Voyages & exploration

Norse explorer Leif Erikson makes landfall in a lush place he calls Vinland.

The site is almost certainly in Newfoundland — archaeologists find a Norse iron smithy at L'Anse aux Meadows, the only confirmed Viking settlement in the Americas.

Leif Erikson, also known as Leif the Lucky, was a Norse explorer who is thought to have been the first European to set foot on continental America, approximately half a millennium before Christopher Columbus. According to the sagas of Icelanders, he established a Norse settlement at Vinland, which is usually interpreted as being coastal North America. There is ongoing speculation that the settlement made by Leif and his crew corresponds to the remains of a Norse settlement found in Newfoundland, Canada, called L'Anse aux Meadows, which was occupied approximately 1,000 years ago.

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Seventeen-year-old Marco Polo leaves Venice with his father and uncle bound for the court of Kublai Khan.

He will spend 17 years in China, but when he dictates his famous book in a Genoese prison, his cellmate — a romance writer — helps shape the prose.

Marco Polo was a Venetian merchant, explorer, and writer who travelled through Asia along the Silk Road between 1271 and 1295. His travels are recorded in The Travels of Marco Polo, a book that described the then-mysterious culture and inner workings of the Eastern world, including the wealth and great size of the Mongol Empire and China under the Yuan dynasty, giving Europeans their first comprehensive look into China, Persia, India, Japan, and other Asian societies.

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Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias rounds the southern tip of Africa in a storm-tossed voyage he doesn't plan.

He originally names the cape 'Cape of Storms'; King João II personally renames it 'Cape of Good Hope' for its commercial promise.

Bartolomeu Dias was a Portuguese mariner and explorer. In February 1488, he became the first European navigator to round the southern tip of Africa and to demonstrate that the most effective southward route for ships is in the open ocean, well to the west of the African coast. His discoveries were later used by Vasco da Gama to establish a sea route between Europe and Asia.

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John Cabot sails under an English flag and makes landfall on the coast of North America.

He believes he has reached Asia, and Henry VII rewards him with a modest £10 — about the cost of a decent coat.

John Cabot was an Italian navigator and explorer. His 1497 voyage to the coast of North America under the commission of Henry VII, King of England is the earliest known European exploration of coastal North America since the Norse visits to Vinland in the eleventh century. To mark the celebration of the 500th anniversary of Cabot's expedition, both the Canadian and British governments declared Cape Bonavista, Newfoundland as representing Cabot's first landing site. However, alternative locations have also been proposed.

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German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller prints the first map to label the new continents 'America.'

He names them after Amerigo Vespucci, not Columbus — because Vespucci was the one who argued in print that it was a wholly new landmass, not Asia.

The Waldseemüller map or Universalis Cosmographia is a printed wall map of the world by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, originally published in April 1507. It is known as the first map to use the name "America". The name America is placed on South America on the main map. As explained in Cosmographiae Introductio, the name was bestowed in honor of the Italian Amerigo Vespucci. The map also was first to depict the Americas as a distinct landmass clearly separated from Asia by the Pacific Ocean.

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Samuel de Champlain builds a fortified 'habitation' at the narrows of the St. Lawrence River and calls it Québec.

Of the 28 men who winter there in the first season, 20 die of scurvy and dysentery — Champlain is one of only eight survivors.

Samuel de Champlain was a French explorer, navigator, cartographer, soldier, geographer, diplomat, and chronicler who founded Quebec City and established New France as a permanent French colony in North America.

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Danish-born explorer Vitus Bering, sailing for Russia, sights the mountains of Alaska through the fog.

Bering never sets foot on the Alaskan mainland — he dies of scurvy on the return voyage and is buried on the island that now bears his name.

Vitus Jonassen Bering, also known as Ivan Ivanovich Bering, was a Danish-born Russian cartographer, explorer, and officer in the Russian Navy. He is known as a leader of two Russian expeditions, the First Kamchatka Expedition and the Great Northern Expedition, exploring the northeastern coast of the Asian continent and from there the western coast of the North American continent. The Bering Strait, the Bering Sea, Bering Island, the Bering Glacier, and Vitus Lake were all named in his honor.

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Royal Navy lieutenant James Cook departs Plymouth aboard HMS Endeavour, officially to observe the transit of Venus from Tahiti.

The ship carries a second, secret set of Admiralty orders, only to be opened after the Venus observation — they instruct Cook to search for the unknown southern continent.

The first voyage of James Cook was a combined Royal Navy and Royal Society expedition to the south Pacific Ocean aboard HMS Endeavour, from 1768 to 1771. The aims were to observe the 1769 transit of Venus from Tahiti and to seek evidence of the postulated Terra Australis Incognita or "undiscovered southern land". It was the first of three voyages of which Cook was the commander.

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Captain James Cook and his crew observe the transit of Venus from Tahiti aboard HMS Endeavour.

The astronomical data they gather is meant to calculate the distance from the Earth to the Sun — but their timing measurements are blurred by the 'black drop effect,' making the whole painstaking effort nearly useless.

The first voyage of James Cook was a combined Royal Navy and Royal Society expedition to the south Pacific Ocean aboard HMS Endeavour, from 1768 to 1771. The aims were to observe the 1769 transit of Venus from Tahiti and to seek evidence of the postulated Terra Australis Incognita or "undiscovered southern land". It was the first of three voyages of which Cook was the commander.

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Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen deliberately freezes his specially built ship, the Fram, into the Arctic pack ice.

His plan — widely mocked as suicidal — works perfectly: the ice carries the ship across the Arctic basin, and Nansen skis to a then-record latitude of 86°13′N.

Fridtjof Nansen's Fram expedition proves the Arctic Ocean has no polar continent and sets a record for the farthest north any human has reached.