Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe by Laurence Bergreen

of ignorance.
     
    I t was a dream as old as the imagination: a voyage to the ends of the earth. Yet until the Age of Discovery, it remained only a dream. At the time, Europe was deeply ignorant of the world at large. Magellan undertook his ambitious voyage in a world ruled by superstition, populated with strange and demonic creatures, and reverberating with a longing for religious redemption. To the average person, the world beyond Europe resembled the fantastic realms depicted in The Thousand and One Nights, a collection of tales including “The Seven Voyages of Sindbad the Sailor.” Going to sea was the most adventurous thing one could do, the Renaissance equivalent of becoming an astronaut, but the likelihood of death and disaster was far greater. These days, there are no undiscovered places on earth; in the age of the Global Positioning System, no one need get lost. But in the Age of Discovery, more than half the world was unexplored, unmapped, and misunderstood by Europeans. Mariners feared they could literally sail over the edge of world. They believed that sea monsters lurked in the briny depths, waiting to devour them. And when they crossed the equator, the ocean would boil and scald them to death.
    Some of the most tenacious ideas about the world at large derived from Pliny the Elder, who died in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. His multivolume, encyclopedic Natural History, rediscovered and widely consulted in the Renaissance, sought to bring together everything that was known about the natural world: mountains, continents, flora and fauna.
    Pliny’s chapters on humankind contained a potent mixture of fact and fantasy. He wrote of a tribe known as the Arimaspi, “a people known for having one eye in the middle of the forehead.” He confidently cited other classical authorities, such as Herodotus, who related tales of a “continual battle between the Arimaspi and griffins in the vicinity of the latter’s mines. The griffin is a type of wild beast with wings, as is commonly reported, which digs gold out of tunnels. The griffins guard the gold and the Arimaspi try to seize it, each with remarkable greed.” Pliny meant this vivid description literally, and while it might have generated some skepticism among naturalists of Magellan’s time, it was generally accepted as fact, as was Pliny’s curious description of “forest-dwellers who have their feet turned back behind their leg; they run with extraordinary speed and wander far and wide with the wild animals.” India offered particularly fertile ground for extraordinary creatures. Pliny evoked “men with dog’s heads who are covered with wild beasts’ skins; they bark instead of speaking and live by hunting and fowling, for which they use their nails.” At one time, says Pliny, over 120,000 of these hominids flourished throughout India.
    Pliny assured his readers that wonders never ceased in the natural world; the result of his labors was a Ripley’s Believe-It-or-Not catalog tinged with the classics. “That women have changed into men is not a myth,” he wrote. “We find in historical records that . . . a girl at Casinum became a boy before her parents’ very eyes.” To emphasize his point, Pliny claimed to have firsthand knowledge of the phenomenon: “In Africa, I myself saw someone who became a man on his wedding-day.” There was more; he claimed that people in Eastern Europe had two sets of eyes, backward-facing heads, or no heads at all. In Africa, Pliny wrote, lived people who combined both sexes in one body, yet managed to reproduce; people who survived without eating; people with ears large enough to blanket their entire bodies; and people with equine feet. In India, he said, there were people with six hands. These marvelous accounts were subsequently retold by various respected chroniclers and widely credited up through Magellan’s time.
    In the open waters of the ocean, lurked even more bizarre creatures, whales and sharks,