Browse Explorations
25 results
Percy Fawcett and the Lost City of Z
1906 - 1925
A cartographer of the unknown, Percy Fawcett erased the mapped edges of the world and walked into a green labyrinth that still keeps its secrets.
Geological Surveys of the West
1867 - 1879
Across cracked river canyons and wind-scoured plains, a generation of men and artists mapped the American West by the rigor of rock and the blunt instrument of endurance â a scientific campaign that remade maps, policy and the nation's imagination.
John C. Frémont
1842 - 1854
A mapmaker of ambition and contradiction, John C. FrĂ©mont pushed instruments, men and politics into the raw heart of the continent â and the tracks he laid would shape who could claim the American West.
Zebulon Pike Expedition
1806 - 1807
A young Army lieutenant steers a handful of men across a continent's edge, into a landscape that refuses easy mapping â and returns with maps, humiliations and a mountain that will one day bear his name.
Lewis and Clark Expedition
1804 - 1806
Two young American officers, a ragged band of frontiersmen, and a Shoshone woman with a newborn crossed a continent between 1804 and 1806 â mapping the impossible and changing the map of a nation.
The Exploration of the Andes
1800 - 1900
Across a century of cold air and treacherous passes, Victorian instruments and stubborn feet pushed into the spine of a continent â the Andes were measured, fought over, climbed and finally remade in the minds of nations.
Alexander von Humboldt
1799 - 1804
A restless mind and an arsenal of instruments set sail at the turn of a century, cutting through tropical storms and imperial suspicion to map the invisible laws that bind mountain, river and climate â the voyage that reshaped how we measure the world.
Alexander Mackenzie
1789 - 1793
A man with a map in his head and a stubborn compass in his hand set forth from the trading posts of the interior to cut a line across a continent â and in doing so he remade the cartography and conscience of an empire.
The Exploration of the Canadian Rockies
1754 - 1885
Beneath a skyline of serrated peaks, men and women crossed ice, river and language to redraw a continent â and in the shadow of those mountains, competing maps, commerce and cultures collided to shape what the Canadian Rockies would become.
The Discovery of Alaska
1741 - 1867
Where sea ice met empire, men sent by distant courts pushed wooden prows into a Pacific they had only guessed at â and in the wake of their breaks and wrecks, islands, species and sovereignties were claimed, catalogued and contested.
René-Robert de La Salle
1679 - 1687
A solitary Frenchman carved a channel through rivers, politics and disaster â RenĂ©-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, raced the mapmakers and the state to turn an inland waterway into an empire, only to see his dream founder amid misnavigation, starvation and murder on a foreign shore.
Samuel de Champlain
1603 - 1635
A single, unflinching chronicle of a man who drew coastlines with ink and alliances with fate â Samuel de Champlain's relentless carving of a French presence into the vast, indifferent north.
The Exploration of the Amazon
1541 - 1914
A river that refuses to be mapped: men crossed mountains and starless nights to sail a newly born ocean of green, and what they encountered rearranged maps, lives and the meaning of the New World.
Francisco VĂĄsquez de Coronado
1540 - 1542
He crossed deserts and prairies chasing cities of gold; what Francisco VĂĄzquez de Coronado found instead were horizons that rewrote the map and a human cost that would echo for generations.
Hernando de Soto
1539 - 1542
He crossed from empire to wilderness â a conquistadorâs hunger for gold turned into a three-year collision with a continent he could not own.
Jacques Cartier
1534 - 1542
A Breton pilot set sail from Saint-Malo with a mapfull of hopes and returned with rivers named and peoples upended â Jacques Cartier's voyages drew the St. Lawrence into European knowledge and left a contested legacy at the edge of two worlds.
Francisco Pizarro
1531 - 1533
A driven castaway from Extremadura leads a handful of hardened men across scorching coasts and misted highlands to confront an empire of goldâan encounter that would shatter worlds and redraw the map of the Americas.
The Exploration of Patagonia
1520 - 1900
Where the Atlantic throws itself against the end of the world, men came to measure horizons, bargain with hunger and death, and leave a map that altered how the globe was held in the European mind.
Hernån Cortés
1519 - 1521
A law student from Extremadura crossed an ocean and a world â not to illuminate a map, but to unmake a capital; the story of HernĂĄn CortĂ©s is a tale of hunger for status, the cruelty of contact, and a cityâs fall beneath the weight of iron, disease, and alliances.
Juan Ponce de LeĂłn
1513 - 1521
A hard-eyed venture from the sun-baked lanes of Hispaniola to the hot, unknown shores of the North American subtropics â the story of one man's hunger for honor, the men who followed him, and an era that reshaped worlds.
Pedro Ălvares Cabral
1500 - 1500
A Portuguese armada sails to the spice seas and, for a few bewildering hours on a Brazilian shore, the map of the Atlantic is remadeâan accidental doorway to a New World that would reshape empires.
Amerigo Vespucci
1499 - 1502
A merchant from Florence who learned to read the ocean â Amerigo Vespucci pushed into horizons that refused to fit old maps, and in the salt and terror of three voyages he helped the world name a continent.
John Cabot
1497 - 1498
A Venetian in English service set sail on a fifty-ton ship and touched a continent the maps had not yet named; the small, weatherbeaten voyage of 1497 opened a fissure in the world that would become empire.
Christopher Columbus
1492 - 1504
A single-minded Genoese mariner set sail into the Atlantic's wide silence and, through storms, shipwrecks, colonial ambitions and political ruin, opened a new hemisphere whose light and shadow shaped the modern world.
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.