On a mammoth voyage, da Gama and his crew sailed down the coast of Africa and out into the Atlantic, before swinging back down and around to pass the Cape of Good Hope.įrom there, they voyaged back up Africa’s east coast before crossing the (hitherto uncharted) Indian Ocean to land, thousands of nautical miles later, in Calicut, India. In 1497, the Portuguese king commissioned him to chart a trading route to the East for the very first time. He found favour with royalty somewhere down the line though!
Vasco da Gama was a famed Portuguese navigator in the great Age of Exploration.įrom what I can tell, not a lot’s known about his early life- other than the fact he was born into a noble family and went on to join the navy, where he learned his craft. So, without further ado, get ready for 20 famous explorers whose stories are sure to get you raring for an adventure of your own.
Shed in that light, can you really describe these guys as ‘ great’?!Ī few of the names in this list of famous explorers weren’t necessarily great people (in the sense that they wreaked bloody chaos on the places they went).īut they were, unquestionably, great explorers, adventurers, and travellers, who leaped head-first into the unknown and shaped the course of history in the process.Īnd it’s that side of the story I’ve chosen to focus on in this post! Time and again, their incredible feats of exploration were a precursor to (or part of) one atrocity or another. It’s a similar story with many great explorers of old. …But they also ravaged, ransacked, and ruined ancient civilisations. These armour-clad individuals were explorers of the highest calibre! They crossed the Atlantic to the New World guided by nothing but sheer audacity and their incredible cartography skills. Take the famed conquistadors of 16th Century Spain and Portugal. 20 of the World’s Greatest Explorers and Their Discoveriesīefore I get into these daring endeavours and brilliant biographies, there’s something worth bearing in mind…īasically, some ‘great explorers’ were also part of great atrocities!īe it the slave-trade, colonisation, or even mass genocide, the more you learn about famous explorers of the past, the more you realize how closely their exploits were tied to a whole bunch of historical horrors.
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