Edward Brooke-Hitching - The Golden Atlas: The Greatest Explorations, Quests and Discoveries on Maps

Sebastian Mnsters map of the monsters thought to terrorize the Scandinavian waters, 1550.

While the early establishment of trade networks made for piecemeal progress, the most monumental advancement in geographic discovery came with the conquerors. With the fourth-century BC campaigns of Alexander the Great in his pursuit of the ends of the world, and the spread of the Roman Empire, the great geographer Claudius Ptolemy was able to illustrate the world AD c. 140 with unprecedented detail using a revolutionary mathematical system of coordinates. As Romanized Europe fell into the Dark Ages of the first millennium with the Empires collapse, the most notable explorations were conducted by those far beyond its borders: the wildfire spread of Islam unified a vast medley of lands from Spain to the East, allowing scholars free passage throughout; while at the same time Scandinavian expeditions took to the tumultuous North Atlantic to reach Iceland, Greenland and then, by sheer accident, Vinland (North America) in the late tenth century.

With the rest of Europe largely oblivious to these Viking discoveries, it was the unstoppable expansionism of the Mongol forces that delivered the next great impact, with the order brought by the Great Khan allowing European merchants (most famously, Marco Polo) to travel with relative safety throughout Asia in the thirteenth century. The wealth of the East was now evident to European eyes but the overland journey was impractically long and arduous a sea route was needed, so that entire ships could be filled with bartered silks and spices. Thus the fifteenth century saw the opening of the great Age of Exploration. Portuguese expeditions crept down Africas west coast, the Crown hoping to establish itself in the Saharan gold and slave trade while searching for a way to India, until Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488 and Vasco da Gama reached India ten years later. At around the same time a British expedition made a remarkable transatlantic crossing to discover Newfoundland (see John Cabot Journeys to North America entry ), while the Spanish also looked to the West, agreeing in 1494 to leave eastern routes to the Portuguese. Christopher Columbus struck out across the Atlantic to win the race to reach China, arriving instead at the New World (and never accepting that he had failed to find the Orient).