Magellan

Enjoyed the book a lot and learned a lot from it. In history classes we get a summary of events, but this book transports us back in time and takes us through many important details giving the events a whole new perspective. All in all, monarchs and governments were good at coating greed for riches and power in ideology, nationalism, religion etc. in order to draft the people to give their life for a "high cause". Nothing changed, the same is true today. Stefan Zweig is very good at pointing out all the details without blemishing the story and making it sound didactic.

Magellan was a Portuguese explorer who led the first expedition to sail from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. He is the one who named the Pacific Ocean (“peaceful sea”) for the calmness of its water and the lack of wind. Although he wasn't alive to complete the entire journey himself after he was killed in a rather unnecessary battle with a local king in the Philippines, the expedition that he once led resulted in the first circumnavigation of the earth. Needless to say, the journey wasn't smooth and clear skies all along otherwise there would hardly be a reason to write a full book about this expedition. Magellan had to overcome the Portuguese king who tried to sabotage this voyage, the mutiny of his crew, hunger, thirst and very harsh weather. Oh, yeah, he also lost his life.Zweig and his stirring prose style seem well suited for the task of writing about this dramatic expedition. Just consider this, for example: “His native country left him in the lurch; his ties with office and duty had been severed. So much the better, now he was free. As so often when a man seems to be at the mercy of the winds, he is in reality being blown back upon his own self.”In his novels, Zweig tends to focus in the psychological aspects of his characters. What drove them and why they acted the way they did. This shows in his biography of Magellan. He portrays him as a quiet introvert and as a very calculated man who rarely made any decision without considering the long term; he was also fairly harsh (at least according to our standards today), but yet very fair.Zweig doesn't dwell too much into to the details of each and every small thing that happened. Along with his dramatic and enjoyable prose style, "Magellan" reads more like one of Zweig’s novels.

I was amazed at how much I was unaware of when it came to the history of trade throughout the evolution of political empires. This book will reveal to the reader the trials and courage of the navigators who changed the world. Be glad you were not born in the 16th century.

If you like history, this is a great book.

For people who don't know much about life in the days of Magellan, Stefan Zweig provides a very good, easy to read account.

Zweigs faszinierend-mittreißende Beschreibung Magellans Menschheit Weltansicht verändernde Heldentat ist so gut dargestellt das ser Leser sich fasst ein Augenzeuge der Geschehnisse fühlt…

A very eye opening account of how the earth was proved to be round.not as simple as one would expect fro, out time perspective. Good Book!

eye opening, though it is cruel

Zweig presents us with an acutely perceptive and elegantly knowledgeable narrative of one of the greatest recorded human adventures. While in certain respects Zweig's account feels dated, for example its lack of scholarly footnotes and certain nationalistic sensitivities, and perhaps he does not let us feel fully the Catholicism, wonder and despair that variously animated the adventurers, it is genuinely masterful in its lyrical appreciation of the magnitude of the adventure, particularly the psychological strength and leadership of Magellan and the spectacular, cataclysmic nature of the circumnavigation and its various attendant 'encuentros de dos mundos'.Magellan, like Columbus before him, had an iron conviction about his navigational objective but based in a faulty understanding of very poor maps. Like Columbus, he persevered even when the maps had let him down, and as Zweig emphasises, Magellan's iron-willed pressing onwards into the unknown was a feat of immensely greater risk than that of Columbus, and necessitated leadership by Magellan of incredible resolve and skill.Zweig emphasises Magellan's utter dedication to his task, his Napoleonic energy, what we might call today his extraordinary, consummate professionalism. He ensured that the motley ships he was given were exhaustively caulked and refitted, the stores meticulously planned down to the last nail for a journey of unknown duration and hardship. When disappointed by the the Rio de la Plata and the Golfo San Matias, when he knew that his maps were wrong and the southern winter was battering, and his lieutenants and crew restless, he did not flinch from anchoring in Puerto San Julián for 5 months to ride out the winter, knowing he would have to face down almost inevitable mutiny, which duly materialised. When in the paso itself, he was tireless in exploring each and every inlet and channel, trusting nothing to chance, lest he miss the one true passage. And on the desertion of the largest and best provisioned of his ships, the San Antonio on the cusp of the Pacific, the moment, as Zweig tells us, of his greatest triumph and despair, Magellan drew deep into his resolve and pressed on, to avoid by only the very slimmest of fates starvation or shipwreck.It is perhaps hard to appreciate today that there was no institutionalised military training of the officers and men. There was no ingrained culture of obedience and professionalism, no clear covenant to the mission understood by all. The ships' captains had their own understandings of their honour and their duties, or not, to their Portuguese admiral Magellan, and to the crown of Spain. When the moment of duress came, when it seemed clear Magellan's hunch was wrong, but that he would press on anyway, 3 of the captains mutinied in order to take the fleet back home. Because of its eminent justifiableness against a possibly mono-maniac deluded leader, the mutiny was prosecuted too delicately, with a view to exoneration back home in Spain, and hence Magellan was able to defeat it with a ruthless counterstroke where he did not hesitate in ordering assassination, and the subsequent execution or abandonment of mutineers as castaways on the desolate Patagonian shore.Zweig rightly references 'The Tempest' at various points, and there is something elementally dark about the mirror this discovery of new worlds holds up to European 'civilisation'. Zweig praises Magellan for his determination to treat peaceably encountered peoples, and in both the bay of Rio de Janeiro and initially in the Philippines, there appears to be an idyllic encounter with tribes who were remarkably welcoming and trusting, and whose lifestyles it seems clear were startlingly free of internecine conflict. But then there is the heartless trapping (and eventual starving) of a Patagonian 'giant', a devastatingly symbolic act of sacrilege that would presage many more breaches of faith, and the eventually extensive rape practised by the surviving crew on the Philippine islanders. Zweig suggests it was Magellan's inability to control this rape that began to undermine the trust the Pacific chiefs had in him. The drama of the Spanish encounter with islanders of Cebú is epic and extraordinary - their immediate obeisance and almost ecstatic conversion to Catholicism, turning suddenly, on Magellan's death and the rupturing of the aura of the conquistadors, to revulsion, rejection and destruction - a fitting but albeit short-lived overturning of Montezuman tragedies elsewhere.The coda is dramatic too. Magellan's own journal and that of Pigafetta are lost, almost certainly deliberately destroyed in order to protect the reputation of the mutineers, and only Pigafetta's outrage at the writing-out from history of Magellan's epic heroism led him to insistently set the record straight in a subsequent Report on the voyage. And the famous Strait of Magellan itself became a graveyard for ships and mariners, so treacherous were its rocky, squall-battered channels that it never became a heavily used navigational route, the crossing of the Panama isthmus by land, and then, after its discovery one hundred years later, passage via Cape Horn being preferred instead.

