Book Description

“...a fundamental work for anyone who desires both the English version of the story of this path-breaking voyage and an up-to-date evaluation of the scholarly production about the voyage that has appeared during the last four and a half centuries.”—Lewis Hanke, Columbia University Today when men orbit the globe in a few minutes, it is difficult to imagine the awe that accompanied the news of the three years’ voyage completing man’s first circumnavigation of the earth. Wonder and amazement marked the contemporary accounts of Magellan’s hazardous adventure; and now the three best accounts have been gathered into one volume and provided with an introduction and commentary based on the most accurate historical information available by an eminent scholar of Hispanic studies. Included are translations of the accounts by Antonio Pigafetta, one of the eighteen actual survivors of the 241 who undertook the voyage; by the secretary of Emperor Charles V, Maximilian of Transylvania, who wrote a long report based on first-hand accounts to his father, the Cardinal of Salzburg; and by Gaspar Correa, a Portuguese historian, who twenty years later wrote of the voyage mixing fact with fanciful tales of the Far East. Several of the maps prepared for this edition are in the style of the period and represent conceptions of the world as seen by cartographers and navigators at the beginning of the Age of Discovery.