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—— ON THIS DAY ——
SEPTEMBER 20, 1519
Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Spain
507 years ago
The departure of the Magellan expedition from Sanlúcar de Barrameda on September 20, 1519, which completed the first circumnavigation of the Earth three years later.
On September 20, 1519, five ships and roughly 270 men sailed from Sanlúcar de Barrameda at the mouth of the Guadalquivir in southern Spain. The commander was Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese navigator sailing under the Spanish crown after his own king had refused to back him. The plan was not to sail around the world. It was to reach the Spice Islands of the East Indies by sailing west, finding a passage through or around the American landmass, and thereby proving that the islands lay within the Spanish half of the world as divided by treaty with Portugal.
The voyage went badly from early on. The fleet crossed the Atlantic, worked its way down the South American coast through the southern winter, and faced a mutiny at Puerto San Julián that Magellan put down with executions and maroonings. One ship was wrecked scouting the coast. Another deserted and returned to Spain. In October 1520 the remaining three found the passage at the southern tip of the continent, a labyrinth of channels more than five hundred kilometres long, now called the Strait of Magellan.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
The first circumnavigation of the Earth, completed in September 1522 by the ship Victoria under Juan Sebastián Elcano, with eighteen survivors of the roughly 270 men who had set out.
Emerging into the ocean beyond, Magellan named it the Pacific because it seemed calm after the strait. The crossing took three months and twenty days, far longer than anyone had estimated, because the size of the Pacific was completely unknown. The fleet found almost no islands where they could resupply. Food ran out. Antonio Pigafetta, the Italian chronicler whose account is the main surviving source, described men eating sawdust, leather stripped from the rigging and soaked in seawater, and rats sold to one another at a price. Scurvy killed a large part of the crew.
They reached Guam in March 1521 and then the Philippines. Magellan involved himself in local politics, converting a ruler on Cebu to Christianity and agreeing to attack a rival chief on the neighbouring island of Mactan. On April 27, 1521, he was killed there in a shallow-water fight by the forces of Lapulapu, who is now honoured in the Philippines as a national figure. Many of the surviving officers were killed shortly afterward in an ambush at a banquet on Cebu.
The remnant burned one ship for lack of crew to sail it, took on cloves in the Moluccas, and split up. The Trinidad tried to return east across the Pacific and failed. The Victoria, under Juan Sebastián Elcano, carried on west across the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, and up the coast of Africa, avoiding Portuguese ports. It reached Sanlúcar on September 6, 1522, with eighteen men aboard, most of them barely able to stand. Its cargo of spices was worth more than the cost of the entire expedition. The voyage settled by direct demonstration that the Earth could be circled and how big it was, and it opened the Pacific to European navigation, with all that followed for the peoples living around it.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
It proved the scale of the world by direct measurement. Scholars had known the Earth was round for centuries, but nobody knew how much of it was ocean. The three-month Pacific crossing settled the question in the most costly way possible.
It opened the Pacific to European navigation. The route through the strait and across the ocean led to Spanish colonization of the Philippines, the Manila galleon trade, and centuries of European presence throughout the Pacific.
Its human cost was extreme even by the standards of the age. Of roughly 270 men who set out, eighteen returned on the Victoria. Starvation, scurvy, mutiny, shipwreck, and violence consumed the rest, including the commander whose name the voyage carries.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
Five ships left Spain on September 20, 1519, to find a western route to the Spice Islands. Three years later one ship came back with eighteen men, having gone the whole way around. Magellan had been killed in the Philippines a year and a half earlier. The spices in the hold still paid for the voyage.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
“We ate biscuit which was no longer biscuit, but powder swarming with worms.”
— Antonio Pigafetta, on the crossing of the Pacific, 1521
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about the Magellan expedition, the mutiny and the strait, the Pacific crossing, Magellan's death at Mactan, and the eighteen men who finished the voyage?
