European exploration

European exploration, exploration of regions

TABLE OF CONTENTS
of Earth for scientific, commercial, religious,
military, and other purposes by Europeans, Introduction

beginning about the 4th century BCE. The exploration of the Old World

The Age of Discovery

The The emergence of the modern world
motives
that spur
human beings to examine their environment are many.
Strong among them are the satisfaction of curiosity, the
zoom_in pursuit of trade, the spread of religion, and the desire
European exploration: early
voyages for security and political power. At different times and
Map depicting the European
exploration of the New World in the
in different places, different motives are dominant.
15th and 16th centuries, including the Sometimes one motive inspires the promoters of
voyages made by Christopher
Columbus, John Cabot, Alonso de discovery, and another motive may inspire the
Ojeda and Amerigo Vespucci, Pedro
individuals who carry out the search.
Álvares Cabral, Ferdinand Magellan
and Juan Sebastián del Cano,
Giovanni da Verrazzano, Jacques For a discussion of the society that engaged in these
Cartier, Sir Francis Drake, and others.
explorations, and their effects on intra-European
The lines of demarcation represent an
early division between the territory of affairs, see European history. The earliest European
Spain (to the west) and Portugal (to
the east). empires are discussed in ancient Greek civilization and
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
ancient Rome.

The threads of geographical exploration are continuous and, being entwined one with
another, are difficult to separate. Three major phases of investigation may nevertheless be
distinguished. The first phase is the exploration of the Old World centred on the
Mediterranean Sea, the second is the so-called Age of Discovery, during which, in the
search for sea routes to Cathay (the name by which China was known to medieval Europe),
a New World was found, and the third is the establishment of the political, social, and
commercial relationships of the New World to the Old and the elucidation of the major
physical features of the continental interiors—in short, the delineation of the modern world.
The exploration of the Old World

From the time of the earliest recorded history to the beginning of the 15th century, Western
knowledge of the world widened from a river valley surrounded by mountains or desert (the
views of Babylonia and Egypt) to a Mediterranean world with hinterlands extending from
the Sahara to the Gobi Desert and from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean (the view of Greece
and Rome). It later expanded again to include the far northern lands beyond the Baltic and
another and dazzling civilization in the Far East (the medieval view).

The earliest known surviving map, dating probably

from the time of Sargon of Akkad (about 2334–2279
BCE), shows canals or rivers—perhaps the Tigris and a
tributary—and surrounding mountains. The rapid
colonization of the shores of the Mediterranean and of
zoom_in the Black Sea by Phoenicia and the Greek city-states in
Phoenician colonies
Phoenician colonization in the the 1st millennium BCE must have been accompanied
Mediterranean.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. by the exploration of their hinterlands by countless
unknown soldiers and traders. Herodotus prefaces his
History (written in the 5th century BCE) with a geographical description of the then known
world: this introductory material reveals that the coastlines of the Mediterranean and the
Black Sea had by then been explored.

Stories survive of a few men who are credited with bringing new knowledge from distant
journeys. Herodotus tells of five young adventurers of the tribe of the Nasamones living on
the desert edge of Cyrenaica in North Africa, who journeyed southwest for many months
across the desert, reaching a great river flowing from west to east; this presumably was the
Niger, although Herodotus thought it to be the Upper Nile.

Exploration of the Atlantic coastlines

Beyond the Pillars of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar), the Carthaginians (from the
Phoenician city of Carthage in what is now Tunisia), holding both shores of the strait, early
ventured out into the Atlantic. A Greek translation of a Punic (Carthaginian) inscription
states that Hanno, a Carthaginian, was sent forth about 500 BCE with 60 ships and 30,000
colonists “to found cities.” Even allowing for a possible great exaggeration of numbers, this
expedition, if it occurred, can hardly have been the first exploratory voyage along the coast
of West Africa; indeed, Herodotus reports that Phoenicians circumnavigated the continent
about 600 BCE. Some scholars think that Hanno reached only the desert edge south of the
Atlas; other scholars identify the “deep river infested with crocodiles and hippopotamuses”
with the Sénégal River; and still others believe that the island where men “scampered up
steep rocks and pelted us with stones” was an island off the coast of Sierra Leone. There is
no record that Hanno’s voyage was followed up before the era of Henry the Navigator, a
Portuguese prince of the 15th century.

About the same time, Himilco, another Carthaginian,

set forth on a voyage northward; he explored the coast
of Spain, reached Brittany, and in his four-month
cruise may have visited Britain. Two centuries later,
about 300 BCE, Carthaginian power at the gate of the
zoom_in Mediterranean temporarily slackened as a result of
Carthaginian empireEncyclopædia
Britannica, Inc. squabbles with the Greek city of Syracuse on the
island of Sicily, so Pytheas, a Greek explorer of
Massilia (Marseille), sailed through. His story is known only from fragments of the work of
a contemporary historian, Timaeus (who lived in the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE), as retold by
the Roman savant Pliny the Elder, the Greek geographer Strabo, and the Greek historian
Diodorus Siculus, all of whom were critical of its truth. It is probable that Pytheas, having
coasted the shores of the Bay of Biscay, crossed from the island of Ouessant (Ushant), off
the French coast of Brittany, to Cornwall in southwestern England, perhaps seeking tin. He
may have sailed around Britain; he describes it as a triangle and also relates that the
inhabitants “harvest grain crops by cutting off the ears…and storing them in covered
granges.” Around Thule, “the northernmost of the British Isles, six days sail from Britain,”
there is “neither sea nor air but a mixture like sea-lung…binds everything together,” a
reference perhaps to drift ice or dense sea fog. Thule has been identified with Iceland (too
far north), with Mainland island of the Shetland group (too far south), and perhaps, most
plausibly, with Norway. Pytheas returned to Brittany and explored “beyond the Rhine”; he
may have reached the Elbe. The voyage of Pytheas, like that of Hanno, does not seem to
have been followed up. Herodotus concludes by saying, “Whether the sea girds Europe
round on the north none can tell.”
It was not Mediterranean folk but Northmen from Scandinavia, emigrating from their
difficult lands centuries later, who carried exploration farther in the North Atlantic. From the
8th to the 11th century bands of Northmen, mainly Swedish, trading southeastward across
the Russian plains, were active under the name of Varangians in the ports of the Black Sea.
At the same time, other groups, mainly Danish, raiding, trading, and settling along the coasts
of the North Sea, arrived in the Mediterranean in the guise of Normans. Neither the Swedes
nor the Danes traveling in these regions were exploring lands that were unknown to civilized
Europeans, but it is doubtless that contact with them brought to these Europeans new
knowledge of the distant northern lands.

