QuizExploration didn't start with Columbus and it didn't end with the Age of Sail — it just changed vehicles, from camel caravans and creaking wooden ships to icebound schooners and, eventually, a rocket. Here are ten expeditions, spanning roughly 700 years, that each redrew the map of what humans knew was out there.
- Zheng He (1405-1433) — The Ming dynasty admiral commanded seven enormous naval expeditions across the Indian Ocean, some with over 300 ships and 27,000 crew — decades before Europe's Age of Exploration began, and on a scale it wouldn't match for centuries.
- Christopher Columbus (1492) — Sailing west for Spain hoping to reach Asia, he instead reached the Caribbean, triggering sustained contact between Europe and the Americas that would reshape both continents.
- Vasco da Gama (1497-98) — The first European to reach India by sailing around Africa, opening a direct sea route between Europe and Asia that bypassed the overland Silk Road entirely.
- Ferdinand Magellan's expedition (1519-1522) — Magellan died in the Philippines partway through, but his expedition's surviving ship completed the first circumnavigation of the globe, settling the question of whether the Earth could actually be sailed around.
- Lewis and Clark (1804-1806) — Commissioned by Thomas Jefferson to map a route to the Pacific, their expedition — guided in part by Sacagawea — produced the first detailed accounts of much of the American West.
- David Livingstone (1850s-1873) — His decades mapping central Africa and searching for the source of the Nile made him a celebrity explorer, cemented by Henry Morton Stanley's famous (possibly apocryphal) greeting: "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?"
- Roald Amundsen (1911) — Beat Robert Falcon Scott's British team to the South Pole by about five weeks, arriving on 14 December 1911 — Scott's team reached it weeks later and died on the return journey.
- Ernest Shackleton (1914-1917) — His ship Endurance was crushed by Antarctic pack ice before it ever reached land, but Shackleton got all 28 crew members home alive via an 800-mile open-boat voyage — one of history's great survival stories, even though the expedition's original goal was never achieved.
- Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay (1953) — The first confirmed climbers to reach the summit of Mount Everest, at 8,849 m the highest point on Earth, after decades of failed attempts by other expeditions.
- Neil Armstrong (1969) — The first human to walk on the Moon, during the Apollo 11 mission — arguably exploration's furthest extension yet, and still the only celestial body beyond Earth a human has ever set foot on.
Worth remembering for trivia night: Zheng He's fleet predates Columbus by almost a century and dwarfed anything Europe put to sea for another 300 years — but because China turned inward and dismantled the fleet after 1433, it's the Europeans who get remembered as "the Age of Exploration."
Think your crew can match names to journeys? Our Explorers, Discoveries & Inventions category has over 100 questions on explorers, scientific discoveries, and the inventions that changed the world.