FEATURE: Ferdinand Magellan
Magellan was first to sail around the world, right? Think again.
Five hundred years on, the explorer’s legacy is complicated—and contested.
FIVE HUNDRED YEARS ago, Ferdinand Magellan began a historic journey to circumnavigate the globe. Simple, right? Not really— the explorer and his voyage are a study in contradiction. Magellan was Portuguese, but sailed on behalf of Spain. He was a formidable captain, but his crew hated him. His expedition was the first to sail around the world, but he didn’t end up circling the globe himself. His name wasn’t even Magellan.
Nonetheless, it’s clear that Ferdinand Magellan’s 1519 expedition changed the world forever. His journey was “the greatest sea voyage ever undertaken, and the most significant,” sayshistorian Laurence Bergreen, author of Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe. “That’s not hyperbole.”
Brutal, bellicose, and brave, Magellan turned a commercial voyage into a hair-raising showdown with a wide world few Europeans could imagine. At the beginning of his journey, his contemporaries suspected it was impossible to sail around the entire globe—and feared that everything from sea monsters to killer fogs awaited anyone foolhardy enough to try. “It sounded suicidal to do this,” says Bergreen.
The Portuguese nobleman was born Fernão de Magalhães around 1480. As a page to queen consort Eleanor and Manuel I, he experienced court life in Lisbon. But the young man had a sense of adventure, and took part in a string of Portuguese voyages designed to discover and seize lucrative spice routes in Africa and India.
At the time, Portugal and Spain were involved in an intense rivalry to see who could find and claim new territory where they could source the spices coveted by European aristocrats. In 1505, Magellan joined the fight, traveling to India, Malaysia, and Indonesia. But his days in service to Portugal were numbered: He was accused of illegal trading and fell out with Manuel I, who turned down his proposal to locate a new spice route.
Magellan was convinced that by sailing west instead of east and going through a rumored strait through South America, he could map a new route to Indonesia and India. So he abandoned his Portuguese loyalty and headed to Spain, where he gained both citizenship and Charles V’s blessing for a five-ship journey westward.
The captain stood to gain great wealth and status from the trip: Charles gave him a decade-long monopoly on any route he might discover, a cut of the profits, and a noble title to boot. But he was in an awkward position when it came to his majority-Spanish crew and his royal mission. “The Castilians resented sailing under a Portuguese commander and the Portuguese considered him a traitor,” writes historian Lincoln Paine.
After winter weather forced his ships to wait for months in what is now Argentina, Magellan’s crew mutinied. One ship wrecked; another ditched the expedition altogether and headed back to Spain. The captain struggled to regain control of his men, but once he did, the repercussions were swift and harsh. He ordered some of the mutineers beheaded and quartered; others were marooned or forced into hard labor.
The voyage got back on track and Magellan managed to navigate a treacherous passage that’s now named in his honor—the Strait of Magellan. But his troubles weren’t over. As the crew forged across the Pacific Ocean, food spoiled and scurvy and starvation struck. Magellan and his men briefly made landfall in what was likely Guam, where they killed indigenous people and burned their homes in response to the theft of a small boat.
A month later, the expedition reached the Philippines. To the crew’s surprise, Enrique, an enslaved man Magellan had purchased before the journey, could understand and speak the indigenous people’s language. It turned out he waslikely raised there before his enslavement—making him, not Magellan, the first person to circumnavigate the globe.
Magellan swiftly claimed the Philippines on Spain’s behalf, but his involvement in what Bergreen calls an “unnecessary war” was his undoing. “He wasn’t defeated by natural forces,” says Bergreen.
Instead, he demanded that local Mactan people convert to Christianity and became embroiled in a rivalry between Humabon and Lapu-Lapu, two local chieftains. On April 27, 1521, Magellan was killed by a poison arrow while attacking Lapu-Lapu’s people.
They “all at once rushed upon him with lances of iron and of bamboo,” wroteAntonio Pigafetta, an Italian scholar who accompanied the journey, “so that they slew our mirror, our light, our comfort, and our true guide.” The crew left his body behind—an indication, perhaps, of how they truly felt about their relentless leader.
