In 1522 an unrecognizable ship arrived in the port of Seville, the Victoria, it became the first ship to circumnavigate the globe.
On board the crew was reduced to 18 starving and thin men, which is quite astonishing considering they began with 241 on board, of diverse nationalities and expertise.
Their voyage, changed the course of history and the way we live today. Nothing would ever be the same.
Abraham Ortelius’s map “Maris Pacifici . . .” (Antwerp, 1595). Latin text beneath I was first to circle the world by means of sails, Carrying you, Magellan, leader, through the new strait. Justly called Victoria . With sails as wings, and glory my prize, I fought the sea. Second-smallest of the five ships of Ferdinand Magellan’s Armada de Molucca, the Victoria was a Spanish carrack or nao (ship).
It opened up the last new ocean, set up trade routes, and provided a more accurate scale of the Earth’s distances.
It’s journey capatianed by Fernão de Magalhães known in English as Ferdinand Magellan, accompanied by the Basque navigator Juan Sebastián del Cano.
Ferdinand Magellan was born to a minor Portuguese noble family in 1480 and by the age of 12 had become a pageboy to his Queen, at the Court of King John II.
Like many of the younger Portuguese nobility he received his education at court and could look forward to a military command, a diplomatic post or an administrative position in Portugal or her colonies.
However inspired by the exploits of earlier Portuguese explorers like Dias and Da Gama, he began his career as a soldier/adventurer on the 1505 expedition to India under the command of Francisco de Almeida.
Vasco da Gama, Portuguese explorer and the first European to reach India by sea. His initial voyage was the first to link Europe and Asia by an ocean, Da Gama’s discovery of the sea route to India was significant and opened the way for an age of global imperialism and for the Portuguese to establish a long-lasting colonial empire in Asia.
The Age of Exploration or Age of Discovery as it is sometimes called, officially began in the early 15th century and lasted until the 17th century.
The period is characterized as a time when Europeans began exploring the world by sea in search of trading partners, new goods, and new trade routes.
In addition, some explorers set sail to simply learn more about the world.
Whatever their reasons though, the information gained during the Age of Exploration significantly helped in the advancement of geographic knowledge.
The prevailing Maritime Law of the time was established by the Pope. Specifically , Pope Alexander VI, born Rodrigo de Borja ( Borgia), whose family still resides in Rome at villa Borgese, which was built by the Pope dismantling portions of the Colosseum and which , he later leased as a quarry for other projects.
Pope Alexander VI is the subject Showtime Series the Borgias, is about Pope Alexander VI and his family, who presided and wrote, the Treaty of Tordesillas , which was latter ratified by of Pope Julius II and nicknamed “The Fearsome Pope”and “The Warrior Pope”.
Pope Julius II ordering Bramante, Michelangelo and Raphael to construct the Vatican
During his nine-year pontificate his military and diplomatic interventions averted a take-over by France of the Italian States (including the Papal States). He also proved a bulwark against Venetian expansionism.
The Treaty of Tordesillas was intended to solve the dispute that had been created following the return of Christopher Columbus and his crew, who had sailed for the Crown of Castile.
On Columbus’ way back to Spain he first reached Lisbon, in Portugal.
There he asked for another meeting with King John II to show him the newly discovered lands.
After learning of the Castilian–sponsored voyage, the Portuguese king sent a threatening letter to the Catholic Monarchs stating that by the Treaty of Alcáçovas signed in 1479 and confirmed in 1481 with the papal bull Æterni regis, that granted all lands south of the Canary Islands to Portugal, all of the lands discovered by Columbus belonged, in fact, to Portugal.
John II of Portugal
Also, the Portuguese king stated that he was already making arrangements for a fleet (an armada led by Francisco de Almeida) to depart shortly and take possession of the new lands.
Detail of the Catholic Monarchs Receiving the Christian Captives after the Conquest of Malaga in 1487, 1867
After reading the letter the Catholic Monarchs knew they did not have any military power in the Atlantic to match the Portuguese, so they pursued a diplomatic way out.
The purpose of the treaty was to divide trading and colonizing rights for all newly discovered lands of the world located between Portugal and Castile (later applied between the Spanish Crown and Portugal) to the exclusion of other European nations.