It was the Norsemen of Norway who were the true

explorers, though, since little of their exploits was
known to contemporaries and that little soon forgotten,
they perhaps added less to the common store of
Europe’s knowledge than their less adventurous
zoom_in compatriots. About 890 CE, Ohthere of Norway,
Viking travel
Routes of travel and settlements by “desirous to try how far that country extended north,”
the Vikings from the 9th century to the
11th century. sailed round the North Cape, along the coast of
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Lapland to the White Sea. But most Norsemen sailing
in high latitudes explored not eastward but westward.
Sweeping down the outer edge of Britain, settling in Orkney, Shetland, the Hebrides, and
Ireland, they then voyaged on to Iceland, where in 870 they settled among Irish colonists
who had preceded them by some two centuries. The Norsemen may well have arrived
piloted by Irish sailors; and Irish refugees from Iceland, fleeing before the Norsemen, may
have been the first discoverers of Greenland and Newfoundland, although this is mere
surmise. The saga of Erik the Red (Eiríks saga rauda; also called Thorfinns saga
Karlsefnis), gives the story of the Norse discovery of Greenland in 982; the west coast was
explored, and at least two settlements were established on it. About 1000 CE, one Bjarni
Herjulfsson, on his way from Iceland to Greenland, was blown off course far to the
southwest; he saw an unknown shore and returned to tell his tale. Leif, Erik’s son, together
with some 30 others, set out in 1001 to explore. They probably reached the coasts of
Labrador and Newfoundland; some think that the farthest point south reached by the settlers,
as described in the sagas, fits best with Maryland or Virginia, but others contend that the
lands about the Gulf of St. Lawrence are more probably designated. The area was named
Vinland, as grapes grew there, but it has been suggested that the “grapes” referred to were in
fact cranberries. Attempts at colonization were unsuccessful; the Norsemen withdrew, and,
although the Greenland colonies lingered on for some four centuries, little knowledge of
these first discoveries came down to colour the vision of the seamen of Cádiz or Bristol. The
voyages of Christopher Columbus and John Cabot had their strongest inspirations in quite
other traditions.

The exploration of the coastlines of the Indian Ocean and the China
Sea

Trade, across the land bridges and through the gulfs linking those parts of Asia, Africa, and
Europe that lie between the Mediterranean and Arabian seas, was actively pursued from
very early times. It is therefore not surprising that exploratory voyages early revealed the
coastlines of the Indian Ocean. Herodotus wrote of Necho II, king of Egypt in the late 7th
and early 6th centuries BCE, that “when he stopped digging the canal…from the Nile to the
Arabian Gulf…[he] sent forth Phoenician men in ships ordering them to sail back by the
Pillars of Hercules.” According to the story, this, in three years, they did. Upon their return,
“they told things…unbelievable by me,” says Herodotus, “namely that in sailing round
Libya they had the sun on the right hand.” Whatever he thought of the story of the sun,
Herodotus was inclined to believe in the voyage: “Libya, that is Africa, shows that it has sea
all round except the part that borders on Asia.” Strabo records another story with the same
theme: one Eudoxus, returning from a voyage to India about 108 BCE, was blown far to the
south of Cape Guardafui. Where he landed he found a wooden prow with a horse carved on
it, and he was told by the Africans that it came from a wrecked ship of men from the west.

About 510 BCE Darius the Great, king of Persia, sent one of his officers, Scylax of Caria, to
explore the Indus. Scylax traveled overland to the Kabul River, reached the Indus, followed
it to the sea, sailed westward, and, passing by the Persian Gulf (which was already well
known), explored the Red Sea, finally arriving at Arsinoë, near modern Suez. The greater
part of the campaigns of the famous conqueror Alexander the Great were military
exploratory journeys. The earlier expeditions through Babylonia and Persia were through
regions already familiar to the Greeks, but the later ones through the enormous tract of land
from the south of the Caspian Sea to the mountains of the Hindu Kush brought the Greeks a
great deal of new geographical knowledge. Alexander and his army crossed the mountains
to the Indus valley and then made a westward march from the lower Indus to Susa through
the desolate country along the southern edge of the Iranian plateau; Nearchus, his admiral, in
command of the naval forces of the expedition, waited for the favourable monsoon and then
sailed from the mouth of the Indus to the mouth of the Euphrates, exploring the northern
coast of the Persian Gulf on his way.

As Roman power grew, increasing wealth brought increasing demands for Oriental luxuries;
this led to great commercial activity in the eastern seas. As the coasts became well known,
the seasonal character of the monsoonal winds was skillfully used; the southwest monsoon
was long known as Hippalus, named for a sailor who was credited with being the first to sail
with it direct from the Gulf of Aden to the coast of the Indian peninsula. During the reign of
the Roman emperor Hadrian in the 1st century BCE, Western traders reached Siam (now
Thailand), Cambodia, Sumatra, and Java; a few also seem to have penetrated northward to
the coast of China. In 161 CE, according to Chinese records, an “embassy” came from the
Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius to the emperor Huan-ti, bearing goods that Huan-ti
gratefully received as “tribute.” Ptolemy, however, did not know of these voyages: he swept
his peninsula of Colmorgo (Malay) southwestward to join the eastward trend of his coast of
Africa, thus creating a closed Indian Ocean. He presumably did not believe the story of the
circumnavigation of Africa. As the 2nd century CE passed and Roman power declined, trade
with the eastern seas did not cease but was gradually taken over by Ethiopians, Parthians,
and Arabs. The Arabs, most successful of all, dominated eastern sea routes from the 3rd to
the 15th century. In the tales of derring-do of Sindbad the Sailor (a hero of the collection of
Arabian tales called The Thousand and One Nights), there may be found, behind the fiction,
the knowledge of these adventurous Arab sailors and traders, supplying detail to fill in the
outline of the geography of the Indian Ocean.

The land routes of Central Asia

The prelude to the Age of Discovery, however, is to be found neither in the Norse
explorations in the Atlantic nor in the Arab activities in the Indian Ocean but, rather, in the
land journeys of Italian missionaries and merchants that linked the Mediterranean coasts to
the China Sea. Cosmas Indicopleustes, an Alexandrian geographer writing in the 6th
century, knew that Tzinitza (China) could be reached by sailing eastward, but he added:
“One who comes by the overland route from Tzinitza to Persia makes a very short cut.”
Goods had certainly passed this way since Roman times, but they usually changed hands at
many a mart, for disorganized and often warring tribes lived along the routes. In the 13th
century the political geography changed. In 1206 a Mongol chief assumed the title of
Genghis Khan and, after campaigns in China that gave him control there, turned his
conquering armies westward. He and his successors built up an enormous empire until, in
the late 13th century, one of them, Kublai Khan, reigned supreme from the Black Sea to the
Yellow Sea. Europeans of perspicacity saw the opportunities that friendship with the
Mongol power might bring. If Christian Europe could only convert the Mongols, this would
at one and the same time heavily tip the scales against Muslim and in favour of Christian
power and also give political protection to Christian merchants along the silk routes to the
legendary sources of wealth in China. With these opportunities in mind, Pope Innocent IV
sent friars to “diligently search out all things that concerned the state of the Tartars” and to
exhort them “to give over their bloody slaughter of mankind and to receive the Christian
faith.” Among others, Giovanni da Pian del Carpini in 1245 and Willem van Ruysbroeck in
1253 went forth to follow these instructions. Traveling the great caravan routes from
southern Russia, north of the Caspian and Aral seas and north of the Tien Shan (Tien
Mountains), both Carpini and Ruysbroeck eventually reached the court of the emperor at
Karakorum. Carpini returned confident that the emperor was about to become a Christian;
Ruysbroeck told of the city in Cathay “having walls of silver and towers of gold”; he had
not seen it but had been “credibly informed” of it.

