BPS Topic Resources: Famous Explorers (Men)

At a time when most Americans were content to live along the Atlantic coast, Daniel Boone was one of the restless pioneers who pushed westward through the wilderness. Often accompanied by their families, these men and women explored, cut trails, and sometimes established new communities.

The ancient trade route upon which goods and ideas were carried between the two great civilizations of Rome and China is known as the Silk Road. Silk came westward to Europe, while wools, gold, and silver went east to China. The road also had branches that connected with routes in India: China received Buddhism from India via this road. The name Silk Road originated with German geographer Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen in the 19th century.

During the Han Dynasty (206 bc–ad 220), the expanding Chinese Empire was threatened by raiders from the north. People who led a nomadic, or wandering, life in the northern steppe land would invade settled agricultural communities to the south to solve periodic food shortages. The Great Wall of China had been built to defend Chinese territory against northern nomads, especially the Xiongnu. The Xiongnu may have been the same people known as the Huns in Europe. Starting in the reign of the Han emperor Wudi, the Chinese carried out long and costly military campaigns along the northern and northwestern

The English navigator Captain Cook became an explorer because of his love of adventure and curiosity about distant lands and their people. He surveyed a greater length of coastline than any other person and remade the map of the Pacific. His explorations gave Britain the lands now occupied by Australia and New Zealand.

Information from Encyclopaedia Britannica online

Amerigo Vespucci (or Americus Vespucius, as the name is spelled in Latin) was born in Florence, Italy, probably in 1454.

On the morning of Oct. 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus stepped ashore on an island in what has since become known as the Americas.

For more than 30 years David Livingstone worked in Africa as a medical missionary and traveled the continent from the near the Equator to the Cape and from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean.

At 11:30 am on May 29, 1953, the New Zealand mountaineer Edmund Hillary and the Tibetan porter Tenzing Norgay reached the 29,035-foot (8,850-meter) summit of Mount Everest in the Himalayas.

The first European to sail across the Pacific Ocean was the Portuguese navigator and explorer Ferdinand Magellan...

The conquest of Peru by an obscure adventurer is one of the most dramatic episodes in the history of the New World...

The Spanish conquistador, or conqueror, Hernán Cortés overthrew the Aztec Empire of Mexico in 1521. He thus captured the great wealth of the Aztec for Spain, and Mexico remained under Spanish rule for three centuries...

The best-known medieval Arab traveler was Ibn Battutah. He wrote one of the most famous travel books in history, the Rihlah (Travels).

The English navigator Captain Cook became an explorer because of his love of adventure and curiosity about distant lands and their people.

“Sooner or later man will live underwater and work there.” So predicted Jacques-Yves Cousteau, the French ocean explorer and pioneer in underwater research.

An Italian explorer sailing for England, John Cabot was the first European to reach the shores of North America after the Vikings.

The story of the life of Captain John Smith, as told by himself, reads more like an adventure novel than like a true autobiography.

The first European to land on the North American continent was a Viking seaman named Leif Eriksson (or Ericson).

Nearly 500 years before the birth of Christopher Columbus, a band of European sailors left their homeland behind in search of a new world. Their high-prowed Viking ship sliced through the cobalt waters of the Atlantic Ocean as winds billowed the boat’s enormous single sail. After traversing unfamiliar waters, the Norsemen aboard the wooden ship spied a new land, dropped anchor and went ashore. Half a millennium before Columbus “discovered” America, those Viking feet may have been the first European ones to ever have touched North American soil.

American settlers knew little about western North America when the Lewis and Clark Expedition set out in 1804...

The French Canadian explorer Louis Jolliet traveled the upper Mississippi River in 1673 along with the French Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette. They were the first people of European descent to explore the river’s upper reaches; the Spaniard Hernando de Soto had explored the lower Mississippi in 1541.

The Venetian merchant and adventurer Marco Polo wrote a fascinating book about his travels in China and other parts of Asia in the late 13th century...

The first person to set foot on the Moon was U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong. As he stepped onto the Moon’s dusty surface, he spoke the now famous words, “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.”

One of the most important figures in the history of polar exploration was Roald Amundsen. He was the first person to reach the South Pole, the first to sail through the Northwest Passage, and the first to fly over the North Pole.

The British naval officer and explorer Robert F. Scott tried to become the first person to reach the South Pole...

During the 15th century Portuguese navigators pressed farther and farther down the uncharted west coast of Africa...

Admiral and diplomat Zheng He helped to extend Chinese maritime and commercial influence throughout the regions bordering the Indian Ocean.

On the morning of Oct. 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus stepped ashore on an island in what has since become known as the Americas. The arrival of his ships in the Western Hemisphere was one of the pivotal events in world history. It opened up a new world for Europeans and initiated the spread of Western civilization to a new hemisphere. But if these lands were a new world for Europeans, they were a very old world for the inhabitants Columbus and his successors encountered. Cultures dating back perhaps 20,000 years already existed on the two “new” continents and neighboring islands. These native cultures ranged from Stone Age societies of hunters and gatherers to highly developed, settled agricultural communities with central cities and imposing monuments. Under the effects of the European explorers and, later, colonists, these native cultures suffered nearly total annihilation.