Magellan.

It was on an overly comfortable ocean liner, en route to South America, that Stefan Zweig had the idea for this biographical odyssey. He thought of the appalling conditions of voyages in the past, the smell of salty death that hung over the rogues and the heroes, their solitude. He thought of Magellan, who, on September 20, 1519, at the age of 39, undertook the first voyage around the world. An exceptional destiny... Seven years of military campaign in India had brought Magellan the Portuguese nothing but indifference in his homeland. He then convinced the King of Spain, Charles V, of a crazy project; "There is a passage leading from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean. Give me a fleet and I will show it to you and I will circumnavigate the earth from east to west" (This was without taking into account the Pacific Ocean, unknown at the time..). Spanish jealousies, cartographic errors, rivalries, mutinies, desertions of his seconds during the crossing, polar cold, hunger and disease, nothing will overcome the determination of Magellan, who will find at the extreme south of the American continent the strait that today bears his name. Leaving Seville with five cutters and 265 men, the expedition will return three years later, reduced to 18 men on a raft. Exhausted, glorious. Without Magellan who met an absurd death during a brawl with savages in the Philippines, his exploit accomplished. In this formidable adventure novel, Zweig exalts the heroic will of Magellan, who proves that "an idea animated by genius and carried by passion is stronger than all the elements combined and that always a man, with his small perishable life, can make what seemed a dream to hundreds of generations a reality and an imperishable truth."