Reader’s Guide
Explorers & Discoverers: From Alexander the Great to Sally Ride, Volume 6, features thirty biographies of nineteen men, nine women, one facility, and one machine that have expanded the horizons of our world and universe. Beginning with an ancient Egyptian queen and extending to a presentday marine biologist, Explorers & Discoverers, Volume 6 presents the lives and times of well-known explorers as well as many lesser-known women and non-Europeans who have also made significant discoveries. Who these travelers were, when and how they lived and traveled, why their journeys were significant, and what the consequences of their discoveries are are all answered within these biographies. The thirty biographical entries in Explorers & Discoverers, Volume 6 are arranged in alphabetical order. More than eighty photographs, illustrations, and maps bring the subjects to life as well as provide geographic details of specific journeys. Additionally, sixteen maps of major regions of the world lead off the volume, and a cumulative chronology of explo-
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ration by region, list of explorers by country of birth, and index conclude the volume.
Comments and Suggestions
We welcome your comments on this work as well as your suggestions for individuals to be featured in future volumes of Explorers & Discoverers. Please write: Editors, Explorers & Discoverers, U•X•L, 835 Penobscot Bldg., Detroit, Michigan 48226-4094; call toll-free: 1-800-877-4253; or fax: (313) 9616348.
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Introduction
Explorers & Discoverers, Volume 6 takes the reader on an adventure with men and women who have made significant contributions to human knowledge about the earth, the plant and animal life with which we share it, and ourselves. Journeying through the centuries, we will conquer frontiers and sail uncharted waters. We will trek across treacherous mountains, scorching deserts, steamy jungles, and icy glaciers. We will plumb the depths of the ocean, live locked inside a giant greenhouse that simulates the earth and its life cycles, and share in intriguing rituals and customs of unfamiliar peoples. We will excavate the oldest human settlement on earth and dwell among the “gentle giants” that are the mountain gorillas, both experiences giving us tantalizing glimpses into our own far distant past. Encountering isolation, disease, and even death, we will come to know the grave sacrifices that discovery sometimes exacts. But we will also experience the joys of achievement! Before joining the explorers and discoverers, however, it is worthwhile to consider why they venture into the unknown.
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Certainly a primary motivation is curiosity: they want to find out what is on the other side of a mountain, or they are intrigued by rumors about a strange new land, or they simply enjoy wandering the world. Yet adventurers often—indeed, usually—embark on a journey of discovery under less spontaneous circumstances. Many explorers were commissioned by the rulers or governments of their countries to lead expeditions with a specific purpose. José Celestino Mutis, for instance, was chosen by King Charles III of Spain to travel to the New World colony of New Granada (now Colombia) to gather plant specimens for the royal botanical collection. The explorer brought back many unknown species, some with great medicinal value; these included the chinchona tree, whose bark produced quinine, which would become the best treatment for malaria. Put in charge of extending telegraph lines through parts of Brazil and surrounding areas by his government, army engineer Cândido Rondón opened up new territories, collected important biological specimens, and made the first peaceful contacts with many little-known Native American tribes that dwelled in the Brazilian jungles. Rondón would later serve, in fact, as the first director of a national agency to protect Brazil’s native population. In 1500 King Manuel I of Portugal sponsored an official voyage of exploration to investigate the recently discovered North American mainland, which—at that time—was believed to be northeast Asia. He asked Gaspar Corte-Real to command the expedition; on his second trip to what he thought was Asia, the explorer became lost sailing down the North American coast in search of China. The king authorized Miguel Corte-Real, Gaspar’s brother, to lead an expedition to look for the lost voyager; Miguel, too, was never heard from again. Far more successful in his royal mission, navigator-turned-priest Andrés de Urdaneta left his quiet life in a New Spain (Mexico) monastery to fulfill the request of Spanish king Philip II, who was looking to found a colony in the Philippines and—especially—to find a safe way to the make the return trip back to the New World. Urdaneta made the first successful west-to-east crossing of the Pacific Ocean by sailing farther north than previous navigators; known as Urdaneta’s Passage, the route
