Collector’s Editions
GREAT
EXPLORERS Christopher Columbus • Sir Francis Drake Marco Polo • Captain Cook • Apollo XI Scott of the Antarctic • Leif Erikson Plus many more...
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Scott’s men in happier times
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ALAMY X3, GETTY X4, MOVIESTILLS X1, NASA X1, REX/SHUTTERSTOCK X1, TOPFOTO X1
The golden age of exploration
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Ibn Battuta encountered Christian culture in Constantinople
The Amazon’s great treasures lured many adventurers
Stars and stripes at the Sea of Tranquillity
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’s Australia as w Outback far o a step to
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ith A brush w the locals in Brazil
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Marco Polo brought Asia to Europe
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MALLORY AND IRVINE
Did a teacher and an engineer conquer Everest in 1924?
GREAT EXPLORERS OF THE TUDOR AGE Need to know ...p14 Europeans in America ...p24 Timeline – Milestones in the Age of Exploration ...p30 Sir Francis Drake – England’s Sea Dragon ...p32
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IBN BATTUTA
Thirty years exploring medieval Africa and Asia
LEIF ERIKSON
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THE LOST CITY OF Z
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Was a Viking the first European to encounter America?
The quest to find a legendary city in the Amazon
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Everest: on top of the world
JAMES COOK
The captain’s exploration of Hawaii would be his last
MARCO POLO
He changed the way the west looked at the world
LEWIS AND CLARK EXPEDITION An 8,000-mile mission across North America
Zheng He’s party numbered tens of thousands
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Captain Cook admired the wonders of Hawaii
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SCOTT OF THE ANTARCTIC
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BURKE AND WILLS
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FRANCISCO DE ORELLANA
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APOLLO II
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His final, tragic expedition to the South Pole
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A doomed exploration of the Australian outback
The first man to navigate the whole of the Amazon
One giant leap sees a man set foot on the Moon
HENRY HUDSON
102
ZHENG HE
108
Mutiny and mystery in the New World
The Chinese mariner with a vast fleet of giant ships
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GREAT EXPLORERS OF THE TUDOR AGE
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D
uring the 15th and 16th centuries, powerful European nations embarked on ambitious campaigns of exploration, colonial conquest and tradeorientated empire building. This was an era of intense ocean-crossing exploration. This was the Age of Discovery. The impact of these missions was immense. The West’s understanding of the planet skyrocketed as a ‘New World’ was revealed across the Atlantic. Enormous wealth poured into Europe, the daily diet of millions changed and technology boomed. Meanwhile, the transatlantic slave trade escalated, and disease and death were delivered to many indigenous peoples, whose cultures were also damaged or destroyed.
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HISTORYEXTRA.COM
These consequences were as unpredictable as the new seas were uncharted. The Vikings had explored North America’s east coast centuries earlier, but their findings weren’t shared. While Aristotle showed, in the fourth century BC, that the Earth was spherical, a myth persisted that a great nothingness existed west of the Mediterranean. Explorers of the age were sailing off the edge of the map.
NOW READ ON… NEED TO KNOW 1 Into the Darkness
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2 Who Went Where and When?
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p18 4 Round the World p20 5 A Sailor’s Life p22 3 The Spice Race
EUROPEANS IN AMERICA Columbus and Cabot p24
TIMELINE Milestones in the Age of Exploration p30
SIR FRANCIS DRAKE
England’s Sea Dragon p32
GET HOOKED
Explore the Age of Discovery p37
“THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA AND THAT OF A PASSAGE TO THE EAST INDIES… ARE THE TWO GREATEST AND MOST IMPORTANT EVENTS RECORDED IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND” ECONOMIST AND PHILOSOPHER ADAM SMITH, 1776
PIONEER CAPTAINS
Columbus, Cabot and Drake (left to right) led the way in this era of exploration
LEIF ERIKSON
BOLD ADVENTURER
ALAMY X1, TOPFOTO X1
Leif Erikson, the Viking hero and first European to land in the Americas
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HISTORYEXTRA.COM
“Columbus wasn’t the first European to set foot on American soil. Not by a long shot”
LEIF ERIKSON’S
VOYAGE TO VINLAND Follow the sagas and explore the exploits of the very first Europeans to visit America
GEOGRAPHY
Fawcett believed that other Amazonian citadel seekers were looking in the wrong places – too close to major rivers – and instead planned to explore inland between the Xingu and Tapajós tributaries, where he was convinced Z lay. Many tribes had tasted contact with the so-called civilised world were profoundly opposed to repeating the experience – having suffered slavery, torture, murder, rape, abuse and exploitation at the hands of the rubber barons who controlled the ‘black gold’ trade – and often met white intruders with lethal violence.
