On August 10, 1519, Ferdinand Magellan and his fleet of five ships sailed out of the harbor of Seville in search of a shorter and cheaper route to the fabulous Spice Islands of the South Pacific. Their quest for "pepper riches" took them to a world charted by highly inaccurate maps, into hemispheres arbitrarily divided between Spain and Portugal, among strange tribes and exotic islands.

One ship and eighteen men of the two hundred who left Spain survived storm, hardship, and mutiny—and returned. Magellan himself was killed in Mactan, a small island in the Philippines. But never again could there be any doubt that the earth was round. Men knew for the first time the vast breadth of the Pacific, and a mysterious strait Magellan discovered in the wrong place would forever memorialize his name.

Through the skillful blending of original sources and explanatory passages of his own, George Sanderlin recreates one of the great journeys of all time. By reproducing the firsthand account of Antonio Pigafetta, a young nobleman who accompanied Magellan, and the pertinent use of excerpts from logbooks, letters, memoirs, records, and reports of the great navigator's contemporaries, he has created a narrative that has the immediacy and excitement of personal experience.

Living history and historical adventure make FIRST AROUND THE WORLD the kind of book both the young reader and student will find hard to put down before the last word has been read.

From the dust jacket