The lands to the east would belong to Portugal and the lands to the west to Castile. The treaty was signed in1494, but the New World was divided a few decades later by the Treaty of Zaragoza, signed on 22 April 1529, which specified the antimeridian to the line of demarcation specified in the Treaty of Tordesillas.
Originals of both treaties are kept at the Archivo General de Indias in Spain and at the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo in Portugal.
This treaty would be observed fairly well by Spain and Portugal, despite considerable ignorance as to the geography of the New World; however, it omitted all of the other European powers.
Those countries generally ignored the treaty, particularly those that became Protestant after the Protestant Reformation.
And so it was , under these treaties, the exploits of Magellan’s crew were under, when they set out for the unknown.
To register the appropriate incredulity and awe about Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition’s circumnavigation of the world, consider this: Christopher Columbus’s hallowed crossing of the Atlantic Ocean took thirty-six days; Magellan’s transit of the Pacific Ocean required ninety-eight days.
1492 Conquest Of Paradise 1992 Movie of Columbus
Day after day, no land. Stagnant water to drink.
Rats, sawdust, and leather to eat.
But that is getting ahead of the truly unique voyage that began Europe’s pursuit of the Pacific.
Manuel I
A Portuguese nobleman and navigator, Magellan sought the support of his king, Manuel I, on three separate occasions for an exploratory expedition to seek a new water route to the Spice Islands.
Magellan
He had acquired experience and demonstrated loyalty, having served the king in a crucial role on an eight-year expedition attempting to create a permanent Portuguese presence in India and to conquer Malacca (today’s Melaka, Malaysia), followed by military service in Morocco, where he was seriously wounded in hand-to-hand fighting.
Portugis Malaka
He had squandered most of his personal fortune in service to the crown.
For various reasons, mostly personal, King Manuel rebuffed Magellan but allowed the officer to offer his services elsewhere in September 1517.
By the end of October, Magellan was in Seville, becoming a Spanish citizen.
The timing was good, for Charles I, aka Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor -the new Spanish king of Castile, Aragon, and León, was also new to Spain, having arrived from Flanders the year before.
Charles I of Spain aka Charles V, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire
The eighteen-year-old monarch was athletic, energetic, and eager for fame and glory, but to become Charles V, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, he would need vast sums of money to pay the electors.
Not all armor was meant for the battlefield. In the royal Spanish court, luxury armor was an emblem of wealth and power. Equestrian Armor of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1500-1558) Augsburg, Germany
Hence, Magellan’s familiarity with Portugal’s secretive navigational knowledge—nothing was published in Portugal between 1500 and 1550 about its navigators’ discoveries—and the prospects of riches in the Indies made a rare and appealing combination.
By sailing west, as Magellan intended, Spain also would respect the tenets of the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), which had given Portugal rights to all the new territory found east of a line drawn 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands.
cape verde islands – present day
Specifically, the project proposed by Magellan (and his supporters) sought a commercial route to the Spice Islands by sailing westward around South America, for Magellan confidently expressed some knowledge about the existence of a possible strait or passage there.
He claimed it would take only two years to make the journey and return to Spain.
The terms of his agreement with King Charles, dated March 22, 1518, included receiving a monopoly of the discovered route for ten years and a fifth of the riches obtained on the voyage.
Magellan was also made a captain, giving him absolute authority at sea.
The government provided five ships, relatively small but maneuverable and seaworthy—ominously pitch black from the tar that covered their hulls and every exposed part—with crew, artillery, and two years’ worth of supplies.
Most of the cost was leveraged with loans from a German banking house at a rate of 14 percent.
Heglobe is focused on Europe and it distinguishes the line of separation of the Treaty of Tordesillas that divided the new world in 1494 between Spain and Portugal, you can also follow the route that Magallanes made on his return to the world and even some traces of the newly discovered America.
The Armada de Molucca, as it was called, departed from Seville on August 10, 1519, sailed down the Guadalquivir River to the coast at Sanlúcar de Barrameda, where they waited for Magellan, who had remained behind to deal with last-minute preparations.
The ships finally entered the Atlantic on September 20.
The majority of the crew were Spanish, but there were also Portuguese, Italians, Greeks, and Frenchmen.
Included were Magellan’s brother-in-law Duarte Barbosa, Magellan’s indentured servant Enrique of Malacca, and Antonio Pigafetta, a Venetian scholar who had signed on as a supernumerary and had been assigned the role of official expedition chronicler.
