Magellan Quotes

Felix believed that the answer to every problem involved penguins; but it wasn't fair to birds, and I was getting tired of teleporting them back home. Somewhere in Antarctica, a whole flock of Magellanic penguins were undergoing psychotherapy.

The thing about Magellan is the thing about all these explorers. Most of the time, they’re just determined to chase impossible things. And most of them are so busy looking at the horizon that they can’t even see what’s right in front of them.

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.

A lifetime can be spent in a Magellanic voyage around the trunk of a single tree.

But nothing lasts forever," Drew said, and then he and Roger sang together "Even cold November rain." I looked from one to the other, baffled. "Seriously?" asked Drew, catching my expression in the rear-view mirror. "Magellan, get this girl some GNR.

So, Magellan, where are we going? (Danger) Away. I’m open to any location, so long as it doesn’t involve returning to your house while Wart-Head is there.

The real significance of Magellan's voyage was not that it was the first to circumnavigate the planet, but that it was the first to realize just how big that planet was.

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.

Magellan’s

Mutluyken adil davranmak, mutsuzken adil davranmaktan daima daha kolaydır. syf- 160

All things look good from far away and it is man's eternally persistent childlike faith in the reality of that illusion that has made him the triumphant restless being he is.

We also now have evidence for several other black holes in systems like Cygnus X-l in our galaxy and in two neighboring galaxies called the Magellanic Clouds. The

Magellan's thirst for glory, under cover of religious zeal, led him fatally astray.

You and your SoulMate are pioneers on the frontier of spiritual partnerships. You are the cusp of the next evolutionary wave. As architects of true SoulMate relationships, you are the Magellans of inner space.

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

Of all the weapons the Europeans brought to the Pacific, guns included, none was more powerful and more capable of effecting lasting change than written language.

Reminiscing in the drizzle of Portland, I notice the ring that’s landed on your finger, a massive insect of glitter, a chandelier shining at the end of a long tunnel. Thirteen years ago, you hid the hurt in your voice under a blanket and said there’s two kinds of women—those you write poems about and those you don’t. It’s true. I never brought you a bouquet of sonnets, or served you haiku in bed. My idea of courtship was tapping Jane’s Addiction lyrics in Morse code on your window at three A.M., whiskey doing push-ups on my breath. But I worked within the confines of my character, cast as the bad boy in your life, the Magellan of your dark side. We don’t have a past so much as a bunch of electricity and liquor, power never put to good use. What we had together makes it sound like a virus, as if we caught one another like colds, and desire was merely a symptom that could be treated with soup and lots of sex. Gliding beside you now, I feel like the Benjamin Franklin of monogamy, as if I invented it, but I’m still not immune to your waterfall scent, still haven’t developed antibodies for your smile. I don’t know how long regret existed before humans stuck a word on it. I don’t know how many paper towels it would take to wipe up the Pacific Ocean, or why the light of a candle being blown out travels faster than the luminescence of one that’s just been lit, but I do know that all our huffing and puffing into each other’s ears—as if the brain was a trick birthday candle—didn’t make the silence any easier to navigate. I’m sorry all the kisses I scrawled on your neck were written in disappearing ink. Sometimes I thought of you so hard one of your legs would pop out of my ear hole, and when I was sleeping, you’d press your face against the porthole of my submarine. I’m sorry this poem has taken thirteen years to reach you. I wish that just once, instead of skidding off the shoulder blade’s precipice and joyriding over flesh, we’d put our hands away like chocolate to be saved for later, and deciphered the calligraphy of each other’s eyelashes, translated a paragraph from the volumes of what couldn’t be said.

Though that, surely, could not be its ultimate goal, it was aimed squarely at the Greater Magellanic Cloud, and the lonely gulfs beyond the Milky Way.

DOES THAT MEAN WE'RE FINALLY BACK IN 2177? I THOUGHT WE WERE NEVER GOING TO GET THERE! - Magellan

MYTH 280. | Spaghetti originated in Italy. Spaghetti originated in China. Magellan tasted it on his travels in Asian and brought

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.)

Tarihte bir başarının ahlaki değeri asla pratik faydasıyla ölçülmez, insanlığa kalıcı bir zenginlik katanlar, insanlığın bilgisini çoğaltıp yaratıcı gücünü arttıranlardır. syf-230

Oceans cover 70 percent of the Earth's surface. Our planet has been misnamed; it is the ocean planet.

