The greatest explorers in history

How these eight explorers were chosen

An explorer here is someone who travelled beyond the edge of what their own society knew and left a record of it: a book, a saga, a ship’s log, an inscription or archaeology that confirms the story. The eight span about 950 years and four kinds of travel: Norse sailing, overland trade routes, ocean fleets and polar sledging.

Two warnings run through the whole list. First, “discovered” usually means “reached and wrote about”: the lands they found were almost always already home to someone. Second, several of these men used force, and some traded in enslaved people. The entries say so. Columbus and Vasco da Gama are left out of the main list, though both appear where they belong in the story.

Leif Erikson (about 970 to 1020): Norse sailor in North America

Leif Erikson, son of Erik the Red, sailed west from Greenland around the year 1000 and reached lands he called Helluland, Markland and Vinland. Our main sources are two Icelandic sagas, the Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Erik the Red, written down in the 13th century, two hundred years after the events.

Most lists miss: the sagas are no longer the only evidence. A Norse site at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland was found in 1960, and in 2021 scientists dated wood cut there with metal tools to exactly AD 1021, using a burst of cosmic radiation recorded in tree rings. More: did the Vikings reach America first.

Marco Polo (1254 to 1324): Venice to the court of Kublai Khan

Marco Polo left Venice in 1271 with his father and uncle, spent about seventeen years in the Mongol empire and returned in 1295. While a prisoner of war in Genoa around 1298 he told his story to Rustichello da Pisa, a writer of romances, who wrote it down. The book spread across Europe; Columbus owned a copy and wrote notes in it.

Most lists miss: the book never mentions the Great Wall, tea or chopsticks, which is why some scholars have doubted he reached China. Others point out that he describes paper money, salt production and the Mongol administration in accurate detail. Most historians now accept he went. See did Marco Polo go to China and Marco Polo vs Ibn Battuta.

Ibn Battuta (1304 to about 1369): about 29 years on the road

Ibn Battuta, a young legal scholar from Tangier in Morocco, left home in 1325 on pilgrimage to Mecca and kept travelling for nearly thirty years: across North and East Africa, Arabia, Persia, Central Asia, India (where he served as a judge in Delhi), the Maldives, Southeast Asia, probably China, and finally Mali in West Africa.

Most lists miss: he did not write the book himself. In 1354 to 1355 the Sultan of Morocco had him dictate it to a court scholar, Ibn Juzayy, in Fez, who polished it and borrowed some descriptions from earlier travel writers. So parts of the Rihla are second-hand, and scholars still argue about the China chapters.

Zheng He (1371 to 1433): seven Ming fleets across the Indian Ocean

Zheng He, born Ma He into a Muslim family in Yunnan, was captured as a boy, made a eunuch and brought into the household of the prince who became the Yongle Emperor. Between 1405 and 1433 he commanded seven voyages to Southeast Asia, India, Arabia and the coast of East Africa. Ming records give the first fleet some 27,000 men.

Most lists miss: in 1409 his fleet left a stone at Galle in Sri Lanka inscribed in Chinese, Tamil and Persian, recording offerings to the Buddha, to Allah and to a Hindu god. It is now in the National Museum in Colombo. The voyages were not purely peaceful, either: he fought pirates at Palembang in 1407 and took a Sri Lankan king captive in 1411. The claim that his ships reached America in 1421 has no support in any record.

Ferdinand Magellan (about 1480 to 1521): the strait and the Pacific

Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese navigator sailing for Spain, left in September 1519 with five ships and about 270 men to reach the Spice Islands by sailing west. He found the strait at the tip of South America in late 1520 and crossed the Pacific, but was killed at Mactan in the Philippines on 27 April 1521 by the forces of the chief Lapulapu, today a Philippine national hero.

Most lists miss: Magellan did not sail around the world. One ship, the Victoria, under Juan Sebastián Elcano, reached Spain in September 1522 with 18 of the original crew. Our best account is the diary of Antonio Pigafetta, one of the survivors.

Sir Francis Drake (about 1540 to 1596): round the world in the Golden Hind

Sir Francis Drake led the second voyage around the world, from 1577 to 1580, raiding Spanish ships and ports on the Pacific coast of the Americas on the way, and was the first captain to command such a voyage from start to finish. Elizabeth I knighted him on board the Golden Hind in 1581. He was later a commander against the Spanish Armada in 1588.

Most lists miss: Drake took part in the Atlantic slave trade in the 1560s with his cousin John Hawkins, yet in 1572 and 1573 he fought alongside the Cimarrons, free communities of people who had escaped slavery in Panama. Both facts are part of his story.

Roald Amundsen (1872 to 1928): first to the South Pole

Roald Amundsen of Norway was first through the Northwest Passage, in the small ship Gjøa between 1903 and 1906, and led the first party to reach the South Pole, on 14 December 1911, about five weeks before Robert Falcon Scott. In 1926 he flew over the North Pole in the airship Norge. He died in 1928 while searching for survivors of a crashed Arctic airship.

Most lists miss: he won the race partly because of what he learned in the Arctic from the Netsilik Inuit during the Gjøa years, especially fur clothing and expert use of sled dogs. His book The South Pole (1912) credits careful preparation, not luck.

Ernest Shackleton (1874 to 1922): the Endurance expedition

Ernest Shackleton came within 97 nautical miles of the South Pole in January 1909 and turned back to save his men. On the Endurance expedition his ship was trapped and crushed by sea ice in 1915. He led all 28 men to safety, which took an 800-mile voyage in the open boat James Caird to South Georgia in 1916 and a crossing of its unmapped mountains on foot.

Most lists miss: the expedition had a second team, the Ross Sea party, on the other side of Antarctica, laying supply depots for a crossing that never came. Three of its men died. The wreck of the Endurance was found in March 2022, about 3,000 metres down in the Weddell Sea. Source: his book South (1919). More: questions to ask Ernest Shackleton.

Summary table: explorers, routes and dates

Project ideas using famous explorers

• Map with evidence: draw each route on a world map and colour it by the strength of the evidence (archaeology, the explorer’s own book, a book by someone else).
• Two travellers compared: put Marco Polo’s and Ibn Battuta’s descriptions of the same region side by side and note what each noticed. See Marco Polo vs Ibn Battuta.
• The other side of the beach: write the arrival of Magellan at Mactan or Leif at Vinland from the point of view of the people already living there, using only what the sources say.
• Interview practice: draft ten questions and try them aloud with Ernest Shackleton or Ibn Battuta on Yuga, where you can talk to AI recreations by voice or text. They are built from the explorers’ writings and the record but are not the real people and can be wrong, so cite the books above, not the app.

For the wider period, read Age of Exploration key figures.