Captain James Cook's third voyage ran from Plymouth Sound by way of Table Bay, Queen Charlotte Sound and Christmas Island to the Hawaiian Islands, where he first landed at Waimea on Kauai and later died at Kealakekua Bay.
The route follows the ships across seven stops: the Cape, a New Zealand anchorage, a coral atoll, and the two Hawaiian landfalls that ended the voyage for its commander. Positions for the bays and the atoll are approximate.
Pole to Pole with Michael Palin is a 1992 BBC series that follows the 30-degree east line of longitude from the North Pole to the South Pole, through Spitsbergen, Chernobyl, Istanbul, Wadi Halfa, the Ngorongoro Crater, Lake Tanganyika and Victoria Falls.
The route picks eight stops from the eight episodes, in order, ending at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. Several are named only as towns or regions in the series summary, so those pins are approximate.
Long Way Down follows Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman's 2007 motorbike ride from John o' Groats in Scotland through Silverstone, Tunisia and the pyramids of Giza to Cape Agulhas and Cape Town.
The route picks five stops along the 12 May to 4 August 2007 journey, from the Scottish start to the southernmost tip of Africa. Pins at Tunisia and Giza are approximate.
Nelson Mandela's life runs from a Mbashe River village to the lawns of the Union Buildings in Pretoria, with stops at Fort Hare, Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia, Robben Island and Victor Verster Prison along the way.
The route follows him from his birth in Mvezo on 18 July 1918 through student days, underground work, years in prison and his inauguration as South Africa's first democratically elected president on 10 May 1994. Most stops can be visited; the pins at Mvezo and Qunu mark the villages, not a single building.
Jules Verne's novel sends Dr. Samuel Ferguson across Africa in a balloon filled with hydrogen, from Zanzibar past Lake Victoria, Lake Chad and Timbuktu to the Senegal River and Saint-Louis.
The route follows seven places from the book in order, from the departure port to the Nile source, the desert crossing and the falls of Gouina where the Victoria is lost. Verne's Africa is a nineteenth-century view, and the novel's pins are broad: most marks are areas, not exact spots.
Out of Africa was filmed around Nairobi and the Ngong Hills in Kenya, with the Danish scenes shot at Castle Rising in Norfolk, England. Sydney Pollack's 1985 film, based on Karen Blixen's memoir, uses the Muthaiga Country Club, the coffee farm that is now the Karen Blixen Museum and the Chyulu Hills standing in for the Ngong Hills.
This route follows Blixen's years in Kenya and the places the film made famous: the railway museum whose locomotive pulls the opening train, the club where Farah is turned away, the farm at the foot of the Ngong Hills, the Norfolk castle that plays Denmark, Voi Airport where Denys Finch Hatton's plane went down, and the obelisk grave on the hillside above Nairobi.
Outer Banks is set on the fictional Kildare Island in North Carolina, but the first season was filmed around Charleston, South Carolina: Shem Creek, Lowndes Grove, Hunting Island and Secessionville stand in for the Cut, Figure Eight and the Pogues' harbor.
This route follows Season 1 from John B's Chateau and the Boneyard brawl to Tannyhill, the Redfield Lighthouse, Kiara's restaurant and the church bell tower where the story turns. Most stops are public waterfront, park or restaurant; the two houses are not open as regular attractions.
Every Far Cry game drops you into a country that does not exist, and almost every one was built from a real place. The developers camped on the savanna, sent a team to Nepal, spent two weeks in Montana and a month in Cuba.
This route follows the series in release order, one stop per game. Pins mark whole countries or regions, not scenes: they show where each fictional setting came from, and one entry has no sourced real model.
In the summer of 1935 the young Laurie Lee left London for Spain with a violin and a single Spanish phrase. For a year he walked and played his way from Galicia to the Andalusian coast, sleeping under the open sky or in cheap posadas, welcomed even by the poorest villagers.
