Round About the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit
*Starred Review* A voyage around terra firma constitutes a unique category of travel, recognized as such since Magellan’s surviving sailors completed their globe-girdling accomplishment in 1522. Chaplin coins an evocative term for epics of circumnavigation, geodrama, the script of which she divides into three acts. The first covers the three centuries following Magellan, when mariners wrapped the world in European networks of trade and empire. Whatever one thinks about imperialism, its political coherence raised the curtain on geodrama’s second act of the nineteenth century, when circling the planet became an enlivening individual challenge, not the virtual condemnation to death that it had been from Magellan to Cook. Indeed, Jules Verne’s hero Phileas Fogg inspired Chaplin to do the research for this work; Fogg winning his bet and his girl epitomizes the personal motivations for globe-trotting. Ocean liners and airlines later democratized the circumnavigational experience and, jettisoning scurvy, furnished it with champagne. Chaplin writes that the confidence this gave that the earth was embraceable and humanity unifiable evaporated with colonialism, to be succeeded by the anxieties of geodrama’s third act, the space age. Spaceships, like sailing ships, were dangerous, and their passengers’ view of the entire planet evoked worries for its fate, environmentally and politically. Weaving myriad connections among disparate voyagers, Chaplin combines acute insights with amazing adventures in a vastly entertaining narrative. --Gilbert Taylor