"By sailing west until they reached the East, and then sailing on in the same direction, they had fulfilled an ambition as old as the human imagination."
— Ferdinand Magellan
By Sailing West Until They Reached
By sailing west until they reached the East, and then sailing on in the same direction, they had fulfilled an ambition as old as the human imagination.
About this quote
This passage comes from Laurence Bergreen's biography Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (2003), where Bergreen reflects on the historical significance of Ferdinand Magellan's expedition. The circumnavigation of 1519–1522 was the first to demonstrate empirically that the Earth's oceans are continuous and navigable from west to east — a conceptual leap that had been imagined for centuries but never proven. Bergreen's narrative draws on Pigafetta's journal and other contemporary sources to reconstruct the voyage as both a physical ordeal and a transformation of the human understanding of the globe.
Source
Laurence Bergreen, Over the Edge of the World