Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe
Popular history at its best, 'Over the Edge of the World' makes good use of the rich primary source material for Magellon's expedition and Bergreen doesn't stint on any adventurous detail.
It's a tricky feat to put out a readable history book that stands up under academic scrutiny. There's a lot of temptation to describe motives and recreate scenes that were never recorded, but Bergreen avoids this - for the most part. There were a few scenes that come off as fanciful; Cartagena and the priest crying desperately for forgiveness after being marooned in Patagonia for example (spoiler alert? Is there such a thing as that for history texts?). He over-apologizes for Magellan's conduct in some cases and makes too much of a ungrateful villain out of Charles V, but I didn't see the harm in Bergreen's indulgences though, they served to make the book more entertaining without warping the essentials of the story.
He quotes most heavily from Antonio Pigafetta's meticulous diary of the voyage, the passages of which show a great deal of individual character and feeling, enough to make me want to seek it out myself. Bergreen also pulls from Spanish and Portuguese records, other accounts and letters and documents from contemporaries and survivors of the expedition. It makes for a comprehensive (and engrossing) reading.
I said that he over-apologizes for Magellon and over-villainizes Charles V, but Bergreen does do his best to explain the context and motivations for the actions of every significant person in the story from Charles V and Lapu-Lapu to the slave Enrique and the chronicler Pigafetta himself. This story is immense and I'm impressed that Bergreen was able to give it as fair-minded treatment as he did.
