You know, history has this funny way of smoothing
over all the rough edges. We remember the headline,
but we totally forget the fine print. Oh, absolutely.
And honestly, there is no bigger headline and
no messier fine print in the entire history of
exploration than Ferdinand Magellan. It's the
ultimate historical branding exercise, isn't
it? The name is just synonymous with the globe
itself. You say Magellan and the first thing
anyone thinks is. First man to circumnavigate
the globe. First circumnavigation every time.
Right. It's the answer to the trivia question.
It's in every single textbook. But here's the
thing. And this is the part that. just gets me
every time. When you actually sit down with the
primary sources, especially the diaries of Antonio
Pigafetta, who was the chronicler on the ship,
you realize that headline is, well, it's technically
a lie. It's not just a lie. It's a complete fabrication
of the timeline. Ferdinand Magellan never finished
the trip. Never made it back. He never made it
back to Spain. He died in the surf in the Philippines
about halfway through the voyage. And the man
who actually did complete the first circumnavigation,
the guy who captained that last ship back to
Seville. A man named... Juan Sebastian Elcano.
And here's the kicker, you know, the part that
gets left out of the grade school version. Elcano
absolutely despised Magellan. Despised might
be putting it lightly. I mean, Elcano spent the
first half of the voyage actively trying to undermine
Magellan. He was part of a mutiny against him.
It's just a profound historical irony. The man
who gets all the credit died this horrible, violent
death thousands of miles from home. And the man
who actually brought the ship home was one of
his bitterest rivals. So today we're going to
do something a little different. We're not just
going to recount the map making. We want to reconstruct
the actual reality of this voyage based on the
sources. And let me tell you, it is nothing like
the romanticized version of brave men sailing
into the sunset. No. This is a story of treason,
execution, scurvy, religious obsession, and a
fatal, fatal error in judgment. And we are so
lucky to have incredible documentation for this.
We're leaning really heavily on the journals
of Antonio Pigafetta, who was this Italian scholar
who basically paid his way onto the ship just
to see the world. Pigafetta is a fascinating
character in his own right. He wasn't a sailor.
He was almost like a tourist with a notebook.
And without him, we'd know almost nothing of
the day -to -day horror of this expedition. He's
the reason we know about the politics, the meals.
The specific words spoken in the final moments,
he saw it all. So let's unpack this. Before we
even get to the ships and the starvation and
everything else, we have to understand the man.
Who was Ferdinand Magellan? Because looking at
his background, he seems like the most unlikely
candidate to lead a Spanish expedition. Well,
primarily because he wasn't Spanish. Right. He
was Portuguese, born around 1480, probably in
northern Portugal, to minor nobility. And this
is crucial. He wasn't an explorer by trade. Not
at first. He was a soldier of the empire. He
spent something like eight years in the Indian
Ocean fighting for the Portuguese crown. Right.
The sources mention he was at the Battle of Diu.
He was in Malacca. This wasn't some armchair
admiral studying star charts in a library. No,
not at all. He was a warrior. He knew the smell
of gunpowder and the sound of steel. In fact,
in 1513, he was fighting in Morocco at a place
called Azamor. During a skirmish there, he was
wounded in the leg. And that wound never healed
right, did it? It never healed properly. It left
him with a permanent limp for the rest of his
life. That limp is such a defining image for
me. You just have this picture of a hardened
veteran limping through the court of Lisbon,
probably feeling like he's given everything to
his country. And feeling like his country gave
him absolutely nothing back. That is the catalyst
for everything that follows. Despite years of
bleeding for Portugal, he fell completely out
of favor with King Manuel I. Why? What happened?
Magellan had been accused of illegal trading
with the Moors, basically war profiteering. Now,
the charges were eventually dropped, but the
stigma, you know, it stuck. It's the classic
disgruntled employee scenario, but on a massive
geopolitical scale. Exactly. Magellan felt he
was owed a higher pension, more respect. He went
to King Manuel repeatedly with this plan. He
wanted to sail to the Spice Islands, the Moluccas.
