This chapter focuses on the term 'exploration' for the identification, investigation and recording of practical routes. The story of exploration in the fifteenth century is very largely of the crossing of the Atlantic with routes that linked its shores and led to other oceans. This story should be understood against the background of the internal exploration of Latin Christendom in the late Middle Ages. The discovery of new sources of gold and slaves meant that the direct economic effects of west African exploration were potentially revolutionary. Exploration was a means whereby the civilisation of Latin Christendom established access to and, in the longer run, command of a disproportionate share of the resources of the world. Explorers made a major contribution to the reversal of fortunes on a global scale. Previous civilisations derived their images of the world from dogmas of cosmology, from inductive reasoning, from revelation, from inherited tradition or from the elaboration of theory.