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 next day, Magellan gave the order to weigh anchor. The ships fired a salvo of cannon that reverberated among the splendid dark green mountains, gray ravines, and azure glaciers of the strait, and the armada set sail once again, heading west, always west.

In any age, there is no shortage of people willing to embark on a hazardous adventure. Columbus and Magellan filled eight ships between them for voyages into the void. One hundred and fifty years ago, the possibilities offered by missionary service were limitless and first-rate. Later, Scott and Shackleton turned away droves after filling their crews for their desperate Antarctic voyages. In 1959 ... sailor H.W. Tilman, looking for a crew for a voyage in an old wooden yacht to the Southern Ocean, ran this ad in the London Times: "Hand [man] wanted for long voyage in small boat. No pay, no prospects, not much pleasure." Tilman received more replies than he could investigate, one from as far away as Saigon.

what motivated explorers? What inspired Magellan, battered by South America’s strange williwaw winds, to hold to his course through an unknown strait with no guarantee that it would lead to an untraversed sea? What makes adult and child alike feel so desperate at the prospect of abandoning their advance along shining rails, across shining seas, that lead beyond the boundaries of their familiar world? What inspires an explorer to undertake a voyage with no destination, to search with no objective, to travel with no itinerary other than the uncharted, the unfathomed, the unexpected?

I recalled the afternoon when the two of us stood beating erasers, and Camille confided that she'd done penance for stories - stories that I'll never know if she wrote or only imagined writing. She'd wanted me to tell her a secret from my dreams, a secret from my dreams I hadn't had as yet, and so I didn't quite understand what she was after. "It's about feeling," Camille had insisted. I didn't understand then that she was talking about risk.

The longest voyage of discovery, the boldest adventure in the records of our race, had begun.

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.

City of Gold. City of Water. City of Faiths. " Quien no ha visto Sevilla, " runs a saying, " no ha visto maravilla ".

they went past the mouth of an alternate route to the Pacific, the Strait of Magellan,

Magellan’s fleet more ressembled the Flying Dutchman, condemned to sail for what must have seemed like forever without making port.

Even young relatives of Magellan found themselves the object of derision and were stoned.

Magellan could only have marveled at the speed with which his plan to reach the Spice Islands had come together.

Magellan led his ships in and around the islands of the bay, but found no sign of a strait.

Once the horror of the inquisitional catharsis subsided, Mesquita (with Magellan’s blessing)

In most of the world, Magellan is thought of as the first guy who went around the world. Here, everyone knows he only made it as far as Mactan Island, where he was killed by Filipinos.

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.

Because it did used to be cool, super-cool, in fact - she was our Magellan, our Marco Polo, one of the wayward Walker women whose restless boundless spirit propels her from place to place, love to love, moment to unpredictable moment.

The ships picked up speed, and the coastline began to recede; there was no turning back now. It would sustain them all, or it would destroy them all. To reach his goal, Magellan would have to master both the great Ocean Sea and a sea of ignorance.

And it was one of these observers who designed the tests and simulations carried out on Old Earth during the last three centuries of its exile in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud to better explain our species to them and measure the empathy of which we are capable.

The telescope, in enabling us to look far out into space, also allows us to look back in time. Light travels at about 186,000 miles per second. When we look up into the daylight sky, we are not seeing the sun as it currently is but as it was about eight minutes ago, since it takes that long for the light radiating from this familiar star to travel 93 million miles to Earth. Similarly, when the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) receives light waves from the depths of the universe, those waves will have originated from points as far as 76 sextillion (76,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) miles away. It will have taken those waves some 13 billion years to arrive on earth, meaning they left their source about a million years after the big bang, and roughly nine to ten years before Earth even formed.

Al clarear el día del martes 20 de septiembre de 1519, se levan ruidosamente las anclas, ondean al viento las velas y truenan las bocas de fuego hacia la tierra que va desapareciendo. Ha comenzado el viaje de exploración más largo, la aventura más audaz que registra la historia de la humanidad.

L'exploit de Magellan a prouvé, une fois de plus, qu'une idée animée par le génie et portée par la passion est plus forte que tous les éléments réunis et que toujours un homme, avec sa petite vie périssable, peut faire de ce qui a paru un rêve à des centaines de générations une réalité et une vérité impérissables.

CENTURY, AFTER TERRANS DISCOVERED IN THE TWENTIETH THAT IT KILLED YOU!” “It took them two hundred years to stop doing it?” I ask, bewildered. “ISN’T THAT INSANE?” Magellan says. “HONESTLY, DOESN’T THAT SOUND LIKE A SPECIES THAT WOULD BENEFIT FROM SOME KIND OF BENEVOLENT MACHINE OVERLORD?” “Silent mode,” Tyler says.

