A retired sake brewer set out on foot to measure Japan. Over ten surveys starting in 1800 Inō Tadataka and his team paced the coasts and paths of the country, and maps based on his work were still in use in 1924.
The route follows his life in places: the brewer's house at Sawara, the shrine where he prayed before the first survey, Mount Hakodate and the far end of that journey in Hokkaido, Nihonbashi, his grave and the shrine that honours him. The surveys were separate expeditions, so the stops are not one connected walk.
In the early 1900s a Russian army surveyor, Vladimir Arsenyev, mapped the wild Ussuri taiga with the help of Dersu Uzala, an indigenous hunter who read the forest better than any map. Arsenyev's memoir became a classic, and Akira Kurosawa turned it into an Oscar-winning film in 1975.
The route follows the story from Vladivostok to Lake Khanka and the Sikhote-Alin, then to Khabarovsk, Dersu's lost grave and the film's shooting base. Pins mark regions and towns, not exact campsites.
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 December 1831 a 22-year-old Cambridge graduate with a passion for beetles and rocks sailed from Plymouth as an unpaid naturalist on HMS Beagle, a ten-gun survey brig. The voyage was meant to take two years and took five. Charles Darwin came home with crates of fossils, skins and notebooks — and with questions about the islands that would lead him, two decades later, to On the Origin of Species.
The route follows the ship around the world in order, using Darwin's own Journal of Researches for dates and details: the volcanic Cape Verde islands, the Brazilian forest, the fossil beds of Argentina, Tierra del Fuego, a great Chilean earthquake, the Galápagos, Cape Town and home to Falmouth.