But the greatest of the 13th-century travelers in Asia were the Polos, wealthy merchants of
Venice. In 1260 the brothers Nicolo and Maffeo Polo set out on a trading expedition to
Crimea. After two years they were ready to return to Venice, but, finding the way home
blocked by war, they traveled eastward to Bukhara (now in Uzbekistan in Central Asia),
where they spent another three years. The Polos then accepted an invitation to accompany a
party of Tatar envoys returning to the court of Kublai Khan at Cambaluc, near Peking
(Beijing). The khan received them well, provided them with a gold tablet as a safe-conduct
back to Europe, and gave them a letter begging the pope to send “some hundred wise men,
learned in the law of Christ and conversant with the seven arts to preach to his people.” The
Polos arrived home, “having toiled three years on the way,” to find that Pope Clement IV
was dead. Two years later they set off again, traveling without the wise men but taking with
them Nicolo’s son, Marco Polo, then a youth of 17. (Marco kept detailed notes of all he saw
and, late in life when a captive of the Genoese, dictated to a fellow prisoner a book
containing an account of his travels and adventures.) This time the Polos took a different
route: starting from the port of Hormuz on the Persian Gulf, they crossed Persia to the
Pamirs and then followed a caravan route along the southern edge of the Tarim Basin and
Gobi Desert to Cambaluc. Information about the route is interesting, but the great
contribution of Marco Polo to the geographical knowledge of the West lay in his vivid
descriptions of the East. He had tremendous opportunities of seeing China and appreciating
its life, for he was taken into the service of the khan and was sent as an administrator to
great cities, busy ports, and remote provinces, with instructions to write full reports. In his
book he described how, upon every main high road, at a distance apart of 25 or 30 miles (40
to 50 km), there were stations, with houses of accommodation for travelers, with 400 good
horses kept in constant readiness at each station. He also reported that, along the roads, the
great khan had caused trees to be planted, both to provide shade in summer and to mark the
route in winter when the ground was covered with snow. Marco Polo lived and worked in
western China, visiting the provinces of Shensi (Shaanxi), Szechwan (Sichuan), and
Yunnan, as well as the borders of Burma (now Myanmar). He frequently visited “the noble
and magnificent city of Quinsay [Hangzhou], a name that signifies the Celestial City and
which it merits from its preeminence to all others in the world in point of grandeur and
beauty.” Cipango (Japan) he did not visit, but he heard about it from merchants and sailors:
“It is situated at a distance of 1,500 miles from the mainland.…They have gold in the
greatest abundance, its sources being inexhaustible.” The most detailed descriptions and the
greatest superlatives were reserved for Cambaluc, capital of Cathay, whose splendours were
beyond compare; to this city, he said,

everything that is most rare and valuable in all parts of the world finds its way: …for not fewer
than 1,000 carriages and pack-horses loaded with raw silk make their daily entry; and gold tissues
and silks of various kinds are manufactured to an immense extent.

No wonder that, when Europe learned of these things, it became enthralled. After 17 years,
the Venetians were permitted to depart; they returned to Europe by sea. After visiting Java
they sailed through the Strait of Malacca (again proving the error of Ptolemy); and, landing
at Hormuz, they traveled cross-country to Armenia, and so home to Venice, which they
reached in 1295.
A few travelers followed the Polos. Giovanni da Montecorvino, a Franciscan friar from
Italy, became archbishop of Peking and lived in China from 1294 to 1328. Friar Oderic of
Pordenone, an Italian monk, became a missionary, journeying throughout the greater part of
Asia between 1316 and 1330. He reached Peking by way of India and Malaya, then traveled
by sea to Canton; he returned to Europe by way of Central Asia, visiting Tibet in 1325—the
first European to do so. Friar Oderic’s account of his journeys had considerable influence in
his day: it was from it that the spurious traveler, the English writer Sir John Mandeville,
quarried most of his stories.

Ibn Baṭṭūṭah, an Arab of Tangier, journeyed farther perhaps than any other medieval traveler.
In 1325 he set out to make the traditional pilgrimage to Mecca, and in some 30 years he
visited the greater part of the Old World, covering, it has been said, more than 75,000 miles
(120,700 km). He was the first to explore much of Arabia; he traveled extensively in India;
he reached Java and Southeast Asia. Then toward the end of his life he returned to the west,
where, after visiting Spain, he explored western Sudan “to the northernmost province of the
Negroes.” He reached the Niger, which he called the Nile, and was astonished by the huge
hippopotamuses “taking them to be elephants.” When he finally returned to Fès in Morocco
he “kissed the hand of the Commander of the Faithful the Sultan…and settled down under
the wing of his bounty.” He wrote a vivid and perspicacious account of his travels, but his
book did not become known to Christian Europe for centuries. It was Marco Polo’s book
that was the most popular of all. Some 138 manuscripts of it survive: it was translated before
1500 into Latin, German, and Spanish, and the first English translation was published in
1577. For centuries Europe’s maps of the Far East were based on the information provided
by Marco Polo; even as late as 1533 Johannes Schöner, the German maker of globes, wrote:

Behind the Sinae and the Ceres [legendary cities of Central Asia]…many countries were
discovered by one Marco Polo…and the sea coasts of these countries have now recently again
been explored by Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci in navigating the Indian Ocean.

Columbus possessed and annotated a copy of the Latin edition (1483–85) of Marco Polo’s
book, and in his journal he identified many of his own discoveries with places that Marco
Polo describes.

Thus, with Ptolemy in one hand and Marco Polo in the other, the European explorers of the
Age of Discovery set forth to try to reach Cathay and Cipango by new ways; Ptolemy
promised that the way was short, and Marco Polo promised that the reward was great.

