Early historical explorers remain figures shrouded in mystery, occupying a middle ground between legendary heroes like Gilgamesh and the well-­recorded later lives of the everyday merchants, ambassadors, and pilgrims, who wrote down the stories of their travels in the Middle Ages. What survives of their voyages are hints and vague allusions in the works of later authors, second-­ and third-hand stories in which the shreds of truth mingle with the mythological and the fantastic.

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In the fifth century BCE, a Carthaginian captain named Hanno is said to have sailed from Libya with a fleet of sixty ships through the Strait of Gibraltar and south along the Atlantic coast of Africa until he reached a land of volcanoes and gorillas. But all that remains of his account is a partial Greek translation of the original Punic text. Scholars have been left to guess just how far he traveled, whether all the way to Cameroon, or perhaps only as far as Morocco.

Roman writers later described another fifth-­century Carthaginian named Himilco, who sailed to northern Europe, encountering sea monsters and what seems to be the seaweed of the Sargasso Sea far out in the Atlantic. Himilco’s voyage remains impossible to confirm, but the knowledge of the mid-­Atlantic that his story reveals is genuine.

Exploration and mythmaking were often so intertwined that genuine accounts of discovery were sometimes dismissed as mere fables.

A century later, an explorer from the Greek colony at Marseilles named Phytheas circumnavigated the British Isles and penetrated deep into the Baltic Sea. He was the first writer to mention Scotland, to tell of polar ice, and to describe the firsthand experience of the land of the midnight sun. Like Hanno and Himilco, however, Phytheas’s original text only survives in excerpts and paraphrases in the works of later authors.

The same is true of the Chinese diplomat Zhang Qian, who was dispatched to Central Asia by Han dynasty emperor Wu in 138 BCE. His journey helped to inaugurate a new era of interconnection in Asia that saw the first flourishing of the famous overland trade network that linked China to India, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean, later called the Silk Road. The truth of his travels is not in question, but his personality, vision, and voice remain a mystery. His journey only survives in the history compiled by his contemporary, Sima Qian.

One of the first explorers to leave a firsthand account of his journey that survives was the Buddhist monk Faxian. In 399 CE, at the age of sixty, Faxian and nine other monks left their monastery in Chang’an (modern Xi’an) in central China and set out on a pilgrimage to India in search of Buddhist texts not available in China. It was a grueling journey on foot across the Gobi Desert, where the only sight other than the “river of sand” was the “dry bones of the dead,” and over the high passes of the Himalayas “among the hills and cold,” where nothing grew and dragons “spit forth poisonous winds” so bitter that Faxian could not speak. The monks crossed the wide Indus into India, the land of Buddha’s birth, where they visited temples and shrines, beheld relics of the Buddha, and walked in his blessed footsteps.

Faxian eventually traveled all the way down the Ganges to the religious center of Varanasi and on to Pataliputra, modern Patna. It was all a strange new world for Faxian, but in no way a lesser one. For Faxian, India was the true “Middle Kingdom,” the center of the universe. China, which proudly claimed the title for itself, was for him a “border-­land.” (Such talk would outrage many readers back home in China, but seen through the Buddhist lens, India was the center of the universe.)

Through his account of his travels, first transmitted orally to his fellow monks, then written down in the annals of Buddhist heroes and read across China, Faxian helped to alter China’s worldview, decentering his homeland and situating it within a wider world. In so doing, he encouraged curiosity and inquiry and inspired generations of explorers to follow his lead. In Faxian we see, perhaps for the first time, how stories of exploration told from the perspective of the explorer have the power to change the world.

But even when firsthand records survive, early accounts of explorers often veer into legend. In some cases, the explorers become legends themselves. In 629 CE, another Buddhist monk named Xuanzang left China to see the land of the Buddha. Born in Chenliu, Henan Province, in 602 CE, Xuanzang entered a monastery in Sichuan, where he became obsessed with tracking down and collecting original Buddhist scriptures from India. In the process, he learned about the journey of Faxian and became determined to follow his example. Like his predecessor, Xuanzang traveled across the great western deserts and climbed the towering passes of the Himalayas before staggering out, exhausted, onto the Gangeatic plain. At the celebrated Nalanda monastery in Bihar, he at last found what he was looking for, plentiful Sanskrit texts and a mentor, the famous monk Śīlabhadra.

When Xuanzang returned to China in 645, he brought with him twenty packhorses worth of scriptures and a treasure trove of tales about the giant stone Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan (later destroyed by the Taliban), the workings of the caste system in India, and a fantastical race of dragon men in the high Himalayas. His knowledge of the outside world, real and imagined, transformed Xuanzang from an obscure young monk into a revered figure. With the emperor’s backing, he established a translation center at Chang’an that drew students and scholars from across Asia, binding the world closer together and spreading his own name in the process. As his fame grew, some of his fellow monks, at the emperor’s insistence, recorded Xuanzang’s account of his voyage for posterity, the Great Tang Records on the Western Regions.

