Admired for his courage and determination, the Portuguese navigator Fernand de Magellan continues to inspire explorers of the cosmos and oceans who, 500 years after the first planetary circumnavigation, see it as a symbol of the quest for knowledge.
"Magellan is still an inspiration 500 years later because it is a pioneer of a time when the navigators who left in the emptiness had a big tendency not to return", told AFP the French Fabien Cousteau, filmmaker and ocean explorer like his grandfather, Jacques-Yves Cousteau.
The Portuguese has never completed the world tour started on August 10, 1519 by its fleet of five ships and 237 men from the port of Seville, in southern Spain.
He died in a battle against the inhabitants of an island located today in the Philippines and it is the Spaniard Juan Sebastian Elcano who completed the journey of three years with about twenty survivors aboard the Victoria, the only boat to have joined the starting point.
"Magellan paid the maximum price, but his team still went around and he made a point in the history that changed the world," said Fabien Cousteau on the sidelines of a conference organized in early July in Lisbon by the American company The Explorers Club.
"This is still one of the greatest exploits in the history of navigation," says American historian Laurence Bergreen, author of a biography of Magellan, the first navigator to cross the Pacific Ocean. by the way named.
"Embrace the planet"
This trip "marks a moment in history that has transformed mankind who for the first time embraced the entire planet," said Alan Stern, NASA engineer and scientific director of the New Horizons mission, a probe having recently flown over the celestial object furthest from the Earth.
"I would even say that Magellan's trip represents the first global event, in the same way that Yuri Gagarin signed the first extra-planetary event," he added in reference to the Russian astronaut who was the first to travel in space in 1961.
Magellan marked the geography by discovering a passage between the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean, the strait that bears his name at the southern end of the American continent.
He marked astronomy by discovering two galaxies visible to the naked eye from the southern hemisphere, the "Magellanic Clouds".
A giant telescope to be built in Chile will bear its name.
Laurence Bergreen, who was invited by NASA to baptize parts of the planet's surface Mars, suggested names attributed by Magellan to Patagonian headlands or bays.
"Lessons for the future"
According to Bergreen, at NASA the Portuguese navigator is considered "as a kind of Albert Einstein explorers".
It is that "to prepare for long-term missions, we are taught that the lessons of the future are written in the past," says the 65-year-old Canadian.
The browser also inspires today's exploits. Like those of American millionaire Victor Vescovo who made the "Grand Slam of the explorers": climb the seven highest peaks of the planet, from Aconcagua to Everest, and ski more than 100 km to the North Poles and south.
The 53-year-old businessman, who is wrapping up an expedition this summer to the deepest points of the five oceans, says he "discovered Magellan as a schoolboy." He was extremely intelligent, determined and, of course, a great leader ".
"Stories like his plant seeds in our brain and when we have the opportunity to do something extraordinary, we want to be like those we saw in our childhood books."