The route follows his memoir from Vigo through Zamora, Toledo, Tarifa and Málaga to Almuñécar, where he was rescued by a British destroyer as the Spanish Civil War began. Pins mark towns, not the roads he actually walked.
Michael Palin's Around the World in 80 Days (BBC, 1988) followed Phileas Fogg with no aircraft, from London's Reform Club to Venice, the Pyramids, Dubai, Hong Kong and Aspen. It ran from 25 September to 12 December and ended at a locked door in Pall Mall.
The route follows nine moments from his own day-by-day captions and diary excerpts: Venice, the Pyramids, a dhow from Dubai to Bombay, Hong Kong, a train to Shanghai, the Pacific, an Aspen balloon and a locked door in Pall Mall. Pins mark cities and landmarks; the real line of travel ran between them.
Amelia Earhart's last flight, 1937: from Oakland and Pearl Harbor to Miami, Lae in New Guinea and Howland Island, which she never reached, and on to Nikumaroro, where one theory says she came down. A crash in Hawaii and a lost radio signal made it one of history's great mysteries.
The route follows both attempts, from Oakland and Pearl Harbor to Miami, Lae and Howland Island, and ends at Nikumaroro, where one theory says she and her navigator came down. That final stop is only a hypothesis.
In 1857 two British officers set out from Zanzibar to find the Great Lakes rumoured to lie in the centre of the continent and, they hoped, the source of the Nile. They found two lakes, and then fell out over what they had found.
The route runs from a failed Somali expedition through Zanzibar, Kazeh and Ujiji to Lake Victoria, then on to Speke's Ripon Falls and the Bath debate that never happened. All pins are approximate, as the sources name regions and towns rather than exact spots.
In July 1497 four ships left Lisbon to find a sea route to India. Vasco da Gama's fleet crossed the open South Atlantic, rounded the Cape, worked its way up the African coast, and reached Calicut on 20 May 1498. The voyage ended with two ships and over half the men lost.
The route follows the voyage from the Restelo shore in Lisbon to Calicut, then home via Anjediva and the Azores. Landing sites are mostly debated or only broadly known, so most pins are approximate. Dates are as the sources give them, in the Julian calendar then in use.
Between 1405 and 1433 the Ming court sent a fleet from Nanjing across the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean, seven times, under the admiral Zheng He. It came home with ambassadors and exotic animals.
This route follows the sequence from the shipyard in Nanjing through Java, Malacca, Ceylon, Calicut and Hormuz to Malindi in East Africa, and ends at his empty tomb. Most ports are approximate pins, and later temple traditions are marked as such.
In 1960 the novelist John Steinbeck fitted a pickup truck with a camper shell, named it Rocinante and set out from Long Island with his poodle, Charley. He wanted to see his country because he made his living writing about it, and his main question was what Americans are like today.
This route follows eight stops of the outer loop, from Sag Harbor through Maine, Niagara Falls and Minnesota to Montana, Yellowstone and Steinbeck's native Salinas Valley, then down to New Orleans. The book is a novelist's account: it has been challenged as partly fictionalised, so read the encounters as stories and the places as real.
On 10 November 1871, on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, the journalist Henry M. Stanley took off his hat in front of a crowd and said, as he tells it in his own book, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" The explorer many thought dead had been found, after nearly eight months on the road from the coast.
The route follows Stanley's account, How I Found Livingstone, over eight stops: from Zanzibar and Bagamoyo through Mpwapwa, Tabora and the Malagarasi to Ujiji, then up the lake to Mugere and back to the parting at Tabora. Stanley's camps are rarely identifiable today, so every pin is approximate.
In 1910 two expeditions set out for the bottom of the world. Roald Amundsen's Norwegians, masters of skis and sled dogs, reached the South Pole on 14 December 1911. Robert Falcon Scott's party arrived on 17 January 1912, 34 days later, to find a Norwegian tent already standing. Amundsen sent his news from Hobart; Scott's party of five died on the return journey.