Zweig is a great author-his 'Beware of Pity' is unsurpassable. His insight as a novelist is well utilised in this history of Magellan. We tend to think of the age of discovery as a golden age, when adventure and daring was a prime motivator for these voyages. Zweig clearly shows that lust for money through the discovery of new trade routes to the spices of the east was the sine qua non of these enterprises. The actual adventure itself ,the negotiation of the passage to the Pacific, the strange and primitive men they found there, and the treachery of the 3 Spanish stooge/captains foisted on Magellan, is wonderfully described. Buy it! One drawback is that the illustrations (about 10) do not reproduce well ,if at all. A warning to that effect is at the front of the book. Personally, it didn't spoil my enjoyment in the least. With all the trash about it makes me wonder why this book isn't in print-it is a true classic...

I always enjoy books by Stefan Zweig. He knows how to keep the narrative flowing in a novelistic way, while still imparting lots of information. He can obviously rack up the suspense too, as I had to stop reading it for a few days when I reached one climax.

Amazing story and very well written.

Unfassbar was die Männer von damals geleistet haben, welche Qualen sie auf sich genommen haben. Jahrelang auf See, hungerleidend, der Tod allgegenwärtig - und dennoch, niemals aufgebend. Hunderte unbekannt, hunderte gestorben, nur einem wird der Ruhm zuteil, nur einen Namen verbinden wir 500 Jahre später mit der ersten Weltumsegelung, dem Beweis, dass die Erde eine Kugel ist - obwohl eben dieser die erste Weltumrundung gar nicht vollendet hat. Hier liegt die Tragödie im Helden, Magellan, der alles bis ins kleinste Detail geplant hat, stirbt einen sinnlosen Tod auf Mactan.Dieses Buch ist ein Meisterwerk. Es war so spannend, so fesselnd. Viele Wörter, die man heute gar nicht mehr kennt. Dieses Buch hat eine große Leidenschaft in mir entfesselt, ich bekomme immer noch Gänsehaut, wenn ich mir dieses Abenteuer vorstelle - heute unvorstellbar (wir hätten ja gar kein Instagramm-Empfang auf hoher See...). Die gefahrene Route kann man bei google earth abfahren. Es gibt tolle Wikipedia-Artikel. Und im Jahr 2022 jährt sich die Ankunft der Victoria in Sevilla zum 500. Mal. Es sind viele Veranstaltungen vor Ort geplant, die hoffentlich coronabedingt auch stattfinden. Auch in Südamerika gibt es Veranstaltungen, im Prinzip entlang der Route an den geschichtsbedeutenden Orten.