Xuanzang’s journey continued even after his death in 664. His image can be found in temples from Taiwan to Dunhuang, in western China, and his relics are still claimed by India, China, and Japan. Over the centuries, his journey became the inspiration for plays, popular literature, and traveling storytellers. Before long, they became a staple of Chinese culture, increasingly fictionalized as the years passed. By the time of the Ming dynasty in the sixteenth century, life and legend had merged so completely that the real Xuanzang had become the fictional Tang Sanzang, hero of the beloved 1592 novel Journey to the West.

Today, that story of a wandering monk and his four disciples, including the hugely popular Monkey King, Sun Wukong, continues to appear in popular culture, from Dragon Ball to Marvel and DC Comics. But even after Xuanzang’s story became subsumed in the legend of Tang Sanzang, the values he represented—­openness, curiosity, adventure, exchange—­lived on to influence generations of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean readers to look upon the world as a place worthy of exploration.

Exploration and mythmaking were often so intertwined that genuine accounts of discovery were sometimes dismissed as mere fables. This was doubly true in the case of two of the first Europeans to set foot in the Americas. Born in Iceland around 980 CE, Gudrid Far-­Traveler was the descendant of the Scandinavian explorers who had crossed the North Sea in the 700s–­800s to settle the islands of the far north Atlantic: the Faroe Islands, the Shetlands, Orkney, and Iceland.

When Gudrid was a young woman, she accompanied her father on the expedition led by the notorious Erik the Red that established the first Norse settlement in Greenland. With North America near at hand, and winds and currents favorable for sailing farther west and south, it was not long before sailors began returning to the Greenland settlement with tales of a verdant land in the direction of the setting sun. It was Erik’s elder son Leif Erikson who led the first Norse expedition to make landfall in the Americas around the year 1000.

Gudrid’s husband Thorstein was Leif’s younger brother, so Gudrid had planned to join Leif’s second expedition to the place he called Vinland (after the wild grapes he noticed growing onshore). But shortly before Gudrid was set to sail, her husband died. With her sights still fixed beyond the horizon, Gudrid chose a prominent merchant named Thorfinn Karlsefni as her second husband and wasted no time urging him to outfit his own expedition. Together, they would help create the first permanent European settlement in North America in what is now Newfoundland, Canada. There, Gudrid gave birth to a son, Snorri, who became the first child of European descent to be born in the Americas.

Gudrid was not the only Viking woman with interests in exploration. She was joined in the Newfoundland settlement by Leif Erikson’s tough-­minded sister, Freydís Eiríksdóttir, who arrived in America as a full partner in the settlement venture and the undisputed leader of a party of more than thirty men. When conflict broke out between the Norse interlopers and the skræling, the Indigenous people of the region (likely either the ancestors of the Beothuk or the Thule, the ancestors of the Inuit), it was Freydís who led the fight, despite being six months pregnant. Furious at the timidity of the settlement’s men, she admonished them for their cowardice, picked up a sword, and rallied the settlers to her. Unlacing her tunic, she beat her bare breast with her sword until the attackers fled. Her bold action in the face of danger would make her a legendary model of female strength, though the two surviving accounts of her life in America differ in their descriptions of her. In Saga of the Greenlanders, Freydís is a warning of the dangers of headstrong women; in Saga of Erik the Red, she is the personification of maternal bravery and sacrifice. In both, though, the story of her voyage held lasting power.

Gudrid and Freydís both abandoned the Vinland settlement when Indigenous resistance to their presence became too fierce. Freydís returned to Greenland, where a Norse settlement would limp on for another four centuries as the farthest outpost of European settlement. Gudrid settled back in Iceland with her son Snorri, converted to Christianity, and, her thirst for travel still unquenched, made the long pilgrimage to Rome. Both women became legendary figures in their native land, their history eventually elided with the myths that surrounded them.

For almost one thousand years, their actual existence was widely dismissed. Indeed, the very fact that two women helped to lead the first European expeditions to the Americas was often interpreted by scholars as evidence that all the stories contained in the sagas were fiction. It was only in 1960, when a Norwegian archaeologist named Anne Stine Ingstad discovered the remains of a Norse settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows, that the lives and deeds of Gudrid Far-­Traveler and Freydís Eiríksdóttir were supported by historical evidence. The age of the settlement Ingstad—­carbon-­dated to around the year 1000—­and its location closely matched the descriptions of Gudrid and Karlsefni’s outpost in Vinland. Among the more than eight hundred objects uncovered at the site, archaeologists found a bone knitting needle, part of a spindle, and evidence of a loom. As spinning and weaving were almost always performed by women in the Viking world, it is all but certain that the settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows was occupied by men and women, just as the sagas of Gudrid and Freydís recorded.

As history unfolded, this potent motivational brew of fame, curiosity, and lust for gain continued to drive people to set out into the unknown.

