History's Greatest Voyages of Exploration

The Vivaldi brothers' ill-fated journey to India; what drives the brothers, or drives any explorer, to take a risk and venture into the unknown; theories on how the Pacific islands become populated starting with an epic movement 7,000 years ago.

The originator of scientific exploration treks to the edge of the world so that he can see what is there; putting Pytheas the Greek in the context of his time and place; the Mediterranean as a cradle of civilization; influencing later exploration.

Religious motivations for exploration; the Irish monk St. Brendan sails the Atlantic in a tiny leather boat; he seeks God and flees the world's corruptions; some search for paradise and some for seclusion; a legacy that affects later exploration.

Alarmed at inconsistencies in the Buddhist texts available to him, Xuanzang embarks on an illegal holy pilgrimage to acquire authoritative teachings; he brings Buddhist traditions to the Confucian Chinese; the central character in a classical novel.

The story of Leif Eriksson and the Vikings is relatively well known; Professor Liulevicius takes one deeper into why the Vikings, or Norsemen, explore; evidenced by their culture of adventure and values that press them onwards in often violent ways.

Traders have traveled the Silk Road since the Roman Empire; there is little awareness of what exists at the other; Marco Polo's accounts of China open Europeans' eyes to an advanced civilization; the medieval world; Polo's travels and legacy.

The life and legacy of Ibn Battuta, who leaves Morocco in 1325 to make a pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca; a craving for spiritual travel; he returns home 24 years later after covering 75,000 miles in the network woven by Muslim civilization.

A tiny Portugal takes to the seas, rounds the continent of Africa, hijacks the Indian Ocean and creates a global empire; Portugal's rise to superpower status; Prince Henry the Navigator's call for exploration; Vasco da Gama's successful Asian voyage.

Christopher Columbus stumbles upon the Americas while attempting to reach Asia by heading West; the massive Columbian Exchange of peoples, plants, commodities and diseases; Columbus's religious motives for launching The Enterprise of the Indies.

The Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan's expedition in service of Spain becomes the first to circumnavigate the world; accomplishing what Columbus promises to do-reaching Asia by sailing west; how his journey binds together the world economy.

The most brutal of explorers; Spanish military entrepreneurs including Cortes, Pizarro and de Soto, who are royally sanctioned to seize wealth and lands in the New World; they topple civilizations using a handful of men; impact on native societies.

Moving from voyages of fruitful discovery to a failure ending in mutiny, murder and a mystery that endures to this day; Henry Hudson's 1610 voyage in search of the Northwest Passage to Asia; funded by two of the first multinational corporations.

The order of the Jesuits uses global cultural exploration to proselytize local cultures across the world, from India and China to the Americas; placing the Jesuit project in the context of a larger intellectual shift towards cultural relativism.

Captain Cook epitomizes the age of scientific discovery, which lauds exploration for the sake of knowledge; his methods and voyages embody new attitudes toward foreign peoples; what Cook does not find helps give one a complete world picture.

Alexander von Humboldt teaches one to see the world as an interrelated ecological unit. Tracing his five-year exploration of the Americas with French botanist Aimé Bonpland, they cover 5,950 miles and catalog 6,300 species of plants and animals.

On Jefferson's orders, the US Corps of Discovery set out to chart the new territories gained by the Louisiana Purchase; recording its people, flora and fauna; they cross Native American-occupied lands peacefully; the expedition's significance.

The doomed expedition of Sir John Franklin, who disappears in 1845 while searching for the Northwest Passage; theories on the fate of the men; how the mystery captures the imagination of Franklin's contemporaries; creating a culture of adventure.

Ida Pfeiffer is a Victorian woman who defies expectations by traveling around the world twice; her extraordinary journeys to exotic locales; how she deftly escapes some perilous situations; cannibalistic Batak warriors in the jungles of Sumatra.

Japan discovers the West through a series of exploratory diplomatic missions abroad to America and Europe towards the end of the 19th century; features of Western culture they find worth emulating; unfamiliar Western practices they reject.

A famous PR stunt; Henry Stanley finds ailing Scottish explorer Dr. Livingstone in a remote town in Africa; how Africa long remains the Dark Continent to the outside world; Mary Kingsley's writing reveals West Africa to a European audience.

The first to make it to the North Pole; the lesser-known moments and figures of the race; Umberto Nobile flying a hydrogen-filled semi-rigid airship over the Pole in 1926, then crashing on a second trip; unleashing an international rescue operation.

The race to the South Pole and the bitter rivalries surrounding it; Norwegian Roald Amundsen outdistances his rival, English explorer Captain Robert Scott; Sir Ernest Shackleton's expedition to cross the punishing Antarctic meets disaster.

A historic descent into the deepest place on earth, the Mariana Trench in the Pacific, by Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard and US Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh; some of the highlights of ocean exploration in the centuries before this 1960 expedition.

Why humans venture beyond Earth; whether the future of space exploration lies with commercial interests; humanity's future in space; the past, present and future of space exploration; Apollo 8's astronauts witness Earthrise on Christmas Eve 1968.