If you want to read a thrilling account of Magellan’s epic voyage and of the terrible fate that befell him on April 27, 1521, an excellent place to start is with William Manchester’s A World Lit Only by Fire. In fact, I’d advise you to read only those chapters in this work dealing with the explorer. As for the rest of this history of the transition between the middle and modern ages, skip it--Manchester, an excellent chronicler of 20th-century history, had compounded his mistake of ranging far beyond his usual writing domain by a) sticking overwhelmingly to secondary rather than primary sources, and b) rehashing the same old stereotypes about the Dark Ages that historians had long overturned.