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Magellan: Missing in Action
by Laurence Bergreen
Author of Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe
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| 1722 map showing North and South America (GLC 05238)
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Ferdinand Magellan, celebrated as the first circumnavigator,
has long been the orphan of history. Although he did not
survive his famous voyage, Magellan became both an icon of
exploration and an outcast—disowned by his native Portugal,
which he abandoned in search of financial backing for his scheme to
pioneer a route over sea to the Spice Islands, and by Spain,
for whom he sailed. Ironically, had he survived the complete
circumnavigation and returned to Seville in September 1522,
he would not have been greeted with accolades or cheering
throngs or recognition from young King Charles I. Instead,
he would have faced trial for treason and the possibility
of imprisonment or execution for sending several Spanish
officers and members of nobility to their deaths for mutiny
during the voyage. The Spanish preferred to honor Sebastian
Elcano, who succeeded him as the Captain General of the fleet,
even though Elcano was a Basque, and thus as much an outsider
as Magellan.
The English viewed with appreciation and envy the imperialistic
ambitions of Spain and Portugal and elevated Ferdinand Magellan
(always pronounced with a hard “g” in England) to his status
as a peerless explorer. King Charles sent several expeditions
designed to emulate Magellan’s circumnavigation, but they all
met with misfortune. It was no accident, then, that Sir Francis Drake,
the second circumnavigator (but the first to complete the journey himself),
happened to be English. His voyage was part exploration and part piracy
on behalf of Queen Elizabeth, reflecting the rising imperial ambitions
of the English throne. His success — and England’s — rested on the
shoulders of Magellan, and his vision of global trade and conquest
by sea rather than by land struck a resounding chord in the British Isles.
Because of the loss of his voyage’s logbooks, little is known
of Magellan’s own views on his adventures or
discoveries. Instead, his complex and contested provenance
is reflected in the historical record, and in other documents
illuminating his voyage. Although copious, these sources are
often politically biased and self-serving, charged with the
motives of those who kept them. Then there are the lacunae.
Portugal, for instance, was entirely secretive about its
exploration and discovery of distant parts of the world.
Producing or even owning a map pertaining to exploration was
illegal. When Christopher Columbus returned to Spain after his
first voyage to the New World, he immediately set about writing
letters to describe and publicize his exploits to his sponsors,
Ferdinand and Isabella. If Columbus had sailed on behalf of
Portugal, he would not have been given a forum; he would have been
muzzled, his exploits known only to a few court insiders, and
perhaps lost to history. As improbable as that sounds, consider
the possibility that two Portuguese explorers, Estêvão Froes and
João de Lisboa, located and explored what we now call the Strait of
Magellan in South America several years before Magellan himself
arrived. Unlike Magellan’s well-documented voyage, their journey
was known mainly through a sketchy account that surfaced mysteriously
in Germany, rather than through the expected official records.
Even though Magellan sailed for Spain, the dead hand of Portuguese
secrecy regarding exploration reached out to crush him as well.
After his death in a tribal battle in the Philippines, the flagship
of his fleet, Trinidad, was captured by the Portuguese as she
attempted to return to Spain. They swiftly impounded all of Magellan’s
personal logbooks, navigational instruments, and other items of interest.
Some of those precious artifacts and documents eventually
reached apparent safety in Lisbon, where scholars might have
eventually been able to examine them, but on November 1, 1755,
the disastrous Lisbon earthquake reduced the entire city to ruin,
and the materials relating to Magellan’s voyage were lost. None
of the surviving records—including individual, legal, and personal
accounts—reflect Magellan’s own view of his exploration and travails.
Magellan’s lost records might have also have afforded a window
into the mind of the most brilliant navigator of the age.
Instead, he is strangely absent from his own epic, and those seeking
to recreate his voyage or come to terms with this difficult,
driven individual are thrown back on other sources. Barring some
unforeseen discovery of previously unknown records of his exploits,
Magellan will never be able to plead his case before the court
of historical consideration and judgment. He stands mute
before rivals, accusers, and imposters.
Current historians and students come to know Magellan through
his well-documented actions rather than his almost nonexistent
words. We may not know, or can only guess at what he intended,
but we know for certain what he did, and frequently just how he
did it. We know what transpired on that voyage on an almost
daily basis, for these events were recorded in almost excruciating
detail, down to the number of fish hooks the fleet took along.
King Charles’s detailed formal orders to Magellan, official
correspondence regarding the expedition, and Magellan’s will
(signed shortly before his departure) have all been preserved
in the Archive of the Indies in Seville.