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

Au commencement étaient les épices.

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.

... insanlığın en dikkate şayan başarılarının hemen her zaman akıtılan kanlarla lekelenmesi ve en büyük işlerin üstesinden zalimlerin gelmesii nsanlığın ebedi lanetidir!" syf- 146

Jusqu'au dernier moment l'homme qui, doué d'une volonté prométhéenne, veut arracher à la terre son secret sentira la griffe du doute lui déchirer le cœur.

Au commencement étaient les épices

Cuando se es afortunado en el juego, se pierden rápido los buenos propósitos”.

Free will comes at a price. A price most of us do not know how to pay.

If a sailor devoted years of his life to getting there and back, and if he managed to bring home a small sack stuffed with spices

Though hardly a revolutionary insight, the comment set Pigafetta apart from sages such as Pliny and Marco Polo,

Among those in attendance at Santa María de la Victoria that day was a Venetian scholar named Antonio Pigafetta

They were entitled to meat three days a week, “That is to say on Sundays, Tuesday, and Thursdays.

The upper chamber contained a quantity of sand trickling into the lower

Pinzón explored the easternmost shores of Brazil and ventured into the mouth of the Amazon River,

Vasco da Gama came to believe that he had been inadequately rewarded for his service to the crown.

That order would prove impossible to enforce, as would another clause prohibiting the use of firearms

The two condemned men kneeled at the water’s edge, crying and pleading for mercy as the ships grew smaller and finally vanished over the horizon.

The mere mention of their names—white and black pepper, myrrh, frankincense, nutmeg, cinnamon, cassia, mace, and cloves, to name a few—evoked the wonders of the Orient and the mysterious East.

Over the centuries, Sanlúcar de Barrameda had witnessed a succession of conquerors, from Roman to Arab to, most recently, King Alfonso X, who claimed it in 1264. In 1498, Christopher Columbus chose it as the departure point for his third voyage to the New World, and Magellan might have chosen the same port to announce that he planned to build on and outdo Columbus’s accomplishments.

Las grandes proezas de la humanidad siempre tienen algo de incomprensible, al elevarse tanto sobre la medida terrenal media, pero lo increíble de la gesta devuelve a la humanidad su fe en sí misma”.

Finally, in September of 1517, Magellan asked if he could offer his services elsewhere, and, to his astonishment, the king replied that Magellan was free to do as he pleased. And when Magellan knelt to kiss the king’s hands, as custom dictated, King Manuel concealed them behind his cloak and turned his back on his petitioner. The humiliating rejection proved to be the making of Ferdinand Magellan.

From the time we left that bay until the present day, we sailed fourteen thousand four hundred and sixty leagues”—nearly sixty thousand miles—“and furthermore completed the circumnavigation of the world from east to west.

The fleet would be called the Armada de Molucca, after the Indonesian name for the Spice Islands. The ships were mostly black—pitch black. They derived their blackness, and their ominous aura, from the tar covering the hull,

Magellan called the region Patagonia. The name may have derived from the inhabitants’ feet—pata means “paw” in Spanish—which, as legend has it, were mammoth; or perhaps the name was borrowed from a medieval saga that featured a monstrous figure known as “the Great Patagon.” There was a sinister design to these fictions. By portraying the natives as both magnificent and less than human, Europeans tried to pretend that their brutal mission of conquest was somehow righteous and heroic.

Chapter VII Dragon’s Tail The ice was here, the ice was there, The ice was all around: It cracked and growled, and roared and howled, Like noises in a swound! The earth’s crust can be compared to a cracked eggshell consisting of tectonic plates

In my family Monahwee is known for his magic with horses. My Aunt Lois Harjo said he was gifted in the ability to travel on a horse. He could leave for a destination at the same time as everyone else, but arrive before anyone, a feat impossible in linear time. The world doesn't always happen in a linear manner. Nature is much more creative than that, especially when it comes to time and the manipulation of time and space. Europe has gifted us with inventions, books and the intricate mechanics of imposing structures on the earth, but there are other means to knowledge and the structuring of knowledge that have no context in the European mind. When the explorer Magellan traveled around the world by ship, he stopped at Tierra del Fuego. The indigenous people who resided there could not see the huge flags of his ships as they docked out in the natural harbor. They had not previously imagined such structures and could not see them. Conversely, neither could European explorers see the particular meaning of indigenous realities.

