Quotes About Exploration

The stone that once held the Magellan escutcheon met with a special fate: It was covered with excrement.

No Portuguese ships occupied the harbor when Magellan arrived, and he felt safe enough to drop anchor.

Although this was his first visit to Brazil, Magellan was familiar with the brilliantly evocative descriptions

but they found only a primitive structure sheltering two hundred gravesites.

the land written by Amerigo Vespucci after his visit in 1502.

approximation to Paradise that Magellan was likely to encounter during his entire voyage around the world.

Santiago's crew soon discovered that food was even more plentiful around the Santa Cruz River

the Indians whom Magellan and his crew would encounter in Rio de Janeiro:

than at Port Saint Julian, and Serrano decided to linger for six days to fish and hunt for sea elephants.

Surviving shipwrecks and pirates, Serrão and several companions arrived at Ternate

A week after leaving Seville, the fleet reached the snug coastal town of Sanlúcar de Barrameda

We send Cristóbal Colón with three caravels through the Ocean Sea to the Indies on some business that concerns the service of God and the expansion of the Catholic faith and our benefit and utility.

Vespucci thrilled readers with gruesome accounts of the Indians' customs.

more than enough, he calculated, to carry them through the strait and to the Moluccas.

Three times, the king, who had disliked and mistrusted Magellan for more than twenty years, refused

The previous circumnavigation came to a tragic conclusion fifty-five years earlier

in September of 1517, Magellan asked if he could offer his services elsewhere

Estêvão Gomes, reassigned as the pilot of San Antonio, strongly dissented. Now that they had found

In 1518, the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan

and, to his astonishment, the king replied that Magellan was free to do as he

the strait, he argued, they should sail back to Spain to assemble a better-equipped fleet.

Magellan led a fleet of five little ships and 258 sailors from a variety of nations

The humiliating rejection proved to be the making of Ferdinand Magellan.

I have found here a new world richer and greater than that of Vasco da Gama," he wrote.