The Britannica Guide to Explorers and Explorations That Changed the Modern World

Britannica Educational Publishing, Kenneth Pletcher

• Publisher: Britannica Educational Publishing
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781615300655
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

There was a time when every voyage contained an element of the unknown. Today, however, the world spreads out before us carefully mapped and plotted. One must credit explorers with this transformation. Readers will devour these tales of explorers who have pushed geographic and personal boundaries, leaving virtually no corner of the globe off limits.

Chapter 1:
Early Explorers

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The motives that spur human beings to examine their environment are many. Strong among them are the satisfaction of curiosity, the pursuit of trade, the spread of religion, and the desire for security and political power. At various times and in distinct places, different motives are dominant. Sometimes one motive inspires discovery, and another motive may inspire the individuals who carry out the search.

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. 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.

However, as the general parameters of the physical world became known, interest grew in scientific inquiry. As the voyages to claim territory or secure trading rights were completed, people increasingly sought to systematically study the natural world—its physical attributes, flora, and fauna—and, ultimately, humanity’s past. This human curiosity has always led individuals to seek Earth’s extremes, be they its remote polar regions, its highest mountains, or its greatest ocean depths.

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 deserts and from the Atlantic to the Indian oceans (the views 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).

EXPLORATION OF THE ATLANTIC COASTLINES

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Beyond the Pillars of Heracles (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 Ocean. A Greek translation of a Punic (Carthaginian) inscription states that Hanno, a Carthaginian, was sent forth “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 Mediterranean temporarily slackened as a result of squabbles with the Greek city of Syracuse on the island of Sicily, so Pytheas, a Greek explorer of Massilia (Marseille), sailed through.

HANNO

The Carthaginian Hanno conducted a voyage of exploration and colonization to the west coast of Africa sometime during the 5th century BCE. Setting sail with 60 vessels holding 30,000 men and women, Hanno founded Thymiaterion (now Kenitra, Mor.) and built a temple at Soloeis (Cape Cantin, now Cape Meddouza). He then founded five additional cities in and around present Morocco, including Carian Fortress (Greek: Karikon Teichos) and Acra (Agadir). The Carian Fortress is perhaps to be identified with Essaouira on the Moroccan coast, where archaeological remains of Punic settlers have been found. Farther south he founded Cerne, possibly on the Río de Oro, as a trading post. He evidently reached the coast of present Gambia or of Sierra Leone and may have ventured as far as Cameroon. An account of his voyage was written in the temple of Baal at Carthage and survives in a 10th-century-CE Greek manuscript known as Periplus of Hannon, which claims to be an ancient Greek translation from the Punic inscription. Modern scholars doubt whether Hanno actually continued beyond Morocco.

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.

PYTHEAS

The navigator, geographer, and astronomer Pytheas (fl. 300 BCE) was the first Greek to visit and describe the British Isles and the Atlantic coast of Europe. Though his principal work, On the Ocean, is lost, something is known of his ventures through the Greek historian Polybius (c. 200–c. 118 BCE).

Sailing from the Mediterranean Sea into the Atlantic, Pytheas stopped at the Phoenician city of Gades (present-day Cádiz, Spain), probably followed the European shoreline to the tip of Brittany, and eventually reached Belerium (Land’s End, Cornwall), where he visited the tin mines, famous in the ancient world. He claimed to have explored a large part of Britain on foot; he accurately estimated its circumference at 4,000 miles (6,400 km). Pytheas also estimated the distance from north Britain to Massalia (Marseille) at 1,050 miles (1,690 km); the actual distance is 1,120 miles (1,800 km). He visited some northern European countries and may have reached the mouth of the Vistula River on the Baltic Sea. He also told of Thule, the northernmost inhabited island, six days’ voyage from northern Britain and extending at least to the Arctic Circle; the region he visited may have been Iceland or Norway.

Pytheas’s comments on small points—e.g., on the native drinks made of cereals and honey and the use of threshing barns (contrasted with open-air threshing in Mediterranean regions)—show acute observation. His scientific interests appear from his calculations made with a sundial at the summer solstice and from notes on the lengthening days as he traveled northward. He also observed that the polestar is not at the true pole and that the Moon affects tides.

It was the Norsemen of Norway who were the true explorers, though since little of their exploits was known to contemporaries and those accounts were soon forgotten, they perhaps added less to the common store of Europe’s knowledge than their less adventurous compatriots. About 890 CE, Ohthere of Norway, “desirous to try how far that country extended north,” sailed round the North Cape, along the coast of 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 conjecture.

ERIK THE RED

Erik the Red (fl. 10th century), founder of the first European settlement on Greenland (c. 986) and the father of Leif Eriksson, was one of the first Europeans to reach North America. As a child, Erik left his native Norway for western Iceland with his father, Thorvald, who had been exiled for manslaughter. In the Scandinavian style of the time he was known as Erik Thorvaldson and in his youth was nicknamed Erik the Red. When Erik was similarly exiled from Iceland about 980, he decided to explore the land to the west (Greenland). That land, visible in distorted form because of the effect of looming (a type of mirage) from the mountaintops of western Iceland, lay across 175 miles (280 km) of water. It had been skirted by the Norwegian Gunnbjörn Ulfsson earlier in the 10th century. Erik sailed in 982 with his household and livestock but was unable to approach the coast because of drift ice. The party rounded the southern tip of Greenland and settled in an area near present Julianehåb (Qaqortoq). During the three-year period of Erik’s exile, the settlers encountered no other people, though they explored to the northwest, discovering Disko Island (now Qeqertarsuaq).