After Magellan’s death, his crew continued in the single ship that remained, captained by Juan Sebastian Elcano, a Basque. They returned to Spain in September 1522. Along the way, they had encountered a new ocean, mapped new routes for European trade, and set the stage for modern globalism. Sixty thousand miles later, and after the death of 80 percent of those involved, the expedition had proven that the globe could be circumnavigated and opened the door to European colonization of the New World in the name of commerce.
A legend was born—and in 1989, one of Magellan’s namesakes even traveled to Venus. During a five-year-long journey, NASA’s Magellan spacecraft made images of the planet before burning up in its atmosphere.
But though Magellan’s name is associated with discovery by some, others shy away from that word. “When I write my textbook I will state that Magellanarrived in the Philippines in 1521,” says historian Ambeth Ocampo, former chairman of the Republic of the Philippines’ national historical commission. “Magellan should not be seen as the beginning of Philippine history but one event [in] a history that still has to be written and rewritten for a new generation.”
For the indigenous people encountered by Magellan and his crew, the explorer’s arrival heralded a new age of conquest, Christianization, and colonization. Lapu-Lapu, the Mactan ruler whose forces killed Magellan, is often credited with slaying the explorer. As a result, notes Ocampo, he has become a national hero in the Philippines.
Though Lapu-Lapu likely did not do the deed, he is widely commemorated as a symbol of Filipino resistance and pride. Now, historians are working toward a more accurate portrayal ahead of the 500th anniversary of Magellan’s arrival in the Philippines. The government’s quincentennial celebrations in 2021 will include replacing a 10-foot statue of Lapu-Lapu in the city that bears his name. A monument that shows the battle itself—and the group effort that brought down an epic explorer—will take its place.
Should Magellan be considered a hero, or what Ocampo calls the Philippines’ “first tourist”? As Guam, the Philippines, Spain and even Portugal celebrate and question the quincentennial, the explorer’s legacy remains as complicated as ever.
In National Geographic
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/2019/09/magellan-first-sail-around-world-think-again/
Magellan and the world’s first circumnavigation, 500 years ago
Five centuries ago, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan discovered a passage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans — today’s Strait of Magellan. He paid dearly for his expedition in search of the East Indies.
Beginning on August 10, 2019, Spain celebrates the 500th anniversary of the start of the first circumnavigation of the world, unwittingly initiated by Ferdinand Magellan.
A battle-hardened knight and hardy sailor at a young age, he never would have imagined he would be the one to make the key contribution to travelling around the globe.
Born about 1480 in Portugal into a Catholic family of minor nobility, Magellan was influenced by the confining religious ideology of the late Middle Ages and the idea of subjecting the world to Christianity. The era was marked by the epochal shift from the Middle Ages to modern times. In 1492, Christopher Columbus had sailed to America, which inspired other seafarers to go on ever more daring voyages of discovery seeking new lands and fabulous wealth.
Career-minded daredevil
The beginning of the colonial era came at just the right time for Magellan, a daredevil who had distinguished himself during military missions at a young age — hoping, experts believe, to rise to the ranks of the upper nobility. He traveled to India or the Malay Peninsula for the first time on board Portuguese spice and war ships. For a total of eight years, he fought on colonial battlegrounds in Asia and North Africa.
In 1512, he and a group of mariners headed to the legendary Spice Islands, also called the Maluku Islands or the Moluccas, in Southeast Asia — islands that are home to the nutmeg tree and above all the clove tree. On the European markets, these precious exotic flavor enhancers were worth their weight in gold. Magellan’s share in the sale of the spices after the crew’s return home secured his livelihood, but it also awakened the desire for more.
Changing allegiance
After a quarrel with the Portuguese king, Ferdinand Magellan in 1517 changed his allegiance over to Spain, to King Charles I, the future Emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire. Bartolome de Las Casas, a Spanish theologian and writer of the time, described Magellan as small and rather unassuming — but exceptionally charismatic. “When it came down to it, he was a brilliant salesman and self-promoter who was able to inspire people with his ideas and great goals,” German historian Christian Jostmann told DW, adding it was no surprise that Magellan managed to convince the Spanish king to shell out the money for a trip to the Moluccas.
