Among the many, and possibly apocryphal, ‘student bloopers’ that have amused readers over the decades – think of the Greeks with their ‘Ironic’ columns, or Martin Luther nailed to the church door – the claim that Ferdinand Magellan ‘circumcised the globe with his 40-foot clipper’ has acquired particular notoriety. Actually, the real ‘blooper’ is the assumption that Magellan did indeed circumnavigate the earth at all. It is a myth on a par with another strangely resilient canard, immortalised by George Gershwin with the help of Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and many others: ‘They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round.’
Neither Columbus nor Magellan was interested in any such thing. Both had the same ambition: to sail to Asia across the Atlantic. Columbus, of course, stumbled across an unfortunate hurdle in the form of the American landmass in 1492, but to his dying day he did not deviate from the conviction that the land he had reached was in Asia.
Magellan had a slightly more open-minded view. He accepted that America was something new, and that it was an irksome obstacle on the way to Asia. But he was just as adamant as Columbus that the globe was a lot smaller than most of their contemporaries assumed. The idea that America might be a vast, previously unknown, hemisphere simply did not cross his mind. It was obvious to him that America was just a prolongation of the world known to Ptolemy, another great peninsula, like Indonesia and Malaya, and that there must be plenty of straits leading to the fabled isles of spices and countless other opportunities for plunder and self-aggrandisement.
