Every period of history has its own exciting record of achieve- ments and events.The period we call the Renaissance--from about A.D.1400 to 1600-is remembered as a time of new ideas,inventions and discoveries. Shakespeare,Michelangelo,Leonardo da Vinci,Cope- rnicus,Galileo,were some of the great people-writers and artists, scientists and thinkers-who made it sucha golden age.Ferdinard Magellan, Portuguese navigator and explorer, was another. Magellan,like most educated people in Renaissance Europe,had come to believe the world was round and shaped like a globe-not flat or saucer-shaped, as so many thought in those days.But nei- ther he nor anyone else yet knew how big the world was, and could only guess at what vast and strange new lands might lie beyond the seas. To find out about these things was the greatest challenge of the age. Portugal and Spain led the way in this great quest. In 1443, Henry the Navigator, a Portuguese prince, founded an observatory and school of navigation at Cape St Vincent, a lonely headland jutting out into the Atlantic from the coast of Portugal. There, some of Europe's most learned astronomers and skilled map-makers devised new ways of Europe's most learned astronomers and cont- inents.Later came the explorers themselves.Bartholomew Diaz and Vasco da Gama,in turn,charted the coast of Africa and sailed on eastward across the Indian Ocean. Christopher Columbus headed in the opposite direction, crossing the unknown Atlantic Ocean to reach the Americas. Not long after them, Magellan set sail on what was to prove the greatest voyage of discovery yet.