“A first-rate historical page turner.” —New York Times Book Review The acclaimed and bestselling account of Ferdinand Magellan’s historic 60,000-mile ocean voyage. Ferdinand Magellan's daring circumnavigation of the globe in the sixteenth century was a three-year odyssey filled with sex, violence, and amazing adventure. Now in Over the Edge of the World, prize-winning biographer and journalist Laurence Bergreen entwines a variety of candid, firsthand accounts, bringing to life this groundbreaking and majestic tale of discovery that changed both the way explorers would henceforth navigate the oceans and history itself. Now updated to include a new introduction commemorating the 500th anniversary of Magellan’s voyage.

Originally published in hardcover in 2012.

The First Voyage around the World is also a remarkably accurate ethnographic and geographical account of the circumnavigation, and one that has earned its reputation among modern historiographers and students of the early contacts between Europe and the East Indies.

“...a fundamental work for anyone who desires both the English version of the story of this path-breaking voyage and an up-to-date evaluation of the scholarly production about the voyage that has appeared during the last four and a half centuries.”—Lewis Hanke, Columbia University Today when men orbit the globe in a few minutes, it is difficult to imagine the awe that accompanied the news of the three years’ voyage completing man’s first circumnavigation of the earth. Wonder and amazement marked the contemporary accounts of Magellan’s hazardous adventure; and now the three best accounts have been gathered into one volume and provided with an introduction and commentary based on the most accurate historical information available by an eminent scholar of Hispanic studies. Included are translations of the accounts by Antonio Pigafetta, one of the eighteen actual survivors of the 241 who undertook the voyage; by the secretary of Emperor Charles V, Maximilian of Transylvania, who wrote a long report based on first-hand accounts to his father, the Cardinal of Salzburg; and by Gaspar Correa, a Portuguese historian, who twenty years later wrote of the voyage mixing fact with fanciful tales of the Far East. Several of the maps prepared for this edition are in the style of the period and represent conceptions of the world as seen by cartographers and navigators at the beginning of the Age of Discovery.