Explorers & Voyages Quiz — 10 Free Questions

Question 1

Which two women, one American and one Norwegian, became in 2001 the first of their sex to ski across the Antarctic landmass, hauling sledges and using kite-sails to cover the last stretch of a 2,700-kilometre traverse?

Question 2

Which Danish-born officer in Russian service led two enormous expeditions across Siberia in the 1720s and 1740s to learn whether Asia and America were joined, proved they were not, and died of scurvy on a bleak island on the way home?

Question 3

Which Dutch navigator made three voyages in the 1590s hunting for a northeast passage to Asia over the top of Russia, and on the third was trapped by ice off a remote island, where his crew built a driftwood cabin and survived a brutal polar winter?

Question 4

Which Frenchman led the 1950 expedition that made the first ascent of any of the world's fourteen mountains over 8,000 metres, reaching the summit without bottled oxygen but losing most of his fingers and toes to frostbite on the desperate descent?

Question 5

Which Turkic Christian monk, born near the Mongol capital in China, set out around 1275 on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, was diverted into diplomacy, and ended up as a Mongol ambassador meeting the Pope, the King of France and the King of England?

Question 6

Which French naval officer led a lavish scientific expedition into the Pacific from 1785, sent regular reports and specimens home from ports along the way, then sailed from Australia in 1788 and was never heard from again?

Question 7

Which Greek geographer from a Mediterranean colony sailed north around 325 BC past Britain to a land he called 'Thule', six days' sail further on, where he reported that the summer sun barely set and that sea, ice and air seemed to merge into a sluggish mass?

Question 8

Which officer of the Imperial Russian Navy led an expedition that, in January 1820, became one of the first, perhaps the very first, to sight the Antarctic continent, seeing an ice shelf where the charts showed only open sea, and then circumnavigated the whole landmass?

Question 9

Which two men led the lavishly equipped 1860 expedition that was the first to cross Australia from south to north, reached tidal mangroves near the Gulf of Carpentaria, and then starved to death on the way back after a series of fatal misunderstandings over a supply camp?

Question 10

Which Chinese Buddhist monk, already about sixty years old, walked west across the desert and over the Himalayas around the year 399 to collect monastic texts in India, then came home by sea via Sri Lanka and Java, surviving storms that scattered his ship?

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About Explorers & Voyages

For most of history a map's edge was an honest statement: nobody knew what lay past it. This quiz is about the people who went to find out, and the journeys they made, on foot, by camel, under sail, over ice and, at the very end, into orbit. Some were after trade routes, spices, gold or souls to convert; some were spies or envoys; some simply could not stop moving. What they share is that they came back, or in a few famous cases did not, with knowledge that redrew the map and, often, changed the balance of power in the world.

The questions run from the ancient world to the twentieth century and deliberately spread the net wide. A Greek from Marseille who sailed to the Arctic in 325 BC. A Han envoy who opened the Silk Road. Chinese monks who walked to India for scriptures and sailed home through typhoons. A Moroccan judge who out-travelled Marco Polo. Ming treasure fleets in the Indian Ocean a century before the Portuguese. Cossacks crossing Siberia in a single lifetime, Pundits pacing out Tibet in secret with prayer-wheel compasses, and women who went around the world in disguise or walked into Lhasa dressed as beggars.

It also covers the parts people picture first: the Portuguese creeping down the African coast toward the Cape; Columbus, Cabot and Cartier stumbling onto a continent that was not Asia; the long, deadly search for the Northwest Passage and the source of the Nile; Cook and Bougainville in the Pacific; and the polar age, when men hauled sledges to the ends of the Earth and not all of them came home. A few questions push past the planet altogether, to the first crew to round the Moon.

Exploration has an ugly side, and the quiz does not hide it. Many of these voyages were the sharp end of conquest, slaving and empire; 'discovery' usually meant arriving somewhere people already lived. Where an explorer's own record is one of cruelty or where the consequences for Indigenous peoples were catastrophic, the answer explanation says so plainly, rather than treating the whole business as an adventure story.

Each question describes a journey and the person behind it without naming them, and gives you four choices. The explanation then fills in the dates, the route, who came close before or after, what made the trip possible or fatal, and what it changed. Where a freely licensed picture exists of the ship, the landscape, the artefact or the setting, but not the explorer's face, it is shown with the question; where a picture would give the answer away, the question is left as text.

A voyages quiz sticks because each answer is a story with a shape: someone set out, something happened, and the known world was a little bigger afterward. Learn who first rounded the Cape, who was cast adrift in the bay that bears his name, who starved on the way back from the South Pole, and you are also learning how the map filled in, and at what cost. The wording is kept plain, and every claim has been checked against reliable sources.