But he had this radical idea. He wanted to go
west. Or cross the Atlantic to avoid the Portuguese
route around Africa that they already controlled.
Exactly. And King Manuel just shut him down.
Completely. Repeatedly. The accounts of their
final meeting are just brutal. Magellan asks
for permission to go. The king says no. Magellan
asks for a tiny increase in his pension. The
king says no. So finally, Magellan asks if he
has the king's permission to offer his services
to another country. Which is really just a polite
way of asking, can I go work for your worst enemy?
And King Manuel, in this moment of pure arrogance
that would literally change the course of history,
basically looked at his males and said, I don't
care what you do. That has to be one of the biggest
oops moments in royal history. It was a massive
strategic error, and Magellan took him at his
word. In 1517, he packs up. moves to Seville,
Spain, he changes his allegiance, he marries
the daughter of a prominent local, and effectively
he defects to Portugal's biggest rival. So now
he's got to sell this same idea to the Spanish
king, Charles I, who's, what, a teenager at this
point? Just a teenager. But I want to pause on
the pitch Magellan makes. Because there was a
huge legal hurdle here, wasn't there? Yeah. The
Treaty of Tordesillas. Right. To understand why
this whole voyage was so controversial, you have
to look at that treaty. The Pope had essentially
taken a ruler and drawn a line right down the
middle of the Atlantic Ocean. And just divided
the non -Christian world in half. In half. Portugal
got everything east of the line. So Africa and
the route to India. Spain got everything to the
west. The Americas, basically. The arrogance
is just... Breathtaking when you really think
about it. It was, but it created this huge problem
for Spain. They wanted the spices, all the wealth
from the east, but they couldn't sell east to
get them. So Magellan's pitch was a workaround.
He's essentially saying, I can get you to the
Spice Islands by going west, through your side
of the map. Exactly. He was hacking the treaty.
He argued that the Spice Islands were so far
east, they actually wrapped all the way around
the globe and fell back into the Spanish hemisphere.
Did he actually believe that, or was he just...
you know, fudging the geography to get the funding.
It's debated, but he certainly sold it with conviction.
And he had a secret weapon in his pitch letters
from a friend, Francisco Soran, who is already
living in the Spice Islands, describing their
insane wealth. And he had a slave named Enrique.
Enrique is such a key figure in all of this.
He is vital. Enrique was from that region, Malacca,
or maybe Sumatra. Magellan brought him to the
Spanish court and presented him as living proof
of the people they would find. He used Enrique
and those letters to convince the young King
Charles that the prize was reachable. And the
king bought it. Hook, line, and sinker. He made
Magellan an admiral, gave him the command of
the Order of Santiago, and funded the Armada
of Molucca. Which brings us to the fleet itself.
Five ships. The Trinidad, the San Antonio, the
Concepción, the Santiago, and the famous Victoria.
And a crew that was, well, let's call it diverse,
but not... in a happy, harmonious kind of way.
It was a powder keg. You had about 270 men. But
the nationalities were all over the map. You
had Spaniards, of course, but also Portuguese,
Italians, Greeks, French, Germans. Even one Englishman
and, of course, Enrique. But the real friction
was at the top. You have a Portuguese commander
leading a Spanish fleet. That was the fatal flaw
in the hierarchy from the very beginning. The
captains of the other ships were all Spanish
noblemen guys like Cartagena and Quesada, and
they absolutely resented being bossed around
by Magellan. To them, he was a traitor to his
own country, a foreigner, and possibly a Portuguese
spy sent to sabotage the whole thing. And back
in Portugal, King Manuel is suddenly realizing
he made a catastrophic mistake. The sources say
he tried to sabotage the fleet before they even
left. Oh, he was furious. He launched a whole
campaign of harassment. He ordered Magellan's
family crest to be vandalized back in Portugal.
