The impulse to seek out new worlds is universal to humanity. In a truly inclusive account of exploration, historian Matthew Lockwood interweaves stories of famous figures—including Sacagawea, Pocahontas and Dr Livingstone—with tales of individuals who are usually denied the title “explorer”. Lockwood’s new cast of adventurers includes Rabban Bar Sawma, a Uighur monk who traversed the Middle East and Europe; Yatsuke, an East African traveller to Japan during the sixteenth century; and David Dorr, a man born in slavery whose travelogues reshaped Americans’ understanding of Africa.

In lives filled with imagination and wonder, curiosity, connection and exchange, these figures unfurl a human tapestry of discovery. Spanning forty centuries and six continents, this thrilling and concise history redefines what it means to discover, who counts as an explorer and what counts as exploration.