Two surviving accounts also shed valuable light on the
circumnavigation, those by Gaspar Corrêa and Francisco
Albo, Magellan’s pilot. And Elcano, who succeeded Magellan,
commissioned his own version of the voyage, De Orbe Novo,
“The New World,” written by the Italian priest and scholar
known as Peter Martyr and published in 1526. Then there are
the hundreds of pages of testimony from the mutineers aboard
Magellan’s ship, men who rebelled against the captain’s
tyrannical, yet lawful, command. All these men sought to
portray the Captain General as a villain in order to defend
themselves from their very serious offense against his authority.
Given the appeal of Magellan’s example to Great Britain,
it is perhaps not surprising that some of the best
published works about his life and voyage are in English.
The American naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison’s vast compilation,
The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages (New York: Oxford, 1974),
contains several fascinating and seminal chapters about Magellan,
and F. H. H. Guillemard’s Life of Ferdinand Magellan (London: George Peters, 1890)
offers one of the more sophisticated accounts of the explorer’s life.
All these voices, as varied and noteworthy as they are,
represent only the Western European point of view of
complex and controversial encounters with foreign cultures,
languages, and political and economic systems. Nearly all
the South American tribes visited by Magellan’s fleet
were pre-literate, and thus left no records of their
experience with these visitors from afar in their battered
black ships. Some of the survivors’ records suggest that the
Europeans, attired in their peculiar garb and speaking in
strange tongues, were taken to be supernatural beings fulfilling
prophecies of visitors from afar. If the tribes of Patagonia
had recorded their encounters with the devout, fearful, and
occasionally rapacious Magellan, modern impressions of his
circumnavigation might be very different.
The most vital chronicle of Magellan’s voyage,
and the best insight into this elusive figure,
comes from the pen of Antonio Pigafetta, a Venetian
papal secretary who found himself in the midst of
the most ambitious ocean voyage of his age quite
by accident. In Seville as Magellan’s expedition
was in formation, Pigafetta introduced himself
to the Captain General, and even though he had
never before been to sea, was hired on the spot
as the journey’s official chronicler and illustrator.
He was everything Magellan was not – broadly educated,
tolerant, courtly – and, most important for posterity,
among the lucky handful of survivors of the voyage.
Of approximately 225 men who set out in 1518, only eighteen
returned to Seville three years later. Along the way,
Pigafetta kept a diary of the voyage and its many pains,
recounting Magellan’s courage and cruelty, and the
wonders of exploration. He published his extraordinary
record in two volumes under the title First Voyage
Around the World, revealing Magellan in all his heroism,
cunning, and ruthlessness. His account is bursting with
botanical, linguistic, and anthropological detail.
Pigafetta recorded a stirring eyewitness account of the
death of Ferdinand Magellan in Mactan harbor on April 27, 1521,
as he faced an overwhelming tribal army led by the
bellicose Lapu Lapu: “An Indian hurled a bamboo spear
into the Captain General’s face, but the latter immediately
killed him with his lance, which he left in the Indian’s body.
Then, trying to lay his hand on sword, he could draw it out
but halfway, because he had been wounded in the arm with a
bamboo spear. When the natives saw that, they all hurled
themselves upon him. One of them wounded him on the left
leg with a large cutlass, which resembles a scimitar, only
larger.” Wounded, Magellan “turned back many times to see
whether we were all in the boats.” Without that concern,
“not a single one of us would have been saved in the boats,
for while he was fighting, the others retired to the boats.”
Eventually, the blows he suffered took their toll. “That caused
the Captain General to fall face downward, when immediately
they rushed upon him with iron and bamboo spears and with
their cutlasses, until they killed our mirror, our light,
our comfort, and our true guide. Thereupon, beholding him
dead, we, wounded, retreated as best we could to the boats,
which were already pulling off.”
Pigafetta revered Magellan, and his feelings were
revealed in his inscription of the slain hero’s epitaph:
“I hope that…the fame of so noble a captain will not become
effaced in our times. Among the other virtues that he
possessed, he was more constant than ever any one else
in the greatest adversity. He endured hunger better than
all the others, and more accurately than any man in the world
did he understand sea charts and navigation. And that his
was the truth was seen openly, for no other had had so much
natural talent nor the boldness to learn how to circumnavigate
the world, as he had almost done…”
| For a list
of books and websites about Ferdinand Magellan, including information on fellow explorers Elcano and Pigafetta, visit our Additional
Resources Page |
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