About book Over The Edge Of The World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation Of The Globe (2004)
It was a dream as old as the imagination: a voyage to the ends of the earth. I could hardly believe this is a non-fiction book. The way Lawrence Bergreen tells it, it rivals the greatest epics of literature, with Magellan a mythical figure to rival Jason or Ulysses. Every word of the book is supported by contemporary documents and whatever speculation was needed in the absence of facts is balanced by presenting the alternative points of view. Bergreen convinced me with his very first book I read that he belongs to the top of his class of historians, not mainly through the thoroughness of his research but mostly through the passion for the subject that jumps out of every page and for the clarity, ease and focus of his prose that informs without drowning the reader in trivia or footnotes. ... Victoria and her ravaged little crew were all that was left, a ghost ship haunted by the memory of more than two hundred absent sailors. Many had died an excruciating death, some from scurvy, others by torture, and a few by drowning. Worse, Magellan, the Captain General, had been brutally killed. Despite her brave name, Victoria was not a ship of triumph, she was a vessel of desolation and anguish.And yet, what a story those few survivors had to tell – a tale of mutiny, of orgies on distant shores, and of the exploration of the entire globe. A story that changed the course of history and the way we look at the world. In the Age of Discovery, many expeditions ended in disaster and were quickly forgotten, yet this one, despite the misfortunes that befell it, became the most important maritime voyage ever undertaken.His other strongpoint as a historian is in the presentation of context, painting with admirable conciseness the rivalry between Spain and Portugal for control of the expanding globe, the economical motivations that funded the expedition (the Oriental spices were more valuable than gold), the religious fervor battling greed and pragmatism in the decisions of the Captain General. Bergreen finds the root of the impulse for exploration in the philosophical revolution of Western Europe in the sixteenth century, the transition from medieval reliance on myths and gospel in our understanding of the world to the scientific method of direct observation and practical testing of theories: Rabelais had a serious point to make; he was directing his readers back to the classical Greek concept of autopsis, seeing for one’s self (and the origin of our word “autopsy”). Autopsis stressed the value of firsthand reporting; the next best thing was obtaining a reliable account from an eyewitness with firsthand knowledge.This was a revolutionary concept in the Age of Discovery, to go see for one’s self, to study the world as it was, not as myths and sacred texts suggested that it should be. Magellan is nothing if not a controversial figure, and balancing the sources between his enemies and his apologists must have been no easy task for the author. I believe he found this balance, and the Magellan that is portrayed in this book is alternatively a visionary and a misguided egomaniac, his death the result of both the alienation of his officers and of his blind faith in his own mission from God (I don’t think we can worry about spoilers here, this is history, not fiction). Without going into the details of the voyage, Magellan is initially leading five ships with over two hundred and fifty sailors in search of a fabled passage West around the Americas. From the very beginning, his leadership is challenged by the other captains, mistrustful of his Portuguese origins and angered by his nepotism and inflexible style of command. Events culminate in Port Saint Julian, a small gulf in Patagonia, where he has to put down a mutiny, showing both resourcefulness and cruelty in the punisments he meted out to the rebels. Descriptions of the ‘strappado’ and of waterboarding, “official” methods of torture used by the Inquisition, remind this reader uncomfortably that he have not evolved much in the moral sense in the last 500 years.Some of the punished officers escape from Magellan’s supervision and return to Spain with one of the remaining ships, and they are the primary source of the negative accounts about the navigator, interested parties who of course wanted to justify their desertion. What these mutineers were unable to describe is the Captain General’s greatest moment, the finding and the crossing of the straits that will come to bear his name for all posterity, a methodical and daring battle with one of the most desolate and destructive maritime passages in the whole world, subject to merciless storms, freezing waters and blinding mists.The continuation of the expedition into the newly discovered Pacific ocean is mostly uneventul, with one major remark: the truly abominable conditions aboard the remaining two ships, componded by the killing scourge of scurvy, untreatable at the time. Was it any wonder that the ship, with all its filth and noise and nauseating odor, was called ‘pajaro puerco’, a flying pig? Controversy marks also the arrival of Magellan in what will come to be known as the Philippines. The navigator becomes the conquistador, with a God given mission to claim these new lands for his King and to convert the heathen to his own religion. Using the