This was originally published on my old blog BackpackBook (Livro de Mochila), a project that blended literature and travel, sometimes just traveling in my lucid dreams. It ran as âA primeira viagem ao redor do mundo estranhoâ on November 30, 2007.
First I should report that for now my first trip around the world will stay in the literature. Unfortunately I wasn’t selected for the next stage of the 2nd Volta ao Mundo prize. That’s fine. I don’t have the words to thank everybody for the support, and I wish the winner an excellent trip.
To console my wounded feelings I turned several nights into a voyage with Magellan and his sailors, a journey around a world that was still strange, told by the Italian Antonio Pigafetta in his book and ship’s diary. The nearly pocket sized (or backpack sized) edition satisfied me completely.
(Parentheses)
Was it really the first voyage around the world? Better not to get into that one. I’ll leave it to the historians, the agitators, the Chinese and related parties.
Heloisa SchĂźrmann is the reason I ventured into this classic. The book fed her family’s twenty years of dreams and voyages around the world.
Land of fire and of giants
It seems Magellan was responsible for the strange names we know today for Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. Patagonia apparently comes from accounts of giants with enormous feet, enormous paws, patagones, that he is said to have met in the region.
I’m happy to contribute to these myths, since I’ve heard more recent travelers describe genuinely gigantic people around there too. Tierra del Fuego was less fanciful. Crossing what would become the Strait of Magellan, the sailors saw many columns of smoke, and where there’s smoke there’s a Land of Fire. In Brazil other stories reigned, such as indigenous people who lived to a hundred and forty. They never knew they were contributing to a place where plenty of people now don’t make it past their first year.
Religious conquests
I think both the religious faithful and the fervent skeptics will get some strong adrenaline out of certain episodes in this book. There are several stories of religious conquest during Magellan’s crossing, and they make you reconsider the real objective of the voyage.
The accounts of the strange savageries connected to Magellan’s last voyage are treated with complete naturalness by Pigafetta, who also managed to mix geography, navigation, religion, mysticism and touches of the human ignorance of a world that seemed strange. Not very different five hundred years later.