Cannibalism as practiced by the inhabitants of the New World, in a popular engraving by Theodore de Bry, late sixteenth century.
Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University
A romantic nineteenth-century view of Magellan’s greatest accomplishment, the discovery of the strait that later bore his name.
Mariners’ Museum, Newport News, VA
Map of the Strait of Magellan, 1606. Upon exiting, Magellan expected to reach the Spice Islands within a short span of time. Instead, he embarked on a grueling ninety-eight-day passage to his first Pacific landfall.
Historical Picture Archive/CORBIS
The Strait of Magellan in winter, as seen by NASA’s SeaStar spacecraft. Magellan’s fleet entered the eastern mouth of the strait, on the right, threaded its way through more than three hundred miles of frigid waters, and exited the western mouth, on the left, into the Pacific Ocean.
Jacques Descloitres, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team/NASA
The Canary Islands off the coast of West Africa, as they appeared to NASA’s SeaStar spacecraft. These sparkling volcanic islands served for centuries as stopovers for expeditions setting out and returning to the Iberian Peninsula.
Jacques Descloitres, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team/NASA
The intricate estuaries and mysterious landscape of the strait look very much the same in this photograph from January 2002 as they appeared to Magellan and his armada nearly five hundred years ago.
author’s photograph
The mesmerizing blue glaciers of the Strait of Magellan dwarfed the ships of the Armada de Molucca in search of the Western Sea—the Pacific Ocean.
Jon Diamond
The French illustrator Gustave Doré captured the psychological travail of a Pacific crossing during the Age of Discovery in this engraving published in 1878. It accompanied Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s narrative poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
Collection Kharbine-Tapabor, Paris, France/Bridgeman Art Library
The baptism of Humabon, the king of Cebu, in April 1521, as it might have appeared.
Mary Evans Picture Library
Only weeks after the triumphant baptism of Humabon, the inhabitants of a neighboring island, Mactan, hacked Magellan to pieces in the harbor after he made a rash decision to burn their village.
Mary Evans Picture Library
A pilot’s chart of the Spice Islands created by the Portuguese in 1519. In the Age of Discovery such charts were considered top secret.
Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France/Bridgeman Art Library
Antonio Pigafetta’s chronicle of Magellan’s voyage shows the Marianas, Magellan’s first landfall in the Pacific, and the speedy, highly maneuverable outrigger canoe known as a proa, which occasionally bedeviled the fleet.
Bruce Dale/National Geographic Image Collection
Clove trees, the source of the rare and precious commodity for which Magellan and his fleet risked all.
Lindsay Hebberd/CORBIS
The marvelous nutmeg, shown in an eighteenth-century French print.
Stapleton Collection/CORBIS
Pigafetta’s illustration of the island of Mactan, in the Philippines. “Icy mourut le Capitaine general,” reads the inscription: This is where the Captain General died. Unlike many crew members, Pigafetta revered Magellan as a courageous explorer and visionary.
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
Antonio Pigafetta’s depiction of the Spice Islands, illustrated with a clove tree. Believed to be indigenous to the Spice Islands, clove trees thrived in their volcanic soil and drenching rainfall.
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
Sailors endure the rigors of the icy Southern Passage as imagined by Gustave Doré in this engraving published in 1878. Magellan’s sailors protected themselves against the cold with animal skins they obtained en route.
Collection Kharbine-Tapabor, Paris, France/Bridgeman Art Library
Oval World Map showing the track of Magellan’s circumnavigation, by Battista Agnese, 1543–45.
Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University
Magellan’s signature. The example on top is from 1510, when he was in the service of Portugal, and the bottom from 1518, contained in a letter to King Charles.
Private Collection/Bridgeman Art Library
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
About the Author
Q & A with Laurence Bergreen
Author Biography
About the Book
Another Account of Magellan’s Death
Timeline of Magellan’s Voyage
Read On
Further Reading from Laurence Bergreen
About the Author Q&A with Laurence Bergreen
What prompted you to write about a 500-year-old voyage around the world?
Ocean voyages have fascinated me since childhood, and I have been contemplating a book about one since 1980, when I started spending part of each summer on Nantucket. About eight years ago, my son became enthralled with competitive sailing, which kept the subject at the forefront of my mind. Things finally crystallized during the research of my previous book, Voyage to Mars (2000), about NASA’s exploration of the Red Planet. I was struck by how NASA scientists kept citing the exploits of Ferdinand Magellan’s “intelligent” approach to discovery in the Renaissance as a precedent for their exploration of the solar system in the twenty-first century. By “intelligent,” they meant he used navigation and had a plan, rather than just bumping into distant shores, the way the Vikings did. I realized that Magellan’s circumnavigation would make an excellent vehicle for a book. When I realized how violent Magellan’s voyage actually was, that no one had written about it authoritatively since 1890, and that a great deal of unexpurgated primary sources were available, I realized that I simply had to do this book.
How did you research such a complex subject?
Researching this book has been a great challenge and a joy. I traveled to Spain several times. There I did research in the Archive of the Indies in Seville, the world’s leading research facility for the Spanish conquest of the New World. In Spain, I also spent time in places familiar to Magellan and important to his voyage, the Seville shipyards, Sanlúcar de Barrameda (his port of embarkation), and Cadíz (another important Spanish port). My most dramatic research occurred in the Strait of Magellan, in southern Chile, just 500 miles above the Antarctic Circle. I spent an arduous but amazing week there in January 2002, retracing Magellan’s route through the strait, and taking many photographs, movies, and notes. The strait is virtually unchanged since Magellan first explored it five centuries ago. I tried to capture some of the exhilaration of wandering through this magnificent, brooding landscape in the book.