ABSTRACT
People in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been travelling to an extent few, if any, could have imagined in the early modern period. Yet there are parallels between these two epochs. Circumnavigation of the globe is but one, albeit the most obvious, travel nexus. Magellan’s early sixteenth-century ocean-faring circumnavigation of the earth in a sailboat anticipated Gagarin’s first spatial circumnavigation of the globe in a spaceship in 1961. Both voyages obliterated preconceived notions of spatial limits. Magellan opened the globe by showing earthly connecting passages; Gagarin physically proved that the sky is not the limit.
