Explorers & Voyages Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which merchant from the town of Tver made a trading journey between 1468 and 1474 down the Volga, across Persia and by sea to India, where he spent three years, writing one of the first European accounts of the country a generation before the Portuguese arrived by sea?

Question 2

Which Norse outlaw, banished from Iceland for killing his neighbours around 982, sailed west to explore a known but unsettled land, spent three years scouting its fjords, and then gave it a deliberately appealing name to lure colonists?

Question 3

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?

Question 4

Which Royal Navy navigator was the first to sail right around the continent he then urged the world to call 'Australia', charting almost its entire coastline between 1801 and 1803 with his cat aboard, only to be jailed for years by the French on Mauritius on his way home?

Question 5

Which Scottish-born surveyor, on his sixth attempt in 1862, became the first to cross Australia from south to north and return alive, mapping a route close to today's overland telegraph line and railway, though he arrived back nearly blind and broken in health?

Question 6

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 7

Who commanded seven huge Chinese fleet expeditions between 1405 and 1433, sailing hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of men across the Indian Ocean to Arabia and the coast of East Africa, and bringing envoys and a live giraffe back to the emperor?

📚 All Quizzes

Browse every category and see the full list of quizzes on BriskQuiz

→

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.