On September 8th, 1522, a lone ship entered the Spanish harbor of Sevilla.
Back then, the port was full of Spanish ships coming and going – either west to the Americas,
or south and west towards Africa and India.
That lone ship was the Victoria, and it had just completed the first circumnavigation
of the globe.
Missing from the ship was the crew’s captain, Ferdinand Magellan.
In fact, much of the crew was missing.
Of a crew of 270 and five ships that set off three years earlier, just 18 men had made
it back, on one boat.
Thin, starving, and clothes in tatters, they straggled off the boat, the first people to
sail around the world in one go.
Welcome back to Nutty History.
Today, we’re diving into the gruesome story of the Magellan 18 – an epic tale of adventure,
mutiny, hardship, and politicking.
So, let’s get back to Magellan.
Remember, he was Portuguese, but sailing out of Spain with funding from the Spanish crown.
This wasn’t an uncommon thing at the time.
Columbus was Genoese but also sailed to the Americas from Spain with Spanish funding – let’s
just call it Spain to avoid more confusion.
Both Portugal and Spain pretty much just wanted the most seasoned seafarers with proven track
records.
The safest investments, in other words.
And Magellan had a pretty good track record.
By the time he was just 27, Magellan had already sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and been
a part of a couple naval battles over territory in the Indian Ocean.
By the time he was 31, he’d been influential in securing Portuguese control of Malaysia
and the valuable spices that grew there.
Yet he became jaded with Portugal after the king refused to pay him what he thought he
deserved after all the time he spent at sea fighting for his homeland.
So, he decided to take his talents to Spain, where King Charles I welcomed him with open
arms.
On September 20th, 1519, Magellan, five ships – the San Antonio, the Concepcion, the Victoria,
the Santiago, and the Trinidad – and his crew of 270 men set off from Sevilla in search
of a Western route to the Pacific Islands, where valuable spices and other resources
sat waiting to be exploited.
They would never realize this journey would have them travel over 60,000 miles.
It was a crazy time for European exploration.
Columbus had just sailed the ocean blue and “discovered” America – a land he thought
was India.
A few years later, Vasco de Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope on Africa’s southern tip
and found a route to the real India.
A few years after that, in 1513, a Spanish explorer named Vasco Nunez de Balboa had made
landfall in the Pacific Islands, and a race was on to see who could find the quickest
route to these exotic, spice-filled lands.
Magellan’s voyage got off to a bad start almost immediately.
While the voyage was being funded by and set sail out of Spain, less than two thirds of
the crew was actually Spanish.
Magellan himself was actually Portuguese, and there were 24 more of his countrymen and
an additional 27 Italians that were part of the fleet.
This mixture of nationalities sewed discord amongst the ranks.
Spanish officials had basically forced Magellan to accept a Spanish nobleman named Juan de
Cartagena as his second-in-command.
Cartagena was apparently giving orders behind Magellan’s back, which the captain didn’t
like, so he arrested and demoted the Spanish nobleman.
It was an act that would have serious repercussions for the rest of the voyage.
When the fleet made it to the western coast of South America, all hell broke loose.
The fleet was traveling south along the coast of South America, searching months-on-end
for a passage farther west into the Pacific that they knew existed somewhere.
The farther south they got, the colder it got.
It was April, the start of winter in the southern hemisphere, and off the coast of Patagonia
there was ice and snow wherever they looked.
Juan de Cartagena, resentful and cold, organized a mutiny.
It played out like a mini-naval battle amongst the five ships in the fleet, with the captains
of the Victoria and the Concepcion joining forces with Cartagena to try to wrest control
of the fleet from Magellan.
They didn’t succeed, and Magellan ended up marooning Cartagena on an island somewhere
off the coast.
Maybe he ended up assimilating into the indigenous culture there, maybe he froze to death.
His fate is unknown.
Back in control, Magellan pushed forward.
But it wasn’t easy.
They had to pause their trip for two months mid-winter as glaciers blocked much of their
path, and they lost the Santiago in a storm.
But finally, in October, they found a strait, and they cut through it from east to west,
and voila, they were in the Pacific.
That straight later was named the Strait of Magellan, and the archipelago they saw to
the south was named Tierra del Fuego because of the fires the crew saw burning, lit by
the indigenous people living there they never got to meet.
It was a short-lived victory.
The Pacific Ocean is massive.
Way larger than anyone at that time thought.
It took Magellan and his crew about 100 days to navigate it.
During that time, loads of crew died of scurvy.
Their teeth rotted and gums swelled to the point where they couldn’t even eat.
It was only later that people learned to bring fruit on voyages to avoid this grisly illness.
Their supplies dwindled, and they were forced to eat sawdust and biscuits filled with rat
excrement that had rotted into piles of what might as well have been sawdust.
The fleet was in trouble.
But on March 6th, 1521, they found land.
They hit the Mariana Islands, restocked, and then headed for the Philippines.