superiority of his steel armored soldiers and of their firearms, Magellan commands an indiscriminate killing spree around the islands. Some of the local kings accomodate Magellan, others fight back with wooden spears in an unequal struggle that nevertheless will result in the death of the leader of the expedition. This is one of the cases where I admired Bergreen’s effort to present both sides of the story: Today, in the Philippines, the tragic encounter between Magellan and Lapu Lapu is seen from a radically different perspective. Magellan is not regarded as a courageous explorer; instead, he is portrayed as an invader and a murderer. And Lapu Lapu has been romanticized beyond recognition. Around this section of the narrative I have discovered another key passage, another welcome broadening of perspective. Most history books we know about are written by Western European authors, but the Age of Exploration is richer and more diverse than what we are taught in schools. Did you know that before Marco Polo there was an Arab traveller who journeyed far wider than the celebrated Venetian? (Ibn Battuta). Did you know that the first person to circumnavigate the globe was not a Spaniard or a Portuguese, but a Philippino slave who acted as pilot and translator for the Armada de Molucca? Did you know that, a few decades before Magellan, the Chinese were sending out a fleet with hundreds of huge wooden ships and almost thirty thousand men to explore the shores of the Indian and Pacific Ocean? For sheer size, the Treasure Fleet was unrivaled until the zenith of the British navy in the nineteenth century. Despite its importance and unique character, the Treasure Fleet is little known in the West, even today. It was the creation, in many respects, of one man whose accomplishments rivaled and in some ways surpassed the more celebrated exploits of Columbus and Magellan: Cheng Ho. I didn’t really, or I read it somewhere in a footnote, and it is the merit of Bergreen to put the Chinese achievement into the correct perspective. He is also quick to point out the major source of difference between the Western and Oriental mentalities, a difference that resulted in long centuries of hardship and subjugation for the less military oriented ‘savages’. Unlike the Armada de Molucca, the Treasure Fleet did not conquer or claimed distant lands. Although the Chinese considered themselves culturally superior to the outside world, they had no interest in establishing a colonial or military empire. Rather, the goal was to establish trade and diplomatic relations with the “barbarians” beyond their borders and to conduct scientific research. I liked this section of the book so much, I almost wish that the historian will write a fully developed account of the Treasure Fleet, including more quotes from the Cheng Ho diaries, like this one here: We have beheld in the ocean huge waves like mountains rising sky-high, and we have set eyes on barbarian regions far away hidden in a blue transparency of light vapors, while our sails, loftily unfurled like clouds, day and night continued their course like that of a star, traversing the savage waves as if treading a public thoroughfare. There is more to the book: the final arrival to the Spice Islands, the game of cat and mouse with the Portuguese who considered them their own colony, the gruelling return trip to Spain and the ensuing trials blaming Magellan for most of the woes of the expedition. One man remains faithful to the great navigator, and this is actually the person who gives us the most detailed first-hand account of the trip, the primary source for Bergreen’s biography, and the main reason the voice of the detractors was pushed back in the history books - Antonio Pigafetta: The reader of Pigafetta’s chronicle hears his voice, alternately bold, astonished, devastated, fascinated, and, in the end, amazed to be alive in the cruelly beautiful world of his time. I probably could have read myself the Pigafetta journals directly, but I strongly believe that Bergreen did a much better job, setting a very high standard on how a non-fiction biography should be written. I also plan to find out what other subjects he has chosen to study and write about. (I think he has one book about Marco Polo)
Portuguese Navigator, first to sail around the world to establish a westbound route to the spice-rich Moluccas. That’s the schoolbook snap-shot of Magellan. Maybe you also know he didn’t actually make it. Killed in the Philippines. But do you know he had been a soldier who fought in Morroco, India, and the Far East, was many times wounded, and walked with a limp as a result? That he had actually gone to the Moluccas as a member of a Portuguese expedition sailing east? That he tried for years and years to get an exploration fleet funded to sail to the Spice Islands by sailing west? Or that he didn’t sail for Portugal, but for Spain? How about that once his expedition was at sea in September of 1519, he faced almost constant mutiny from his largely Spanish officers, Castilians to boot?Here, the Captain General of the five-ship Armada de Molucca emerges as both a subtle, keenly intelligent, and utterly ruthless strategist and tactician. The mutinous officers took over three of his ships while the fleet was wintering in 1520 in Port Saint Julian on the east coast of South America. Magellan brilliantly retook them one by one. He had the mutineers