3. First forays

‘First forays ’ considers several notable figures in the history of exploration including: Harkhuf, who in 2270 bce explored the Nile River; Pytheas of Massalia, who around 325 bce sailed out north of the Bay of Biscay and circumnavigated the British Isles; Alexander the Great who introduced the Greeks to Arabia and India; Zhang Qian, in 139 bce, who provided the geographical stimulus to the further opening of the Silk Road; Ptolemy, whose second-century treatise Geographia encouraged exploratory ambitions for centuries to come; thirteenth-century Friar William of Rubruck; the traveller Marco Polo; and the accidental explorers Zheng He, who lead maritime expeditions through the Indian Ocean, between 1405 and 1433, and Moroccan pilgrim Abu 'Abdallah ibn Battúta.

2. The peopling of the earth

When did exploration begin and who were the first explorers? ‘The peopling of the earth ’ shows that the deep origins of exploration are inseparable from the long process of the peopling of the earth that began between one and two million years ago, with the migration of Homo erectus out of the East Africa rift valleys. It considers the Polynesian seafaring people whose remarkable exploratory oceanic migration resulted in settlements and cultural exchange around and across the Pacific Ocean. The maritime exploration of the Norse reached Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland. The global circle of humanity closed, and the first of history's two big stories, that of human divergence, ended, and the second, that of human convergence, began.

1. What is (and is not) exploration?

‘What is (and is not) exploration?’ discusses what it means to explore and be an explorer by considering explorations and discoveries through history by Leif Eiriksson, Christopher Columbus, Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, Alexander von Humboldt, Henry Morton Stanley, Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, David Livingstone, and James Cook. Exploration is often fundamentally about mediation, intercession, cultural negotiation, and sometimes, even, symbiosis. Exploration also encouraged some form of occupation, conquest, or control. Explorers were the primary agents of contact not just between cultures and peoples, but between whole ecosystems and environments. To that joint anthropological and ecological extent, exploration ultimately means change: it is a particularly adventurous form of original travel involving discovery, cultural contact, and change.

5. Exploration and the Enlightenment

‘Exploration and the Enlightenment ’ considers a “Second Great Age of Discovery” that came about during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. It began with the 1735 Geodesic Mission to the Equator, designed to ascertain the true figure of the Earth. Never before had so large and learned a group of Europeans headed into the remote interior of the New World for an expressly scientific purpose or the results of an expedition been so elaborately publicized in maps, journals, and official reports back home. This trip is seen as the prototype of the modern exploring expedition. The voyages of Captain James Cook in the Pacific Ocean and Alexander von Humboldt's trip to South America provide further examples of Enlightenment exploration.

4. The age of exploration

‘The age of exploration ’ considers why textbooks and teachers privilege late-medieval and early-modern Europe when designating “the age of exploration” and not the earlier Greek, Roman, Arab, Norse, Polynesian, or Mongol achievements in terms of exploration and cultural reach. It is for three main reasons. Firstly, because the late-medieval extrusion of European maritime power and the associated record of exploration were global in reach. Secondly, they were unprecedented in scope and daring. Thirdly, the exploration of the world by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century European mariners, such as Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama, permanently and decisively altered the lineaments of global power and set human history on the broad common course that it still to this day follows.

7. To the ends of the earth

With the filling of the large space on the map that was Tibet and High Asia, explorers turned to smaller spaces or else they turned to those untouched extremities where there was no map—the Arctic and the Antarctic. ‘To the ends of the earth ’ first describes the search for the North Pole in the Arctic. It was Americans Frederick Cook and Robert Peary who laid their competing claims to 90° north, but the race to the South Pole was between Robert Scott and Roald Amundsen. It was Amundsen who succeeded. The two next terrestrial prizes were the world's highest mountain, Mount Everest, and Rub' al Khali, the “Empty Quarter” of southeastern Arabia.

6. Exploration and empire

‘Exploration and empire’ begins with Jefferson's famous “Corps of Discovery” up the Missouri River and into the heart of the Great Plains lead by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Its two overriding purposes were to find a practicable water route across the North American continent and to establish peaceful relations with the native peoples now manifestly destined to come under American rule. The essential colonial context of late-nineteenth-century exploration is seen in Mungo Park's exploration of the Niger region in Africa; the British exploratory efforts to find the Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic; the race to the Antarctic; David Livingstone's attempts to find the Nile's source; and the search for the “forbidden city” of Lhasa, Tibet.

Epilogue: Final frontiers?

‘Epilogue: Final frontiers?’ considers undersea and space exploration. Jacques-Yves Cousteau claimed the oceans were the last frontier of our planet. The Cold War race to the moon took exploration into space. Are these the final frontiers? For all the different forms it takes in different historical periods, for all the worthy and unworthy motives that lie behind it, exploration—travel for the sake of discovery and adventure—seems to be a human compulsion, a human obsession even; it is a defining element of a distinctly human identity, and it will never rest at any frontier, whether terrestrial or extraterrestrial.