There were credible rumors of assassination plots
in the streets of Seville. Wow. The Portuguese
ambassador tried to bribe Magellan to cancel
the trip. And when that didn't work, he started
whispering in the ears of the Spanish captains,
sowing the seeds of mutiny before they even untied
the ropes. Talk about a toxic work environment.
I mean, they haven't even left port and half
the management team already wants the CEO dead.
Exactly. The fleet sailed in September 1519 under
this dark cloud of suspicion and hatred. And
Magellan knew. He knew his own captains were
just looking for any excuse to remove him. So
they crossed the Atlantic. The first major stop
is Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Yeah, specifically
Guanabara Bay. Now, because this was Portuguese
territory, they had to be careful, but they managed
to stop and trade with the Tupi natives. This
part of the journal always feels like the calm
before the storm. They're trading little bells
and mirrors for fresh food and water. It was
a brief respite, but the discipline issues started
showing their teeth almost immediately. The sources
note a really grim detail here. Magellan executed
a crew member, a man named Antonio Salomon, for
sodomy while they were in Brazil. So he's sending
a pretty clear message right from the start.
He was asserting absolute authority. He was telling
the entire crew, I am the law out here. But the
real trouble begins when they leave the warmth
of Brazil and head south, searching for this
mythical passage to the Pacific. And they don't
find it. Not at first. No. The coast of South
America just goes on and on and on. They keep
sailing south and it gets colder. The days get
shorter. The seas get rougher. They explore the
river plate where modern day Argentina is thinking
that might be the Strait. But it's just a dead
end. So now it's winter in the southern hemisphere.
They're stuck in Patagonia at this bleak, desolate
harbor they call Port St. Julian. It's the bottom
of the world. It is freezing. The men are on
reduced rations. They're miserable. And that
misery is the perfect breeding ground for mutiny.
This is the Easter mutiny of 1520. And honestly,
the way it plays out is like something out of
Game of Thrones. It really is. On Easter night,
three of the five captains, Cartagena, Quesada,
and Mendoza, they make their move. They secretly
board the San Antonio, put its captain in chains,
and stab the ship's master. By morning, they
control three of the five ships. So Magellan
wakes up, looks out at the harbor, and realizes
he's completely outnumbered. The rebels send
him a message basically saying, we're in charge
now and we're going back to Spain. Most commanders
would have surrendered. It was hopeless. But
Magellan. He does something incredibly ruthless.
He knew that open warfare would just sink the
ship, so he used deception. He sent a small boat
over to Mendoza's ship, the Victoria, supposedly
to deliver a letter to negotiate terms. The classic
Trojan horse. Exactly. Mendoza, feeling confident,
lets the men on board. He takes the letter from
the messenger, looks at it, and apparently starts
laughing at Magellan's audacity. At that exact
moment, the messenger pulls out a dagger and
stabs Mendoza in the throat. Wow. Just like that.
Simultaneously. another boat filled with loyalists
storms the ship. In a matter of minutes, Magellan
had regained control of the Victoria. Now the
balance of power was three ships to two in his
favor. The mutiny just collapsed. And the punishment.
I mean, we talk about harsh management, but this
was something else. This was medieval. In Magellan's
eyes, it was necessary theater. He had to make
an example of them. Qasada, one of the ringleaders,
was beheaded. Okay, that seems... standard for
mutiny. But Magellan didn't stop there. He had
Quesada's body quartered, cut into four pieces,
and hung on gibbets on the shore for everyone
to see. And Cartagena. They're really high -ranking
noblemen. Cartagena was too well -connected to
just execute, so Magellan devised a punishment
that was arguably much worse. When the fleet
finally left St. Julian months later, they left
Cartagena behind. Marooned him. Marooned him
on that desolate, freezing coast with a priest
who had also conspired with him. They just left
them there with a small supply of hardtack and
wine. Just left to freeze or starve at the edge
of the world. They were never seen again. It
established Magellan's absolute terrifying authority.