The Age of Discovery

In the 100 years from the mid-15th to the mid-16th century, a combination of circumstances
stimulated men to seek new routes, and it was new routes rather than new lands that filled
the minds of kings and commoners, scholars and seamen. First, toward the end of the 14th
century, the vast empire of the Mongols was breaking up; thus, Western merchants could no
longer be assured of safe-conduct along the land routes. Second, the Ottoman Turks and the
Venetians controlled commercial access to the Mediterranean and the ancient sea routes
from the East. Third, new nations on the Atlantic shores of Europe were now ready to seek
overseas trade and adventure.

The sea route east by south to Cathay

zoom_in
European exploration Henry the Navigator, prince of Portugal, initiated the
World map by J.M. Contarini, 1506,
depicting the expanding horizons
first great enterprise of the Age of Discovery—the
becoming known to European search for a sea route east by south to Cathay. His
geographers in the Age of Discovery.
Courtesy of the trustees of the British motives were mixed. He was curious about the world;
Museum; photograph, J.R. Freeman &
he was interested in new navigational aids and better
Co. Ltd.
ship design and was eager to test them; he was also a
Crusader and hoped that, by sailing south and then east along the coast of Africa, Arab
power in North Africa could be attacked from the rear. The promotion of profitable trade
was yet another motive; he aimed to divert the Guinea trade in gold and ivory away from its
routes across the Sahara to the Moors of Barbary (North Africa) and instead channel it via
the sea route to Portugal.

Expedition after expedition was sent forth throughout the 15th century to explore the coast
of Africa. In 1445 the Portuguese navigator Dinís Dias reached the mouth of the Sénégal,
which “men say comes from the Nile, being one of the most glorious rivers of Earth,
flowing from the Garden of Eden and the earthly paradise.” Once the desert coast had been
passed, the sailors pushed on: in 1455 and 1456 Alvise Ca’ da Mosto made voyages to
Gambia and the Cape Verde Islands. Prince Henry died in 1460 after a career that had
brought the colonization of the Madeira Islands and the Azores and the traversal of the
African coast to Sierra Leone. Henry’s captain, Diogo Cão, discovered the Congo River in
1482. All seemed promising; trade was good with the riverine peoples, and the coast was
trending hopefully eastward. Then the disappointing fact was realized: the head of a great
gulf had been reached, and, beyond, the coast seemed to stretch endlessly southward. Yet,
when Columbus sought backing for his plan to sail westward across the Atlantic to the
Indies, he was refused—“seeing that King John II [of Portugal] ordered the coast of Africa
to be explored with the intention of going by that route to India.”

King John II sought to establish two routes: the first, a land and sea route through Egypt and
Ethiopia to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean and, the second, a sea route around the
southern shores of Africa, the latter an act of faith, since Ptolemy’s map showed a
landlocked Indian Ocean. In 1487, a Portuguese emissary, Pêro da Covilhã, successfully
followed the first route; but, on returning to Cairo, he reported that, in order to travel to
India, the Portuguese “could navigate by their coasts and the seas of Guinea.” In the same
year, another Portuguese navigator, Bartolomeu Dias, found encouraging evidence that this
was so. In 1487 he rounded the Cape of Storms in such bad weather that he did not see it,
but he satisfied himself that the coast was now trending northeastward; before turning back,
he reached the Great Fish River, in what is now South Africa. On the return voyage, he
sighted the Cape and set up a pillar upon it to mark its discovery.

The seaway was now open, but eight years were to elapse before
zoom_in it was exploited. In 1492 Columbus had apparently reached the
John II of Portugal
John II of Portugal. East by a much easier route. By the end of the decade, however,
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
doubts of the validity of Columbus’s claim were current. Interest
was therefore renewed in establishing the sea route south by east to the known riches of
India. In 1497 a Portuguese captain, Vasco da Gama, sailed in command of a fleet under
instructions to reach Calicut (Kozhikode), on India’s west coast. This he did after a
magnificent voyage around the Cape of Storms (which he renamed the Cape of Good Hope)
and along the unknown coast of East Africa. Yet another Portuguese fleet set out in 1500,
this one being under the command of Pedro Álvarez Cabral; on the advice of da Gama,
Cabral steered southwestward to avoid the calms of the Guinea coast; thus, en route for
Calicut, Brazil was discovered. Soon trading depots, known as factories, were built along
the African coast, at the strategic entrances to the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and along
the shores of the Indian peninsula. In 1511 the Portuguese established a base at Malacca
(now Melaka, Malaysia), commanding the straits into the China Sea; in 1511 and 1512, the
Moluccas, or Spice Islands, and Java were reached; in 1557 the trading port of Macau was
founded at the mouth of the Canton River. Europe had arrived in the East. It was in the end
the Portuguese, not the Turks, who destroyed the commercial supremacy of the Italian cities,
which had been based on a monopoly of Europe’s trade with the East by land. But Portugal
was soon overextended; it was therefore the Dutch, the English, and the French who in the
long run reaped the harvest of Portuguese enterprise.

Some idea of the knowledge that these trading explorers brought to the common store may
be gained by a study of contemporary maps. The map of the German Henricus Martellus,
published in 1492, shows the shores of North Africa and of the Gulf of Guinea more or less
correctly and was probably taken from numerous seamen’s charts. The delineation of the
west coast of southern Africa from the Guinea Gulf to the Cape suggests a knowledge of the
charts of the expedition of Bartolomeu Dias. The coastlines of the Indian Ocean are largely
Ptolemaic with two exceptions: first, the Indian Ocean is no longer landlocked; and second,
the Malay Peninsula is shown twice—once according to Ptolemy and once again,
presumably, according to Marco Polo. The Contarini map of 1506 shows further advances;
the shape of Africa is generally accurate, and there is new knowledge of the Indian Ocean,
although it is curiously treated. Peninsular India (on which Cananor and Calicut are named)
is shown; although too small, it is, however, recognizable. There is even an indication to the
east of it of the Bay of Bengal, with a great river running into it. Eastward of this is
Ptolemy’s India, with the huge island of Taprobane—a muddled representation of the Indian
peninsula and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). East again, as on the map of Henricus Martellus, the
Malay Peninsula appears twice. Ptolemy’s bonds were hard to break.

The sea route west to Cathay

It is not known when the idea originated of sailing westward in order to reach Cathay. Many
sailors set forth searching for islands in the west; and it was a commonplace among
scientists that the east could be reached by sailing west, but to believe this a practicable
voyage was an entirely different matter. Christopher Columbus, a Genoese who had settled
in Lisbon about 1476, argued that Cipango lay a mere 2,500 nautical miles west of the
Canary Islands in the eastern Atlantic. He took 45 instead of 60 nautical miles as the value
of a degree; he accepted Ptolemy’s exaggerated west–east extent of Asia and then added to it
the lands described by Marco Polo, thus reducing the true distance between the Canaries and
Cipango by about one-third. He could not convince the Portuguese scientists nor the
merchants of Lisbon that his idea was worth backing; but eventually he obtained the support
of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. The sovereigns probably argued that the
cost of equipping the expedition would not be very great; the loss, if it failed, could be
borne; the gain, should it succeed, was incalculable—indeed, it might divert to Spain all the
wealth of Asia.

