Browse Explorations
7 results
Zheng He
1405 - 1433
A vast Chinese armada cuts a silver line across the ocean in the early fifteenth century — a state spectacle of power, religion, and commerce that remade coastlines and then, almost as quickly, vanished from the state record.
Ibn Battuta
1325 - 1354
A jurist from Tangier becomes the most far-traveled mortal of the medieval world — not by conquest but by relentless curiosity, surviving shipwrecks, courts and deserts to bind an Islamic world together in a single story.
Marco Polo
1271 - 1295
A Venetian boy turned emissary to an imperial court: a seventeen-year passage across deserts, mountains and oceans that remade Europe's map of Asia and left behind a contested story of wonder and violence.
Leif Erikson and Vinland
1000 - 1000
A wooden keel cutting into an ocean of ice and stars: one Norseman's voyage reshaped the map of the world long before Columbus, leaving footprints in forests and stories in sagas that would only be proved a millennium later.
The Discovery of Greenland
982 - 1000
When exile pushed a restless Viking westward, he crossed an ice-studded ocean and planted a fragile kingdom on the edge of the world — a story of hunger, bargaining, and stubborn survival that reshaped the North Atlantic.
Viking Exploration of the Atlantic
700 - 1100
When wooden keels first cleaved the North Atlantic’s grey skin, a people from fjords and fire-razed homesteads set a chain of voyages that would stitch islands to continents and rewrite the map of the medieval world.
The Tuareg Caravan Routes
500 - 1900
Across a sea of sand, the Tuareg carved invisible highways of salt and story — a seven-century artery where camels, courage and commerce braided the Sahara into the world.