Over the Edge of the World

Introduction to the Quincentenary Edition

It’s been five hundred years since the survivors of Magellan’s Armada de Molucca completed the first circumnavigation. Fifteen years ago, Over the Edge of the World, my account of this astonishing journey, was first published. Since then, the book has taken on a life of its own in ways I never imagined during my years of strenuous work on it.

For me, the narrative originated, strangely enough, at NASA in connection with my previous book, Voyage to Mars, about America’s efforts to explore “the red planet.” During the time I spent with NASA’s scientists and engineers observing how they designed and operated missions to Mars, I occasionally heard references to Magellan. It denoted both the name given to the Mars-bound spacecraft launched back in 1989 by NASA and the Renaissance explorer. When I asked how they made the connection across the centuries between a robotic spacecraft and the all-too-human voyager, they explained that Ferdinand Magellan, like a few other figures of his age, pursued “intelligent exploration,” meaning he set out with a specific purpose, using the best available maps and other aids. Similarly, NASA’s managers and scientists worked diligently to achieve specific scientific and strategic goals, including human space travel. Until that time, I hadn’t given much thought to Ferdinand Magellan as an inspiration for the exploration of space, let alone as the subject of a book. But sea stories had fascinated me since I was a boy. Something was so compelling about the misery the sailors had endured, the bizarre places they had visited, and their encounters with uncanny flora and fauna. Their sagas outdid fiction. During the intervals between writing and publishing books, I often wandered through the library stacks, looking for an exceptional sea story, but nothing sparked my imagination. I visited maritime museums, spent parts of twenty summers on the island of Nantucket, and went sailing with my son, who became an accomplished Laser Class racer.

Eventually my thoughts turned to Magellan. I began to consider the possibility that an unusual story was there to be recounted. He was possessed by a demonic personality: driven and visionary, yet highly knowledgeable. He was mysterious, opaque. Unfortunately, there was little to quote in his own words. His papers had sunk to the bottom of the sea. Contemporary psychological analysis didn’t apply. Unlike my previous subject, the ebullient Louis Armstrong—who seemed to sit at my elbow as I wrote about his life—I had no idea what Magellan was really like other than a few basic facts I knew about him. It was difficult to imagine him anywhere other than on the deck of his ship, but I gradually became enthralled by this mystical figure who made Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab seem like a well-adjusted extrovert in comparison.

I faced other hurdles. The limited supply of English-language accounts of Magellan overlooked many significant primary sources in Spanish, Italian, and French. Each of these manuscript traditions tended to ignore those in different languages. The solution was to embrace them all. I could handle French myself, and I arranged for the accounts in other languages to be translated into English. This allowed me to reconstruct a multidimensional account of the voyage.

Next, I traveled to see vital original documents not available online or in most libraries. That meant primarily the General Archive of the Indies in Seville, an immense collection of official documents relating to Spanish exploration housed in a former cigarette factory, which also happened to be where French composer Georges Bizet and his librettists set their opera Carmen. And closer to home, the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, a bilingual library of exploration with an outstanding staff, proved enlightening each time I visited.

The single most significant moment in all of my archival research occurred when I visited the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University. I drove up from New York early on a snowy morning to consult one of the few extant copies of the famous journal kept by a young scholar and diplomat named Antonio Pigafetta. Among the handful of survivors, Pigafetta had wandered into this historical event by accident when he volunteered to serve Magellan and became the official chronicler of the voyage. Pilots and sailors compiled specialized accounts, but only Pigafetta, from the Republic of Venice, sought to describe the entire journey—the massacres and orgies; the botany and the weather; the terror, grief, and excitement of the circumnavigation.

The Yale librarian brought out a dusty volume larger than an unabridged dictionary and lowered it into a foam cradle. First Voyage Around the World by Antonio Pigafetta. I donned white gloves as I opened it and turned the parchment pages. The colors—the azures and gold and black—were so brilliant that it seemed as if the ink hadn’t yet dried on the page. The ornaments still glistened. Pigafetta had included his own childlike illustrations to help get his points across, and they evoked a strangely innocent lost world. As I turned the ageless pages, I felt as if five hundred intervening years had disappeared. I could practically hear the surf, as if holding a conch shell to my ear and concentrating on the roaring of the ocean within.

Until that moment, I had been bewildered by the challenges presented by fully describing Magellan’s voyage. The number of languages, the fantastical quality of the story, and the remoteness from contemporary life all stood in the way. But thanks to Pigafetta’s marvelous account, I was hooked. I became convinced that this was a story that I had to tell, and more than that, I knew I could tell it with reasonable accuracy. All I had to do was unearth it, dust it off, and reassemble the elements in the proper sequence as if they were dinosaur bones recovered from an archaeological site. Later, my visits to sites important to Magellan added to my understanding of his life and times.

As I conducted research for the book, the world around me was changing on both a micro and macro scale. My brother died early in 2001 of Hodgkin’s disease. My father unexpectedly died six months later. And my long marriage was in the process of unraveling. My literary agent, Suzanne Gluck, remarked that I, too, was going over the edge of the world. When it seemed that things couldn’t get any worse, the 9/11 attacks occurred a few months later; ground zero was a couple of miles from my home in New York. The event radically changed geopolitics overnight. Contemporary life became destabilized in a way that Magellan might have recognized. It was a strange time. People stopped going out. Traffic disappeared. The world paused to catch its breath. Working on the book became a consolation and an escape rather than a chore.

During this period, my ever-helpful friend Daniel Dolgin inveigled me into a seminar on historiography taught by the distinguished classicist Peter Pouncey of Columbia University. Reading masses of material by Livy, Tacitus, Herodotus, and others who were familiar with historical convulsions took me back to the ordeal of learning Latin, which remained stamped into my cerebral cortex after all these years, and I began to apply some of the lessons of these masters to my own efforts regarding Magellan. I tried at times to emulate the accuracy and compression they brought to their sweeping descriptions, the sense of impartiality and serenity they conveyed, and the absence of ideology.