The crew was petrified of him now. But it also
hardened the hatred that the remaining Spanish
officers felt. They weren't following him out
of loyalty anymore. They were following him out
of fear. Cure fear. So with the mutiny crushed
and the winter finally over, they keep pushing
south. And in October of 1520, they find it.
The Strait. The Strait of Magellan. You know,
we look at it on a map today and it's just a
line. But in reality, it is this treacherous,
winding maze of fjords and waterways. The currents
are violent. The winds are completely unpredictable.
It must have been terrifying. They had no idea
if it even went all the way through to the other
side. And during this exploration of the Strait,
they lose another ship. The San Antonio, which
was the largest supply ship carrying the bulk
of their food. Oh, no. It was sent to scout a
particular branch of the strait. The pilot, a
man named Estevan Gomes, who hated Magellan,
saw his chance. He overpowered the captain, turned
the ship around. They deserted. They fled, turned
tail and sailed all the way back to Spain. That
is a catastrophic blow. They've just lost a massive
chunk of their supplies right before what's going
to be the longest leg of the journey. It was
devastating. But Magellan didn't know they had
deserted. He assumed they were lost or shipwrecked.
He actually spent days searching for them before
finally giving up and pushing on. And in November
1520, the three remaining ships, the Trinidad,
Concepcion, and Victoria, emerged from the Strait
into this vast open ocean. And the ocean was
so calm, so peaceful compared to the violent
Atlantic, that Magellan named it Mar Pacifico,
the Pacific Ocean. A beautiful name for what
became essentially a death trap. You have to
understand Magellan had no concept of how large
this ocean was. The maps of the time were just
completely wrong. They wildly underestimated
the circumference of the earth. So he thought
the Spice Islands were just a few days away.
A few days, maybe a week tops. He thought we'll
be there by the weekend. He honestly believed
the hard part was over. And how long did it actually
take to cross? Three months and 20 days. Pause
and imagine that. You think you have rations
for a week. And you were out there for nearly
four months without seeing a single speck of
land. The conditions that Pigafetta describes
are the stuff of nightmares. They ran out of
fresh food almost immediately. The water in the
casks went putrid and turned yellow. Pigafetta
writes that they were reduced to eating biscuit
dust that was mixed with worms. And it gets worse
than that. Oh, it gets much worse. They ran out
of the wormy biscuits. So they started looking
at the ship itself for food. They began cutting
the ox hide leather from the yardarm's leather
that had been hardened by years of sun and rain
and salt. Beating leather. They would drag it
in the sea for four or five days just to soften
it. Then they would grill it over embers and
try to chew it. Eating leather. Eating sawdust
from the planks. Rats became a delicacy. A luxury
item. If you were lucky enough to catch a rat,
you could sell it to another starving sailor
for half a gold ducat. And then came the scurvy.
Scurvy is just a gruesome, gruesome way to die.
It's your body literally falling apart because
it can't make collagen. Pigafetta describes the
men's gums swelling up until they completely
covered their teeth. They couldn't eat even if
they had food. And their old wounds would open
up? Yes. Old scars from years ago would just
spontaneously open up and start bleeding again.
It's horrific. About 30 men died during this
crossing. But here is the detail that always
sticks with me from the sources. Magellan himself
never got sick. It's a fascinating anomaly. While
his men are rotting alive around him, Magellan
remained perfectly healthy. Was it just a strong
constitution? Or luck? We think it was his diet.
The sources mention that Magellan had a personal
stash of preserved quince. It's a fruit, sort
of like a pear or an apple, that he kept in his
cabin. He ate it as a delicacy, a little taste
of home. He had no idea. He had no idea, but
quince is packed with vitamin C. It was accidentally
medicinal. He was saving his own life without
even knowing it. Right, but think about the optics
of that. You're a starving crewman. You're chewing
on leather, watching your friends die in the
dark. And you look up at the quarterdeck and
you see your captain looking healthy, energetic,
eating his special private stash of fruit. It
must have looked like sorcery. Or worse, just
plain selfishness. It would have fueled that
whole us versus them narrative that Elcano and
the other Spanish officers were nurturing. Absolutely.