Prospects of great wealth are one thing, but Charles I also agreed because he had an eye on power politics. At the beginning of the 16th century, Spain and Portugal had split up the world among themselves, with ownership of the Spice Islands, which today belong to Indonesia, still up in the air.
Magellan could not sail around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa because the route was blocked by the Portuguese. To avoid Portuguese territories altogether, Magellan vowed to find a western sea route to the Moluccas. Since Columbus’ sea journey, about 500 ships had tried in vain to find a passage through the American land mass.
Magellan’s Moluccan Armada of five completely overhauled ships equipped with cannons left Seville on August 10, 1519 — headed for Sanlucar de Barrameda on the Atlantic coast. The fleet with its crew of 240 set sail again from there about a month later.
‘Life in a wooden tub’
Magellan aimed to become rich, found colonies for Spain and convert the natives, all while keeping in mind the prospect of social advancement, said Jostmann. In his book Magellan or The First Circumnavigation of the Earth, the historian vividly describes what Magellan and his companions experienced on this first travel around the world, including stormy and calm seas, hunger, thirst, diseases, mutinies and deadly conflicts with indigenous peoples.
It was far from a seafaring idyll, Jostmann said. “About 50 men lived for months in a wooden tub measuring about 150 square meters with no sanitary facilities, no kitchen, no privacy.” The food was modest, there was hardly any medical care, and then there was always the insecurity of this being a suicide mission, he added.
The fleet sailed to the Canary Islands, then along the African coast to Sierra Leone. At the narrowest point, it crossed the Atlantic Ocean and reached the South American continent along the area that today is Rio de Janeiro. The journey continued along the South American east coast, with the men constantly on the lookout for the hypothetical passage to the west. It was all very tedious, and the fleet stopped en route in the winter months. The supply situation was increasingly difficult and the mood on board the ships soured, leading to a mutiny.
Sea passage to the west
Magellan, however, proved to be tenacious. On October 21, 1520, he discovered a cape. His fleet sailed between the southern tip of the South American continent and the island of Tierra del Fuego, into a labyrinth of waterways, losing one ship on the way while another ship took advantage of the confusion and fled back to Spain. But Magellan had found the longed-for passage in these storm-battered waters. It took the decimated armada six weeks to reach the Pacific Ocean.
From the southeast of the Pacific Ocean, they continued in a northwesterly arc for three and a half months without once encountering inhabited islands. Hunger, thirst and illness claimed 19 lives before the crews found fresh provisions on one of the Mariana Islands — a tragedy because unwittingly, Magellan’s ships had passed by many islands that could have provided him and his crew with fresh water and food.
Finally, the three remaining ships and their 150-strong crew landed in the Philippines on March 21, 1521 as the first Europeans there ever. It was Magellan’s final destination. He planned to take possession of these rich islands for Spain, with an eye on a possible governorship. “When he arrived in the Philippines, he pulled off such a crazy show that large numbers of natives converted to Christianity and capitulated to Spain,” according to Jostmann. Others were not swayed, and when Magellan tried to conquer a village on April 21, he was killed by spears and a poison arrows. Lacking sufficient sailors for three ships, two vessels quickly fled after the crews sank the third.
Completing the circumnavigation
Under the command of Juan Sebastian Elcano, the two ships sailed to the Spice Islands, where they finally took the long-desired cargo on board. Elcano chose the route around the Cape of Good Hope for the return trip.
In the end, almost three years after setting sail for the Moluccas, only one of the five ships returned home, with Captain Elcano completing Magellan’s involuntary and unplanned circumnavigation of the world.
On September 6, 1522, the Victoria reached the Spanish port of Sanlucar de Barrameda. About 20 sailors survived the first historically documented circumnavigation of the world. Since the middle of the 16th century, the western passage has been named Strait of Magellan after Ferdinand Magellan.
In the 19th century, many intellectuals celebrated Magellan as a hero and genius, a view that’s outdated now with our perspective on colonialism, said Christian Jostmann. You have to admire the explorer’s ambition, tenacity and sheer will power, he added, but for the historian, that’s not a reason to celebrate him.
In DW
https://www.dw.com/en/magellan-and-the-worlds-first-circumnavigation-500-years-ago/a-49946044
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