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would change the nature of Pacific travel and give Spain a practical link to the Orient by way of Mexico. Explorers also received backing from private sponsors or were motivated by economic self-interest. The Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa—also known as the African Association—was a private organization composed of twelve London gentlemen who commissioned explorers to investigate the little-known interior of the continent in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Retired military officer Daniel Houghton was one of the early explorers the Association sponsored; his mission was to investigate the Niger River region, which was rumored to be an area of great wealth and the site of a rich trade center called Timbuktu. Traveling inland from the west coast of Africa, Houghton died before he could reach his destination. Swiss scholar Jean-Louis Burckhardt, too, was commissioned by the Association to travel to Timbuktu. His mission, however, was to approach the region from the north, by way of Cairo and the Sahara Desert. While years of delays prevented Burckhardt from fulfilling his mission as well, his travels in the Middle East—especially to the forbidden Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina—provided Europeans with valuable information about Muslim life. In an effort to expand the fur-trading operations of the British North West Company, of which he was partowner, Simon Fraser traveled from British North America to the Pacific Northwest, into what is now British Columbia. There he established fur-trading posts and encampments, including Fort McLeod, the first European settlement west of the Rocky Mountains. His efforts opened up the territory for future British occupation at a time when the United States, too, was eager to establish claims in the Pacific Northwest. Religious dedication has long been a strong motivating force behind exploration and travel into unknown lands. I-Ching, for example, was one of many Chinese Buddhist monks who made the trip to India—the birthplace of Buddhism—to visit holy sites and study original religious texts. But unlike most of these pilgrims, he was unable to take the usual land route to India across central Asia and the Himalayas
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because of political turmoil in the region. He was forced to take a more southerly route, most of it by sea, beginning in 671. The accounts he wrote about his years of religious travel provide a rare record of the early history, culture, and religion of the peoples of Indonesia. French missionary priest Jordanus of Séverac also left valuable written accounts that resulted from his years of religious travel. Arriving in India in 1321 to serve that country’s small Christian population and make further converts, Jordanus traveled throughout the subcontinent, becoming a bishop of southern India in 1330. His Mirabilia (Book of Marvels) is considered the best description of medieval India by a Westerner. And under circumstances oddly similar to those of I-Ching’s (but occurring a millennium later), Jesuit missionary priest Johann Grüber, working in China during the mid-seventeenth century, also had to find an alternative route to complete his religious mission. Because maritime warfare between the Dutch and the Portuguese along China’s coast cut off the usual sailing routes, Grüber—a trained mathematician and geographer—was asked to find an overland passage from the Jesuit mission in Peking to Catholic headquarters in Rome. The difficult trip took him through the Himalayas and the little-known mountain kingdom of Tibet; he was the first Westerner to describe such wonders as the Potala, the royal palace and monastery that was the centerpiece of Tibetan Buddhism. Explorers have been inspired, too, by the quest for scientific knowledge. British archaeologist Kathleen M. Kenyon spent five trying but exciting years in the Jordan desert, excavating the site of the ancient city of Jericho. At first determined to learn what she could about its most famous “era” (described in the Bible, when Joshua and the Israelites blew horns and shouted in order to collapse the walls that surrounded the city), Kenyon shocked herself and the world when she discovered that the town had been rebuilt dozens of times, and that it dated back to the Neolithic or New Stone Age, around 7800 B.C. Her findings also revealed that Jericho’s Neolithic dwellers were surprisingly advanced. Years of studying the mountain gorillas that lived in the Virunga Mountain range of east central Africa led to surprising discoveries for American
