History of exploration timeline
Voyages, expeditions and firsts, from crossing oceans to walking on the Moon.
153 events, oldest first.
Timeline of History of exploration
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c. 325 BC
Pytheas sails to Britain
The Greek explorer's account is the earliest description of Britain.
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138 BC
Zhang Qian sets out along the future Silk Road
His journeys west for the Han emperor helped open the Silk Road.
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645
Xuanzang returns from his journey to India
The monk's travels later inspired the classic novel Journey to the West.
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c. 874
Norse settlers arrive in Iceland
Iceland was one of the last large European islands to be settled.
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1021
Vikings live at L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland
Tree rings in wood cut by Vikings showed they were in North America in exactly that year.
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c. 1280
Polynesians settle New Zealand
It was one of the last large land masses on Earth to be settled by humans.
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1295
Marco Polo returns to Venice
He dictated his travels to a fellow prisoner after being captured in a war with Genoa.
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1325
Ibn Battuta sets out on his travels
He travelled about 117,000 km over 29 years, far more than Marco Polo.
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1405
Zheng He sets sail on his first treasure voyage
His fleet had over 300 ships, decades before Columbus crossed the Atlantic with three.
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1488
Bartolomeu Dias rounds the Cape of Good Hope
He called it the Cape of Storms; the king renamed it to sound more hopeful.
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1492
Columbus reaches the Americas
He landed in the Bahamas and died believing he had reached Asia.
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1493
Columbus brings the first cattle to the Americas
They came on his second voyage, along with horses and pigs.
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1497
John Cabot reaches Newfoundland
Cabot was Italian - his real name was Giovanni Caboto.
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1498
Vasco da Gama reaches India by sea
His voyage from Lisbon took about ten months.
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1500
Cabral reaches Brazil
Portugal's claim on Brazil is why Brazilians speak Portuguese today.
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1501
Amerigo Vespucci sails along South America
His letters argued the lands were a 'New World', not part of Asia.
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1507
'America' first appears on a map
Martin Waldseemüller named the new continent after explorer Amerigo Vespucci.
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1513
Balboa sights the Pacific Ocean
He was the first European to see the Pacific from the Americas.
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1513
Ponce de León reaches Florida
He named it after Pascua Florida, the Spanish Easter 'feast of flowers'.
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1522
Magellan's fleet completes the first circumnavigation
Magellan himself died on the way; only 18 of about 270 men made it back to Spain.
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1524
Giovanni da Verrazzano enters New York Harbor
The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge is named after him.
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1534
Jacques Cartier claims Canada for France
The name Canada comes from an Iroquoian word for 'village'.
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1540
Coronado searches for the Seven Cities of Gold
His expedition were the first Europeans to see the Grand Canyon.
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1541
Hernando de Soto reaches the Mississippi
He was the first European known to have crossed the great river.
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1542
Francisco de Orellana sails down the Amazon
The river was named after the female warriors of Greek myth he said he saw.
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1569
Mercator publishes his world map
His projection is still used by most online maps, which is why Greenland looks so huge.
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1576
Martin Frobisher sails to Baffin Island
His tonnes of 'gold' ore turned out to be worthless pyrite, later used to mend roads.
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1580
Francis Drake completes his circumnavigation
Queen Elizabeth I knighted him aboard his ship, the Golden Hind.
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1596
Willem Barentsz winters in the Arctic
His crew survived the winter in a hut built from driftwood.
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1606
Willem Janszoon lands in Australia
He was the first European known to set foot in Australia.
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1609
Henry Hudson sails up the Hudson River
He was looking for a shortcut to Asia.
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1611
Henry Hudson is cast adrift by his crew
He was never seen again.
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1642
Abel Tasman sights New Zealand
He called it Staten Landt; mapmakers later named it Nova Zeelandia.
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1741
Vitus Bering sights Alaska
Bering was a Dane sailing for Russia, which later sold Alaska to the US.
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1748
The excavation of Pompeii begins
The diggers at first thought they had found the nearby town of Stabiae.
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1768
Captain Cook sets sail on his first voyage
One of its aims was to observe the transit of Venus from Tahiti.
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1769
Bougainville completes France's first circumnavigation
His crew included Jeanne Baret, the first woman known to sail round the world.