tortured and two of their bodies drawn and quartered and displayed for the crews to see for the remainder of the time in port. The lesson was unmistakable: the only thing worse than the misery of obeying Magellan, and freezing or sailing into storms or even over the edge of the world (as some crew members still believed possible, despite a round earth being accepted among navigators), was disobeying him.He succeeded in becoming the first to sail from the Atlantic to the Pacific and the first European to cross the Pacific. Landing on several Philippine islands, Magellan accepted warm welcomes but demonstrated the utter folly of opposing him by showing off the explosive force of the fleet’s guns and his soldiers’ immunity to arrows and swords when wearing suits of armor. But on Mactan Island, in April 1521, he was either too over-confident or suffered lapses in his tactics, and the author takes you right inside the battle scene.Then the book shifts back to Seville where a mutinous ship of the fleet returns and describes Magellan’s actions in the worst possible terms. Meanwhile, the remaining two ships strive to complete the expedition to the Spice Islands. Although they do, only the Victoria with just eighteen survivors returns to Seville in September of 1522. Even though Victoria brought back the true story in the diary of one the officers, the mutineers’ version dominated Magellan’s reputation for many years. The degree of Magellan’s accomplishment perhaps appears clearest in the simple fact that, despite numerous attempts, it was not duplicated until eighty years later by Sir Francis Drake.Really well paced. Richly detailed. Definitely holds your interest from start to finish.
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When I was about eight I became obsessed with Magellan. I have no idea why as I was an uncurious kid other than my interest in WWII (all the Dads in town were vets including mine) and late-model cars, of which I had an idiot savant's ability to identify by the smallest detail (my sisters would actually try to stump me by cutting out a taillight section or fin from a magazine ad, but I would promptly respond, "62 Rambler Classic in the special trim edition. Obviously"). My Magellan kick abruptly ended with my grandma Archangela Leccese, a lovely, clam, quiet woman who could kick your butt at any word game or crossword puzzle, crafted me a realistic Captain General Halloween costume complete with pantaloons, a breastplate and a papier mache sword. She must have worked it for hours at her foot-pedal sewing machine and at Grandpa Mike's workbench. Though it broke my heart to tell her this (and probably hers to my rue to this day), I could not wear the outfit. The thought of approaching the doorstep of all those VFW dads who served in Guadalcanal and Normandy and Iceland (my Dad) and whose sons were about to march off to 'Nam--the thought of approaching them as a semi-obscure Portugese explorer in tights--I just couldn't do it. Among my peers I was already suspected to be a "fem" (their word). What can I say, I was a gentle soul. I provisioned Halloween at the Army Navy Store and went with gas mask bag, fatigues and helmet as Vic Morrow's sergeant in "Combat." That was 1963.But I never forgot Magellan. He was like the slatternly, semi-psychotic girlfriend of yore who you were lucky to escape from, but you always, wonder, What if? (Well maybe not quite.) So I was delighted to find this book on a remainder table and it was quite okay. Bergeen is a thoughtful and scrupulous historian who puts you in the place of of a hapless Spanish crewman put out to sea for more than three years under the ruthless rule of a Portugese religious zealot and military ultradisciplinarian, a kind of Christian Brother for the 16th century. I won't tell you more about the voyage lest "spoiler alert," but it did not turn out the way I remember from age eight and it's hard to imagine why I fixated on Magellan as a hero. "Over the Edge of the WOrld" was informative, meticulous researched and written in clear prose, although full of colorful arcane terms like arquebus and maravedi. Yet it's chore to read. Bergeen is handed the narrative gift of a voyage and he follows it from A to Z. He might have done better to shuffle the sequence. The voyage is full of Sargasso Seas and often reads like one damn thing after another. Magellan as a main character is a problem. He's 400 pages of churl and we can't get that close to him since his own journals were lost. (Bergeen relies primarily on the diaries of the wonderfully named Italian chronicleer Pigafetta, a supernumerary and Magellan loyalist during one or two mutinies and the subsequent inquiries upon the voyage's return to Seville.) For all the adventure at high seas and encounters with exotic (and sexually kinky) natives in South America, Africa, and Indonesia, the story lacks voltage; although in its documentarian dryness it does convey the advanced boredom and privation that realistically accompanies such a voyage. The producers of "The Tudors" might have been brought in as consultants. (TV miniseries available on Netflix. Formula: Three minutes of horses and swordplay and then sex with chambermaids. Another one of Henry VIII's wives loses her head just before closing credits.) Still if you have had a half-century hankering to get the inside dip on Magellan--"Over the Edge of the World" is your man.