On August 3, 1492, Columbus sailed from Palos, Spain, with three small ships manned by
Spaniards. From the Canaries he sailed westward, for, on the evidence of the globes and
maps in which he had faith, Japan was on the same latitude. If Japan should be missed,
Columbus thought that the route adopted would land him, only a little further on, on the
coast of China itself. Fair winds favoured him, the sea was calm, and, on October 12,
landfall was made on the Bahama island of Guanahaní, which he renamed San Salvador
(also called Watling Island, though Samana Cay and other islands have been identified as
Guanahaní). With the help of the local Indians, the ships reached Cuba and then Haiti.
Although there was no sign of the wealth of the lands of Kublai Khan, Columbus
nevertheless seemed convinced that he had reached China, since, according to his reckoning,
he was beyond Japan. A second voyage in 1493 and 1494, searching fruitlessly for the court
of Kublai Khan, further explored the islands of “the Indies.” Doubts seem to have arisen
among the would-be colonists as to the identity of the islands since Columbus demanded
that all take an oath that Cuba was the southeast promontory of Asia—the Golden
Chersonese. On his third voyage, in 1498, Columbus sighted Trinidad, entered the Gulf of
Paria, on the coast of what is now Venezuela, and annexed for Spain “a very great
continent…until today unknown.” On a fourth voyage, from 1502 to 1504, he explored the
coast of Central America from Honduras to Darien on the Isthmus of Panama, seeking a
navigable passage to the west. What passage he had in mind is obscure; if at this point he
still believed he had reached Asia, it is conceivable that he sought a way through Ptolemy’s
Golden Chersonese into the Indian Ocean.

Columbus’s tenacity, courage, and skill in navigation make him stand out among the few
explorers who have changed substantially ideas about the world. At the time, however, his
efforts must have seemed ill-rewarded: he found no emperor’s court rich in spices, silks,
gold, or precious stones but had to contend with mutinous sailors, dissident colonists, and
disappointed sovereigns. He died at Valladolid in 1506. Did he believe to the end that he
indeed had reached Cathay, or did he, however dimly, perceive that he had found a New
World?

Whatever Columbus thought, it was clear to others that there was much to be investigated,
and probably much to be gained, by exploration westward. Not only in Lisbon and Cádiz but
also in other Atlantic ports, groups of men congregated in hopes of joining in the search. In
England, Bristol, with its western outlook and Icelandic trade, was the port best placed to
nurture adventurous seamen. In the latter part of the 15th century, John Cabot, with his wife
and three sons, came to Bristol from Genoa or Venice. His project to sail west gained
support, and with one small ship, the Matthew, he set out in May 1497, taking a course due
west from Dursey Head, Ireland. His landfall on the other side of the ocean was probably on
the northern peninsula of what is now known as Newfoundland. From there, Cabot explored
southward, perhaps encouraged to do so, even if seeking a westward passage, by ice in the
Strait of Belle Isle. Little is known of John Cabot’s first voyage, and almost nothing of his
second, in 1498, from which he did not return, but his voyages in high latitudes represented
almost as great a navigational feat as those of Columbus.

The coasts between the landfalls of Columbus and of John Cabot were charted in the first
quarter of the 16th century by Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese sailors. Sebastian
Cabot, son of John, gained a great reputation as a navigator and promoter of Atlantic
exploration, but whether this was based primarily on his own experience or on the
achievements of his father is uncertain. In 1499 Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian merchant
living in Sevilla (Seville), together with the Spanish explorer Alonso de Ojeda, explored the
north coast of South America from Suriname to the Golfo de Venezuela. His lively and
embellished description of these lands became popular, and Waldseemüller, on his map of
1507, gave the name America to the southern part of the continent.

The 1506 map of Contarini represented a brave attempt to collate the mass of new
information, true and false, that accrued from these western voyages. The land explored by
Columbus on his third voyage and by Vespucci and de Ojeda in 1499 is shown at the bottom
left of the map as a promontory of a great northern bulge of a continent extending far to the
south. The northeast coast of Asia at the top left is pulled out into a great peninsula on which
is shown a big river and some mountains representing Contarini’s concept of Newfoundland
and the lands found by the Cabots and others. In the wide sea that separates these northern
lands from South America, the West Indies are shown. Halfway between the Indies and the
coast of Asia, Japan is drawn. A legend placed between Japan and China reveals the state of
opinion among at least some contemporary geographers; it presumably refers to the fourth
voyage of Columbus in 1502 and may be an addition to the map. It runs:

Christopher Columbus, Viceroy of Spain, sailing westwards, reached the Spanish islands after
many hardships and dangers. Weighing anchor thence he sailed to the province called Ciambra [a
province which then adjoined Cochinchina].

Others did not agree with Contarini’s interpretation. To more and more people it was
becoming plain that a New World had been found, although for a long time there was little
inclination to explore it but instead a great determination to find a way past it to the wealth
of Asia. The voyage of the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan, from 1519 to 1521,
dispelled two long-cherished illusions: first, that there was an easy way through the barrier
and, second, that, once the barrier was passed, Cathay was near at hand.

Ferdinand Magellan had served in the East Indies as a young man. Familiar with the long
sea route to Asia eastward from Europe via the Cape of Good Hope, he was convinced that
there must be an easier sea route westward. His plan was in accord with Spanish hopes; five
Spanish ships were fitted out in Sevilla, and in August 1519 they sailed under his command
first to the Cape Verde Islands and thence to Brazil. Standing offshore, they then sailed
southward along the east coast of South America; the estuary of the Río de la Plata was
explored in the vain hope that it might prove to be a strait leading to the Pacific. Magellan’s
ships then sailed south along the coast of Patagonia. The Gulf of St. George, and doubtless
many more small embayments, raised hopes that a strait had been found, only to dash them;
at last at Port Julian, at 49°15′ S, winter quarters were established. In September 1520 a
southward course was set once more, until, finally, on October 21, Magellan found a strait
leading westward. It proved to be an extremely difficult one: it was long, deep, tortuous,
rock-walled, and bedevilled by icy squalls and dense fogs. It was a miracle that three of the
five ships got through its 325-mile (525-km) length. After 38 days, they sailed out into the
open ocean. Once away from land, the ocean seemed calm enough; Magellan consequently
named it the Pacific. The Pacific, however, proved to be of vast extent, and for 14 weeks the
little ships sailed on a northwesterly course without encountering land. Short of food and
water, the sailors ate sawdust mixed with ship’s biscuits and chewed the leather parts of their
gear to keep themselves alive. At last, on March 6, 1521, exhausted and scurvy-ridden, they
landed at the island of Guam. Ten days later they reached the Philippines, where Magellan
was killed in a local quarrel. The survivors, in two ships, sailed on to the Moluccas; thus,
sailing westward, they arrived at last in territory already known to the Portuguese sailing
eastward. One ship attempted, but failed, to return across the Pacific. The remaining ship,
the Vittoria, laden with spices, under the command of the Spanish navigator Juan Sebastián
del Cano, sailed alone across the Indian Ocean, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and
arrived at Sevilla on September 9, 1522, with a crew of four Indians and only 17 survivors
of the 239 Europeans who had set sail with the expedition three years earlier. Cano, not
having allowed for the fact that his circumnavigation had caused him to lose a day, was
greatly puzzled to find that his carefully kept log was one day out; he was, however,
delighted to discover that the cargo that he had brought back more than paid for the
expenses of the voyage.