In all probability there is an infinite variety of mental states that no Sapiens, bat or dinosaur ever experienced in 4 billion years of terrestrial evolution, because they did not have the necessary faculties. In the future, however, powerful drugs, genetic engineering, electronic helmets and direct brain–computer interfaces may open passages to these places. Just as Columbus and Magellan sailed beyond the horizon to explore new islands and unknown continents, so we may one day embark for the antipodes of the mind.

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.

¡Pero no hay que despreciar el error! Cuando le toca el genio, cuando lo guía el azar, del más loco error puede brotar la verdad más suprema. Se cuentan por cientos y por miles los inventos importantes provocados por falsas hipótesis en todos los terrenos de la ciencia”.

And on a sensitive point, Magellan and Faleiro had to see to it that the crew members had no contact with local women. “You shall never consent to have anyone touch a woman . . . the reason being that in all those parts the people, on account of this thing over and above all, might rebel and do harm.” That order would prove impossible to enforce, as would another clause prohibiting the use of firearms; members of the expedition were forbidden to discharge them in newly found lands lest they terrify the Indians on whose goodwill they would depend.

My espionage travels took me once around the world, to all of the continents except Australia, over most of the great mountain ranges and across most of the great rivers. At various times I followed the routes of Captain Cook, Sinbad the Sailor, T.E. Lawrence, Magellan, Vasco da Gama, Marshal Lyautey, and Admiral Livy. In telling some of the stories of those years, I plead the precedent of the Author of the Old Testament in being security minded, and I hope to be excused for leaving a number of things untold and a number unexplained. Rome, March 1953.

Every captain sponsored by Prince Henry was under orders to record the tides, the currents, and the winds, and to compile accurate charts of the coastlines. Voyage by voyage, these charts added to the Portuguese knowledge of the oceans and of the world beyond the Iberian peninsula.

Magellan and Faleiro were ordered to record every landfall and landmark they attained, and if they came across any inhabited lands, they were to “try and ascertain if there is anything in that land that will be to our interest.” They were also to treat humanely any indigenous peoples they happen to find, if only to make it possible for the fleet to assure its supply of food and water. Magellan could seize any Arabs he found in the Portuguese hemisphere—an implicit admission that he might violate the Treaty of Tordesillas, after all—and, if he wished, sell them for slaves.

Europeans came to believe that spices came from Africa, when in fact they only changed hands there. To protect their monopoly, Arab spice merchants invented all sorts of monsters and myths to conceal the ordinary process of harvesting spices, making it sound impossibly dangerous to acquire them.

El carácter de un hombre nunca se reconoce mejor que en su conducta en los momentos decisivos. El peligro siempre saca a la luz las fuerzas y capacidades más ocultas de una persona; todas aquellas propiedades escondidas que, en los momentos más moderados, quedan por debajo del límite de la mensurabilidad”.

Por fin brilla desde lejos el campanario blanco de la Giralda. ¡Sevilla! ¡Sevilla! Elcano ordena: ¡A las bombardas! Y esta es su última orden. Ya retumba una ancha salva a lo largo del río. Así también se han despedido de la patria, tres años atrás, con bocas metálicas. De esa misma manera los cañones han saludado solemnemente el Estrecho de Magallanes recién descubierto y el hasta entonces desconocido Océano Pacífico. Han dado voces de triunfo al distinguir el ignorado archipiélago de las Filipinas, y con el mismo júbilo estruendoso han notificado el deber cumplido al llegar a las islas de las especias, la meta señalada por Magallanes. Así han saludado a los camaradas que despidieron en Tidore, cuando el último barco tuvo que dejarlos en la infinita lontananza. Pero nunca la voz metálica ha resonado tan clara y jubilosa como ahora al proclamar la nueva: “Estamos de vuelta. Hemos cumplido lo que nadie antes que nosotros. Hemos sido los primeros en dar la vuelta al mundo".

The greatest dangers he faced came not from the anticipated calamities of storms or starvation or sickness, which he managed to survive with a combination of skill and luck, but from his own traitorous men, several of whom believed they were more entitled to lead the expedition. When they mutinied and returned to Spain, they spread stories of Magellan’s perfidy and incompetence, partly to explain away their own actions, and partly to make sure Magellan would be imprisoned, tried, and executed if he ever returned. As he circled the world, Magellan became a man without a country, rebuffed by his native Portugal and mistrusted by Spain, the kingdom that had sponsored the voyage.

