geography

Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundson reaches the South Pole on 14 December 1911, making him the first person to set foot there.

Thomas Jefferson commissioned Lewis and Clark’s expedition to search for a Northwest Passage to Asia. The expedition to the Pacific resulted in detailed environmental reports about the American West.

The American diplomat and philologist George Perkins Marsh publishes Man and Nature.

The Persian scholar Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn al-Husayn ibn Ali al-Mas’udi (c. 896-956) is among the first to record the use of simple vertical-shaft windmills in Sistan, Persia.

Franklin makes his second expedition to the Canadian Arctic in the hope of finding a shorter sea route from Europe to Asia.

Briton James Cook is the first European to sight the Southwest Pacific region.