Student Question
What skills would explorers like Vasco da Gama need for their jobs?
Quick answer:
Explorers like Vasco da Gama required skills in cartography to interpret and create maps, crucial for navigation and documenting new lands. They also needed strong management abilities to lead large crews, manage limited resources, and maintain morale to prevent mutinies. Additionally, explorers needed excellent observational, writing, and speaking skills to accurately record and communicate their discoveries, such as new plants and animals, to their sponsors and the scientific community back home.
Explorers such as Vasco da Gama needed to be extremely skillful to do their jobs well. Here are a few necessary skills they should have:
- First, they had to be skilled cartographers, or mapmakers. They had to be able to read and interpret existent maps, as well as construct new ones for the lands they explored.
- Second, they needed exemplary management skills. Most expeditions involved a large crew, limited supplies, and no assurances about how long the journey would take or how difficult it would be. Explorers needed to conserve their resources, but also keep their crew alive and prevent them from mutinying (as many crews did, including Henry Hudson's).
- Third, explorers needed strong observational, writing, and speaking skills. Explorers observed phenomena (plants, animals, etc.) which no one from their part of the world had ever observed before. It was important that they could accurately record and describe these observations to people back home. Lewis and Clark, for example, included many scientific observations and sketches in their expedition journal when they explored the Louisiana Territory.
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