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Ferdinand Magellan and the Discovery of the World Ocean (World Explorers)
Ferdinand Magellan and the Discovery of the World Ocean - World Explorers Author:Rebecca Stefoff The fleet of five small ships that left Spain's Guadalquivir River on September 26, 1519, hardly seemed capable of enduring the tremendous task set before it. Small and clumsy, the vessels were kept afloat only by unceasing labor at wooden pumps, and there were few reliable maps or charts or means of calculating longitude aboard--only compas... more »s, hourglass, and astrolabe. In these primitive craft, a Portuguese sailor named Ferdinand Magellan led the most daring expedition of his time into unknown seas to become the first man to chart a route around the earth. Before its three-year voyage was through, Magellan's expedition would endure almost unimaginable hardship, discover the existence of a strait linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, encounter exotic peoples and creatures in lands as yet unknown to Europeans, and demonstrate--by dint of harsh experience--the vastness of the world's largest ocean. Magellan would not survive this most perilous of journeys--only 18 men would, of a crew of more than 220. But accounts of his voyage enabled man, for the first time, to see the world whole, in its actual dimensions and shape, and it stood revealed as an even greater and more complex and variegated place than the most fanciful dreamers had imagined.« less