Books: Martyr or Martinet?

CONQUEROR OF THE SEAS—Stefan Zweig —Viking ($3.50).

This is the second book on Magellan in two months. In Charles Ford’s Death Sails With Magellan (TIME. Nov. 15) the ill-fated Portuguese navigator was portrayed as a cold-blooded martinet who double-crossed his best friends, intended to double-cross Spain and set up his own kingdom in the East Indies.

In Conqueror of the Seas Author Zweig admits that Magellan was a secretive, unpersonable dictator. But Magellan’s voyage he calls “the most glorious Odyssey in the history of mankind.” Magellan he defends as a sincere Christian whose ruthlessness was only an unavoidable means toward a great end. His generally known facts take in less detail than most biographers’. As in Author Zweig’s other defenses of historical figures he considers maligned (Marie Antoinette, Mary, Queen oj Scotland and the Isles), his method is that of the biographical essay; his persuasiveness is that of the eloquent defense attorney. Thus, where the facts go too strongly against him (as with Magellan’s execution of his Spanish captains and South American natives). Author Zweig asks the jury: “Is it not the eternal doom of man that his most memorable achievements should so often be stained with blood, and that those who are harshest are those who usually accomplish the greatest deeds?”.