Magellan Strait Quotes

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.

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.

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?

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.

The strait still eluded them but, God willing, they would find it, and reach the Spice Islands,

Most East Asians speak and dream in the language of the Han Empire. No matter what their origins, nearly all the inhabitants of the two American continents, from Alaska’s Barrow Peninsula to the Straits of Magellan, communicate in one of four imperial languages: Spanish, Portuguese, French or English. Present-day Egyptians speak Arabic, think of themselves as Arabs, and identify wholeheartedly with the Arab Empire that conquered Egypt in the seventh century and crushed with an iron fist the repeated revolts that broke out against its rule. About 10 million Zulus in South Africa hark back to the Zulu age of glory in the nineteenth century, even though most of them descend from tribes who fought against the Zulu Empire, and were incorporated into it only through bloody military campaigns.

There is an excellent prayer by John Davis, the Elizabethan seaman who, with his crew reduced to fifteen men from seventy-three, was beaten back three times into Magellan’s Strait: ‘May it please his Divine Majesty that we may rather proceed than otherwise; or, if it be his will, that our mortal being shall now take an end, I rather desire that it may be in proceeding than in returning’ . . . And I think I have troubles! But do appreciate the ‘proceeding than in returning’ part. What a man, and I cannot help thinking that my complaint about the wind seems absurd when you consider what he had to put up with – without complaining!

however, the round trip was a very long one (fourteen months was in fact well below the average). It was also hazardous: of twenty-two ships that set sail in 1598, only a dozen returned safely. For these reasons, it made sense for merchants to pool their resources. By 1600 there were around six fledgling East India companies operating out of the major Dutch ports. However, in each case the entities had a limited term that was specified in advance – usually the expected duration of a voyage – after which the capital was repaid to investors.10 This business model could not suffice to build the permanent bases and fortifications that were clearly necessary if the Portuguese and their Spanish allies* were to be supplanted. Actuated as much by strategic calculations as by the profit motive, the Dutch States-General, the parliament of the United Provinces, therefore proposed to merge the existing companies into a single entity. The result was the United East India Company – the Vereenigde Nederlandsche Geoctroyeerde Oostindische Compagnie (United Dutch Chartered East India Company, or VOC for short), formally chartered in 1602 to enjoy a monopoly on all Dutch trade east of the Cape of Good Hope and west of the Straits of Magellan.11 The structure of the VOC was novel in a number of respects. True, like its predecessors, it was supposed to last for a fixed period, in this case twenty-one years; indeed, Article 7 of its charter stated that investors would be entitled to withdraw their money at the end of just ten years, when the first general balance was drawn up. But the scale of the enterprise was unprecedented. Subscription to the Company’s capital was open to all residents of the United Provinces and the charter set no upper limit on how much might be raised. Merchants, artisans and even servants rushed to acquire shares; in Amsterdam alone there were 1,143 subscribers, only eighty of whom invested more than 10,000 guilders, and 445 of whom invested less than 1,000. The amount raised, 6.45 million guilders, made the VOC much the biggest corporation of the era. The capital of its English rival, the East India Company, founded two years earlier, was just £68,373 – around 820,000 guilders – shared between a mere 219 subscribers.12 Because the VOC was a government-sponsored enterprise, every effort was made to overcome the rivalry between the different provinces (and particularly between Holland, the richest province, and Zeeland). The capital of the Company was divided (albeit unequally) between six regional chambers (Amsterdam, Zeeland, Enkhuizen, Delft, Hoorn and Rotterdam). The seventy directors (bewindhebbers), who were each substantial investors, were also distributed between these chambers. One of their roles was to appoint seventeen people to act as the Heeren XVII – the Seventeen Lords – as a kind of company board. Although Amsterdam accounted for 57.4 per cent of the VOC’s total capital, it nominated only eight out of the Seventeen Lords.

he renewed his acquaintanceship with Magellan, and combined their enthusiasm for a search for the strait.

Years before Magellan arrived at the Río de la Plata, both Spanish and Portuguese ships had searched for the strait at this very point.

But suppose you do not find any strait by which you can go into the other sea?” he asked.

According to this account, the expedition came to a strait, entered it, and sailed west until violent storms

forced the ships to turn back. Lisboa might even have navigated the strait all the way to the Pacific.

Although incomplete, the description of Lisboa’s clandestine voyage was consistent with the strait that Magellan eventually explored.

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

The farther south he went, the more concerned Magellan became that he had accidentally passed the strait.

To Magellan, the gulf appeared far more likely to lead to the strait than the Río de la Plata

Magellan preferred to anchor offshore, away from danger, as he continued his single-minded quest for the strait.

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

and carefully explored it to locate an entrance to the strait.

After the tranquil respite, Santiago set sail and proceeded south in search of the strait. On May 22, the wind picked

water and strong currents, appearing to be a strait and the mouth of a big gulf that might be discharging into it.

saw it: the outlet leading west, just as he prayed it would. Magellan had finally found his strait.

we found by miracle a strait which we called the Cape of the Eleven Thousand Virgins.

After all the ordeals suffered by the armada, the discovery of the strait did lay claim to being a miracle.

marks the entrance to the strait that Magellan had sought for more than two years.

Schöner’s globe depicted a strait cutting through the American continent in the approximate location

of the Isthmus of Panama—several thousand miles north of the actual strait.

does demonstrate that cartographers were starting to include some sort of strait in South America,

If this was the map Magellan had in mind, it would have been nearly useless in trying to find the strait.

more than enough, he calculated, to carry them through the strait and to the Moluccas.

the strait, he argued, they should sail back to Spain to assemble a better-equipped fleet.

they had arrived at the Strait of Magellan,

Winter had navigated the Strait not just once, as Magellan and Drake had, but twice.

Letelier had been Chile’s Defense Minister when Salvador Allende was overthrown and murdered by the junta generals in September of 1973. The junta generals had gotten into power with the help of the CIA and David Phillips’s Track II program.* More than 10,000 were shot or tortured to death in the years following the coup. Letelier was arrested, tortured and shipped to a concentration camp on a barren island in the Straits of Magellan where he was put to work cracking rocks.