The travellers’ calendar
In August 1897, three Swedes whose balloon had come down were walking across the Arctic ice, as the Belgica sailed for the Antarctic
The Belgica is the ship in which Racoviță would winter in the Antarctic ice. We laid the journeys from 26 stories on this site on one calendar, from Pytheas to Voyager 1. Their travellers were rarely on the road at the same time: four times in more than 2,300 years, and only once with the day certain at both ends. These are those 52 days.
Scroll: the calendar moves forward, and every dot on the map advances at its own pace, between the dates in its story.
22 July – 7 October 1897
Fifty-two days
At seven in the evening on 22 July 1897, three Swedes set off on foot across the Arctic ice. Their balloon, the Örnen, had come down on the ice eight days earlier, 786 kilometres from the Pole. They hauled heavy sledges towards land while the ice beneath them carried them somewhere other than where they walked.
On 16 August, at the other end of the map, the Belgica left Antwerp for the Antarctic. Her naturalist, Emil Racoviță, would only come aboard at Punta Arenas, the last port of call.
From then until 7 October, the last day the Swedes' diaries date for certain, two parties of travellers from this site were on the road at the same time: 52 days, with firm dates at both ends. Nobody knew where the Swedes were. The last word from them had been a carrier pigeon on 13 July. It stayed the last until the summer of 1930.
They set off for the North Pole by balloon in 1897. Their film was developed in 1930 · A Romanian, a ship, and the first Antarctic winter: Racoviță and the Belgica (1897–1899)
around 325 BC
The first, alone
Let us wind the calendar back to the first traveller on this site. Pytheas sails from Massalia, today's Marseille, out into the ocean, towards Britain and a place he calls Thule. His book is lost; we know it from the quotations of people who did not believe him. No fragment gives a particular year.
That is why his dot has no pace: the page can rebuild only the order of the places, not the road between them. And after him the calendar stays empty for some seven hundred years. That does not mean nobody travelled. This map shows only the roads on this site, not the world's.
Pytheas: rebuilt from the quotations of people who doubted him
381–412
Two pilgrims, fifteen years apart
Egeria, a woman from the western edge of the Empire, reaches Jerusalem in 381 and writes to her friends at home. Her years come from a calculation by Pierre Devos, based on the date of Easter: she most likely climbed Sinai in December 383, and on 22 April 384 she was at Harran.
Fifteen years later, in 399, a monk sets out from China for India: Faxian. He comes home by sea, by way of Sri Lanka, around 412. They never met, not even on the calendar. Almost nine hundred more years will pass before one road on this site overlaps another.
Egeria: a woman's pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Sinai and Edessa, 381–384 · Chinese medieval explorers: seven journeys from China to India, Baghdad, Paris and Africa (399–1433)
844–950
From Seville to Sulina
In 844 a Scandinavian fleet sails down past the coast of Galicia and Lisbon and up the Guadalquivir to Seville. Ibn Idhari counts 42 days from arrival to departure. Between 858 and 861 other Vikings round Spain, winter in the Camargue and reach as far as Pisa.
Around the middle of the next century a Byzantine emperor, Constantine, describes the Rus convoy that comes down the Dnieper to Constantinople: over the rapids, then along the coast, past the Danube mouth at Sulina and probably Constanța. The page gives only the decade, not the year, so the dot on the map is a position we placed.
Where did the Vikings go? 120 sourced places in Europe, 793–1066
1030–1066
One man on the calendar
Harald is fifteen when he flees wounded from Stiklestad in 1030. He passes through Novgorod, goes down to Constantinople, fights for Byzantium in Sicily and escapes, probably in April 1042, over the chain that closed the harbour. He gets home, becomes king of Norway, and in 1066 sails for England and dies at Stamford Bridge on 25 September.
At least 16,000 kilometres in all. And for all that time, no one else is on this calendar.
1245–1255
The same camp, seven years apart
After the Mongol invasion of 1241, two Franciscans set out for the khan's court. Carpini leaves Lyon on 16 April 1245 and on 24 August 1246 witnesses Güyük's proclamation. Rubruck leaves Constantinople on 7 May 1253 and enters Karakorum on Palm Sunday, 5 April 1254.
Both pass through Batu's camp on the Volga: Carpini in 1246 and again on the way back in 1247; Rubruck in 1253 and again in 1254. The same place, a different decade. Rubruck measured his days in distances from home: almost every day, about as far as from Paris to Orléans.
