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Magellan's Route
Our Boy Makes Good (Sort of)

by Kai Sonderling

Our name means we get a lot of hits from frustrated middle-schoolers doing last minute "research" for a paper on you-know-who.

We've felt bad about those desperate young scholars, seeing our name turn up in search results, and thinking, "'Magellan's Log'! Cool! Just what I need." If you've been reading us for a while, you can imagine their confusion after their click their way into the vast cultural muddle that is Magellan's Log. All they want is maybe a picture of the great man and a map of where he went, and here they are reading about the Fugs, or Arnold Schoenberg, or, worse yet, George W. Bush and Monica Lewinsky striking up a "friendship." Clearly NOT the stuff of which middle-school geography reports are made.

As a public service, and trying to be good citizens of the Internet, we decided to rectify the situation in two ways, with a portrait, and a map.

1. Portrait of Ferdinand Magellan

2. Where Magellan Went and When He Went There

It turns out the only really good maps of Magellan's route are in books (remember "books"?). Our own Internet searches revealed only the crudest of maps, the kind that, included in your middle-school paper, are bound to elicit some red-pencil note like "Messy work!"

As part of our move toward being better citizens of the information community, we created our own map which, if not good for an A+, will at least get you by with a solid B.

The story behind the trip is in many ways more extraordinary than that behind Columbus's first voyage. In the early days of this publication our editor wrote briefly about that story (and about the meaning of our name). You can read his remarks here.

For the rest, there are several excellent accounts of the first circumnaviation on the Internet.

END

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