Rulers of Exploration

12" Wooden Ruler made U.S.A. of American-grown basswood. Humans have always traveled to unfamiliar places just because they wanted to learn more about them. We are a curious species! This ruler highlights some of the people who did just that and came back having learned a lot. Our first entry, Scylax of Caryanda (6th century BC) was a Greek sea-captain and Hanno the Navigator (c.500 BC) was Carthaginian. The exact location of the place called “Vinland”, explored by Leif Ericsson (c.970-1020), is unknown, but it was probably the area surrounding the Gulf of Saint Lawrence in what is now eastern Canada. Genoese Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) is known for having explored America, but it was after a different explorer, the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512), that the continent was named. Female explorers include Mary Kingsley (1862-1900), who first traveled to West Africa in 1893, and Alexandra David-Néel (1869-1968), who traveled to Lhasa, Tibet, in 1924, when it was forbidden to