Customer Reviews

Over the Edge of the World

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a fast moving account of Ferdinand Magellan's search for the western route to the Spice Islands, his encounter with fate and the almost incomplete circumnavigation of the world by a ragtag group of survivors and unwillling passengers whom the crew of the sole surviving ship of the 4 which crossed the Pacific picked up along the way to find their way home. After years of sea-borne adventure without charts, a method of establishing longitude and replenishment of water and supplies on an as available basis, only 20 some of the original 260 crew and staff of the 5 ship armada completed the voyage and then only as scurvy bitten invalids adrift on an incapacitated storm decimated ship. Magellan himself, driven as he had to be to seek passage via a strait that he himself only believed to exist, was himself killed in the Phillipines when he intervened in native affairs unecessarily but because he thought himself invincible. The book is primarily based on a surviving journal kept by Magellan's scribe/historian who doubled as a student of exotic language, amateur anthopologist and sometimes "censor" of events of which he thought the Spanish king/sponsor of the voyage might not approve. The social environment in Spain and Portugal, the home base of the intrepid travellers, a splinter group of mutineers seeking to discredit the eventual survivors of the voyage who had returned rather than weather the new-found straits around Patagonia, and the perils of nature and hostile peoples are all told in a style that flows well and makes reference to other histroical events and circumstances. Well worth reading.

Quickly, this book drew me in and had me eager for every next page. Who knew?