Word: magellans
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Early travelers tended to emphasize wonders at the expense of precision, secure in the belief that no one would make the same arduous journey simply to contradict them. A colleague of Magellan's reported a strange sight in Patagonia: "One day, without anyone expecting it, we saw a giant, who was on the shore of the sea, quite naked, and was dancing and leaping, and singing, and whilst singing he put the sand and dust on his head . . . He was so tall that the tallest of us only came up to his waist." After the dawn of the Enlightenment...
Many investors still expect People Express to survive in some trimmed-down form. Says Peter Lynch, manager of the Fidelity Magellan Fund, which has invested in People from its inception: "They may have to abandon Denver and shrink their company by a third." Nonetheless, he adds, "they're still in a dominant position in New York, the largest market in the country...
Still, I fancied myself to be some Magellan-like discover, setting out to disprove the myths and stereotypes which we thrust upon the Soviet Union...
...honor heroes by building myths in their memory; and myths, not facts, give us the passion and the will to be heroes. The passion of discovery shows most readily with the most exotic and most romantic figures, and passages about them are the most interesting in the book Ferdinand Magellan, who "with five barely seaworthy ships would face rougher seas, negotiate more treacherous passages, and find his way across a broader ocean" than any previous explorer, when he sought to circle the globe; Captain James Cook, first to sail to Antarctica, "a frigid continent girded by icebergs, some the size...
Boorstin clearly relishes such tales, not only about notable discoverers like Columbus and Magellan but also about the half-forgotten Cheng Ho, a Chinese eunuch who set forth in the 15th century with a gigantic fleet of more than 300 vessels and nearly 40,000 men. Exploring as far as Zanzibar, Chêng Ho brought back to the imperial zoo its first giraffe, which the Chinese were convinced was a unicorn, whose horn was said to provide the most powerful of aphrodisiacs...