But finally, in March of 1521, they spot land.
Guam. And the first contact to Guam sets a really,
really dark precedent for the rest of the voyage.
It was a disaster of cultural misunderstanding.
The local Chamorro people came out to the ships.
They were amazed by this European technology.
They climbed aboard and they started taking things,
some rigging, bits of iron, and they took a small
skiff, a little rowboat. To the Chamorro, this
was probably just trade shed, right? Fresh water
and fruit were taking this cool boat. Exactly.
In their culture, property was likely more communal
or transactional. But to the Europeans, who were
starving and paranoid and on edge, this was theft,
pure and simple. And Magellan reacted with completely
disproportionate violence. He led a raiding party
ashore. With crossbows and muskets. They burned
down 40 or 50 houses and killed seven men. Just
to get the rowboat back. Just to get the little
boat back. He named the islands La Namera de
los Ladornes, the Islands of Thieves. It just
showed that Magellan's patience was completely
gone. He was desperate and he was willing to
use terror to get what he needed. So they leave
Guam, restocked but with blood on their hands,
and they finally, finally reach the Philippines.
This is the moment Magellan had been dreaming
of. He has crossed the impossible ocean. They
arrived at the island of Samar and then moved
to a smaller island called Limasawa. And this
is where we have one of the most incredible goosebump
-inducing moments in the entire history of exploration.
This is the Enrique moment. Yes. Remember Enrique,
the slave Magellan bought in Malacca all those
years ago? He had traveled west with Magellan
to Portugal, then to Spain, then all the way
across the Atlantic, then all the way across
the Pacific. He had gone the long way around.
So when the fleet arrives in the Philippines,
a small boat of locals approaches. Magellan tries
to speak to them. Nothing. The Spanish soldiers
try nothing. Then Enrique speaks. And they understood
him. That gives me chills every single time I
think about it. He was speaking a Malay dialect
that was the trade language of the entire region.
The locals replied they could communicate. You
have to stop and think about the implications
of that. Enrique had technically completed the
circle. Linguistically, culturally, he was home.
It proved the world was round in a way that no
map ever could. They had reached the east by
sailing west. And it's very likely that Enrique
was the first person in history to culturally
circumnavigate the globe. So with Enrique translating,
Magellan starts making alliances. They move to
the bigger island of Cebu. And things go surprisingly
well at first. Almost. Too well. It was suspiciously
easy. The ruler of Cebu, a man named Rajah Humabon,
was a very savvy politician. He saw these Europeans
with their steel armor and their loud boomsticks,
and he saw an opportunity to use them against
his own local rivals. And Magellan saw an opportunity,
too. But his focus had shifted somehow. He wasn't
acting like a merchant or an admiral anymore.
He was acting more like a messiah. He became
obsessed with evangelism, absolutely obsessed.
He wanted to convert everyone he met to Christianity.
Humabon, likely for purely political reasons,
agreed to convert. He was baptized as Carlos.
His wife was baptized as Juana. And this is where
the Santonino comes into the story. Yes. In a
moment of what seems like genuine exchange, Magellan
gave the queen a small wooden statue of the child
Jesus. And she accepted it with tears in her
eyes. That statue is still there, by the way.
You can go to the Basilica in Cebu today and
see it. It is the oldest Catholic relic in the
entire Philippines. But this religious success,
it went to Magellan's head. He started to believe
he was invincible. He believed God was personally
guiding his sword. It was hubris, pure and simple.
He began ordering all the other local chiefs
to convert and pay tribute, not just to Humabon,
but to the king of Spain. He was completely upsetting
the local balance of power. And that brings us
to Mactan, a small island right across the channel
from Cebu. The chief of Mactan was a man named
Lapulapu. And Lapulapu was not having any of
it. He refused to bow to Humabon, who he saw
as a rival, and he certainly refused to bow to
some foreign king he had never even met. And
Magellan takes this as a personal insult. He
took it as a direct challenge to his faith and
his authority. His own officers, even the Spanish
captains who hated him, begged him not to go.
