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Magellan
Stefan Zweig
Stefan Zweig's *Magellan* is a novelist's biography of the man who led the first expedition to circle the globe. Zweig — the immensely popular Austrian writer of the interwar years — wrote it in 1938 from European exile, as the continent he loved slid toward catastrophe, and something of that mood colors his portrait of a stubborn, wronged captain risking everything on an idea. He tells the story of Ferdinand Magellan's voyage as high drama: the mutinies, the icy strait, the starving crossing of an unknown ocean, and the captain's death before the survivors limped home. Published in English as *Conqueror of the Seas*, it is history written for pace and feeling rather than footnotes. For readers who like their explorers vivid and their prose propulsive, it remains a gripping introduction to one of the age of discovery's great gambles.
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The author
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) was one of the most widely read writers in the world between the wars, author of novellas, essays, and psychologically acute biographies. A Jewish Austrian, he fled Nazism into exile in England, the United States, and finally Brazil, where he and his wife took their own lives in 1942 in despair at the war.
The book
Written in 1938 as Magellan: Der Mann und seine Tat and translated into English by Eden and Cedar Paul as Conqueror of the Seas: The Story of Magellan, the book recounts the 1519–22 voyage that first circumnavigated the earth. Zweig dramatizes the mutinies, the passage of the strait that now bears Magellan's name, the terrible Pacific crossing, and the captain's death in the Philippines.
How it reads
It reads like a novel, with Zweig's gift for pace and sympathy to the fore. Modern scholarship has refined the history, and Zweig is frankly a partisan of his hero, but few accounts convey the sheer audacity and suffering of the voyage as vividly.
For more context
Readers wanting the documentary backbone can turn to Antonio Pigafetta's eyewitness chronicle of the voyage, and to Laurence Bergreen's modern narrative Over the Edge of the World.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Stefan Zweig
- Place of publication
- London
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Biography & Memoir
- Location
- Maine