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1769
Captain Cook maps New Zealand
His chart was so accurate it was used for many decades.
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1770
Captain Cook reaches Botany Bay
The bay was named for the many new plants found there by botanist Joseph Banks.
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1770
James Bruce reaches the source of the Blue Nile
People back in Britain refused to believe many of his stories.
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1773
Captain Cook crosses the Antarctic Circle
He came within about 120 km of Antarctica without ever seeing it.
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1778
Captain Cook reaches Hawaii
He named them the Sandwich Islands, after the Earl of Sandwich.
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1783
The first crewed hot-air balloon flight
Before risking people, the Montgolfiers sent up a sheep, a duck and a rooster.
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1786
Mont Blanc is first climbed
The climb was spurred on by a reward offered by Swiss scientist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure.
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1789
The mutiny on the Bounty
Captain Bligh sailed about 6,700 km in an open boat to safety.
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1790
The Aztec Sun Stone is unearthed
Workers repaving Mexico City's main square dug it up.
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1796
Mungo Park reaches the River Niger
He was the first European known to see the middle Niger.
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1797
The first parachute jump from a balloon
André-Jacques Garnerin jumped from about 1,000 metres above Paris.
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1799
Humboldt sets sail for South America
More species and places are named after him than after almost anyone else.
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1799
The Rosetta Stone is discovered
French soldiers found it while rebuilding a fort near the Egyptian town of Rashid (Rosetta).
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1803
Matthew Flinders sails around Australia
He popularised the name 'Australia'.
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1804
Lewis and Clark set out across America
Sacagawea, a Shoshone woman, guided them while carrying her baby son.
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1820
Antarctica is first sighted
Russian, British and American crews all claimed to have seen it that year.
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1831
Darwin sets sail on HMS Beagle
The voyage was planned to take two years, but lasted almost five.
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1831
James Clark Ross reaches the North Magnetic Pole
The magnetic pole has since wandered hundreds of kilometres.
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1835
Darwin reaches the Galápagos Islands
He spent only about five weeks there.
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1838
The first steamship crossing of the Atlantic
Tales of the crew burning furniture are a myth - they burned a few barrels of resin.
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1845
Franklin's Arctic expedition sets sail
Both ships vanished; HMS Erebus was found on the seabed in 2014, and HMS Terror in 2016.
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1848
Ludwig Leichhardt vanishes in Australia
The only confirmed relic is a small brass nameplate found on a burnt gun around 1900.
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1853
Richard Burton enters Mecca in disguise
He travelled disguised as a Muslim pilgrim.
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1855
Livingstone reaches Victoria Falls
Locally the falls are called 'the smoke that thunders'.
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1858
Speke reaches Lake Victoria
He correctly guessed it was the source of the Nile, though few believed him at first.
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1859
Blondin crosses Niagara Falls on a tightrope
On later crossings he went blindfolded and even stopped to cook an omelette.
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1861
Burke and Wills cross Australia
They reached the north coast but died on the return journey.
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1865
Mount Everest gets its English name
It was named after surveyor George Everest, who objected to the honour.
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1865
The Matterhorn is first climbed
Edward Whymper's team narrowly beat an Italian party climbing from the other side.
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1871
Stanley finds Livingstone
Whether he really said 'Dr Livingstone, I presume?' is doubted - the diary page is missing.
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1875
Matthew Webb swims the English Channel
Smeared in porpoise oil, he took nearly 22 hours.
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1888
Fridtjof Nansen crosses Greenland
He went from east to west so there would be no turning back.
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1889
Kilimanjaro is first climbed
Hans Meyer and Ludwig Purtscheller reached the summit on Meyer's third attempt.
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1890
Nellie Bly completes her round-the-world race
She did it in 72 days, beating the fictional Phileas Fogg's 80.
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1893
Nansen's ship Fram sets off to drift across the Arctic
The ship was designed to be squeezed up by the ice rather than crushed.
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1897
Aconcagua is first climbed
It is the highest mountain outside Asia.
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1898
Joshua Slocum completes the first solo circumnavigation
He sailed a rebuilt oyster boat called Spray.
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1900
Sponge divers discover the Antikythera wreck
Its treasures included the Antikythera mechanism, often called the first analogue computer.
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1901
Annie Edson Taylor goes over Niagara Falls in a barrel
The first person to survive it was a 63-year-old schoolteacher.
