The History of Exploration

This timeline opens with a landfall: Leif Erikson stepping ashore in Vinland around the year 1000, five centuries before Columbus. From there it follows the whole restless story of exploration. Polynesian navigators settle the last empty islands of the Pacific, Zheng He leads Ming treasure fleets across the Indian Ocean, and the Iberian voyages of the 1490s connect hemispheres that had never known each other, for better and for much worse. Later eras push into the blank spaces that remained: the interiors of continents, the poles, the deep ocean floor, and finally orbit and the Moon. Each expedition below links to a full event page, and the era headings put every voyage back into the world that launched it.