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zoologist Dian Fossey as well. She found that far from the violent, chest-thumping beasts that they were thought to be, the mountain gorillas were really “gentle giants,” who had strong family ties and cared for one another almost tenderly. With their population threatened by hunters and farmers, Fossey used aggressive methods to protect these endangered animals and brought their plight to the attention of the world; she was murdered in her wilderness camp in retaliation for her antipoaching activities. With similar passion, marine biologist Sylvia Earle has devoted her life to developing new ways and tools to make the deep sea and its little-known inhabitants easier to study. In 1979 she made a record-breaking dive in a specially designed suit that allowed her to explore deeper waters than anyone had done before; since 1982 she has been developing small, easy-to-use submersibles for deep-sea exploration. Earle believes that the more we know about the oceans and their wondrous inhabitants, the more concerned we will be about protecting them. But perhaps the foremost motivation to explore is the desire to be the first to accomplish a particular feat. Scottish explorer James Bruce was determined to become the first Westerner to discover the source of Africa’s great Nile River, a mystery for centuries. During a five-year journey in which he endured illness, imprisonment, and a near-death experience in the desert, Bruce managed to find the source of the Blue Nile River in the highlands of Ethiopia. Jubilant over the fame and honors he would receive upon his return to Europe, Bruce was bitterly disappointed when his fantastic tales of African adventure and discovery were thought to be made up. Experiencing similar grave disappointment was Arctic sea captain Bob Bartlett, who piloted the ship and participated in the campaigns of explorer Robert Edwin Peary as he attempted to become the first man to reach the North Pole. Bartlett joined Peary on the condition that he be allowed to accompany the explorer to the Pole. However, at the last advance camp—just 150 miles from their destination—Peary told Bartlett to turn back while he proceeded. Peary’s controversial last-minute decision has since been the subject of much speculation. Also controversial are the claims of Louis Hennepin, the Francis-
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can missionary priest who accompanied French explorer René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle on a voyage through the Great Lakes into the upper Mississippi River valley. Sent with three others as advance scouts to try to locate the great river, Hennepin maintained that he and the scouts not only found the Mississippi, but in less than two months’ time had canoed south to its mouth (beating La Salle to the destination by two years) and returned, an impossible journey of more than 3,000 miles. When Hennepin experienced ill fortune later in his life, he blamed it on a plot by La Salle to discredit him and his claim. Attempting her “first” before the eyes of the world, popular American newspaper reporter Nellie Bly took her challenge from a fictional character—Phileas Fogg from Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days. During 1889–90 she rushed to circle the globe by boat and train faster than Fogg (or any real person, for that matter), and accomplished her goal, traveling 21,740 miles in 72 days, 6 hours, and 11 minutes. Conceived as a way of increasing readership of the newspaper she wrote for, Bly’s trip succeeded wildly as people around the world followed her progress and cheered her achievement. By concentrating on biographies of individual explorers and discoverers in this book we seem to suggest that many of these adventurers were loners who set out on their own to singlehandedly confront the unknown. But as a rule, explorers rarely traveled alone—they had help in achieving their goals. Therefore, use of an individual name is often only shorthand for the achievements of an expedition as a whole. Explorers were often accompanied by large groups of servants and porters and—most importantly—native guides. Sometimes the contributions of these guides were so vital to the success of an expedition that they received individual recognition; such was the case of Sacagawea, the Native American woman who accompanied Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on their journey of discovery across the American West. Many times during the trip the expedition leaders were grateful for her unique skills: she gathered nutritious food from the wild when provisions were low, guided the travelers through unknown territories, and acted as an interpreter when they needed to
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trade with other Indian tribes for horses for overland travel. While it took nearly a century, Sacagawea’s invaluable contribution to the opening of the American West is at last publicly recognized. Explorers & Discoverers, Volume 6 tells the stories of these men and women as well as those of others motivated by a daring spirit and an intense curiosity. A final note of clarification: When we say that an explorer “discovered” a place, we do not mean that she or he was the first human ever to have been there. Although the discoverer may have been the first from her or his own country to set foot in a new land, most areas of the world during the great periods of exploration were already occupied or their existence had been verified by other people.
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