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1906
Amundsen sails through the Northwest Passage
His small ship, Gjøa, took three years to make the voyage.
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1909
Louis Blériot flies across the English Channel
He won a £1,000 prize offered by the Daily Mail.
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1909
Peary claims to reach the North Pole
Whether he actually got there is still disputed.
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1911
Amundsen reaches the South Pole
He beat Robert Falcon Scott's team by about five weeks.
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1911
Hiram Bingham reaches Machu Picchu
Local farmers were already living there, and a local boy guided him up.
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1912
Scott's team reaches the South Pole
They found that Amundsen had beaten them, leaving a tent and a letter.
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1913
Denali is first climbed
The first to reach the top, Walter Harper, was an Alaska Native.
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1914
Roosevelt explores the River of Doubt
The former president almost died on the Amazon expedition.
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1915
Shackleton's ship Endurance is crushed by ice
All 28 men survived, thanks to an epic open-boat journey to South Georgia.
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1919
Alcock and Brown fly nonstop across the Atlantic
They crash-landed in an Irish bog.
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1922
Tutankhamun's tomb is discovered
Howard Carter's team spent ten years cataloguing its more than 5,000 objects.
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1924
George Mallory vanishes on Everest
His body was found in 1999; whether he reached the summit is still a mystery.
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1927
Lindbergh flies solo across the Atlantic
He packed five sandwiches for the 33-hour flight and ate only one and a half.
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1928
Kingsford Smith flies across the Pacific
The flight from California to Australia took about 83 hours of flying.
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1929
Richard Byrd flies over the South Pole
The crew had to dump supplies to clear the high polar plateau.
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1930
Amy Johnson flies solo to Australia
She had gained her pilot's licence only about a year earlier.
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1931
Auguste Piccard flies into the stratosphere
His pressurised balloon gondola reached about 15.8 km.
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1932
Amelia Earhart flies solo across the Atlantic
She landed in a field in Northern Ireland and told a farmhand she'd come from America.
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1933
Wiley Post flies solo around the world
He completed the trip in under eight days.
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1934
William Beebe's bathysphere dives half a mile
He described glowing deep-sea creatures by telephone to the surface.
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1937
Amelia Earhart disappears over the Pacific
What happened to her remains one of aviation's great mysteries.
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1938
The Eiger's North Face is first climbed
The 1,800-metre wall was climbed by a team of two Germans and two Austrians.
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1939
The Sutton Hoo ship burial is excavated
The Anglo-Saxon treasure was found on a Suffolk estate weeks before war broke out.
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1940
The Lascaux cave paintings are discovered
Four teenagers found the paintings, which are around 17,000 years old.
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1943
Cousteau co-invents the Aqua-Lung
It made modern scuba diving possible.
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1946
The first photo of Earth from space
It was taken by a camera on a captured German V-2 rocket launched from New Mexico.
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1947
Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier
He flew with two broken ribs from a horse-riding accident days earlier.
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1947
The first Dead Sea Scrolls are found
A Bedouin shepherd stumbled on them in a cave, reportedly while searching for a stray goat.
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1947
Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki voyage
His balsa-wood raft drifted about 6,900 km across the Pacific.
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1950
Annapurna is climbed, the first 8,000-metre peak
Maurice Herzog's team had to find the mountain on poor maps before they could climb it.
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1953
Hillary and Tenzing reach the summit of Everest
The news reached London on the morning of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation.
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1954
K2 is first climbed
Its first climbers were Italian, on an expedition led by Ardito Desio.
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1957
Laika becomes the first animal to orbit Earth
A stray dog from the streets of Moscow, she is honoured with a monument there.
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1957
Sputnik 1 is launched
Its radio beeps could be picked up by amateur radio operators around the world.
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1958
El Capitan is first climbed
The climb took 47 days of effort spread over 18 months.
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1958
NASA is founded
It was created partly in response to the shock of Sputnik.
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1958
Vivian Fuchs completes the first crossing of Antarctica
Edmund Hillary laid supply depots for the expedition.
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1960
Belka and Strelka return from orbit
One of Strelka's puppies was later given to President Kennedy's daughter.
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1960
The Trieste dives to the deepest point in the ocean
Its two-man crew spent about 20 minutes on the bottom, nearly 11 km down.