1 DECEMBER 1924
England – Rio de Janeiro
Percy and Jack Fawcett leave from Liverpool on 3 December, bound for New York aboard the Aquitania. Raleigh Rimell is in America already, as is Fawcett’s business partner, Lynch, who is busy boozing through the expedition kitty. After a brief NYC stop they continue together (minus Lynch) to Rio de Janeiro.
2 FEBRUARY 1925
Rio de Janeiro – Corumbá
Travelling by train, the Fawcetts and Rimmell leave Rio on 11 February. They first visit São Paulo for antivenom supplies before going west into the enormous country’s interior towards the Paraguay River, skirting along the Brazil-Bolivia border and arriving in Corumbá a week later.
3 FEBRUARY–MARCH 1925 Corumbá – Cuiabá
On 23 February, the party boards the Iguatemi and travels along the Paraguay, São Lourenço and Cuiabá rivers, reaching the remote outpost of Cuiabá on 3 March.
4 APRIL 1925
Cuiabá – Rio Novo
Having waited out the end of the wet season, the expedition begins in earnest on 20 April, with the party trekking across the hot cerrado. After an incident in which Fawcett senior becomes separated from the party while looking for rock art, he allows a pit stop at a remote Rio Novo ranch, home to Hermenegildo Galvão.
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MAY 1925
Bakairi Post
After a tough month of travel through rough terrain, the party reaches the very last outpost on the edge of the virgin Amazon jungle, a tiny government garrison.
“I have never felt so well”, wrote Jack Fawcett to his mother during the exp editio
6 MAY 1925
Dead Horse Camp
Setting off from Bakairi Post on 20 May, it takes the party nine days to reach the spot where Fawcett had been forced to turn around on a
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previous expedition. The bleached bare bones of his old horse still mark the spot. From here, the native guides return to Cuiabá with written dispatches for publication and letters for the explorers’ families, while Percy and Jack Fawcett and Raleigh Rimell press on, into the hostile territories of the Kayapo, Suyá and Xavante peoples. They are never seen again.
Dead Horse Camp ? Rio 6 Novo 4 5 Bakairi Post
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3 Cuiabá o renc Lou er o ã S Riv
2 Corumbá
PARAGUAY
Rio de Janeiro
BRAZIL
CHILE
Par a Rivguay er
São Paulo
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NEW YORK From England
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Rio de Janeiro
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THE LOST CITY OF Z as porters for the first, easiest section of the expedition, before returning to Cuiabá with the promised dispatches for the newspapers. Jack Fawcett and Rimell’s first taste of the difficulty was crossing the cerrado, dry and comparatively easy terrain, but it brought home how tough the trip was going to be. Fawcett senior drove them through savage heat at an unforgiving pace, covering up to 15 miles a day, and the young men had a brutal introduction to ys the bites of the region’s insects. pla am nn Hu ie Charl 17 Rimell’s foot became infected from bites, Fawcett in the 20 movie adaptation he rapidly lost weight and his ardour for the adventure began to cool. Jack, however, demonstrated a similar constitution to his father, almost revelling in the adversity. By the banks of the Manso River, Percy exact route top secret. Fawcett forged ahead and the party was The Fawcetts met Rimell in New York, where formed over years, as he chanced upon separated overnight, leaving the boys fearful they discovered Lynch had blown a fifth of their unexplainable pottery shards in the that their leader had been captured or killed expedition fund on illegal booze and prostitutes darkest depths of the jungle and gained an by indigenous Kayapo people. They were in the Waldorf Astoria hotel. Fortunately, appreciation of the complexity and size of reunited the next morning, however, and millionaire oil magnate JD Rockefeller Jr had the indigenous cultures he encountered. Fawcett subsequently consented to several read about their quest, and replenished the While scouring forgotten documents days rest at the super-remote Rio Novo ranch kitty. Lynch was dispatched to London in in the recesses of Rio de Janeiro’s of Hermenegildo Galvão, an infamously brutal disgrace, and the explorers continued by National Library, he discovered cattle farmer who lived deep in