Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
INTRODUCTION
The mythical tale is told of a medieval Englishman who decided
to see the world and, despite the warnings of family and friends, set
off westward. After many years of crossing broad seas and encounter-
ing strange peoples he landed upon a shore where the natives spoke
the English language. Continuing through this country he reached a
locality where even his own dialect was used. Then he came upon a
village which looked exactly like his own and where the people all
knew him. Believing himself bewitched, he fled in terror, retracing his
steps and not stopping until he came safe home.
When Sebastian d'Elcano led his little band of seventeen seamen
each 'more emaciated than any old worn-out hack horse' through the
streets of Seville on 8 September 1522, the wide-eyed citizens who
gazed upon the first circumnavigators were people who could not
grasp the concept that the earth was a sphere, and that therefore it
was theoretically possible to travel around it. Ptolomaic geography
was espoused by only a small coterie of radical scholars. It was the
expedition begun by Magellan and completed by Elcano that turned
their theories into facts. But it also demonstrated that the world's
wild oceans and savage lands held a thousand horrors and dangers
for sixteenth century mariners and their puny ships. Throughout the
rest of the century captains prepared to follow in Elcano's wake were
few and far between.
Such were the first, hesitant voyages which began the era of cir-
cumnavigation, an era that lasted almost four hundred years and only
came to an end in the last years of the nineteenth century. It was a
magnificent era, one of the most exciting and formative in the long
saga of the human species. During those epic years man fully pos-
sessed himself of his own planet. Whether inspired by hope of fin-
ancial gain, national rivalry, scientific curiosity or the spirit of adven-
 
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