The caravel "Victoria" enters the port of Seville after Magellan's expedition's circumnavigation of the globe
"Once Around the World" is the title of a book recently published by Lonely Planet. As Deutsche Welle notes, it seems especially captivating right now, when almost the entire world is locked down in their countries, cities, and apartments due to the coronavirus pandemic and cannot even visit friends, let alone travel around the world. Let's travel together.
The subtitle of this book reads: "The Craziest Journeys Around the Globe." And indeed, the very first circumnavigation, embarked upon in September 1519 by Ferdinand Magellan's expedition, seems like madness. Nautical charts and navigation techniques were very imperfect back then. Pilot books were literally dotted with blank spots. Today, for example, we know that the strait stretching 570 km and named after the legendary sea conqueror Magellan connects the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, but Magellan and his crew were not even sure it was a strait—especially since in some places its width is less than three kilometers.
Officers who considered the venture hopeless mutinied, demanding to turn the ships around and return to Spain. One of the participants in this mutiny was Juan Sebastián Elcano. After the rebellion was suppressed, he was pardoned and even given command of one of the expedition's ships. Soon Magellan was killed by locals, and Juan Elcano took over the expedition. His caravel "Victoria" became the only one of the five ships that began the voyage to safely return to Spain.
So strictly speaking, it was Juan Elcano (and 17 members of his crew) who were the first to circumnavigate the globe, not Magellan, who died at the hands of natives on one of the Philippine islands and, naturally, never made it back to his homeland. But the glory went to Magellan.
Underwater Circumnavigation
Today, five centuries later, circumnavigations by ships, yachts, and cruise liners have long become commonplace (only the coronavirus pandemic managed to temporarily halt them). But underwater, the US Navy submarine USS Triton first circumnavigated the globe relatively recently—in 1960. Then, at the height of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union and the United States were escalating the arms race, the Americans decided to test the limits of their new nuclear submarine and its crew, which was tasked with circling the globe in 56 days.
The Triton, equipped with two nuclear reactors, was then the largest and most expensive ($109 million) submarine in the world. The expedition was kept in the strictest secrecy, and the Triton was spotted only once—by a 19-year-old Filipino fisherman who nearly had a heart attack when a periscope suddenly emerged from the sea near his boat. This happened, incidentally, very close to Mactan Island, where Magellan was killed.
The Triton's voyage successfully ended off the coast of America on April 26, 1960. A lavish celebration in honor of the submarine's crew was planned for the following week, with US President Eisenhower expected to attend, but on May 1, Soviet air defenses shot down an American U-2 spy plane over Sverdlovsk, and after that, the president naturally had no time for festivities.
Flying Housewife
Since we're talking about airplanes, military pilots, amateur pilots, and adventurers have flown around the globe... The most unusual among them was a housewife from Ohio, Geraldine Mock. The granddaughter of German immigrants, she grew up in a wealthy family, married, had two sons and a daughter, and then one evening told her husband, "If I stay home any longer, I'll go crazy." So in 1964, she set off alone in her single-engine Cessna 180, which the family usually used for vacation flights, on an aerial journey around the world.
By irony of fate, literally the same week, her competitor—another American female pilot—also set off around the world. But Jerry, as everyone called her, was an experienced pilot (she started flying at school age), and her route turned out to be slightly shorter. True, during one of the intermediate stops, she had to wait a week for good weather, and in Egypt, Jerry was arrested at a military airfield where she landed by mistake, but still, the "flying housewife," as newspapers called her, was the first.
Dynamite, Ball Gowns, and Hard-Boiled Eggs
The authors of the book about the "craziest" journeys around the world write with particular reverence about women who undertook circumnavigations in times when they were far from safe. Among them is German racing driver Clärenore Stinnes, who in May 1927 set off on a round-the-world trip in a standard production car of the time, an Adler with an engine of only 50 horsepower. Accompanying the traveler was a truck carrying two mechanics and Swedish cameraman Carl-Axel Söderström, who immortalized this road trip, which lasted a total of over two years. The support vehicle was loaded with spare parts and luggage, which included, among other things, a crate of dynamite, 100 packs of cigarettes, three ball gowns, and 178 hard-boiled eggs.
The journey began in Frankfurt am Main—first south to the Balkans, then further to Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, Tehran, Moscow... From there, across European Russia and Siberia to Lake Baikal, which Stinnes crossed on ice, and so on. In New York, the traveler was personally received by then-US President Herbert Hoover. Then an ocean liner took her to Europe. On June 24, she arrived in Berlin, becoming the first woman to circumnavigate the globe by car.
The adventures, by the way, did not end there. During the circumnavigation, Clärenore and her cameraman fell in love. Söderström was married; after returning, he divorced, they married and lived on an estate in Sweden. They had three biological children and several adopted ones.
With Songs and Dances Around the World
But, in my opinion, the most extraordinary among the many remarkable circumnavigations described in the book—by land, air, water, and underwater, on ships, planes, bicycles (the first being Englishman Thomas Stevens in 1886), motorcycles, hot air balloons, trains (the authors' clear favorite being the Trans-Siberian Railway), and so on—was the journey of Romanian Dumitru Dan. Together with three fellow countrymen who, like him, were studying at a Parisian university, he decided to walk around the globe to earn the 100,000 francs promised by the Touring Club of France, and at the same time to glorify his country and its culture.
Dumitru and his comrades prepared for the journey for almost two years: training by taking multi-kilometer hikes, studying cartography and foreign languages, learning to play the flute and accordion, and rehearsing Romanian folk songs and dances.
They set out in national costumes and traditional Romanian sandals. Dan wore out nearly 500 pairs of such sandals over six years of circumnavigation. Money on the road was earned through folk concerts.
The circumnavigation remained unfinished due to World War I. Only in 1923 did Dan manage to complete the final leg of the journey to Paris. His comrades did not live to see this triumph. One died in Bombay in 1911 from opium smoking, another fell into an abyss a year later in the South China Mountains, a third developed gangrene during the crossing of Alaska and soon died in a hospital.
Dumitru Dan himself later became a professional geographer and professor. And he remained a legend—a man who crossed five continents, visited 76 countries and 1,500 cities around the world.