En el caso de los grandes logros, el mundo prefiere fijarse, para simplificar, en los momentos dramáticos, pintorescos, de sus héroes: César cruzando el Rubicón, Napoleón en el puente de Arcole. En cambio, quedan en sombra los años, no menos creativos, de preparación, el crecimiento intelectual, paciente, organizativo, de una gesta histórica…”.

Collectively, they, and not Magellan, would have the final say over the disposition of the fleet and its finances. They, and not Magellan, would decide the allocation of personnel and resources. Magellan still held the rank of Captain General, it was true, but it was reduced in power; from Fonseca’s point of view, Magellan served at the pleasure of his Castilian captains, rather than the other way around. The arrangement made it impossible for Magellan and his captains to make decisions in the best of circumstances, even if they felt goodwill toward one another. And if they lacked mutual trust and respect, which was far more likely to be the case, it set the stage for endless challenges to Magellan’s authority, in other words, for mutiny.

Las cruzadas no fueron en absoluto (como a menudo se nos presenta de manera romántica) un intento meramente místico y religioso de arrancar a los incrédulos los santos lugares; aquella primera coalición cristiana europea representaba al mismo tiempo el primer intento, lógico y dirigido, de romper la barrera del mar Rojo y liberar el comercio de Oriente para Europa, para la Cristiandad”.

On September 6, 1522, a battered ship appeared on the horizon … A small pilot boat was dispatched to lead the strange ship over the reefs … The vessel they were guiding into the harbor was manned by a skeleton crew of just eighteen sailors and three captives, all of them severely malnourished. … Their captain was dead, as were the officers, the boatswains, and the pilots; in fact, nearly the entire crew had perished … the ship, Victoria, … had departed three years earlier. No one knew what had become of her … Despite the journey’s hardships, Victoria and her diminished crew accomplished what no other ship had ever done before. By sailing west until they reached the East, and then sailing on in the same direction, they had fulfilled an ambition as old as the human imagination, the first circumnavigation of the globe

Macellan'ın artık çürütemeyeceği bu iddialar doğru mu gerçekten? Hemen hemen her olay gerçekleşmesinden bir an sonra bile muğlaklaşır ve tarih daha sonra Macellan'a hak verse bile genellikle tarihin kaybedenlere değil kazananlara hak verdiğini unutmamak gerekir. Hebbel çok güzel bir laf etmiştir: Bir şeyin nasıl olduğu tarihin hiç umurunda değildir. Tarih bir şeyi gerçekleştirenlerden, tamamlayanlardan yana çıkar. Syf-145

Rather than settling disputes between Portugal and Spain, this arrangement touched off a furious race between the nations to claim new lands and to control the world’s trade routes even as they attempted to shift the line of demarcation to favor one side or the other. The bickering over the line’s location continued as diplomats from both countries convened in the little town of Tordesillas, in northwestern Spain, to work out a compromise.

Most sailors were in their teens or twenties. Anyone who had reached his thirties was considered a veteran scalawag; by the time he had survived to that age, he had seen what life at sea held: brutality, loneliness, and disease; he had experienced flashes of camaraderie and heroism, as well as persistent dishonesty and callousness. He knew all about the avarice of shipowners, the uncomprehending indifference of kings under whose flags the expedition sailed, and the tyranny of captains.

Pliny assured his readers that wonders never ceased in the natural world; the result of his labors was a Ripley’s Believe-It-or-Not catalog tinged with the classics. “That women have changed into men is not a myth,” he wrote. “We find in historical records that . . . a girl at Casinum became a boy before her parents’ very eyes.” To emphasize his point, Pliny claimed to have firsthand knowledge of the phenomenon: “In Africa, I myself saw someone who became a man on his wedding-day.” There was more; he claimed that people in Eastern Europe had two sets of eyes, backward-facing heads, or no heads at all. In Africa, Pliny wrote, lived people who combined both sexes in one body, yet managed to reproduce; people who survived without eating; people with ears large enough to blanket their entire bodies; and people with equine feet. In India, he said, there were people with six hands. These marvelous accounts were subsequently retold by various respected chroniclers and widely credited up through Magellan’s time.

We were sitting, no longer talking or touching, and I remember thinking that I didn't want to argue with you anymore. I didn't want to sit like this in hurt silence; I wanted to talk excitedly all night as we once had. I wanted to find some way that wasn't corny sounding to tell you how much fun I'd had in your company, how much knowing you had meant to me, and how I had suddenly realized that I'd been so intent on becoming lovers that I'd overlooked how close we'd been as friends. I wanted you to know that. I wanted you to like me again.

