Ferdinand Magellan Quotes

The church says the earth is flat; but I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more confidence even in a shadow than in the church.

The sea is dangerous and its storms terrible, but these obstacles have never been sufficient reason to remain ashore... Unlike the mediocre, intrepid spirits seek victory over those things that seem impossible... It is with an iron will that they embark on the most daring of all endeavors... to meet the shadowy future without fear and conquer the unknown.

The Church says that the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the Church. Ferdinand Magellan, Portuguese and Spanish explorer

During Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition—the first to circumnavigate the globe, in 1522—a scribe onboard wrote that the pilots “will not speak of the longitude.” Longitudinal lines, which run perpendicular to the parallels of latitude, have no fixed reference point, like the equator. And so navigators must establish their own demarcation—their home port or some other arbitrary line—from which to gauge how far east or west they are. (Today, Greenwich, England, is designated the prime meridian, marking zero degrees longitude.)

When Ferdinand Magellan attempted his circumnavigation of the globe in the sixteenth century, he had to assure his nervous, uneducated mariners that they would not in fact fall off the edge of the earth.

If and when all the laws governing physical phenomena are finally discovered, and all the empirical constants occurring in these laws are finally expressed through the four independent basic constants, we will be able to say that physical science has reached its end, that no excitement is left in further explorations, and that all that remains to a physicist is either tedious work on minor details or the self-educational study and adoration of the magnificence of the completed system. At that stage physical science will enter from the epoch of Columbus and Magellan into the epoch of the National Geographic Magazine!

The sea is dangerous and its storms terrible, but these obstacles have never been sufficient reason to remain ashore.

The Church says that the Earth is flat, but I know that it is round. For I have seen the shadow of the earth on the moon and I have more faith in the Shadow than in the Church.

James Cook was not the first explorer to think this way. The Portuguese and Spanish voyagers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries already did. Prince Henry the Navigator and Vasco da Gama explored the coasts of Africa and, while doing so, seized control of islands and harbours. Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ America and immediately claimed sovereignty over the new lands for the kings of Spain. Ferdinand Magellan found a way around the world, and simultaneously laid the foundation for the Spanish conquest of the Philippines.

Over the next 300 years, the Afro-Asian giant swallowed up all the other worlds. It consumed the Mesoamerican World in 1521, when the Spanish conquered the Aztec Empire. It took its first bite out of the Oceanic World at the same time, during Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe, and soon after that completed its conquest. The Andean World collapsed in 1532, when Spanish conquistadors crushed the Inca Empire. The first European landed on the Australian continent in 1606, and that pristine world came to an end when British colonisation began in earnest in 1788. Fifteen years later the Britons established their first settlement in Tasmania, thus bringing the last autonomous human world into the Afro-Asian sphere of influence. It took the Afro-Asian giant several centuries to digest all that it had swallowed, but the process was irreversible. Today almost all humans share the same geopolitical system (the entire planet is divided into internationally recognised states); the same economic system (capitalist market forces shape even the remotest corners of the globe); the same legal system (human rights and international law are valid everywhere, at least theoretically); and the same scientific system (experts in Iran, Israel, Australia and Argentina have exactly the same views about the structure of atoms or the treatment of tuberculosis). The single global culture is not homogeneous. Just as a single organic body contains many different kinds of organs and cells, so our single global culture contains many different types of lifestyles and people, from New York stockbrokers to Afghan shepherds. Yet they are all closely connected and they influence one another in myriad ways. They still argue and fight, but they argue using the same concepts and fight using the same weapons. A real ‘clash of civilisations’ is like the proverbial dialogue of the deaf. Nobody can grasp what the other is saying. Today when Iran and the United States rattle swords at one another, they both speak the language of nation states, capitalist economies, international rights and nuclear physics.

Fernão de Magalhães, or Ferdinand Magellan. According to most accounts, he was born in 1480, in the remote mountain parish of Sabrosa, the seat of the family homestead. He spent his childhood in northwestern Portugal, within sight of the pounding surf of the Atlantic.

The scope of exploration, and distances, involved in the vehicles’ respective journeys were scarcely comparable: Armstrong and Aldrin’s trip to the lunar surface required them to break entirely free of Earth’s gravity and embark on an eight-day round trip through more than 900,000 miles of outer space; the Space Shuttle would be required merely to travel into low Earth orbit—between 190 and 330 miles above sea level—where it would circle the planet for up to a week before returning home. In some ways, it was as if the sixteenth-century explorer Ferdinand Magellan had proposed to follow up the first circumnavigation of the world by rowing across Lisbon harbor and back.

punishment of Ferdinand Magellan’s crime of moving to Castile.

they rarely ate with the crew. To most of the men aboard the fleet, even the flagship, Trinidad, Ferdinand Magellan

long and checkered history in the service of the Portuguese empire in Africa: Fernão de Magalhães, or Ferdinand Magellan.

is possible that she had Jewish ancestry, and if she did, Ferdinand was also Jewish,

Ferdinand Magellan never thought of himself as anything other than a devout Catholic.

