Before steam and sextants, before borders were inked straight, the world was rumor and horizon. These are the sailors who turned rumor into route. They chased the sun into cold seas and warm monsoons, bent wood and will against uncharted water, and sketched coastlines that would redraw empires. From the fog of Thule to the cloves of Malacca, from Greenland’s ice to the Cape’s black storms, they didn’t just find new places—they changed how we see the whole. Meet the six who sailed first and furthest, telling their stories in their own salt-bright voices: Pytheas of Massalia , who followed the summer sun toward the edge of night and named a northern world—tides, amber, and the myth of Thule made real. - Leif Erikson , the lucky son of Greenland, who beached his longship among wild grapes and salmon runs and called the land Vinland. - Marco Polo , the Venetian wayfarer whose road of courts and caravans showed Europe a continent of paper money, porcelain, and power. - Ibn Battuta , the jurist on pilgrimage whose wandering became a world—caravan to junk, desert to delta, the Rihla that braided an age together. - Zheng He , the admiral of ten thousand oars, who stitched the Indian Ocean with ritual and reach—giraffes on the quay, charts like star-stitched ribbons. - Bartolomeu Dias , the hard pilot who found the weather road in the open Atlantic and shouldered past the Cape of Storms into hope. In Tales of Legends: Six Explorers Who Changed the World’s Map , six first-person narratives plunge you into the wind and reckoning of discovery. Feel the creak of frames in polar swell, the hush of a starlit landfall, the tight math of water casks and monsoon hours. Watch hearsay become coastline, caravan talk become coordinates, and sailors become signals by which later ages steered. This is not a museum of dates and latitudes—this is the ocean told by those who crossed it. History remembers their routes. This book remembers their voices.