The Travels of John Mandeville
Direct Answer The Travels of Sir John Mandeville is a fourteenth-century book composed in Anglo-Norman French between roughly 1357 and 1371, surviving in some three hundred manuscripts across at least eleven languages and stitched together from the writings of Odoric of Pordenone, William of Boldensele, Vincent of Beauvais, Pliny, and Pseudo-Methodius. Modern scholarship treats it […]
The First Crusade
What Was the First Crusade? The First Crusade (1096-1099) was an armed pilgrimage launched from Latin Christendom in response to Pope Urban II‘s sermon at Clermont on 27 November 1095. Tens of thousands of fighters and non-combatants travelled overland to Constantinople, fought through Anatolia and Syria, and stormed Jerusalem on 15 July 1099 with a […]
The Donner Party Tragedy
What Was the Donner Party Tragedy? The Donner Party was a wagon company of roughly eighty-seven Illinois and Missouri emigrants who left Springfield, Illinois in the spring of 1846 for California, took a poorly tested shortcut promoted by the lawyer Lansford W. Hastings, lost five weeks crossing the Wasatch Mountains and the Bonneville Salt Flats, […]
The Pilgrims’ Voyage on the Mayflower
What Was the Pilgrims’ Voyage on the Mayflower, and Why Does It Still Matter? The Pilgrims’ voyage on the Mayflower was a sixty-six-day Atlantic crossing carrying 102 English passengers and roughly thirty crew from Plymouth, Devon, on 16 September 1620 to a landfall at the tip of Cape Cod on 9 November 1620. The journey […]
Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic Voyage
What Was Shackleton’s Antarctic Voyage and Why Has It Survived a Century? Ernest Henry Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914 to 1917 was a planned crossing of the Antarctic continent that became, instead, an accidental masterclass in survival. The expedition ship Endurance was crushed in the Weddell Sea ice in late 1915, and across twenty […]
The Expeditions of Roald Amundsen
Who Was Roald Amundsen and Why Do His Expeditions Still Matter? Roald Engelbregt Gravning Amundsen (1872 to 1928) was the Norwegian polar navigator who first sailed the Northwest Passage, first reached the geographic South Pole, and first crossed the Arctic by air. His four signature expeditions, from the Gjoa voyage of 1903 through the Latham […]
The Burke and Wills Expedition
What Was the Burke and Wills Expedition? The Burke and Wills expedition, formally the Victorian Exploring Expedition, was the 1860 to 1861 attempt to cross the Australian continent from south to north. Robert O’Hara Burke (1821-1861), an Irish-born police superintendent, led nineteen men out of Melbourne’s Royal Park on 20 August 1860 with twenty-three horses, […]
The Voyages of Captain James Cook
What Were the Voyages of Captain James Cook? The voyages of Captain James Cook (1728-1779) were three British Admiralty expeditions into the Pacific between 1768 and 1779 that produced the first accurate European charts of New Zealand and the eastern Australian coast, the first crossing of the Antarctic Circle, and the first sustained European contact […]
The Viking Voyages to Vinland
What Was Vinland, and What Have the Vikings Left Behind? Vinland was the Old Norse name for a forested coastal region of northeastern North America that Greenlandic Norse explorers reached around the year 1000 CE. The clearest physical trace is at L’Anse aux Meadows, a small Norse base camp on the northern tip of Newfoundland, […]
The Search for El Dorado
What Was the Search for El Dorado? The search for El Dorado was the four-century European pursuit of a treasure that did not exist in the form European explorers were looking for. The phrase began as a nickname, el dorado meaning “the gilded one,” attached to a single Muisca chieftain who was anointed in gold […]