My thirteenth review is up on the Best British Biographies website! Please enjoy with my compliments.

An excellent read and it ticked several boxes of things for me, which I love reading about: history, exploration and the struggle for survival. What these men accomplished during the 16th century was equally breathtaking, horrifying and wrong and it turned this book into a real pageturner.

The only complaint I have about this book is that the author sometimes goes on a tangent, talking about things that are not essential to the actual story. But other than that, this has been a truly gripping story. 

Page count: 414 = $ 5.00

They were cautioned not to speak directly to the king. Should they wish to say anything, they were to inform a servant, who would pass it on to a functionary of slightly higher rank, who would then tell the governor´s brother, who would in turn whisper the message through a "speaking-tube" and relay it to the king.

Being forced to participate in a game of Chinese whisper with a foreign ruler doesn´t bode well for the crew of the armada. 

During their expedition Magellan‘s crew encountered the indiginous people of Patagonia. This meeting and the account of one of the crew members inspired Shakespeare to write The Tempest.

This book is truly fascinating. And I‘m way past the point, at which it is easy to put the book down for something irrelevant like sleep or food or work.

Within days, the strait´s gloomy enchantment impressed itself on the crew. As they negotiated its frigid waters, they observed thickly vegetated, forbidding shores sliding past, cloaked in eerie shadows. Late one night, during the few hours of darkness at that time of year, they caught glimpses of what they believed were signs of human settlements; distant fires with an indistinct source burst forth, their ruby flames glimmering like spectral apparitions in front of the dark green cypresses, vines and ferns. The fires sent plumes of smoke into the hazy sky, and fouled the air with an acrid odor.

This book and Lansings "Endurance" give a pretty clear-cut impression of the fact, that the area around the southern most tip of South America and the passage between South America and Antartica are the most vicious and inhospitable places on earth.