It is fitting to consider this first circumnavigation as marking the close of the Age of
Discovery. Magellan and his men had demonstrated that Columbus had discovered a New
World and not the route to China and that Columbus’s “Indies”—the West Indies—were
separated from the East Indies by a vast ocean.

Not all the major problems of world geography were, however, now solved. Two great
questions still remained unanswered. Were there “northern passages” between the Atlantic
and Pacific oceans more easily navigable than the dangerous Strait of Magellan to the south?
Was there a great landmass somewhere in the vastness of the southern oceans—a Terra
Australis (“southern land”) that would balance the northern continents?

The emergence of the modern world

The centuries that have elapsed since the Age of Discovery have seen the end of dreams of
easy routes to the East by the north, the discovery of Australasia and Antarctica in place of
Terra Australis Incognita, and the identification of the major features of the continental
interiors.
While, as in earlier centuries, traders and missionaries often proved themselves also to be
intrepid explorers, in this period of geographical discovery the seeker after knowledge for its
own sake played a greater part than ever before.

The northern passages

Roger Barlow, in his Briefe Summe of Geographie, written in 1540–41, asserted that “the
shortest route, the northern, has been reserved by Divine Providence for England.”

The concept of a Northeast Passage was at first favoured by the English: it was thought that,
although its entry was in high latitudes, it “turning itself, trendeth towards the southeast…
and stretcheth directly to Cathay.” It was also argued that the cold lands bordering this route
would provide a much needed market for English cloth. In 1553 a trading company, later
known as the Muscovy Company, was formed with Sebastian Cabot as its governor. Under
its auspices numerous expeditions were sent out. In 1553 an expedition set sail under the
command of Sir Hugh Willoughby; Willoughby’s ship was lost, but the exploration
continued under the leadership of its pilot general, Richard Chancellor. Chancellor and his
men wintered in the White Sea, and next spring “after much adoe at last came to Mosco.”
Between 1557 and 1560, another English voyager, Anthony Jenkinson, following up this
opening, traveled from the White Sea to Moscow, then to the Caspian, and so on to Bukhara,
thus reaching the old east–west trade routes by a new way. Soon, attempts to find a passage
to Cathay were replaced by efforts to divert the trade of the ancient silk routes from their
traditional outlets on the Black Sea to new northern outlets on the White Sea.

The Dutch next took up the search for the passage. The Dutch navigator William Barents
made three expeditions between 1594 and 1597 (when he died in Novaya Zemlya, modern
Russia). The English navigator Henry Hudson, in the employ of the Dutch, discovered
between 1605 and 1607 that ice blocked the way both east and west of Svalbard
(Spitsbergen). Between 1725 and 1729 and from 1734 to 1743, a series of expeditions
inspired by the Danish-Russian explorer Vitus Bering attempted the passage from the
eastern end, but it was not until 1878–79 that Baron Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, the Finnish-
Swedish scientist and explorer, sailed through it.

The Northwest Passage, on the other hand, also had its strong supporters. In 1576 Humphrey
Gilbert, the English soldier and navigator, argued that “Mangia [South China], Quinzay
[Hangzhou] and the Moluccas are nearer to us by the North West than by the North East,”
while John Dee in 1577 set out the view that the Strait of Anian, separating America from
Asia, led southwest “along the backeside of Newfoundland.” In 1534 Jacques Cartier, the
French navigator, explored the St. Lawrence estuary. In 1576 the English explorer Sir Martin
Frobisher found the bay named after him. Between 1585 and 1587, the English navigator
John Davis explored Cumberland Sound and the western shore of Greenland to 73° N;
although he met “a mighty block of ice,” he reported that “the passage is most probable and
the execution easy.” In 1610 Henry Hudson sailed through Hudson Strait to Hudson Bay,
confident, before he was set adrift by a mutinous crew, that success was at hand. Between
1612 and 1615, three English voyagers—Robert Bylot, Sir Thomas Button, and William
Baffin—thoroughly explored the bay, returning convinced that there was no strait out of it
leading westward. As in the quest for a Northeast Passage, interest turned from the search
for a route leading to the riches of the East to the exploitation of local resources. Englishmen
of the Hudson’s Bay Company, founded in 1670 to trade in furs, explored the wide
hinterlands of the St. Lawrence estuary and Hudson Bay. Further search for the passage
itself did not take place until the 19th century: expeditions led by Sir William Parry (1819–
25) and Sir John Franklin (1819–45), as well as more than 40 expeditions sent out to search
for Franklin and his party, failed to find the passage. It was left to the Norwegian explorer
Roald Amundsen to be the first to sail through the passage, which he did in 1903–05.

Eastward voyages to the Pacific

zoom_in
Colonial exploration routes in By the end of the 16th century, Portugal in the East
CanadaEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
held only the ports of Goa and Diu, in India, and
Macau, in China. The English dominated the trade of India, and the Dutch that of the East
Indies. It was the Dutch, trading on the fringes of the known world, who were the explorers.
Victualing their ships at the Cape, they soon learned that, by sailing east for some 3,000
miles (5,000 km) before turning north, they would encounter favourable winds in setting a
course toward the Spice Islands (now the Moluccas). Before long, reports were received of
landfalls made on an unknown coast; as early as 1618, a Dutch skipper suggested that “this
land is a fit point to be made by ships…in order to get a fixed course for Java.” Thereafter,
the west coast of Australia was gradually charted: it was identified by some as the coast of
the great southern continent shown on Mercator’s map and, by others, as the continent of
Loach or Beach mentioned by Marco Polo, interpreted as lying to the south of Malacca
(Melaka); Polo, however, was probably describing the Malay Peninsula.

