Discovery depends on who is doing the looking
COLUMBUS did not discover America. He arrived in 1492 at islands that already held millions of people, went to his grave insisting he had reached the edge of Asia, and never set foot on the North American mainland. What he did do was open a permanent route between two halves of the world that had been separated for ten thousand years, which changed both beyond recognition.
It is also only honest to say what followed. Columbus governed Hispaniola so brutally that the Spanish crown arrested him and shipped him home in chains in 1500. CORTES and PIZARRO led the conquests of the Aztec and Inca empires. Henry Morton STANLEY's expeditions in the Congo laid groundwork for one of the worst colonial regimes in history. They are on this list because they changed the map, which is a different claim from deserving a statue.
Two continents named after a mapmaker's guess
Amerigo VESPUCCI made a smaller contribution than Columbus and got both continents named after him, because of one German mapmaker. In 1507 Martin Waldseemüller produced a world map, read Vespucci's published letters arguing that this was a new landmass rather than Asia, decided he deserved the credit, and wrote America across the southern part.
A thousand copies went out across Europe. Waldseemüller changed his mind within a few years and dropped the name from later maps, but it was too late — other cartographers had copied it and it had already stuck. One man's editorial decision, made in a printing workshop in Lorraine, is the reason for the name on two continents.
Magellan did not sail round the world
The first circumnavigation is credited to MAGELLAN, who did not complete it. He was killed in April 1521 in a skirmish on Mactan in the Philippines, roughly halfway, having talked his way into a local war that was not his to fight.
The voyage was finished by Juan Sebastián Elcano, who brought one ship and eighteen men back to Spain in September 1522 out of five ships and about 270 who had left three years earlier. They also came home a day out — the first people to discover by accident that circling the globe westwards costs you a calendar day, which nobody had thought about before.
The most famous expedition failed completely
SHACKLETON set out in 1914 to cross Antarctica on foot. The Endurance was trapped in pack ice before the expedition even landed, drifted for ten months, and was crushed. The continent was never crossed and not a single one of the stated objectives was met.
He then got all twenty-eight men home alive — camping on floes, sailing a modified lifeboat 800 miles across the Southern Ocean, and crossing the mountains of South Georgia to a whaling station. The wreck was found on the seabed in 2022, remarkably intact. It is the expedition everyone remembers, and the reason is the rescue rather than the plan. Elsewhere in the grid: AMUNDSEN reaching the South Pole and SCOTT dying on the way back, HILLARY on Everest, LEWIS and CLARK crossing a continent, COOK, DRAKE, CABOT, CARTIER, TASMAN, BERING, FROBISHER, HUDSON, BALBOA, DIAS, MARCOPOLO, and Leif ERIKSON, who reached North America about five centuries before Columbus and is covered on our Vikings page.