Andrew Taylor
Death Became Him
Over The Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe
By Laurence Bergreen
HarperCollins 456pp £25 order from our bookshop
MY ONLY GRUMBLE about Over the Edge of the World is the title, with its superior, twenty-first-century nod towards the image of a boatload of wide-eyed innocents sailing terror-stricken towards expected destruction as they tumble off the flat world and into the void. That is a modern myth: it had been well known since at least the time of Pythagoras of Samos in the sixth century BC that the earth was a globe.
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