The fleet stopped briefly in the Canary Islands for more provisions; later, Magellan learned that his suppliers had swindled him by misrepresenting the quantity and quality of supplies they provided.
He ordered the fleet south along the coast of Africa to avoid and outrun two fleets that had been sent by the Portuguese king to intercept the expedition and arrest the Captain General for his treason.
After weeks of storms, followed by doldrums, Magellan’s ships reached Sierra Leone, then headed west and crossed the Atlantic, finding anchorage in Rio de Janeiro on December 13, 1519.
Thereafter, the crew became increasingly resentful of their leader.
The fleet hugged the coast of South America, heading steadily south—sailing only during the day and anchoring at night—searching for the strait that would take them to the Spice Islands.
The Rio de la Plata offered hope but proved to be too shallow.
As the southern hemisphere slowly entered its winter, the fleet established a settlement at n Patagonia (Argentina), at a latitude of 49°20′ S, where they encountered the tall Tehuelche Indians
. Pigafetta’s description of these people would give birth to the myth of the Patagonian Giants.
Magellan reduced rations and tried to keep the men busy, but dissension, especially among the Spanish captains and crew, soon erupted into midnight mutiny on April 2.
But with subterfuge and some luck, Magellan quickly seized control. Luis de Mendoza, the captain of Victoria, was killed in the fighting; Gaspar de Quesada, the captain of Concepción, was executed—their dead bodies were drawn and quartered and put on display
. (Later, two other conspirators, Juan de Cartagena, the captain of San Antonio, and a priest named Padre Sánchez de la Reina, were left marooned on the coast when the fleet left.)
The Santiago was sent to do some southerly scouting and was wrecked in a powerful storm, yet all of its crew survived the long journey, in freezing weather, back along the land.
After what seemed an interminable five months, the remaining four ships of the armada weighed anchor on August 24, 1520.
Foul weather hindered their progress, but on October 21 (the feast day of St. Ursula of the Eleven Thousand Virgins), around 52° S latitude, they reached a headland they called the Cape of the Eleven Thousand Virgins (today’s Vírgenes), beyond which, cutting into the landmass, stretched a broad and deep waterway with strong currents: it was the longed-for strait. Navigating its 350 miles would prove to be a nautical nightmare, owing to the high tides (up to twenty-four feet) and strong winds and currents.
Magellan methodically advanced into this Never Never Land.
St. Elmo’s fire, is a weather phenomenon, during thunderstorms a bright blue or violet glowing ball of light; fiery in appearance, is visible, under the low light conditions, from tall; sharply pointed structures such as lightning rods, masts on ships, or spires etc.
Seeing distant fires at night, indicative of human settlements, he named the area Tierra del Fuego, Land of Fire.
After thirty-eight days, negotiating channels, bays, and glacier-fed fjords, past huge, snow-capped mountains and coarse, evergreen shores, surviving a fierce williwaw and the rebellion of another ship—San Antonio, the largest in the fleet, containing many provisions, had stealthily headed back to Spain—Magellan achieved part of his goal: the Pacific Ocean.
Overcoming all of the challenges was a remarkable testament to his abilities as a navigator and strategist and to his crews’ forbearance and skill. The three ships reached Cape Desire on November 28, 1520, and entered an ocean Magellan called pacific for its mildness.
According to historical weather research, Magellan probably benefited from El Niño, which provided calm winds across the Pacific during his crossing.
Some cautionary notes were sounded, for supplies were low and great danger inevitably awaited them.
Yet all realized that the voyage was worthless without reaching the Spice Islands, which they assumed would be a short distance away.
Of course, no one realized that the greatest expanse of water on the planet lay ahead. And Magellan’s course, first northward along the western coast of South America and then west, unluckily avoided virtually all of the ocean’s twenty-five thousand islands.
In fact, during the transpacific crossing, they sighted land only once—barren atolls of the Tuamotu Islands, which Magellan dubbed Islands of Disappointment—before reaching Guam in the Ladrones (“Islands of Thieves,” today’s Marianas) on March 6, 1521, after ninety-eight days on the ocean.
