Explorers

The title of “history’s most famous traveler” usually goes to Marco Polo, the great Venetian wayfarer who visited China in the 13th century. For sheer distance covered, however, Polo trails far behind the Muslim scholar Ibn Battuta. Though little known outside the Islamic world, ...read more

The painting depicts a white-breasted bird lying on its back, its delicate beak tipped into the air. Labeled simply “Tree-Creeper, March 1899,” it was found in a paper portfolio left on a bunk in one of two historic huts on Cape Adare, a peninsula on the far east side of ...read more

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca first arrived in the New World in 1528 as the royal treasurer on a Spanish voyage of discovery. When he finally left eight years later as one of the expedition’s sole survivors, he had walked across the American continent, made first contact with dozens ...read more

“Another hard grind in the afternoon and five miles added,” British explorer Robert Falcon Scott wrote in his diary. “Our chance still holds good if we can put the work in, but it’s a terribly trying time.” It was mid-January 1912, and the 43-year-old Royal Navy officer was ...read more

On March 21, 1871, Henry Morton Stanley set out from the African port of Bagamoyo on what he hoped would be a career-making adventure. The 30-year-old journalist had arrived on the “Dark Continent” at the behest of the New York Herald newspaper, yet he wasn’t chasing any ordinary ...read more

As England slipped out of sight on August 6, 1914, James Wordie eagerly awaited his next icy challenge. As an experienced Alpine climber, the 25-year-old native of Scotland was used to reaching great heights, but now he sought adventure at the bottom of the world. Part of the ...read more

The pure air that Edward Whymper inhaled atop the summit of the Matterhorn on July 14, 1865, was so rarified that it had never filled the lungs of another person—or so the English mountaineer hoped. The 25-year-old illustrator from London had never even seen a mountain when he ...read more

With his steely blue eyes, manicured beard and trademark Stetson hat, Colonel Percy Fawcett looked like the quintessential swashbuckling adventurer. His resume included a stint as a British artilleryman in Sri Lanka, a tour of duty in World War I and a top-secret gig as a spy in ...read more

1. Cook joined the Royal Navy relatively late in life. Cook worked on a Yorkshire farm in his youth before winning an apprenticeship with a merchant sailing company at age 17. He cut his teeth as a mariner on shipping voyages in the choppy waters of North and Baltic Seas, and ...read more

The Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan is often credited as being the first person to have circumnavigated the globe, but the reality of his journey is a bit more complicated. Magellan first set sail in September 1519 as part of an epic attempt to find a western route to the ...read more

1. Alexander Selkirk Scottish mariner Alexander Selkirk’s solitary odyssey began in 1704, when he arrived at an island off the coast of Chile along with a group of British privateers. The men had spent the previous year harassing Spanish shipping around South America, but when ...read more

1. The Kingdom of Prester John For more than 500 years, Europeans believed a Christian king ruled over a vast empire somewhere in the wilds of Africa, India or the Far East. The myth first gained popularity in 1165, after the Byzantine and Holy Roman emperors received a ...read more

1. Hiram Bingham III: Told the world about Machu Picchu Bingham is credited with becoming the first outsider, in 1911, to visit the ruins of Machu Picchu, the now-famous Inca settlement in the Peruvian Andes that was built in the 15th century and abandoned around the time of the ...read more

1. Percy Fawcett The unforgiving Amazon jungle has claimed the lives of more than one adventurer, but perhaps none so famous as Colonel Percy Fawcett, who disappeared in 1925 while on the trail of a mythical lost city. One of the most colorful figures of his era, Fawcett had made ...read more

It’s a familiar story, but that doesn’t make it any less remarkable: a forgotten shipwreck, long ago sunk to the bottom of the sea, holding once-edible treasures like honey, olive oil or wine. Just this summer, a Roman ship was discovered off the coast of Italy that held nearly ...read more

1. Magellan’s expedition had a multinational crew. Although it was a Spanish expedition, Magellan’s fleet featured a culturally diverse crew. Spaniards and Portuguese made up the vast majority of the sailors, but the voyage also included mariners from Greece, Sicily, England, ...read more