In 1642 a farsighted governor general of the Dutch East India Company, Anthony van
Diemen, sent out the Dutch navigator Abel Tasman for the immediate purpose of making an
exploratory voyage, but with the ultimate aim of developing trade. Sailing first south then
east from Mauritius, Tasman landed on the coast of Tasmania, after which he coasted round
the island to the south and, sailing east, discovered the South Island of New Zealand; “We
trust that this is the mainland coast of the unknown South land,” he wrote. He sailed north
without finding Cook Strait, and, making a sweeping arc on his voyage back to the Dutch
port of Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia), he discovered the Tonga and the Fiji Islands. In
1644, on a second voyage, he traced the north coast of Australia from Cape York (which he
thought to be a part of New Guinea) to the North West Cape.

Westward voyages to the Pacific

The earlier European explorers in the Pacific were primarily in search of trade or booty; the
later ones were primarily in search of information. The traders, for the most part Spaniards,
established land portages from harbours on the Caribbean to harbours on the west coast of
Central and South America; from the Pacific coast ports of the Americas, they then set a
course westward to the Philippines. Many of their ships crossed and recrossed the Pacific
without making a landfall; many islands were found, named, and lost, only to be found again
without recognition, renamed, and perhaps lost yet again. In the days before longitude could
be accurately fixed, such uncertainty was not surprising.

Some voyages—for example, those of Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira, the Spanish explorer, in
1567 and 1568; Mendaña and the Portuguese navigator Pedro Fernández de Quirós in 1595;
Quirós and another Portuguese explorer, Luis de Torres, in 1606—had, among other
motives, the purpose of finding the great southern continent. Quirós was sure that in Espíritu
Santo in the New Hebrides he had found his goal; he “took possession of the site on which is
to be founded the New Jerusalem.” Torres sailed from there to New Guinea and thence to
Manila, in the Philippines. In doing so, he coasted the south shore of New Guinea, sailing
through Torres Strait, unaware that another continent lay on his left hand.
The English were rivals of the Spaniards in the search for wealth in unknown lands in the
Pacific. Two English seamen, Sir Francis Drake and Thomas Cavendish, circumnavigated
the world from west to east in 1577 to 1580 and 1586 to 1588, respectively. One of Drake’s
avowed objects was the search for Terra Australis. Once he was through Magellan’s straits,
however, strong winds made him turn north—perhaps not reluctantly. He then sailed along
the coast of Peru, surprising and plundering Spanish ships laden with gold, silver, precious
stones, and pearls. His fortune made, Drake continued northward perhaps in search of the
Northwest Passage. He explored the west coast of North America to 48° N. He returned
south to winter in New Albion (California); the next summer he sailed on the Spanish route
to Manila, then returned home by the Cape.

Despite the fact that he participated in several buccaneering voyages, the English seaman
William Dampier, who was active in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, may be regarded
as the first to travel mainly to satisfy scientific curiosity. He wrote: “I was well satisfied
enough knowing that, the further we went, the more knowledge and experience I should get,
which was the main thing I regarded.” His book A New Voyage Round the World, published
in 1697, further popularized the idea of a great southern continent.

In the late 18th century, the final phase of Pacific exploration occurred. The French sent the
explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville to the Pacific in 1768. He appears to have been
more of a skeptic than many of his contemporaries, for, while he agreed “that it is difficult to
conceive such a number of low islands and almost drowned lands without a continent near
them,” at the same time he maintained that “if any considerable land existed hereabouts we
could not fail meeting with it.” The British, for their part, commissioned John Byron in 1764
and Samuel Wallis and Phillip Carteret in 1766 “to discover unknown lands and to explore
the coast of New Albion.” For all the navigational skill and personal endurance shown by
captains and crews, the rewards of these voyages in increasing geographical knowledge
were not great. The courses sailed were in the familiar waters of the southern tropics; none
was through the dangerous waters of higher latitudes.

Capt. James Cook, the English navigator, in three magnificent voyages at long last
succeeded in demolishing the fables about Pacific geography. He was given command of an
expedition to observe the transit of the planet Venus at Tahiti on June 3, 1769; with the
observation completed, he carried out his instructions to search the area between 40° and
35° S “until you discover it [Terra Australis] or fall in with the eastern side of the land
discovered by Tasman and now called New Zealand.” He reached New Zealand,
circumnavigated both islands, sailed westward, and on April 19, 1770, made landfall on the
eastern coast of Australia. He then turned northward, charting carefully, being well aware of
the dangers of the Great Barrier Reef. At Cape York, Cook took possession of the whole
eastern coast, to which he gave the name New South Wales. He sailed through Torres Strait,
recognizing as he did so that New Guinea was an island. When Cook sailed back to England
by Batavia and the Cape, the coastline of the fifth continent was almost complete; only in
the south did it still remain unknown. In 1798 to 1799, two British navigators, George Bass
and Matthew Flinders, circumnavigated Tasmania, and in 1801–03 Flinders charted the
coast of the Great Australian Bight and circumnavigated the continent, thereby proving that
there was no strait from the bight to the Gulf of Carpentaria.

In a second voyage, from 1772 to 1775, which in many

zoom_in ways was the greatest of the three, Cook searched
early non-indigenous exploration
of Australia and systematically for the elusive continent that many still
TasmaniaEncyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
believed might exist. The first summer he examined
the area to the south of the Indian Ocean; in the second, he searched the ocean between New
Zealand and Cape Horn; and, in the third, the ocean between Cape Horn and the Cape of
Good Hope. He sailed home convinced that the great South Pacific continent of the map
makers was a fable.

With the exploration of the Pacific completed, interest in a Northwest Passage revived. In
1778 Cook proceeded to latitude 65° N, but he found no way through the ice barrier either to
east or to west. He then sailed south to Hawaii, where he was killed in a dispute with the
islanders.

Terra Australis Incognita had disappeared: there was now no unknown landmass in the
southern oceans. It was Matthew Flinders who suggested that the fifth continent should be
named Australia—a name that had long associations with the South Seas and that accorded
well with the names of the other continents.

The continental interiors

At the opening of the 19th century, the major features of Europe, Asia, and North and South
America were known; in Africa some classic misconceptions still persisted; inland Australia
was still almost blank; and Antarctica was not on the map at all.

Africa

The river systems were the key to African geography. The existence of a great river in the
interior of West Africa was known to the Greeks, but in which direction it flowed and
whether it found an outlet in the Sénégal, the Gambia, the Congo, or even the Nile were in
dispute. A young Scottish surgeon, Mungo Park, was asked to explore it by the African
Association of London. In 1796 Park, who had traveled inland from the Gambia, saw “the
long sought for majestic Niger flowing slowly eastwards.” On a second expedition,
attempting to follow its course to the mouth, he was drowned near Bussa, in what is now
Nigeria. In 1830 an English explorer, Richard Lander, traveled from the Bight of Benin, on
the West African coast, to Bussa, and he then navigated the river down to its mouth, which
was revealed as being one of the delta distributaries that, because of the trade in palm oil,
were known to traders as “the oil rivers” on the Gulf of Guinea.

