The Untold Magellan Story at Velasco Bookstore
THE UNTOLD MAGELLAN STORY NOW IN DAVAO
(Avila, Charles. The Untold Magellan Story. Manila: Maine& Co., Inc. for The Gardener’s Tales, 2021. ISBN 978-621-96436-0-3)
Landing at Velasco Bookstore during the Kadayawan week, The Untold Magellan Story by Charles Avila is now available in Davao City.
Charles Avila was Research Assistant of Father Jose Vicente, Braganza, SVD in the latter's book "The Encounter". He is an author (Ownership: Early Christian Teaching), historian, socio-civic consultant and coconut industry advocate.
Still in the heels of the celebration (2019-2022) of the first circumnavigation of planet Earth. The voyage 500 years ago that is now universally considered the greatest human achievement on the sea. It led to humankind’s realization of an essentially single humanity circumscribed by one round planet Earth.
So much, and yet, not enough has been written about Magellan and his times. In this concise Untold Story, Avila utilizes a unique literary form on the basis of rigorous and solid research done collectively by scholars through the decades and succeeds to let the great conquistador speak for himself, and tell it as it was.
This book is history, not fiction– one has to keep reminding the reader. Undoubtedly a thriller and a page-turner, it takes the form of a Letter from Magellan to the Peoples of the Oceans, the Islands, the Archipelagos and the Continents.
Hear Magellan tell of life and the joys and intrigues in the courts of Europe in the 1500’s, the battles of conquest in Africa, South Asia and Asia Pacific that he was so much a part of, and the years of discovering the Americas and the Pacific, as he established once and for all that, indeed, the world is round. Proof? He had gone around it.
The discoveries and the conquests, the consequent proselytization and colonization, were all about two superpowers racing to own Southeast Asia and in particular Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines – if one must use the modern country names for contemporary understanding.
Get into Magellan’s inner thoughts and introspections, his motives and real purposes, his awareness that he was humanity’s consciousness knowing itself in the age of planetary self-discovery. It has been 500 years. The Untold Magellan Story beckons the modern reader to look back and, perhaps, begin to understand the present better. For, truth be told, there is a Magellan in all of us. -30-
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