Let’s look at some of the greatest travellers in world history.
Marco Polo was an Italian merchant who traveled through Asia, at the age of seventeen with his father and uncle, along the Silk Road between 1271 and 1295.
Throughout his travels, Polo explored the Silk Road, visited Tibet, and spent several years in China, where he became a trusted advisor to the Mongolian emperor Kublai Khan.
He returned to Venice in 1295 after travelling almost 24,000 Km. His travelogue ‘The Travels of Marco Polo’ introduced Europe to the cultures of the East.
Ibn Battuta was an Islamic scholar who visited most of Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, China, the Iberian Peninsula, and West Africa between 1325 to 1354.
His travelogue is “A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling”, commonly known as The Rihla.
Zheng He was a Chinese mariner, diplomat, fleet admiral, and court eunuch during China’s early Ming dynasty.
He is known for his huge fleets and between 1405 and 1433, commanded seven expeditionary treasure voyages to Southeast Asia, South Asia, West Asia, and East Africa.
Christopher Columbus was an Italian mariner and navigator who completed four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean between 1492 and 1504.
On his first voyage (1492-1493), Columbus made landfall on one of the Bahamian islands and sailed from island to island in what we now know as the Caribbean.
Columbus’s voyage opened up a new era of exploration and discovery, leading to the establishment of new trade routes between Europe and the New World.
Captain James Cook was a British cartographer and naval officer. He is famous for his three voyages between 1768 and 1779 in the Pacific Ocean .
During his voyages, he achieved the first recorded European contact with the eastern coastline of Australia and the Hawaiian Islands, and the first recorded circumnavigation of New Zealand.
Dame Freya Madeline Stark was a British-Italian traveller and writer . Born in 1893, she started her solo visit by boarding a ship to Beirut in 1927.
She had completed three dangerous treks into the wilderness of western Iran, exploring regions that no Westerner had ever ventured before.
Her explorations led her to discover the legendary Valleys of the Assassins. She documented her remarkable discoveries and adventures in her book titled ‘The Valleys of the Assassins’.