the forest. boat to Rio de Janeiro. a manuscript written by a A month after leaving Cuiabá they reached By February 1925, the party was in bandeirante – possibly João da Bakairi Post, a tiny government garrison on the São Paulo, visiting a snake farm to Silva Guimarães – describing very edge of the known map. Here, the excited pick up a load of antivenom serum. the ruins of a once-great city, Estimated number of people who died looking younger men met their first true tribespeople, From here they travelled by train, which the author had found for Fawcett after his even engaging in a singing session with them heading west towards the Paraguay in 1753. This tattered piece disappearance. using a ukulele they’d brought along. River along the Brazil-Bolivia border of paper stoked his lethal On 20 May, the day after Jack turned 22, the to Corumbá. Aboard the Iguatemi, obsession and ultimately men left the last hint of civilisation. Nine gruelling the party then cruised the Paraguay, sealed his fate. days later, they reached Dead Horse Camp, where São Lourenço and Cuiabá rivers to reach Percy Fawcett had been forced to shoot his ailing the outpost of Cuiabá, which Rimell pack animal and retreat on a previous described as a “God forsaken OFF THE CHART expedition. From here they entered Sailing from England to America with Jack in late hole … best seen with eyes utterly unknown territory, heading closed”. Here, they 1924, Fawcett exuded confidence, yet inwardly towards the River of Death. This bought provisions he was wracked by paranoia. What if his rivals region was home to tribes such and pack animals, beat him to Z? The rich American explorer Dr as the Kayapo, Suyá and and impatiently Alexander Hamilton Rice, with a light aircraft Xavante, who harboured a waited for the dry at his disposal, and the native Brazilian Cândido violent hatred of intruders season. Mariano da Silva Rondon, who worked for after their murderous When Fawcett government and had guided Theodore Roosevelt mistreatment at the hands of judged the time along the Amazonian River of Doubt, both had rubber barons and soldiers, was right, they ambitions in the area. To muddy his tracks and and the suffering they’d conceal clues, the cagey colonel concocted a code set off. Several Fawcett’s younger son endured as epidemics of disease native guides acted for writing down grid references and kept his Brian inspects bones believed to be his father’s, devastated their societies found in the Amazon following contact with Europeans. The guides would go no further, and they began heading back to Cuiabá with expedition reports and letters for loved by a hostile tribe or simply succumbed In the 90-plus years since they disappeared, dozens of ones. Percy Fawcett wrote to his wife, and Jack’s to one of the Amazon’s innumerable dangers. expeditions have ventured into the jungle attempting mother, Nina: “You need have no fear of failure.” In an ironic twist, though, it now appears that Fawcett to discover the fate of the Fawcetts and Rimell. Many had already found his lost city without realising it. went missing themselves. Various gory stories and Unearthed by anthropologist Michael Heckenberger, far-fetched survival yarns have emerged, including GET HOOKED Kuhikugu is a sprawling archaeological site in remote claims that the explorers found Z and disappeared Mato Grosso, near the Xingu River, which evidence through a portal into another dimension. In life Fawcett READ (including the pottery Fawcett puzzled over) suggests experimented with mysticism, and in absentia he has The Lost City of Z by David Grann (Doubleday, 2009) is a lively read detailing the backstory to the 1925 expedition and subsequent acquired a cult-like following. Years after they vanished, once played home to an enormous and sophisticated attempts to locate the explorers. civilisation. It’s no Machu Picchu–style citadel, but an indigenous fair-skinned boy was presented and around 50,000 people lived here before the arrival of paraded as Jack’s son, before Nina pointed out he was WATCH Europeans heralded a disease apocalypse. simply an albino. In all probability, the men were killed A film version of David Grann’s The Lost City of Z, starring Charlie Hunnam, Sienna Miller and Tom Holland, was released in April 2017.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?
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