Quotes from Laurence Bergreen

Of all the weapons the Europeans brought to the Pacific, guns included, none was more powerful and more capable of effecting lasting change than written language.

And so he found himself always in search of the perfect love, always unable to find it or sustain it, and predisposed to reenact his mother's bewildering abandonment of him.

Oceans cover 70 percent of the Earth's surface. Our planet has been misnamed; it is the ocean planet.

Magellan's thirst for glory, under cover of religious zeal, led him fatally astray.

City of Gold. City of Water. City of Faiths. Quien no ha visto Sevilla, runs a saying, no ha visto maravilla .

The next day, Magellan gave the order to weigh anchor. The ships fired a salvo of cannon that reverberated among the splendid dark green mountains, gray ravines, and azure glaciers of the strait, and the armada set sail once again, heading west, always west.

he became King of Portugal, King of Naples, King of Sicily, the Duke of Milan

Europeans knew little about the ocean beyond latitude 27°N, marked by Cape Bojador in West Africa.

So they went to sea because it was their livelihood, and in all likelihood their fathers' before them;

openly told his crew that the conspirators had resolved to kill him on Easter Day

Relations with the Patagonian giants deteriorated when a European scouting party unearthed a cache of Indian weapons.

was believed that the waters south of this point teemed with monsters, that their storms made them too violent to navigate

because they knew the sea better than they knew land;

he did and, secretly armed, went to a small sandy islet where a small house had been built to accommodate the ceremony.

The discovery suggested that an ambush might be in the making.

home, they knew the dreary routines life held in store for them, whereas at sea anything could happen;

Magellan expected to see all four captains at Easter mass but only one, Luis de Mendoza, of Victoria, arrived.

Many of the men went to sea simply to escape. Some were fleeing jail, hanging, or torture;

Others were avoiding debtors' prison; once they obtained a berth on a ship

Most sailors were in their teens or twenties. Anyone who had reached his thirties was considered a veteran scalawag; by the time he had survived to that age, he had seen what life at sea held: brutality, loneliness, and disease; he had experienced flashes of camaraderie and heroism, as well as persistent dishonesty and callousness. He knew all about the avarice of shipowners, the uncomprehending indifference of kings under whose flags the expedition sailed, and the tyranny of captains.

they would be immune from arrest, safe for as long as they were at sea.

Cervantes's words, as "the shelter and refuge of Spain's desperadoes, the church of the lawless

Both treaties assumed that the Catholic Church had the final say over the matter

safe haven of murderers, the native land and cover for cardsharps, the general lure for loose women