Round About the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit

Hardship, frolic, barnstorming, and spiritual enigma shape this scintillating history of round-the-world travel. Harvard historian Chaplin (The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius) traces evolving styles of circumnavigation from the Age of Sail’s epics of scurvy and shipwreck through the chic, precisely scheduled luxury-liner tourism of the late British Empire to modern times, when globe-trotting on everything from bicycles to airplanes and space capsules could be an exercise in long-distance banality, a political statement, or a solo voyage of self-discovery. Along the way she lucidly explains the innovations and soggy pitfalls of developing transport technologies, explores the cultural meanings—her exegesis of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days is a gem—and outlines the human experience of circumnavigation; one constant, she notes, is the need for reassuring companionship, whether pets or local navigators kidnapped to point the sea routes forward. The book’s heart is its profusion of entertaining travel picaresques with their gallery of colorful figures on grand, eccentric, or piratical quests. These anecdotes are so many and so repetitive that the text occasionally feels like it’s going in circles, but Chaplin is such a charming, perceptive raconteur that we’re happy to drift in the eddies of her prose. Photos, 4 maps. Agent: Andrew Wylie, the Wylie Agency. (Nov. 13)