Palavras lidas #227

PROLOGUE

A Ghostly Apparition

Oh! dream of joy! is this indeed

The lighthouse top I see?

Is this the hill? is this the kirk?

Is this mine own countree?

On September 6, 1522*, a battered ship appeared on the horizon near the port of Saluncar de Barrameda, Spain.

As the ship came closer, those who gathered onshore noticed that her tattered sails flailed in the breeze, her rigging had rotted away, the sun had bleached her colors, and storms had gouged her sides. A small pilot boat was dispatched to lead the strange ship over the reefs to the harbor. Those aboard the pilot boat found themselves looking into the face of every sailor's nightmare. The vessel they were guiding into the harbor was manned by a skeleton crew of just eighteen sailors and three captives, all of them severely malnourished. Most lacked the strength to walk or even to speak. Their tongues were swollen, and their bodies were covered with painful boils. Their captain was dead, as were the officers, the boatswains, and the pilots; in fact, nearly the entire crew had perished.

The pilot boat gradually coaxed the battered vessel past the natural hazards guarding the harbor, and the ship, Victoria, slowly began to make her way along the gently winding Guadalquivir River to Seville, the city from which she had departed three years earlier. No one knew what had become of her since then, and her appearance came as a surprise to those who watched the horizon for sails. Victoria was a ship of mystery, and every gaunt face on her deck was filled with the dark secrets of a prolonged voyage to unknown lands. Despite the journey's hardships, Victoria and her diminished crew accomplished what no other ship had ever done before. By sailing west until they reached the East, and then sailing on in the same direction, they had fulfilled an ambition as old as the human imagination, the first circumnavigation of the globe. (...)

Bergreen, Laurence. Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe, 2003, pp. 1-2.
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*491 years to this exact day!