In 1497, Vasco da Gama, a young Portuguese sea captain, was summoned to the court of King Manuel I. The king informed him that, as one of the most notable navigators of his day, he had been chosen to lead an expedition in an attempt to find a sea route from Portugal to the Indies, round the southern tip of …

As early as 1897, the first attempt was made to reach the North Pole by aircraft, when a Swedish explorer and three other set off in a balloon had crashed. By then the North Pole had been crossed by a three-engined Fokker monoplane, the Josephine Ford. It carried Lt. Commander (later Rear-Admiral) R.E. Byrd with Floyd Bennett as pilot. The …

Men began to explore the Arctic as early as 1553, but it was not until 6 April 1909 that the Pole itself was reached. Three and a half centuries of effort and courage ended with an American, Robert E. Peary ‘nailing the Stars and Stripes to the North Pole’. The quest for the South Pole began much later, the first …

The year was 1919. On 14 and 15 June the first non-stop trans-Atlantic flight was made by John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown. Alcock was the pilot, Whitten Brown the navigator. Their aircraft was an adapted Vickers Vimy bomber fitted with two Rolls-Royce Eagle VIII engines. They took off from St John’s, Newfoundland, and landed, sixteen hours, twenty-seven minutes later, …

Even by the 1830s, central Australia was still a great mystery. Several people had tried to explore the interior but had been defeated by desert, lack of water and hostile natives. One of these was Edward Eyre, who had failed twice. His third attempt also seemed hopeless but finally, after an appalling journey of 2,000 km, Eyre and Wylie, his …

In 1803 the United States purchased from France a huge area known as Louisiana which gave the U.S. twice as much territory as it had previously owned. Much of it was unexplored, however, and President Jefferson ordered Captain Meriwether Lewis and Lieutenant William Clark to explore this ‘wild’ western area as thoroughly as possible. They set off up the Missouri …

In December 1831, HMS Beagle was sent by the British Government on a surveying expedition. Attached to this mission as naturalist was a young man, Charles Darwin. Born in Shrewsbury in 1809, he had disappointed his father by refusing to become a doctor or a clergyman. It was feared he would be a failure in life but he became interested …

With the discovery of the New World, Spain and Portugal became great rivals. Before this rivalry led to war, Pope Alexander VI divided the world, in 1494, into two parts by drawing a line from the south of Greenland to the mouth of the Amazon. All lands to the west of this line belonged to Spain, all to the east …

The first French explorer in the New World was Jacques Cartier. On 20 April 1534 he sailed westwards with two ships, seeking a short route to the Indies. Having reached Newfoundland, he waited until the winter ice had cleared, and then sailed through a strait and explored a great bay, claiming the territory in the name of France. On a …

Monkombu Sambasivan Swaminathan (born 7 August 1925) is an Indian agricultural scientist. He currently serves as a Member of Parliament from Rajya Sabha and is also member of the National Advisory Council. Swaminathan is known as the “Father of the Green Revolution in India”, for his leadership and success in introducing and further developing high-yielding varieties of wheat in India. …