Is There Anybody Out There? Trivia Quiz

Answer: Carthage

Hanno the Navigator led a fleet of 60 Carthaginian ships through the Straits of Gibraltar and down the coast of northwest Africa. Hanno famously encountered a tribe of "hirsute and savage people" whom he called 'Gorillai'. More than 2,000 years later, when Europeans first came across gorillas, it was thought that they were the same tribe described by Hanno, and thus were mankind's close relatives named.

Answer: 4th century B.C.

Alexander III of Macedon was born into the Argead dynasty in 356 B.C. in Pella, the ancient capital of the kingdom of Macedon. The "Archaeological Museum of Pella" can be visited today in the modern village of the same name in northern Greece.

A student of the philosopher Aristotle in his youth, Alexander succeeded to the throne at the age of twenty following the assassination of his father, King Philip II. Two years later he began a military campaign that would see him rule an empire stretching from the Adriatic Sea to the Indus River.

Amazing for a man who achieved so much, Alexander died aged just 32, in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar II in Babylon in June 323 B.C.

Answer: Greenland

Exiled from Norway for committing manslaughter, Erik's father took his family with him to Iceland, where they settled on the island's northwesternmost peninsular, Hornstrandir. When he was 32, Erik himself was involved in some illegal activity and he was banished from the island for three years.

More than a century before Erik travelled to Greenland, Norwegian explorer Gunnbjörn Ulfsson had seen the coastline and outlying islands on his way to becoming the first European to sight North America. Other unsuccessful attempts to colonize Greenland were made in the ensuing years. Erik spent his three years in exile exploring the southwest coast of Greenland and eventually founded the first permanent European settlement on the world's largest island.

Icelandic-born Leif Ericson, reputedly the first European explorer to land in North America, was Erik the Red's son.

Answer: Genoa

Marco Polo was born in Venice in 1254. Merchants Niccolò and Maffeo Polo travelled throughout Asia during the 1260s and first met Kublai Khan at the end of that decade. When they again left Venice for the East in 1271, they took Marco with them on a trip that was to last 24 years.

The Polos returned to a very different Venice in 1295: their home city state was at war with the Genovese. Marco found himself a galley and quickly joined the war on behalf of his native city, but he was soon captured and found himself in prison in Genoa. As luck would have it, from 1298 until his release the following year Polo shared a cell with Rustichello da Pisa, a writer of romance novels from nearby Pisa. Polo dictated the story of his epic journey to the East and between the two of them they produced "The Travels of Marco Polo", published around 1300.

Upon his release, Marco immediately returned to Venice, where he married, had three children and became a wealthy merchant. He financed numerous subsequent trips to the East but he never personally left Venice again. He died aged 69 in 1324.

Answer: Ferdinand Magellan

Born in 1480 in the municipality of Sabrosa in northern Portugal, Ferdinand Magellan led the Spanish expedition that became the first to circumnavigate the globe. The fleet, which consisted of five ships led by Magellan's caravel "Trinidad", departed from Seville in August 1519 heading for the East Indies. Only the "Victoria" returned almost exactly three years later, with 18 crew members from the original complement of 250. Magellan himself had been killed in April 1521 in the Philippines.

Of the alternatives, Bartolomeu Dias was born in the Algarve, Portugal in 1450; Christopher Colombus was from Genoa, Italy was born between 1450 and 1451; and Amerigo Vespucci was born in Florence, Italy in 1454.

Answer: Rio de la Plata

The estuary of the Río de la Plata (meaning "River of Silver" and called River Plate in English) is a 180-mile long funnel-shaped indentation in the coastline of southeastern South America. Formed from the confluence of the River Uruguay and the River Parana, Rio de la Plata is little more than a mile across at its narrowest point but widens so that it is some 140 miles from the north shore to the south at its mouth. Two national capitals face each other across the wide expanse, with Buenos Aires, the Argentine capital, on the sothwestern shore and the Uruguayan capital, Montevideo, on the north.

Answer: Vasco da Gama

Born sometime around 1460 in the historical region of Alentejo in southern Portugal, Vasco da Gama's discovery began the age of global imperialism as Portugal established an Asian empire than would last for many centuries. It would be the best part of a hundred years before France, The Netherlands and Britain broke Portugal's dominance of the Cape of Good Hope route to Asia and began to form their own empires in that part of the world.

Just months before his death in December 1524 (in Kochi, now Cochin, a port on India's southwest coast), da Gama was created Viceroy of India and given the title 1st Count of Vidigueira.

Answer: Australia and New Guinea

Born sometime around 1565 in the province of Galicia in the extreme northwest of Spain, Luís Vaz de Torres circumnavigated the island of New Guinea in 1606. Along the south side of the island, the expedition passed through the 100-mile strait that separates New Guinea from Australia and which now bears Torres' name.

Torres claimed the island of New Guinea for the Spanish crown, whilst also proving that is was not part of the recently-discovered continent of Australia.

Answer: Meriwether & William

Meriwether Lewis was born in 1774 in the unincorporated community of Ivy in central Virginia. William Clark was born in 1770 in Caroline County, on the eastern edge of the same state. Today, their names are synonymous with the expedition commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson to explore the new American territory gained by the Louisiana Purchase.

Of the alternatives, Charles & Hamilton are the first names of Sturt & Hume, who explored southeastern Australia in the 1820s; Robert O'Hara Burke and William John Wills led an ill-fated North-South expedition in Australia in the 1860s; and David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley are famous as explorers in Africa.

Answer: Denmark

Vitus is a relatively multinational name: Saint Vitus is an Italian saint who is patron of actors, comedians, dancers and epileptics. The patron saint of towns in Italy, Netherlands and Belgium, he is also the patron saint of Bohemia: the magnificent "Metropolitan Cathedral of Saints Vitus, Wenceslaus and Adalbert" in Prague is usually known simply as Saint Vitus Cathedral.

Saint Vitus is also the name of an (extremely) strong drink, a German bitters. Weihenstephaner Vitus is a German beer that originated at a Benedictine monastery in Bavaria. Vitus is also the name of a well-known French bicycle manufacturing company.

The explorer Vitus Jonassen Bering was born in 1681 in the city of Horsens, located on the east coast of the Jutland peninsular in Denmark. Bering became a seaman at the age of 18 and, in 1704, enrolled in Peter the Great's rapidly-expanding Russian Navy. In 1725, he led an expedition to map the 780-mile long Kamchatka Peninsula in the far eastern extremes of Russia. The rest, as they say, is history. Bering died at the age of 60, in 1741, on the island that today bears his name, the largest and westernmost of the Commander Islands in the Bering Sea.