels
3. ^ ""Robyn Davidson book"". http://www.amazon.com/Tracks-Robyn-Davidson/dp/0679762876/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1225493451&sr=8-1. 
4. ^ ""National Geographic Explorer Kira Salak"". http://www.nationalgeographic.com/field/explorers/kira-salak.html. 
5. ^ Salak, Kira. ""Kira Salak's official website"". http://www.kirasalak.com/index.html. 
6. ^ Padilla, Victoria. "Mulford B. Foster". Journal of the Bromeliad Society, 1978. Vol 28, #6, pg 243–244
7. ^ ""A Bibliography of Plant Collectors in Bolivia"" (PDF). http://www.sil.si.edu/smithsoniancontributions/Botany/pdf_hi/sctb-0070.pdf. 

External links

Look up exploration in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Time to Eat the Dogs - A Blog about Science, History, and Exploration
• Ocean Explorer - Public outreach site for explorations sponsored by the Office of Ocean Exploration.
• NOAA, Ocean Explorer History
• NOAA, Ocean Explorer Gallery - A rich collection of images, video, audio and podcast.
• NOAA's Office of Ocean Exploration
• Explorers worksheets and printables for teachers
• Hassanein Bey of the Libyan Desert, RGS Gold Medalist of 1924 - NGS article of 1924, biography, etc.
• National Geographic Explorers - National Geographic Explorers

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