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1961
Yuri Gagarin becomes the first person in space
His flight lasted 108 minutes, and he ejected and landed by parachute.
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1963
Valentina Tereshkova becomes the first woman in space
Before becoming a cosmonaut, she was a textile worker and amateur parachutist.
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1965
Alexei Leonov makes the first spacewalk
His suit ballooned so much that he had to let air out to squeeze back inside.
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1968
Apollo 8 photographs Earthrise
Its crew were the first people ever to see the Earth rise over the Moon.
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1969
Apollo 11 lands on the Moon
Neil Armstrong's spacesuit was sewn by seamstresses from the bra-maker Playtex.
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1969
Robin Knox-Johnston sails solo nonstop around the world
He was the only one of nine starters to finish the race.
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1970
Apollo 13 returns safely to Earth
The crew used their lunar module as a lifeboat for the journey home.
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1972
Apollo 17, the last crewed Moon landing
No one has walked on the Moon since - a gap of more than 50 years.
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1973
Skylab is launched
Its first crew had to rig a sunshade after it lost a heat shield during launch.
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1974
The Terracotta Army is discovered
Farmers digging a well found the first fragments of more than 8,000 clay soldiers.
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1975
Junko Tabei becomes the first woman to climb Everest
Twelve days earlier, she had been buried by an avalanche.
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1975
US and Soviet spacecraft dock in orbit
During Apollo-Soyuz, the crews shook hands, swapped gifts and shared meals.
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1976
Viking 1 lands on Mars
It sent back the first clear photographs from the surface of Mars.
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1977
Voyager 1 is launched
It is the most distant human-made object, more than 24 billion km away.
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1978
Everest is climbed without bottled oxygen
Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler proved doctors wrong who said it was impossible.
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1978
The Aztec Templo Mayor is rediscovered
Electricity workers in Mexico City stumbled on a huge carved stone of a moon goddess.
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1981
The Space Shuttle flies for the first time
It was the first time a new US spacecraft carried a crew on its very first launch.
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1982
Henry VIII's warship Mary Rose is raised
It had lain on the seabed of the Solent for 437 years.
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1985
The wreck of the Titanic is found
It lay almost 4 km down, 73 years after the sinking.
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1986
The Mir space station is launched
It orbited for 15 years before being steered into the Pacific Ocean.
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1990
The Hubble Space Telescope is launched
Its main mirror was ground very slightly wrong, and astronauts had to fit corrective optics.
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1990
Voyager 1 takes the 'Pale Blue Dot' photo
In it, Earth is a speck less than a pixel wide.
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1991
Ötzi the Iceman is found in the Alps
Hikers first thought he was a modern climber; he had died about 5,300 years earlier.
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1997
Sojourner becomes the first Mars rover
The little rover was about the size of a microwave oven.
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1999
The first nonstop balloon flight around the world
Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones flew for nearly 20 days.
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2000
The first crew arrives at the Space Station
People have lived aboard the station continuously ever since.
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2002
Steve Fossett flies a balloon solo around the world
It was his sixth attempt.
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2005
Ellen MacArthur sets a solo round-the-world record
She sailed around the world alone in about 71 days.
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2009
The Staffordshire Hoard is found
A metal detectorist found the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold ever discovered.
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2010
Hayabusa returns asteroid dust to Earth
It was the first mission to bring back samples from an asteroid.
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2012
James Cameron dives solo to the ocean's deepest point
The film director's craft was called Deepsea Challenger.
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2012
Richard III's skeleton is found under a car park
In a spooky coincidence, he lay beneath a Leicester parking space marked with the letter 'R'.
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2014
Rosetta's lander touches down on a comet
The Philae lander bounced twice before coming to rest.
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2015
SpaceX lands a rocket booster upright
It was the first time an orbital rocket's first stage landed back on the ground.
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2019
China lands on the far side of the Moon
Chang'e 4 was the first spacecraft to soft-land there.
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2021
A helicopter flies on Mars
Ingenuity was the first powered aircraft to fly on another planet.
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2021
The James Webb Space Telescope is launched
Its gold-coated mirror is 6.5 metres across.
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2022
The wreck of Shackleton's Endurance is found
It lay about 3 km down in the Weddell Sea, remarkably intact.
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