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This chapter discusses two significant events which are most literally relevant to world-making. These are, first, the series of cosmological and geographical revolutions leading from Ptolemy through Copernicus (On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres, 1543) to Galileo and Newton; second, the circumnavigation of the planet and the European discovery of the Americas, hermetically figured by Magellan (who did not complete his voyage, which ended in 1522) and Christopher Columbus. In subsequent imaginaries, the two events are readily conjoined.

This chapter assesses Chile's emergence as a modern nation in the early nineteenth century. It describes its evolution into an influential power in southern South America, aligned with liberals in Latin America, the United States, and Europe in at the end of that century. It introduces Chileans as internationalists involved in the construction of modern Latin America and the inter-American and transatlantic communities.

Magellan’s discovery that the distance from the New World to the Spice Islands was much greater than anyone had expected it to be is often identified as a crucial turning point in the ongoing invention of America as a continent separate and different from Asia. This chapter examines how Antonio Pigafetta’s narrative of the first circumnavigation of the Earth invented the Pacific as a vast, empty space that separated America from Asia, and how the Spanish crown responded to Magellan’s invention with ideologically-charged maps and narratives that minimized the potential implications posed by the breadth of the South Sea (i.e., the Pacific) for physical and human geography, as well as for the perceived viability of transpacific imperialism on the part of Spain. These narratives nevertheless reveal some of the anxieties at work in this imperfect effort to contain the broad Pacific within the narrow confines of a largely imaginary South Sea.

This chapter shows that despite the failure of the SSEC plan—the bloated Mars Observer, the deferral of Mariner Mark II—the decade of the 1980s closed on a generally upbeat note. The optimism of 1985, dashed by Challenger, returned. Mars Observer and CRAF/Cassini, although expanding beyond austerity, were still under way. Voyager meanwhile continued to sustain the lab with encounters with Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989, and together with Galileo and Magellan it combined to restore confidence at JPL. Amid the drought in planetary launches, the main sustenance for planetary scientists in this period came from Voyager 2's encounters at Uranus and Neptune, which extended Voyager's triumphal tour of the outer solar system. The encounters, however, did not simply entail sitting back and waiting for the spacecraft to get there but required much new work.

This chapter details the voyage of Ferdinand Magellan, arguably the first man to circumnavigate the globe. In 1518, Magellan was appointed by Spain's King Charles to command a fleet of five ships for a journey to the Spice Islands. The voyage itself was fraught with problems including mutinies, desertions, and deaths of captains and crew alike, which eventually reduced the fleet to three ships. On November 28, 1520, after weeks of searching, Magellan finally reached the channel that would lead to the Pacific Ocean. On April 7, 1521, the fleet reached Cebu where Magellan developed a cordial relationship with local king, Humabon. The ruler, his family, and most of the people in Cebu later converted to Christianity. Pleased with his success as a missionary, Magellan decided to establish a trading station on Cebu and to make all the local chieftains accept Humabon as their sovereign. One who refused was the chief of Lapulapu on Mactan Island. On the morning of April 27, 1521, Magellan took sixty men to subdue what he thought would be a poorly defended village. Instead, he found his small force battling a huge body of men, armed with spears and poisoned arrows. Magellan was killed, as were half a dozen others.

This chapter describes the initial contact between the Europeans and the indigenous peoples of the Mariana Islands. It begins with Magellan’s 1521 encounter with the islanders, which would set a precedent that became a tragic pattern in later Spanish–Chamorro relations. The great cultural differences in the values and behavior of the two sides led repeatedly to hostility and armed conflict. At the same time tensions arose between Spain and Portugal over a dispute regarding access to the Moluccas, setting off a wave of European explorers into the far Pacific and an age of exploration and conquest that would extend itself to Magellan’s final destination—the Philippines.

This introductory chapter presents a historical and geographical overview of Guam and its enduring significance in international affairs. Even in the twenty-first century, Americanized, modern, multiethnic, and still one of the world’s last colonies, Guam continues to fulfill the geopolitical role imposed on it by outsiders centuries ago. In place of Spanish galleons, Guam now serves international airlines, nuclear-powered submarines, space satellites, and all the other creations of modern humans that have followed for good or bad in Magellan’s momentous wake. From here the rest of the chapter discusses the routes Magellan had taken in his voyage which would eventually land him in Guam.

This chapter describes the geography, history, and culture of Guam. Guam is the southernmost and largest of the fifteen islands in the Marianas archipelago. With 209 square miles of landmass, Guam constitutes 20 percent of the entire dry land of Micronesia and is the most useful for shipping, communications, and military purposes. Guam's first contact with the West occurred in March 1521 when Ferdinand Magellan and his crew spotted land that would later come to be known as Rota and Guam. It was almost 150 years after the arrival of Magellan that Spain laid claim to the Mariana Islands in 1665; serious colonizing began in 1668. On August 12, 1898, a protocol was signed Spain agreed to give up Cuba, cede Puerto Rico and Guam to the United States, and permit the United States to occupy the city, bay, and harbor at Manila pending a peace treaty to determine the control, disposition, and government of the Philippines.

Santo Niño de Cebu is one of the most revered saints in the Philippines and draws tens of thousands of devotees during his fiestas, like few others. Santo Niño’s origins and cult formation can be traced to the very first instances of the Spanish conquest. This chapter analyzes the documentary genealogy of the colonial discourse that figures Santo Niño as the symbol for the predestined Christianization of the Philippines and tracks the rise of a native counter-narrative at the end of the sixteenth century that denies his Spanish origins. Its argues that for the Cebuano subjects, as well as other natives of the colonized Philippines, to speak of the pre-Hispanic origins of Santo Niño could have been a means to maintain their own collective memory of the material and spiritual pillage that arose with the Spanish conquest.

The chapter begins in December 1524 when Sebastian Cabot, Robert Thorne, and five Genoese merchants agreed to raise funds to finance a voyage—to send a fleet to the Moluccas. The group were keen to find a passage to the source of spice that was easier and faster than Magellan’s route. The voyage exemplified how entangled Atlantic history can be. Although the voyage had the support of the Spanish Crown, it was initiated by a Genoese and English consortium and relied on funds, expertise, and labour from around Europe. The chapter examines the conflicting agendas that hampered the voyage from the beginning and looks at how Roger Barlow, the supercargo on the flagship, prepared. It charts the path of the fleet from April to June 1526; from when the four ships left San Lucar, stopping in the Canary Islands before crossing the Atlantic, and reaching Pernambuco on the Brazilian coast.

Accompanied by first-time sample translations from Lem’s first three novels: Man From Mars, The Astronauts, and The Magellan Nebula, this chapter systematically surveys the contents, themes, and problematics of these virtually unknown books in an effort to bring them closer to English-speaking readers. Contextualizing their science fiction storylines and characters in terms of Stanislaw Lem’s entire oeuvre, it critically evaluates these pioneering novels in literary-stylistic as well as popular-scientific terms.