Ferdinand Magellan was one of the greatest explorers of all times. The story of how he led an armada of small ships all the way around the world for the first time ever is filled with drama and suspense and horror.
And yet– here’s what it says about Magellan in this history textbook for high school sophomores:
“The (appropriately named) Portuguese ship Victoria, which limped into the harbor near Seville on September 6, 1522, with its sick and ragged surviving crew, had made history by circumnavigating the globe. Although the expedition’s commander, Ferdinand Magellan, did not live to savor the triumph, his crew had done what no humans had done before.”
This is why I loathe textbooks. What should be really fascinating just . . . isn’t.
Magellan was a demanding, irascible, and hugely ambitious man. He set sail from Spain in September, 1519 with five ships and 265 men. It was meant to be a two-year expedition, and their goal was to find a westward route to the Spice Islands. It turned into a three-year voyage, and only 19 men survived. Magellan was not one of them. Still, one of his ships made it all the way around, and history gives Magellan credit for it.
Six years earlier, Vasco Nunez de Balboa had sailed to the narrow strip of land that is now Panama, climbed a peak in Darien, and beheld the Pacific Ocean, which he called the South Sea. (On a side note, and sorry for geeking out here, but Keats gets his explorers mixed up in this famous sonnet about that peak in Darien.) Magellan, gravely misinformed along with most Europeans of his time, believed the South Sea/Pacific Ocean was small, and if only he could find a strip of water that would enable him to cross the land barrier between the Atlantic and the Pacific, Asia was practically a hop, skip and a jump away.
After many long, stressful months, Magellan’s ships finally found a strait from east to west, but the maps of the time were all wrong and it turned out to be much, much farther south than he thought. His sailors had to endure reduced rations, treacherous reefs and currents, and increasingly freezing temperatures—the strait was practically all the way to the South Pole. Some lost hope they’d ever find it, and two of the ships mutinied. Magellan managed to squash the mutiny. He rounded up the ringleaders and had their heads chopped off and their bodies drawn and quartered. Suffice to say, it was a good thing they found the strait when they did, because morale was at an all-time low.
At long last his armada proceeded across what would be known as the Strait of Magellan. Now they were facing the Pacific, with no idea how big this vast ocean actually was, and they had only about three months’ worth of food. With no maps or decent navigational tools, and scant food, two of the ships peeled off and headed back to Spain. The remaining three set off across the unknown waters, fully aware that if they didn’t find the other side, they’d face certain death. After sailing nearly 13,000 miles (think of that), they finally saw land. They landed near an island, now called Guam. The survivors were barely alive, reduced to drinking smelly, horrible-tasting water and eating crumbled biscuits full of rat droppings and maggots. Roasted rat was a rare delicacy. Nineteen men died of starvation, the rest were mere days from expiring themselves, and all of the survivors, emaciated and listless, had lost most of their teeth to scurvy.
The natives on Guam turned out not to be very friendly. At the second island they came to, they were greeted by natives (in what is now part of the Filppino archipelago) bearing bananas and coconuts and welcoming them with open arms—including young, unclothed females. They decided to stay for awhile.
While his men cavorted around in this apparent Paradise (this is a PG-rated blog), Magellan became increasingly fanatic about his faith, and tried to convert every native he could to Christianity. Sensing growing hostility from the native men, some of Magellan’s officers urged him to depart for Spain, but he resisted.
He decided instead to wage a pointless battle against a local chieftain, partly in hopes of converting him to Christianity. After wading ashore with a vastly outnumbered and inexperienced band of fighters, but firm in the belief that God was on his side, Magellan was struck with a poisoned arrow and then set upon and ignominiously hacked to death by the natives. Only one of the five ships made it back to Spain, in 1522.
This account relies heavily on one of my favorite books about this time, A World Lit Only By Fire. I highly recommend it.