When I began my own journey to the strait in January 2002, international travel had shrunk to a bare minimum. (I’d planned to go on to the Philippines, where Magellan died, but that leg of the trip no longer seemed wise. The world’s attention was still focused on the implications of 9/11.) With an intrepid companion I flew from New York to Punta Arenas, one of the southernmost cities in the world, and boarded a small cruise ship. We sailed through this astonishing part of the world, traveling from one end of the strait to the other and back again. Along the way I took detailed notes and many photographs, and compared my contemporary documentation to the accounts and illustrations recorded by Magellan and his crew half a millennium before. Nothing had changed—nothing significant, anyway. Natural surroundings had never seemed more powerful, protective, and destructive at the same time. I could see the vistas and inhale the scents that Magellan had experienced. When the time came to write, I combined my observations with those of Magellan’s men to form a palimpsest of the strait.

The influence of the NASA scientists with whom I’d spent time also affected my understanding of this environment. They were trained to describe natural phenomena with a technical precision beyond that normally found in journalism or in popular history. Since Magellan’s voyage was as much an exploration of nature as it was of human conflict and aspiration, this scientific approach prompted me to include features of geology, botany, and meteorology as I observed the gloomy fjords, robin’s-egg blue glaciers, and chattering penguins that imparted a distinctive character to this very special part of the world.

Magellan and his men often didn’t understand what they experienced. When he began the voyage, he had no idea of the extent of the Pacific Ocean, the largest body of water on the planet, nor did he know where the strait could be found until he stumbled across it. And that is one definition of discovery: finding something you didn’t know existed. I remember attending a NASA press conference concerning Mars, and the journalists present were peppering the scientists with questions about what they planned to discover. Finally one of the scientists declared that if the people at NASA knew in advance what they were going to discover, it wouldn’t be a discovery, would it?

Reeling from discoveries of his own, Magellan evolved during the arduous voyage from a conventionally unyielding captain with specific commercial goals—bring back cloves to the king of Spain or else!—to a seeker engaged in a spiritual quest. Thousands of miles from home, things looked different. Government, marriage customs, and language all varied greatly from the European and Mediterranean societies he’d known. 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.

Still, his knowledge of the cosmos—the oceans, the landmasses, and the heavens—expanded. For instance, Magellan first noted the phenomenon now called the Magellanic Clouds. The faint smudge he observed in the night sky was actually a pair of dwarf galaxies attached to the Milky Way, all of it visible to the naked eye, at least in the southern hemisphere. If the size of the Pacific was past envisioning for Magellan, the size and scope of the Magellanic Clouds would have short-circuited his imagination. These celestial blotches consisted of countless suns and universes that people of Magellan’s time could not have conceived because it was still believed that all heavenly bodies revolved around the earth. Magellan and his men could not accept that the earth was, in Carl Sagan’s phrase, just a “pale blue dot” lost in a cosmos of incomprehensible dimensions.

As Magellan sailed across the earth’s surface, he was also journeying into time and space, into a multidimensional voyage of cosmology that baffled him even as it added greatly to our understanding of the nature of the planet where we live. It should be mentioned that by Magellan’s day almost no one thought it was flat. Any sailor who observed a departing ship gradually sink below the horizon could tell you it was curved. Nor did it trail off into mists, as fanciful maps depicted. Nor did islands float, or mermaids enchant gullible mariners, or powerful submerged magnets pull nails from the hulls of ships—to list common superstitions disproved by Magellan for all time. His voyage showed, in case there was any doubt, that the world was round, and mostly covered with water. It was possible to reach the East by sailing west, and connect with almost any coastline. All of these revelations were disconcerting to Magellan, who’d seen more of the world than he ever thought he would.

The challenge I faced, half a millennium later, was squeezing the world as it was circa 1520 into a book. I wrote and wrote, trying to encompass the world. And then, at last, the work was done. There was only one problem. I had written nearly twice as much as I should have. My editor, Henry Ferris—courteous, skillful, no-nonsense, and passionate about the book—put the manuscript on a strict diet. Eventually, a more manageable version of the story emerged, stronger, perhaps, because extraneous material had been excised.

When the book was published in October 2003 (and months and years later in other lands and languages), I was taken aback by the response from all over the globe. This was my seventh book, and I thought I knew more or less who my readers were, but in this case, it reached audiences I could not have imagined across the United States, in Sweden, the Philippines, Portugal, Spain, Greece, Brazil, and even ships at sea. Sailors responded with enthusiasm, as did insomniacs. My mother noted typos and posed questions in the marginal notes she made in her copy. I met with the prime minister of Portugal, who asked for my recommendations concerning the Portuguese economy. (I didn’t have any.)

The book is still appearing in various countries. China is coming up, as is Turkey. I’ve heard rumors of an Indonesian edition, but I never saw it, not even in the age of the Internet. A version for younger readers, skillfully abridged by my daughter, Sara, appeared. I’m glad the book has taken on a life of its own and has become part of the quincentenary observance of Magellan’s circumnavigation. A global Magellan network will look back on this extraordinary voyage and reflect on what it has meant for global commerce, culture, and history.

The response to my account surprised me. All I’d set out to do was write a rattling good story that would keep people up late, turning the pages to find out what happens next. I also wanted to convey a sense of amazement at the world we inhabit as it was experienced by some impossibly brave, foolhardy, and vainglorious explorers who lived and died five hundred years ago. These days, Magellan’s circumnavigation is often considered the greatest single sea voyage ever undertaken. And as NASA’s missions demonstrate, it still inspires today’s explorers.