Over the Edge of the World

Photo Section

This anonymous sixteenth-century portrait of Magellan is one of the few accurate likenesses of the explorer.

Mariners’ Museum, Newport News, VA

The Guadalquivir River depicted in this sixteenth-century painting gave life to Seville’s shipping industry but proved dangerous for ships to navigate.

Museo de America, Madrid, Spain/Bridgeman Art Library

Sixteenth-century Seville was a prosperous, tumultuous city and the starting point for Spanish expeditions to the Indies, including Magellan’s.

Scala/Art Resource, NY

A youthful Charles I by Barent van Orley. The king was just eighteen when he commissioned Magellan’s expedition.

Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

Idealized portrait of Manuel I of Portugal. This strange and withdrawn ruler, jealous of potential rivals, repeatedly refused Magellan’s requests for backing a voyage to the Spice Islands. In frustration, the explorer turned to Portugal’s main rival, Spain.

Historical Picture Archive/CORBIS

Ptolemaic map of the world, 1486. Maps based on the works of Claudius Ptolemy, the Greco-Egyptian astronomer and mathematician, distorted or omitted significant parts of the globe.

Giraudon/Art Resource, NY

A T in O map, depicting a scripturally inspired view of the earth. In the T in O model, the ocean encircles three continents, Europe, Asia, and Africa, divided by waterways.

Archivo Iconografico, S.A./CORBIS

A portolan chart of the Atlantic Ocean by Battista Agnese, 1544. Agnese was a Genoese chartmaker known for his beautiful presentation copies of maps showing the newest discoveries.

Royalty-Free/CORBIS

Pope Leo X in a portrait by Raphael.

Scala/Art Resource, NY

The strappado as depicted by Domenico Beccafumi in this sixteenth-century ink and charcoal rendition. Magellan subjected at least one of the participants in the Port Saint Julian mutiny to its agonies.

Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY

Cannibalism as practiced by the inhabitants of the New World, in a popular engraving by Theodore de Bry, late sixteenth century.

Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University

A romantic nineteenth-century view of Magellan’s greatest accomplishment, the discovery of the strait that later bore his name.

Mariners’ Museum, Newport News, VA

Map of the Strait of Magellan, 1606. Upon exiting, Magellan expected to reach the Spice Islands within a short span of time. Instead, he embarked on a grueling ninety-eight-day passage to his first Pacific landfall.

Historical Picture Archive/CORBIS

The Strait of Magellan in winter, as seen by NASA’s SeaStar spacecraft. Magellan’s fleet entered the eastern mouth of the strait, on the right, threaded its way through more than three hundred miles of frigid waters, and exited the western mouth, on the left, into the Pacific Ocean.

Jacques Descloitres, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team/NASA

The Canary Islands off the coast of West Africa, as they appeared to NASA’s SeaStar spacecraft. These sparkling volcanic islands served for centuries as stopovers for expeditions setting out and returning to the Iberian Peninsula.

Jacques Descloitres, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team/NASA

The intricate estuaries and mysterious landscape of the strait look very much the same in this photograph from January 2002 as they appeared to Magellan and his armada nearly five hundred years ago.

author’s photograph

The mesmerizing blue glaciers of the Strait of Magellan dwarfed the ships of the Armada de Molucca in search of the Western Sea—the Pacific Ocean.

Jon Diamond

The French illustrator Gustave Doré captured the psychological travail of a Pacific crossing during the Age of Discovery in this engraving published in 1878. It accompanied Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s narrative poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

Collection Kharbine-Tapabor, Paris, France/Bridgeman Art Library

The baptism of Humabon, the king of Cebu, in April 1521, as it might have appeared.

Mary Evans Picture Library

Only weeks after the triumphant baptism of Humabon, the inhabitants of a neighboring island, Mactan, hacked Magellan to pieces in the harbor after he made a rash decision to burn their village.

Mary Evans Picture Library

A pilot’s chart of the Spice Islands created by the Portuguese in 1519. In the Age of Discovery such charts were considered top secret.

Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France/Bridgeman Art Library

Antonio Pigafetta’s chronicle of Magellan’s voyage shows the Marianas, Magellan’s first landfall in the Pacific, and the speedy, highly maneuverable outrigger canoe known as a proa, which occasionally bedeviled the fleet.

Bruce Dale/National Geographic Image Collection

Clove trees, the source of the rare and precious commodity for which Magellan and his fleet risked all.

Lindsay Hebberd/CORBIS

The marvelous nutmeg, shown in an eighteenth-century French print.

Stapleton Collection/CORBIS

Pigafetta’s illustration of the island of Mactan, in the Philippines. “Icy mourut le Capitaine general,” reads the inscription: This is where the Captain General died. Unlike many crew members, Pigafetta revered Magellan as a courageous explorer and visionary.

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

Antonio Pigafetta’s depiction of the Spice Islands, illustrated with a clove tree. Believed to be indigenous to the Spice Islands, clove trees thrived in their volcanic soil and drenching rainfall.

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

Sailors endure the rigors of the icy Southern Passage as imagined by Gustave Doré in this engraving published in 1878. Magellan’s sailors protected themselves against the cold with animal skins they obtained en route.

Collection Kharbine-Tapabor, Paris, France/Bridgeman Art Library

Oval World Map showing the track of Magellan’s circumnavigation, by Battista Agnese, 1543–45.

Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University

Magellan’s signature. The example on top is from 1510, when he was in the service of Portugal, and the bottom from 1518, contained in a letter to King Charles.

Private Collection/Bridgeman Art Library