The taller, stronger indigenous people, the Chamorros, surrounded the fleet in their proas (their multihulled sailing canoes), quickly boarded the flagship, and started stealing anything loose that they could.
Perceived theft
De Mafra mentions that the first incident between Chamorros and Europeans took place when an officer of the Trinidad “for little cause” slapped one of the islanders, who then slapped him back.
The officer returned with a blow of his machete, at which the islanders jumped into the water, returned rapidly to their proas (small canoes) and started to throw spears at the ship, hurting some of the Europeans.
Another group of Chamorros came from shore and went over to the ships and started trading while the first group continued throwing spears
After the trading was concluded, and to the surprise of the Europeans, the second group of Chamorros joined the group that was fighting.
Altercations developed, guns were fired, arrows shot, but the fighting subsided when Magellan seeing that the number of canoes was increasing ,ordered his men to stop—soon food was being distributed to the starving crew and some trading took place.
Some islanders cut the rope of one of the skiffs off the Trinidad and took it. Magellan arranged a punishment and sent a raiding party ashore the next day for this perceived theft, disembarking the next day and setting some settlements on the coast on fire.
Seven Chamorros were killed during the attack. Following an old medieval superstition, the European sailors who were sick asked crew members, who took part in the attack, to bring back the entrails of the dead natives, so that they could eat them and recover their health.
Pigafetta spent much of that time with Paul, their captive Patagonian Giant, learning some of his language and converting him to Christianity just before he died.
Scurvy made its deathly appearance and carried off about thirty of the men, who had been reduced to eating biscuits swarming with worms, drinking putrid yellow water, soaking (softening) then chewing the ox-hide top coverings of sails, eating sawdust from boards, and trading rats.
The officers fared better for reasons unknown to them: they had a supply of preserved quince, a potent anti-scorbutic.
Magellan was desperate and depressed, confounded by the distance and amount of time they had spent sailing.
They approached Guam with great relief yet caution, anchoring in a large turquoise lagoon (today’s Umatac Bay).
Guam was not the Spice Islands, and so the fleet moved on to points still unknown, reaching Homonhom Island at the edge of the Philippine Archipelago on March 16.
Magellan’s servant, Enrique, who had been with him since Malacca days, was able to communicate with a nearby island’s inhabitants, whose Filipino leader, Rajah Kolambu, treated Magellan like royalty.
Wanting to impress, Magellan demonstrated the Spaniards’ weaponry and offered to subdue the king’s enemies.
Kolambu offered pilots to lead them to a larger, more impressive island, Cebu, ruled by an ally, Raja Humabon.
There the fleet arrived on April 7.
Humabon and Magellan quickly formed a tight bond as blood brothers.
Once Humabon and his queen were baptized as Christians, their subjects followed suit.
Tribute to Magellan was given, allegiance to Spain was offered—it seemed too perfect.
Buoyed by these developments and his own confidence, Magellan demanded obedience from neighboring islands to Humabon
and the conversion of their inhabitants to Christianity. (He was exceeding the instructions King Charles had given him.)
One of the two chieftains of Mactan, Lapu Lapu, refused and challenged Magellan to a fight.
Determined to show the power of the Spanish armored warriors, and against the advice of his own men to engage in a needless battle,
Magellan sailed to Mactan on Saturday, April 27, 1521.
The coastal water was shallow, forcing the ships to anchor well offshore.
The men had to wade through two crossbow flights of thigh-high water to reach the shore.
In the “Battle of Mactan,” forty-nine European musketeers and crossbowmen confronted three divisions of Mactan fighters,
more than one thousand men, armed with arrows, bamboo spears tipped with iron, and fire-hardened stakes.
Further inciting the islanders’ wrath, Magellan ordered the burning of nearby homes.
The fighting lasted about an hour, culminating, as Pigafetta describes it, with Magellan’s death:
Which seeing [Magellan wounded in the arm], all those people threw themselves on him, and one of them with a large javelin . . . thrust it into his leg,
whereby he fell face downward. On this all at once rushed upon him with lances of iron and of bamboo and with these javelins,
so that they slew our mirror, our light, our comfort, and our true guide. [vol. 1, p. 88]
It was an undignified end, offshore, in water up to his knees.
His hacked body pieces were kept by the Mactans as a memorial; no armor was ever recovered.