Erik returned to Iceland in 986. His descriptions of the territory, which he named Greenland, convinced many people anxious for more habitable land to join a return expedition. Of the 25 ships that sailed from Iceland, only 14 ships and 350 colonists are believed to have landed safely at an area later known as Eystribygdh (Eastern Colony). By the year 1000 there were an estimated 1,000 Scandinavian settlers in the colony, but an epidemic in 1002 considerably reduced the population. Erik’s colony, commemorated in the Icelandic Eiríks saga (“Saga of Erik”; translated in the The Vineland Sagas), gradually died out; but other Norse settlements in Greenland continued and maintained contact with Norway until the 15th century, when communications stopped for more than 100 years.

LEIF ERIKSSON THE LUCKY

The second of Erik’s three sons, Leif Eriksson (fl. 11th century) is widely held to have been the first European to reach the shores of North America. The 13th- and 14th-century Icelandic accounts of his life and additional later evidence show that he was certainly a member of an early Viking voyage to North America, but it remains doubtful whether he led the initial expedition.

Leif sailed from Greenland to Norway in 1000, according to the Icelandic Eiríks saga, and was there converted to Christianity by the Norwegian king Olaf I Tryggvason. The following year Leif was commissioned by Olaf to urge Christianity upon the Greenland settlers. He sailed off course on the return voyage and landed on the North American continent, at a region he called Vinland. On returning to Greenland, he proselytized for Christianity and converted his mother, who built the first Christian church in Greenland, at Brattahild.

According to the Groenlendinga saga (Grænlendinga saga; “Tale of the Greenlanders”) in the Flateyjarbók (“Songbook”; also translated in The Vineland Sagas)—considered more reliable than the Eiríks saga by many modern scholars—Leif learned of Vinland from the Icelander Bjarni Herjulfsson, who had been there 14 years earlier. The Saga pictures Leif as reaching North America several years after 1000 and visiting Helluland (possibly Labrador) and Markland (possibly Newfoundland) as well as Vinland. Further expeditions to Vinland were then made by Thorvald, Leif’s brother, and by the Icelander Thorfinn Karlsefni.

VINLAND

The exact location of the wooded land in North America that was visited and named by Leif Eriksson is not known, but it was probably somewhere along the Atlantic coastline of what is now eastern or northeastern Canada. As indicated above, the two saga accounts differ somewhat. According to the Groenlendinga saga, Bjarni Herjulfsson’s Greenland-bound ship was blown westward off course about 986. He apparently sailed along the Atlantic coastline of eastern Canada and then returned to Greenland. About 1000 a crew of 35 men led by Leif Eriksson set out to try to find the land accidentally sighted by Bjarni. (Eiríks saga presents Leif himself as the first to sight Vinland.) Leif’s expedition came first to an icy, barren land which they called Helluland (“Flat-Stone Land”); sailing southward, they encountered a flat, wooded land which they named Markland (“Wood Land”). Again they set sail southward, and the warmer, wooded area that they found they named Vinland. There they built some houses and explored the region before returning to Greenland.

In 1003 Leif’s brother Thorvald led an expedition to Vinland and spent two years there. In 1004 (or 1010, according to other historians) Thorfinn Karlsefni, encouraged by Thorvald’s reports of grapes growing wild in Vinland, led a colonizing expedition of about 130 people (or 65, according to one saga) to Vinland. By the time they had stayed there three years, the colonists’ trade with the local Native Americans (First Nations) had turned to warfare, and so the colonists gave up and returned to Greenland. About 1013 Erik the Red’s daughter Freydis led an unsuccessful expedition to Vinland and soon afterward returned to Greenland. So ended the Norse visits to the Americas as far as the historical record is concerned.

The Norsemen’s name for the land they discovered, Vinland, means “Wine Land.” Thorfinn reported that he found “wine berries” growing there, and these were later interpreted to mean grapes, though the Norsemen referred to any berry as a “wine berry,” and it is probable that they had actually come upon cranberries. This fruit evidently proved disappointing to Thorfinn’s colonists, for when they became disgruntled during the third year of the colonizing expedition, they made a grievance out of not having seen much of the wine banquets that had been promised them.

Nevertheless, the Scandinavians retained the Vinland name. It was as a wine land that the North American continent entered the literature of continental Europe, almost certainly first in 1075 through the History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen written by Adam, head of the cathedral school of Bremen. Adam mentioned Vinland on the authority of King Sweyn II Estridsen of Denmark, who told of Iceland, Greenland, and other lands of the northern Atlantic known to the Scandinavians. Adam says of King Sweyn: “He spoke also of yet another island of the many found in that ocean. It is called Vinland because vines producing excellent wines grow there.”

In the 1960s Helge Ingstad adopted the view of the Swedish philologist Sven Söderberg that Vinland did not mean “wine land” but rather “grassland” or “grazing land.” Ingstad discovered in 1963 the remains of house sites and other artifacts of a Norse settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows, at the northernmost tip of Newfoundland. Dating techniques have conclusively proved that the remains date from about 1000 CE—i.e., the time of the Norsemen’s reputed visits. Further evidence of Viking exploration came in 1965, when the Yale University Press published a medieval map showing the outlines of continental Europe, Iceland, Greenland, and Vinland, the latter being described in a notation on the map as “Island of Vinland, discovered by Bjarni and Leif in company.” The authenticity of this map, however, has been sharply debated.

PERSIAN AND ROMAN EXPLORATIONS

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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 O...