CHAPTER SIX Nash found Calvin sipping coffee and doing his bookwork. “You got any of that mud left?” “It’s a new pot. Help yourself.” Nash poured himself a cup and sat down across from his friend. “How’s business?” “It’s the same...always the same. It’s not like we get any tourists around here.” “Frank’s recruiting a couple dozen new mappers.” Calvin nodded. “It seems like strange timing.” “You think he’s up to something?” “Maybe,” Nash allowed. “Could it be you’re paranoid? It seems to me we’ve spent a fair number of mornings right here with me counting

Pigafetta was not the only diarist on the voyage. Francisco Albo, Trinidad’s pilot, kept a logbook, and some of the surviving sailors gave extensive interviews and depositions on their return to Spain, or wrote their own accounts from memory. The plethora of firsthand impressions of the voyage, combined with the fantastically detailed Spanish records, make it possible to re-create and understand it from a variety of perspectives, ranging from the deeply personal and casually anecdotal to the official and legalistic; royalty and ordinary seamen alike have their voices in this epic of discovery.

Magellan seemed relieved to rid himself of the unstable Faleiro; he agreed to the removal as long as the fleet could keep the cosmographer’s precious, state-of-the-art navigational instruments, which is exactly what occurred. Faleiro’s trove consisted of thirty-five compasses, supplemented by an additional fifteen devices that Magellan purchased in Seville; a wooden astrolabe constructed by Faleiro himself; six metal astrolabes of a more common variety; twenty-one wooden quadrants; and eighteen hourglasses, some of which Magellan purchased himself. Then there were the charts, twenty-four in all, most of them top secret, all of them extremely valuable. An unauthorized individual caught with a chart could be punished severely, even with death. They were kept under lock and key, and under armed guard. Of the total number of charts, six had been drafted by Faleiro. Eighteen others were the work of the cosmographer Nuño Garcia, seven of these under the direction of Faleiro, and eleven more under the direction of Magellan. All of these precious items remained with the armada, at Magellan’s disposal. The fleet also carried quantities of prepared blank parchment, as well as dried skins to make still more parchment,

Ferdinand and Isabella implored Pope Alexander VI to support Spain’s title to the New World. He responded by issuing papal bulls—solemn edicts—establishing a line of demarcation between Spanish and Portuguese territories around the globe. The line extended from the North Pole to the South Pole. It was located one hundred leagues (about four hundred miles) west of an obscure archipelago known as the Cape Verde Islands, located in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of North Africa. Antonio and Bartolomeo da Noli, Genoese navigators sailing for Portugal, had discovered them in 1460, and ever since, the islands had served as an outpost in the Portuguese slave trade.

Although it might be expected that pilots worked closely with cosmologists, that was far from the case. Pilots were hired hands who occupied a lower social stratum. Many of them were illiterate and relied on simple charts that delineated familiar coastlines and harbors, as well as on their own instincts regarding wind and water. The cosmologists looked down on pilots as “coarse men” who possessed “little understanding.” The pilots, who risked their lives at sea, were inclined to regard cosmologists as impractical dreamers. Explorers setting out on ocean voyages to distant lands needed the skills of both; they took their inspiration from cosmologists, but they relied on pilots for execution.

But in the Age of Discovery, more than half the world was unexplored, unmapped, and misunderstood by Europeans. Mariners feared they could literally sail over the edge of world. They believed that sea monsters lurked in the briny depths, waiting to devour them. And when they crossed the equator, the ocean would boil and scald them to death. Some of the most tenacious ideas about the world at large derived from Pliny the Elder, who died in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. His multivolume, encyclopedic Natural History, rediscovered and widely consulted in the Renaissance, sought to bring together everything that was known about the natural world: mountains, continents, flora and fauna.

the ship, Victoria, slowly began to make her way along the gently winding Guadalquivir River to Seville, the city from which she had departed three years earlier. No one knew what had become of her since then, and her appearance came as a surprise to those who watched the horizon for sails. Victoria was a ship of mystery, and every gaunt face on her deck was filled with the dark secrets of a prolonged voyage to unknown lands. Despite the journey’s hardships, Victoria and her diminished crew accomplished what no other ship had ever done before. By sailing west until they reached the East, and then sailing on in the same direction, they had fulfilled an ambition as old as the human imagination, the first circumnavigation of the globe.

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.