The Zambezi, in south-central Africa, was not known at all until, in the mid-19th century,
the Scottish missionary-explorer David Livingstone crossed the Kalahari from the south,
found Lake Ngami, and, hearing of populous areas farther north, came upon the river in
midcourse. On a great exploratory journey from 1852 to 1856, the main purpose of which
was to expose the slave trade, he first traveled upstream, crossed the watershed between the
tributaries of the upper Zambezi and those of the lower Congo, and reached the west coast at
Luanda, Angola. From there a year’s march brought him back to his starting point near the
falls that the Africans called “smoke does sound” but that Livingstone prosaically renamed
the Victoria Falls; from here he followed the Zambezi downstream, reaching the east coast
at Quelimane, in Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique). On his second journey, sent out by
the British government to test the navigability of the lower Zambezi, he explored the Shire
(Chire) and Rovuma rivers and reached Lake Nyasa. His last journey, from 1865 to 1871,
was undertaken at the behest of the president of Britain’s Royal Geographical Society
(successor to the African Association) “to solve a question of intense geographical
interest…namely the watershed or watersheds of southern Africa.” On this journey
Livingstone investigated the complex drainage system between Lake Nyasa and Lake
Tanganyika and explored the headwaters of the Congo. He refused to return to England with
the Welsh explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who was sent to his rescue in 1871, because he
was still uncertain of the position of the watershed between the Nile and the Congo; he
wondered if the Lualaba was perhaps a headstream of the Nile. He struggled back to the
maze of waterways around Lake Bangweulu and died there in 1873.

The whereabouts of the source of the Nile had intrigued men since the days of the pharaohs.
A Scottish explorer, James Bruce, traveling in Ethiopia in 1770, visited the two fountains in
Lake Tana, the source of the Blue Nile, first discovered by the Spanish priest Paez in 1618.
The English explorers Richard Burton and John Speke discovered Lake Tanganyika in 1857.
Speke then traveled north alone and reached the southern creek of a lake, which he named
Victoria Nyanza. Without exploring farther, he returned to England, sure that he had found
the source of the Nile. He was right—but he had not seen the outlet, and Burton did not
believe him. In 1862 Speke, traveling with the Scottish explorer James Grant, found the
Ripon Falls, in Uganda (which was submerged following the construction of the Owen Falls
Dam [now the Nalubaale Dam] in 1954), and “saw without any doubt that Old Father Nile
rises in Victoria Nyanza.” Stanley completed the puzzle in 1875; he circumnavigated
Victoria Nyanza, crossed to the Lualaba, followed that river to the Congo, and then followed
the Congo to its mouth. The pattern made by the river systems of Africa was elucidated at
last.

Australia
The interior of Australia also posed a problem: was its heart an inland sea or a desert? This
question did not arouse anything approaching the same degree of public interest that was
taken in the geography of Africa. Exploration was slow; the early settlers on the east coast
found that the valleys led to impassable walls at the valley heads. In 1813 the Australian
explorer Gregory Blaxland successfully crossed the Blue Mountains by following a ridge
instead of taking a valley route. Rivers were found beyond the mountains, but they did not
behave as expected. Another explorer, the Australian John Oxley, in 1818 observed: “On
every hill a spring, in every valley a rivulet, but the river itself disappears.” He guessed that
the great fan of rivers that drained the western slopes of the Great Dividing Range of eastern
Australia fell into an inland sea. The Australian Charles Sturt resolved the problem by an
imaginative journey made in 1829–30. He embarked on the Murrumbidgee River and was
“hurried into a great and noble river [the Murray].” A week later he encountered another big
river flowing into the Murray from the north, that he rightly concluded was the Darling, the
middle course of which he had explored the year before. The voyage ended when he
discovered that the Murray drained into Encounter Bay on the south coast. The heart of
Australia was not an inland sea but a vast desert. Many more expeditions were needed to
map the continent’s major features, but two revealed its great extent. In 1840–41 the
Australian Edward John Eyre traveled along the south coast from Adelaide to Albany, a
distance of more than 1,300 miles (2,100 km); the Australians Robert Burke and William
John Wills traveled from Melbourne in the southeast to the Gulf of Carpentaria in the north.

Polar regions

The exploration of the polar regions was the work of the first half of the 20th century.
Scientific curiosity mainly inspired the various enterprises, although political rivalry also
played some part.

In the North Polar regions, the scientific age began

zoom_in with the voyaging of William Scoresby, an English
Arctic explorationsEncyclopædia
Britannica, Inc. whaler and scientist, who in 1806 reached 81°21′ N. In
1828 an English explorer, Sir William Parry, traveling
over drift ice from Svalbard, reached 82° N. The Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen in
1893 attempted to reach the Pole by allowing his ship, the Fram, to be frozen into the ice in
the East Siberian Sea in the hope that a current would carry it over the Pole to east
Greenland. At 84° N 102° E, Nansen with a companion left the ship and traveled by sled to
86°13′ N: the ship eventually emerged from the pack ice north of Svalbard. In 1909 an
American explorer, Robert Peary, reached the North Pole by journeying by sled with 50
Eskimos from Ellesmere Island, northwest of Greenland. Soundings of 9,000 feet (2,700
metres) were made within 5 miles (8 km) of the Pole; it seemed, therefore, that there could
be no continent here. In 1958 the U.S. submarines Skate and Nautilus traveled across the
Arctic Ocean under the ice cap.

The great southern continent, which Captain Cook demonstrated could not lie in the South
Pacific, lay there neglected for some 50 years. From 1839 to 1843, the British rear admiral
James Ross, in command of the ships Erebus and Terror, explored the coast of Victoria
Land. In 1894 Leonard Christensen, captain of a Norwegian whaler, landed a party at Cape
Adare, the first to set foot on Antarctica. In the first decade of the 20th century, various
explorers, including Britons such as William Bruce, Robert Falcon Scott, and Sir Ernest
Henry Shackleton, the German Erich von Drygalski, and the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste
Charcot, confirmed the existence of an ice cap of continental dimensions. In 1908–09
Shackleton led a brilliant expedition, during which he examined the Great Barrier, climbed
to 11,000 feet (3,400 metres), and reached 88°23′ S. Scott and his party reached the Pole on
Jan. 17, 1912, only to find that the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had already been
there on December 14, 1911; Scott’s party, caught in a blizzard, died on their return journey.
In 1928 Sir Hubert Wilkins, the British explorer and aviator, flew over Graham Land, using
Deception Island as a base. In 1957 and 1958 the British explorer Vivian Fuchs and Sir
Edmund Hillary, the New Zealand mountaineer, traveled across the continent.

Jean Brown Mitchell

Citation Information
Article Title:
European exploration
Website Name:
Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher:
Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published:
29 October 2020
URL:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/European-exploration
Access Date:
November 13, 2021