In his history of American naval operations in WWII, naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison noted that the month before he died, Magellan and his men reached an island in the Philippines known as Limasawa, where “westward-advancing Christianity first met eastward-advancing Islam.” That phrase has become more pregnant with irony and portent in the 60 years since Morison wrote them. It also inspires a different way of viewing Magellan’s odyssey.