Carpini and Rubruck: two friars at the Great Khan's court after the 1241 Mongol invasion (1245–1255) · Chinese medieval explorers: seven journeys from China to India, Baghdad, Paris and Africa (399–1433)
1275–1288
One going east, the other west
The first true overlap. Marco Polo sets out for China at the end of 1271 and reaches Kublai's court around 1275. Around then, a Christian monk leaves Beijing in the opposite direction: Rabban Bar Sauma, bound for Jerusalem. He never gets there, but he does reach Europe, sent by the Mongol ruler of Persia.
“In 1287, as Bar Sauma reached Rome, Marco Polo was in China, in the service of Kublai Khan.” On the map, Polo's dot stands still: 17 years in China. Most of a long journey is not walking, it is staying. Bar Sauma died in Baghdad in January 1294 and never saw his home city again. Polo was back in Venice in 1295.
Marco Polo never mentions the Great Wall. Was he really in China? · Chinese medieval explorers: seven journeys from China to India, Baghdad, Paris and Africa (399–1433)
1325–1330
Five years with two on the road
On 14 June 1325 Ibn Battuta leaves Tangier for Mecca. He is 21 and will be away for 24 years. That same year the Franciscan Odoric of Pordenone had been on the road for seven years, since leaving Padua in April 1318. Odoric comes home and dictates his account in Padua in May 1330.
Five years, then, with two travellers on the road at once: the calendar's second overlap. They never met, and we do not know where Odoric was in any given year: his page dates only the start and the end of his road. Ibn Battuta will pass 108,000 kilometres, measured on his page, about three times Marco Polo's road measured the same way. For 1328–1332 his page follows Ross Dunn's chronology; by the book's own dates the same journeys would fall two years later.
Ibn Battuta's travels mapped, 1325–1354 · Seven people who drew the world · Medieval explorers
c. 1419–1444 · 1261–1484
The road that ran through Moldavia
Some roads belong to no single person. The Genoese hold Caffa, on the Crimean coast, from 1275, and from there goods travel up to Lviv through Cetatea Albă, Chilia and Suceava. Along this road, in 1427, the Bavarian Johann Schiltberger comes home having escaped from captivity: through Chilia, Cetatea Albă, Suceava and Lviv.
That year someone else was on the road, far away: the Venetian Niccolò de’ Conti, who left for the East nobody knows exactly when and came home to Venice in 1444, after 25 years. It is the calendar’s third overlap, counted by the year, not the day. Around 1437, while Conti was still away, the Castilian Pero Tafur stood in Kaffa’s slave market.
Ibn Battuta had crossed the Black Sea from Sinop to Crimea around 1330–1332. On 4 November Nikitin reached the same city, at the end of his notes; the year, 1472, is a reconstruction. Three years later, in 1475, Caffa fell to the Ottomans, and Chilia and Cetatea Albă would fall in the summer of 1484.
Who paid for medieval Moldavia? The Genoese road (1261–1484) · Seven people who drew the world · Medieval explorers · Ibn Battuta's travels mapped, 1325–1354 · Nikitin in India, 1466–1472: the Tver merchant beyond three seas
1466–1472
A merchant without years
Afanasy Nikitin leaves Tver in the spring of 1466, is robbed at the mouth of the Volga and in the end reaches India, at Bidar. He writes down no year; he counts his Easters. Every year on his page is a reconstruction.
At Hormuz he passes where Polo had passed some two centuries earlier, and he lands at Chaul in 1469, 29 years before da Gama. Zheng He, the Chinese admiral who had led seven ocean expeditions between 1405 and 1433, had been off the sea for more than three decades. His dot on the map has no pace: the page does not date each expedition, so we cannot put him on the road in the same year as anyone else.
Nikitin in India, 1466–1472: the Tver merchant beyond three seas
1519–1522
The only one who comes back from the other side
On 10 August 1519 Magellan's fleet leaves Seville. Antonio Pigafetta writes down the whole voyage: the strait, the hunger in the Pacific, Magellan's death at Mactan on 27 April 1521. On 9 July 1522, at Cape Verde, the survivors discover they have lost a day.
On 8 September 1522 they are back in Seville. On this map his is the only dot that leaves by the left-hand edge and comes back in from the right.
Around the World with Pigafetta: the journal of the first circumnavigation, 1519–1522
1533 · 1697–1698
The same towns, 160 years apart
From 1533, with a commission from Henry VIII, John Leland travels England and Wales and notes his distances mile by mile. The order in which he went can no longer be rebuilt by anyone, so his dot does not move: it sits over the towns he described.