There, on the island of Limasawa, they went to work Christianizing the native people there
and taking as many cloves as they could.
Then, Magellan found out that there were some indigenous people on the nearby island of
Mactan who were pretty skeptical of the Spanish and of Christianity, so he decided to go over
there and force them to submit to Jesus with the almighty force of gunpowder.
It didn’t go well for the Europeans.
Maybe their weapons were salty and faulty and unable to fire, maybe the islander’s
spears and arrows were too much for a bedraggled group of explorers who just barely managed
to make it as far as they had.
In any case, the Mactan Islanders, led by a chieftain known as Lapulapu, successfully
fought them off, and Magellan was felled in the battle.
The surviving Europeans were forced to flee, leaving Magellan’s remains on the island
to a fate unknown.
Magellan had effectively already circumnavigated the globe, albeit in two trips.
The first went west to east when he was younger and serving Portugal, and the second from
east to west until he was brought down by understandably hostile Pacific Islanders.
In the aftermath of the battle, what remained of the fleet limped around from island to
island for a while, losing two of their remaining three ships in the process.
Miraculously, the Victoria and its crew, under the new command of Juan Sebastian Elcano,
finally made its way back to Spain, despite losing almost everyone to disease and starvation.
The Magellan 18 thus became the first humans in recorded history to make it all the way
around the world in one go.
It was a monumental achievement, for sure, but a bittersweet one.
The western route to the Pacific Islands proved a far longer and more treacherous journey
than anyone anticipated, in large part because of a huge underestimation of how vast the
Pacific Ocean was.
There was a silver lining, however.
The Victoria brough enough cloves back with it to cover the cost of all five ships and
then some.
Spices were all the rage back then.
The power struggle within Magellan’s crew was a microcosm of what was going on between
Portugal and Spain at the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th as they
were vying for control of areas around the globe that they were just realizing existed.
But to really understand this rivalry, we need to go back a bit farther in time than
the 15th Century.
Modern-day Portugal and Spain both sit on a piece of land called the Iberian Peninsula.
Back before either country existed, the Iberian Peninsula was controlled by the Umayyad Caliphate,
a Muslim empire that had reached over from Arabia, through northern Africa, and taken
Iberia from the Visigoths back in 718.
For the next three to four hundred years, the Umayyads controlled much of Iberia.
But Christian kingdoms began to emerge shortly after the Muslims arrived, and a series of
battles saw these Christians take a significant amount of territory from the Muslims.
The period between the mid-700s to mid-1400s became known as the “Reconquista” or “Reconquest”.
By 1143, Portugal became an independent nation and just under 100 years later, Portugal’s
Reconquista was declared a success.
Spain’s was a bit more drawn out.
If you wanna split hairs, Spain wasn’t really “Spain” until 1876, when it was officially
named “Espanya” in the constitution.
Before that, it was really a union between the old kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, which
occurred in 1469 when King Ferdinand of Castile married Queen Isabella of Aragon and united
the two kingdoms.
Once Columbus landed in India – sorry America, sorry, modern-day Bahamas, sorry, what the
native Lucayan people already living there called the Guanahani – Spain and Portugal
figured they needed to iron out some rules about who could exploit the people and resources
of newly-discovered lands.
So, in 1494, they wrote up the Treaty of Tordesillas, which drew a line down the Atlantic Ocean
from the North Pole to the South Pole some 1200 miles west of Cape Verde off the western
coast of Africa.
Spain was entitled to everything to the west of the line, and Portugal to everything east
of the line.
This treaty – a kind of mutually agreed-upon global manifest destiny – had a pretty glaring
issue.
The earth was round.
Today, many people think that Columbus set out to prove that the earth was round, and
that Europeans from the medieval period onwards thought that the earth was flat.
This just isn’t true.
Greeks in the third century BC figured out that the earth was indeed round, and so did
pretty much everyone else since then.
But history was edited after a biography of Christopher Columbus written by Irving Washing
became hugely popular, a biography where Irving claimed, wrongly, that Columbus was in fact
trying to disprove the 15th century equivalent of the Flat Earth Theory.
At the time, cartography wasn’t super precise, so over the years, there were lots of amendments
and violations of both treaties.
For example, Spain just went and colonized the Philippines, which was west of the Zaragoza
line and technically under Spanish purview, and Portugal went and colonized modern-day
Brazil, which was west of the Tordesillas line and technically quote-unquote “belonged”
to Spain.
According to the Castilian writer Peter Maryr d’Anghiera, a small boy stopped a member
of the Portuguese delegation as they were on their way to meet the Spanish to draft
the Treaty of Zaragoza.
They boy asked if they planned on dividing up the world.
When the Portuguese man replied “Why of course'', the boy pulled his pants down, showed
them his backside, and suggested they draw their line through his behind.
A fitting metaphor.
Could you survive a voyage around the world in a ship back then?
Let us know in the comments, and don’t forget to like and subscribe for more Nutty History.