Writing of his compatriots who sailed west across the Atlantic to Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland, the first explorers from the Old World to set foot upon the New, a Norwegian chronicler was at a loss to explain why anyone would take such risks without a clear idea of the rewards. “What people go to Greenland and why they fare thither through such great perils?” he asked. The only explanation was “man’s threefold nature,” he concluded: “One motive is fame, another curiosity, and a third is a lust for gain.” As history unfolded, this potent motivational brew of fame, curiosity, and lust for gain continued to drive people to set out into the unknown. It also ensured that the stories they told about far-­off lands were widely read—­though their tales were often greeted with suspicion.

For seven centuries and more, most have agreed that Marco Polo’s Travels, the most famous account of exploration in Western history, was a work of fiction, as doubted and dismissed as the account of Gudrid’s travels in the Vinland sagas. And yet, even as Rustichello penned Marco Polo’s tale, there were those who knew for certain that many of the things he said were true. Those individuals had traveled the same roads that took Polo across the world to Xanadu. They had seen new worlds too.

Rabban Bar Sauma had been at sea for more than a week when the smell of brimstone wafted in on the wind and the sky itself seemed to catch fire. This wine-­dark “sea of Italy” was “a terrible sea,” the monk reflected. It was like no body of water he had ever seen. He could well believe the sailors’ stories that “very many thousands of people” had “perished” beneath its waves. And now, the first land they had seen in days was a mountain belching hellish sulfur smoke “all day long.” At night, when sea and sky became one dark sheet, pillars of fire could be seen bursting forth from its peak. “Some people say there is a great serpent there,” Sauma wrote, a dragon lurking in its depths. Perhaps the hellish climate was a sign. Perhaps it had been a mistake to have come so far to explore the land of the Franks.

A fire of another kind set Sauma on his journey. He had been born in Khanbaliq (Beijing) in 1220 to a wealthy Uyghur couple. His parents were members of the Christian Nestorian Church of the East that had reached China in the seventh century. The Mongol Yuan dynasty of Sauma’s day was tolerant of many faiths—­Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, Shamanic—­as Marco Polo would later attest. Sauma’s parents had high hopes for their son. At twenty, however, “the divine fire was kindled in his heart, and…burned up the brambles of sin,” Sauma remembered. He decided to become a monk.

By his middle years, Sauma had become a religious teacher of some repute and a prominent figure in the Nestorian Christian community of the Yuan dynasty. And yet, the world he found in the pages of the Bible drew his thoughts to the lands of Christ and his disciples in the West. He longed to walk in the footsteps of the savior and see the shrines of the saints for himself. His precocious student Markos also had visions of Christendom, and together they began to plan a pilgrimage. “It would be exceedingly helpful to us if we were to leave this region and set out for the West,” Sauma told Markos, “for we could then [visit] the tombs of the holy martyrs and Catholic Fathers… And if Christ… prolonged our lives, and sustained us by His grace, we could go to Jerusalem.” Their friends tried to warn them off, telling the pair that they did not “know how very far off that region is” or “how difficult it will be for you to travel over the roads…ye will never reach there.” “The kingdom of heaven is within you,” they argued; there was no need to seek it in the West. But Sauma and Markos would not be diverted. They “burned to set out on the road,” Sauma recorded—­as monks, they had already “renounced the world” and were not afraid to die: “We consider ourselves already dead.”

Of course, there was precedent for their journey. Chinese ambassadors had reached the borders of Europe before the birth of Christ. In the centuries after, Buddhist monks had regularly crossed the Himalayas to India to visit the birthplace of the Buddha. Two of these monks, Faxian and Xuanzang, had even written down the story of their travels. Sauma would do the same.

Markos and Sauma set off from Yinchuan across the baking Gobi Desert, skirting the treacherous Taklamakan Desert to Khotan, then Kashgar and Khorasan, where they arrived “in a state of exhaustion whereto fear was added.” From Khorasan they headed through Mosul to Ani in the Christian kingdom of Georgia, where their path was blocked by war. The road west was too dangerous to continue, but they had no intention of turning back. “We have not come from that country [China] in order to turn back and go again thither,” Sauma reasoned, “and we do not intend to endure a repetition of the hardship which we have already suffered. For the man who is tripped up twice by the [same] stone is a fool.” They decided to head south for Baghdad, the capital of the Mongol Ilkhanate of Persia, a substate of the Great Khan of China.

When they arrived in Baghdad, they were summoned to the court of the Ilkhan Arghun, the Mongol governor of Persia, who asked why they had come and “what their native country was.” They explained that they had come all the way from China in hopes of visiting the Christian Holy Land. With their hopes of reaching Jerusalem dashed, they asked to be allowed to settle in Baghdad among the thriving Christian community protected by the Mongols. Once granted permission, they remained in Baghdad for several years, where Sauma reprised his role as a teacher and Markos rose to become patriarch of the Church of the East. Perhaps they even noticed a trio of Venetian merchants passing through on the same road they had taken west.

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From Explorers: A New History by Matthew Lockwood. Copyright © 2024. Available from W.W. Norton & Company.