A century and a half later, in 1697 and 1698, Celia Fiennes passes through many of them: Canterbury, Dover, Sandwich, York. She does 184 miles in five days through Kent, and in 1698 above 1,551 miles, “many of them Long miles”, as she writes. Leland finds old Winchelsea fallen to ruin; at Sandwich she finds a town falling apart.
John Leland: Henry VIII's unfinished commission · Celia Fiennes: 1,551 miles across England, 1698
1659–1678
One came to Moldavia, the other had left it
In December 1659 Evliya Çelebi reaches Iași; the letter that brings him is dated 4 December. He stays forty days, passes through Wallachia and Transylvania, is at the siege of Oradea in the summer of 1660 and writes down numbers that he himself sometimes marks as hearsay.
Sixteen years later a Moldavian born around 1636 near Vaslui, Nicolae Milescu, leaves Moscow for China on 4 March 1675. He crosses Siberia and enters Beijing on 15 May 1676. His dates come from Russian documents, in the Julian calendar, ten days behind the one used in Catholic Europe.
Evliya Çelebi in Moldavia, Wallachia and Transylvania (1659–1661): what he counted and where he exaggerated · Nicolae Milescu (Spathari) in China: the Russian embassy to the Kangxi Emperor, 1675–1678
1792–1826
Two on one meridian, two looking west
In 1792 two astronomers set out to measure the meridian between Dunkirk and Barcelona, tower by tower, to create the metre: Delambre from the north, Méchain from the south. Méchain finds a number that will not fit and hides it. He dies on the road, at Castellón, on 20 September 1804.
Then come two guests from the east. Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, the Persian envoy, lands at Plymouth at the end of November 1809 and stays in London until the summer of 1810. Between 1824 and 1826 the boyar Dinicu Golescu sees lamps lit all night in Vienna and peasants reading newspapers in Switzerland. None of them overlaps another on the calendar.
He hid a number that would not fit · A Persian in London, 1809-10 — the diary of Mirza Abul Hassan Khan · Dinicu Golescu's European travels, 1824–1826: what a Wallachian boyar saw and what he wrote about home
1897–1899, then 1930
The winter at the other end
The Swedes die on the island of Kvitøya, most probably in October 1897; the day is not known for any of them. The Belgica sails on. In March 1898 she is caught in the pack ice of the Bellingshausen Sea: thirteen months of drift, a polar night and the first wintering in the Antarctic region.
On 5 November 1899 the Belgica enters Antwerp, bringing 1,200 zoological and 400 botanical samples. The Swedes' camp, their diaries and their film would be found by Norwegian sealers only in the summer of 1930.
A Romanian, a ship, and the first Antarctic winter: Racoviță and the Belgica (1897–1899) · They set off for the North Pole by balloon in 1897. Their film was developed in 1930
1965 · 1977
The day the calendar stopped being empty
In the autumn of 1965 the brig Mircea is towed from Constanța towards Hamburg and rides out the storm in the Bay of Biscay between 25 and 28 November. A voyage dated day by day, but alone on the calendar.
On 5 September 1977 Voyager 1 is launched. It is not on the map: it is far beyond it. But ever since, our calendar has not had a single day without someone on the road. On board flies a greeting in Romanian, on the golden record.
How did the Mircea survive the Biscay storm? · The farthest thing people have ever made is a day away, even for light
August 2013 – June 2014
The year the roads crowd together
In August 2013 three storks carrying transmitters set off for Africa: one from Russia, one from Poland and one from Germany. The Polish stork crosses Romania day by day: over the Mureș on 24 August, near Brașov on the 25th, near Oltenița on the 26th. On the 28th it crosses the Bosphorus. The Russian stork passes through Dobruja, south of Tulcea, on 31 August, and gets as far as Johannesburg.
That same autumn, painted lady butterflies cross the Atlantic: at least 4,200 kilometres in five to eight days. Three were caught alive in French Guiana on 28 October 2013. No stork from a Romanian nest has yet carried a transmitter, so the exact road of our storks is still to be measured.
The storks that leave: how Romania's storks reach Africa · A five-centimetre butterfly. A migration of up to 15,000 kilometres. No generation sees the whole journey.
The whole calendar
Now you move the calendar. The empty years are folded away so you do not scroll through centuries with no one in them; every dot moves between the dates on its page and stands still where the page says its traveller stayed.