The route follows both men from Cardiff and Madeira to their bases, up their two glaciers, to the Pole and to the endings: Amundsen's cables from Hobart and Scott's last camp. Antarctic pins mark glaciers and bays, not camps, and the ice has moved since.
Santiago, a shepherd boy from Andalusia, keeps dreaming of treasure at the Egyptian pyramids. A fortune-teller and a mysterious old king send him across the strait to Africa, where he is robbed in Tangier, falls in love at an oasis and crosses a desert of warring tribes. Paulo Coelho's 1988 fable has sold more than 150 million copies.
The route follows the boy from a ruined church to the Giza plateau and back again. The book keeps its geography loose, so most pins mark the best-known place for a scene rather than a spot the author names.
Battlefield 1 sends its soldiers across the Western Front, the Italian Front, Gallipoli and Arabia. This route follows the War Stories and multiplayer maps that go with them, from the Suez Canal in 1915 to Monte Grappa in October 1918.
Stops run in the order of the real battles, not the game's menu. The maps are the game's own reconstructions, so each pin marks the real ground behind a level, and one stop is a village the game invented.
On 20 September 1519 five ships and about 270 men sailed from Spain to find a western sea road to the Spice Islands. Magellan died in the Philippines, but Juan Sebastián Elcano brought the Victoria home three years later with eighteen survivors and 26 tons of spices, having sailed all the way around the world.
The route follows the voyage from the mouth of the Guadalquivir past Port St. Julian, through the strait and across the Pacific to the Moluccas, then home past the Cape of Good Hope. Anchorages are often unrecorded, so most pins mark the nearest known place; the dates come from Pigafetta's journal and modern accounts.
The Hound of the Baskervilles takes Sherlock Holmes across Dartmoor: Cabell's tomb at Buckfastleigh, the ten-thirty train from Paddington, Princetown's prison and Hound Tor. A spectral hound stalks the moor.
The route runs from the grave that may have inspired the legend and the ten-thirty train from Paddington to the convict prison at Princetown, the mire, the tors and the Stapletons' house. Baskerville Hall and Merripit House exist only in the book, so their pins mark a stand-in or nothing at all.
In 1581 the African slave Diogo comes to Kyoto with a Jesuit delegation and is handed to the warlord Oda Nobunaga, who renames him Yasuke and makes him a samurai. That year Nobunaga's army crushes the ninja province of Iga, where the young shinobi Naoe loses her father and inherits his Hidden Blade.
From there the two hunt the same conspiracy across Kansai: the port of Sakai, the temple at Honnō-ji where Nobunaga dies, a kofun in Settsu, the castle of Shōryūji at Yamazaki, the shrines of Yamato, and the Templar recruiting ground of Kii. Most stops are real castles, temples and tombs that the game rebuilds.
Troy has fallen. Aeneas, a Trojan prince, carries his old father out of the burning city and sets sail with the survivors to find the new homeland the gods have promised them. Virgil's Aeneid, written for Augustus in the 20s BC, follows years of wrong turns, storms and prophecies until the exiles land in Italy, where their descendants will one day found Rome.
This route follows the voyage in the order it happens, which is not the order Virgil tells it: the poem opens in Carthage and lets Aeneas recount the earlier wanderings to Queen Dido. Every stop is a real ancient site, most now open as archaeological parks; Aeneas himself belongs to legend. Quotations are from John Dryden's 1697 translation.
In August 1914 France expels its German residents, and Karl is torn from his French wife Marie and their baby on a farm near Saint-Mihiel and drafted into the German army. Marie's father Emile is called up on the other side. Ubisoft Montpellier's hand-drawn 2014 game, made for the war's centenary, follows them, an American volunteer called Freddie, a Belgian nurse, Anna, and Walt the medic dog across four years of the Western Front.
The heroes are invented, but the battles are not, and every chapter is full of real objects and short historical notes. This route visits the places the story passes through, from the Marne in 1914 to the Chemin des Dames in 1917. Most are now memorials, museums or preserved battlefields.