If that was the climax of the expedition’s circumnavigation, what remained was completing
the rest of the mission, and the drama continued. Enrique was not freed, as Magellan’s will instructed; in revenge,
he schemed with Humabon, and a number of the Europeans were massacred at a feast. Shorthanded, the men decided to burn the Concepción.
Eventually, the navigational skills of Juan Sebastián de Elcano (ca. 1476–1526), a Basque merchant mariner,
lead Victoria and Trinidad to Tidore in the Moluccas on November 8, 1521.
Quickly reaching trading agreements with the sultan of Tidore, who also disliked the Portuguese authorities, the crews stuffed the two ships with cloves.
The Trinidad, needing repair, stayed behind while the Victoria, with Elcano in charge, departed for Spain on December 21.
(Later, the Trinidad tried unsuccessfully to cross eastward across the Pacific
and was captured by Portuguese ships looking for Magellan and his Armada de Molucca;
its cargo, including possibly Magellan’s personal logbook, was confiscated, and its crew imprisoned on Ternate for several years.
Juan Sebastian Elcano “
The ship was wrecked there in a storm.)
On September 6, 1522, Victoria, with a ghastly/ghostly crew of eighteen survivors,
reached Sanlúcar de Barrameda on the coast of Spain, and tied up at the docks in the Triana district of Seville four days later,
after an absence of three years and a distance, according to Pigafetta, of 14,460 leagues. They had sailed completely around the world.
The boat’s hold of cloves (381 sacks) was worth more than the cost of the original five-ship armada: after everything, the voyage had been profitable.
But Magellan’s detractors had arrived first (remember that the San Antonio had turned back in the Strait of Magellan).
Additionally criticized and vilified in the reports of Elcano and others of the Victoria, Magellan did not receive his due credit for the expedition he had initiated.
None of the promises King Charles had made to him and his heirs were kept. Both countries, Spain and Portugal, considered him a traitor.
Perhaps the greatest irony is that Charles, still short of cash, sold Spain’s rights to the Moluccas to Portugal in the 1529 Treaty of Saragossa.
(For more on this treaty, see the Lines of Demarcation box in the Spice Islands section.)
All that Magellan had accomplished with his expedition was apparently unnecessary.
For mapmakers, of course, the geographical nut had been cracked—the true size and scope of the planet had been revealed. No speculation or guesswork was needed anymore.
There was a passage to the Pacific, and a vast uncharted ocean now awaited the pursuit of European explorers.
It was Pigafetta’s wish that “the renown of so valiant and noble a captain will not be extinguished or fall into oblivion in our time” [vol. 1, p. 88]. Surviving the circumnavigation with his journal intact, this loyal and indefatigable chronicler began making sure of that.
Other Books:
- Pigafetta, Antonio. Magellan’s Voyage: A Narrative Account of the First Circumnavigation. Translated and edited by R. A. Skelton from the manuscript in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University. 2 vols. New Haven, Conn., 1969. [Rare Books Division]
This is an English translation (with facsimile volume) of a French version of Pigafetta’s lost original journal, Relazione del primo viaggio intorno al mondo (Relation on the First Voyage around the World), dated about 1525 and now owned by Yale University. There are three other surviving “copies”—two in French, one in Italian—and their provenance and relationships are described in great detail here in Skelton’s work. The Yale manuscript is considered the finest copy, clearly intended for presentation to a nobleman; it is also the most complete of the three French copies. Purchasing it from an English dealer’s catalogue in 1953, Edwin J. Beinecke presented it to Yale’s Beinecke Library in 1964. It consists of 103 leaves of vellum (97 bearing text or maps), with text written in a clear, careful humanistic script, twenty-seven lines to the page, and with illuminated initials and paragraph marks. The manuscript is divided into forty-eight chapters, each preceded by a summary. There are numerous marginal captions and twenty-three maps interspersed through the text.
- Baccino Ponce de León, Napoleón. Five Black Ships: A Novel of the Discoverers. Translated by Nick Caistor. New York, 1994. First English edition. The dust jacket bears the subtitle A Novel of Magellan. [General Library Collection]
A first-person fictional account of Magellan’s expedition told by a court jester accompanying the voyage. This first novel by the Uruguayan writer won the 1989 Novela Casa de las Américas Award, one of Latin America’s oldest and most prestigious literary prizes.