Human exploration.
Humans just can’t help it, we love to explore. If we stumble on a cave, we just have to find out what’s in it. A mountain… well, we just have to climb it. There might be something at the top , and we won’t know unless we climb it. Early European explorers like Marco Polo just had to explore Asia and find out what was there. Portuguese explorers had to explore Africa and another way round it to get to the East to find spices, and in the process found the Cape of Good Hope, which led to South Africa, and then the Dutch settlers of the Cape had to explore inland, which led to founding of Transvaal, Natal, the whole of South Africa, which led to findinding the fierce Zulu tribe, and diamonds, and gold, which led to the British exploring the entire Southern African sub continent and founding Northern and Southern Rhodesia, Victoria Falls, it just goes on and on. All the Indian Ocean islands were discovered by the European maritime explorers. And then, those explorers decided to try and find a quicker, shorter way to the eastern Spice Islands and India and sailed west, and instead found the new world, North, Central and South America. And that opened up a whole lot of new discoveries and possibilities. New lands, new cultures, riches, escape from persecution. Of course, just finding a new continent wasn’t enough, then we had to explore that continent by going west. The frontier attracted almost every young man with dreams of finding gold, or their own land, or just the excitement of finding something new. Just sailing west wasn’t enough, explorers had to find a quicker, shorter way west, and so the Panama Canal was built. To build it took many explorations along the coast, hikes through dense forests, clashes with hostile tribes. All the excitement that exploring brings. Like I said, it’s in our blood.
