Discovery of the Strait of Magellan Widened the World

The following is a summary of the original story, which is written in Portuguese and published on the Folha de S.Paulo website. Click here to read the original report.

Here is the strait that opened the world wide. The phrase echoes one of the many paradoxes that surround the labyrinth of islands and bays, meanders and alleys, channels and glaciers through which European navigators discovered their world was less than half the real world — and the Earth was round and the Atlantic looked more like a swimming pool compared to the immense ocean that even so, in yet another irony surrounding that “discovery”, the intrepid Ferdinand Magellan chose to name Pacific.

In the midst of an epic journey of hunger and torment, of difficulties and misfortunes, Magellan, a resentful Portuguese naturalized Spanish, lame and one-eyed — and one of the greatest navigators of all times — decided to call the last corner of the planet Tierra del Fuego and its inhabitants Patagons, although neither that land nor the people are neither the one nor the other.”

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