Ferdinand Magellan and his brother Diogo moved to Lisbon, where they became pages at the royal court;

Ferdinand took advantage of the most advanced education in Portugal,

Through his privileged position at court, Ferdinand came of age hearing about Portuguese and Spanish discoveries

The humiliating rejection proved to be the making of Ferdinand Magellan.

Two years later, in 1512, Solis, deftly manipulating the levers of influence, rehabilitated himself, and King Ferdinand

King Manuel of Portugal protested, Ferdinand, shading the truth a bit, explained that Solis’s task was simply to find the line

Soon after, Ferdinand canceled the expedition, but he sent word to his representatives in the Caribbean

participant in Columbus’s second voyage to the New World, Ponce de León received a commission from King Ferdinand

THE TEMPESTUOUS SEA OF LIBERTY “The sea is dangerous and its storms terrible, but these obstacles have never been sufficient reason to remain ashore. Unlike the mediocre, intrepid spirits seek victory over those things that seem impossible. It is with an iron will that they embark on the most daring of all endeavors, to meet the shadowy future without fear and conquer the unknown.” —Attributed to Ferdinand Magellan

and disappointed King Ferdinand clapped Solis in jail.

Within months of hearing the news, King Ferdinand once again sent Juan de Solis to find the strait,

did the fleets led by Christopher Columbus or Ferdinand Magellan (circa 1480–1521)?

when King Manuel wished to take the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella as his wife,

The Church says the earth is flat. But I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more confidence in that shadow than the Church.” Attributed to Ferdinand Magellan (1480-1521)

Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World of the Americas in 1492. Ferdinand Magellan’s crew sailed around the globe, returning in 1522. And in 1607, when Galileo was forty-three, settlers arrived in Jamestown and founded one of the first English settlements in North America.

The Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan (1480–1521) understood what he was seeing at the time of a lunar eclipse: ‘The church says the earth is flat, but I know it is round for I have seen its shadow on the moon and I have more faith in a shadow than the church.

In 1518, the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan,

Ferdinand Magellan reached the western edge in 1520, confirming for the first time that the earth was flat.

European imperialism was entirely unlike all other imperial projects in history. Previous seekers of empire tended to assume that they already understood the world. Conquest merely utilised and spread their view of the world. The Arabs, to name one example, did not conquer Egypt, Spain or India in order to discover something they did not know. The Romans, Mongols and Aztecs voraciously conquered new lands in search of power and wealth – not of knowledge. In contrast, European imperialists set out to distant shores in the hope of obtaining new knowledge along with new territories. James Cook was not the first explorer to think this way. The Portuguese and Spanish voyagers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries already did. Prince Henry the Navigator and Vasco da Gama explored the coasts of Africa and, while doing so, seized control of islands and harbours. Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ America and immediately claimed sovereignty over the new lands for the kings of Spain. Ferdinand Magellan found a way around the world, and simultaneously laid the foundation for the Spanish conquest of the Philippines.

In fact, the monument was known as the Statute of the Sentinel of Freedom, partially because he was the first native Mactan chieftain to resist when the Spanish attempted to colonize and is regarded as a national hero. In addition to his Spanish resistance, Lapu-Lapu also stood up to a heavily armed Spanish army, led by their Portuguese captain, Ferdinand Magellan, on the morning of April 27th, 1521.

In the early sixteenth century, Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe was a three-year odyssey filled with violence, starvation, and death. Magellan’s voyage was the first successfully to steer a course around the globe. In the process, he smashed the endurance record on the high seas, established the dimensions of the planet, and—taking place as the enterprise did in the context of European colonialism—opened the way for social and economic exchange on an international scale. Most of Magellan’s sailors recognized they were risking catastrophe. Though it was no longer widely believed that the Earth was flat, its roundness had not been proved as fact, and many in his crew may have feared sailing off the edge of the world. Both he and his crew were aware they would pay heavily for any mistaken assumptions. And indeed they did err, and they did pay: They had underestimated the length of their journey, the quantities of food needed to sustain them, the dangers of mass poisonings, and the risk of damaged or otherwise inoperative ships. Of the original fleet of five vessels carrying approximately 270 crewmembers, only one solitary ship bearing eighteen ghostly survivors returned to port in Spain. Not among them was their captain, who had perished along the way after being hit in the leg by a poisoned arrow.

In the early sixteenth century, Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe was a three-year odyssey filled with violence, starvation, and death. Magellan’s voyage was the first successfully to steer a course around the globe. In the process, he smashed the endurance record on the high seas, established the dimensions of the planet, and—taking place as the enterprise did in the context of European colonialism—opened the way for social and economic exchange on an international scale. Most of Magellan’s sailors recognized they were risking catastrophe. Though it was no longer widely believed that the Earth was flat, its roundness had not been proved as fact, and many in his crew may have feared sailing off the edge of the world. Both he and his crew were aware they would pay heavily for any mistaken assumptions. And indeed they did err, and they did pay: They had underestimated the length of their journey, the quantities of food needed to sustain them, the dangers of mass poisonings, and the risk of damaged or otherwise inoperative ships. Of the original fleet of five vessels carrying approximately 270 crewmembers, only one solitary ship bearing eighteen ghostly survivors returned to port in Spain.