—Michael
(If you don't know the story of Magellan, there are spoilers here.)Where to begin? This book was terrible. The story of Magellan is interesting, but this author completely ruined it, in my opinion.First, the author skips around in time so often that I found myself having to stop reading in the middle of a chapter just so I would forget the jarring transitions from being on the ships to loading them with swine before leaving port to suddenly being 1000 miles further along in their journey. Some people can do non-linear well; this author did not.Magellan was such a horrid person that I find the author's sympathetic tone to be bothersome. Yes, Magellan helped accomplish something extraordinary, but: 1) Magellan had so little regard for humanity that he hardly hesitated to torture and murder his own crew and the peoples he met on his travels; he just doesn't deserve to be lauded as a hero.2) Magellan himself didn't circumnavigate the globe---he died from arrogance well before the end of the trip.3) Magellan was doing this for fame and fortune, not out of scientific curiosity or for any great ambition for humankind or to increase human knowledge of the world. I don't find such people to be very endearing.The author doesn't understand the science he inserts to try to make the story more harrowing, so the story is often frustrating rather than tense.Much of the story is obviously fabrication by the author. I was expecting a history, not historical fiction, so was bothered by the level of detail that was clearly not in any historical record.I plan on not reading any more work by this author. :(
—Moses
i have become a huge fan of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast and recently a friend downloaded the whole archive of his work so i had access to all the podcasts Carlin had done before i began listening. one of them was on the voyage of Magellan and he cited this book as a primary source.the name Magellan was of course instantly recognized and i flashed back to the pleasure of social studies in grade four (five?) when we covered the adventures of the explorers. now i admit my enjoyment of this topic might have been influenced by how much i loved colouring those world maps and tracing the voyages on to them. a solid line for the first, a broken line for the second, a dotted line for the third .... and should he be so lucky ... a dash dot dash line for his fourth voyage. Dan Carlin's wonderful telling of Magellan's story and my fond memory of making those maps, sparked me to pick up this book from the library.the author Laurence Bergreen calls the circumnavigation of the globe, 'the renaissance equivalent of going to the moon', and reading this account i am hard-pressed to argue any different. but as forward-thinking as Magellan's ambition is, and as amazing and terrible as this voyage is, i am left thinking how, but for a whim of fate or some such thing, we might never have known his name and very little of the voyage. other than a few dates, a few names and the fact, that this voyage proved without doubt that the earth was round and that one could travel east and arrive in the west or visa versa, little record of it would exist. i mean Magellan didn't actually live to see Europe again, and his name was muddied by crew members who did. his name was muddied in order to save their own good names. were it not for Antonio Pigafetta's dedication in keeping a daily journal of the voyage ... were it not for Pigafetta's interest in flora and fauna and language and anthropology .... were it not for Pigafetta's unfaltering admiration of, and loyalty to, Magellan .... were it not for Pigafetta's survival (one of only eighteen - those odds alone are significant) ..... were it not for Pigafetta's commitment to seeing his journal printed AND copies of it surviving the ensuing centuries .... Magellan's name would be scarcely remembered. were it not for the preserved words of this one man, this amazing accomplishment -this equivalent of going to the moon- would be lost to history.
—Sooz