They said, look, we are explorers, not soldiers.
Let the locals handle their own politics. We
need to get the spices and go home. But Magellan
insisted. He wanted to make a point. He wanted
to show off his military superiority to impress
his new ally, Humabon. So he made a series of
tactical blunders that are just almost hard to
believe. First, he decided to attack Mactan at
dawn. He took only 49 men. 49. 49 men. And he
was facing a force that Pigafetta estimates was
around 1 ,500 warriors. 49 against 1 ,500. The
math is suicidal. But Magellan believed one European
soldier with armor and a gun was worth a hundred
locals. He was catastrophically wrong. And the
terrain itself worked against him, too. Disastrously.
He attacked at low tide. The bay at Mactan is
filled with coral rocks and shallow water for
a long way out. The Spanish ships couldn't get
close to the shore. Which means their cannons.
Their biggest advantage, the ship's cannons,
were completely out of range. So the men had
to get out of the boats and wade to shore. They
had to wade through thigh -deep water for the
length of two football fields just to reach the
beach. By the time they got there, they were
slow, they were wet, and they were exhausted.
And Le Palapu's men were waiting. And they were
smart. They had observed the Europeans. They
realized the heads and torsos were armored, but
the legs were mostly bare. So they aimed low.
They aimed for the legs. Pigafetta was there,
fighting right next to Magellan. His account
is just visceral. He describes the warriors swarming
them. They weren't intimidated by the muskets,
which were slow to reload and inaccurate at that
range. They just rushed in. And Magellan gets
isolated from his men. He was the target. They
recognized the captain. He was shot in the leg
with a poison arrow. He tried to pull it out,
but then he was hit in the face with a bamboo
spear. Actually, a fire -hardened rattan lance.
It sounds so chaotic and brutal. It was a brawl
in the water. Magellan killed the attacker with
his lance but the lance got stuck in the body.
He tried to draw his sword but he couldn't because
his sword arm had already been wounded by another
spear. He was defenseless. And that's the end.
Pigafetta writes, and I'm paraphrasing here,
that a warrior struck him on the leg with a large
cutlass, and that caused the captain to fall
face down. And then they just rushed him with
spears and swords until they killed our mirror,
our light, our comfort, and our true guide. Our
mirror, our light. You could just hear the heartbreak
in Pigafetta's writing. He really loved Magellan.
He did. But the locals didn't. They hacked him
to pieces right there in the serve. And they
never got the body back. No. Hugh Mabon offered
a huge ransom copper, iron, anything they wanted.
Lapu Lapu refused. He said he would keep the
body as a trophy of his victory. To this day,
there is no grave for Ferdinand Magellan. He's
just part of the island of Mactan. So Magellan
is dead. The invincible Europeans have been defeated
by a local chief. The spell is completely broken.
And this is where the story shifts gears into
like a survival horror movie. Yes. Because now,
Raja Humabon, the so -called Christian convert,
he looks at these surviving Europeans and realizes
they are not gods. They are just men and they
are losing. He decides he needs to twitch sides
before he gets dragged down with them. The betrayal.
Humabon invited the remaining officers to a banquet
ashore, supposedly to give them jewels to take
back to the king of Spain. It was a trap. While
they were eating, Humabon's men attacked. It
was a complete massacre. And the men on the ships
could hear the screaming. They heard the screaming
and they saw the commotion, but they were too
terrified to go ashore and help. They just cut
the anchor cables and fled. They actually fired
their cannons into the village as they left,
killing locals and possibly even their own men
who were still being held captive. It was just
sheer panic. So now they're leaderless. They're
down to about 115 men. They don't even have enough
crew to sail all three ships. No. So they make
a hard choice. They take the Concepcion, which
was the oldest and leakiest ship, and they set
it on fire. They transfer the supplies and the
men to the Trinidad and the Victoria. And now,
finally, the man who will actually finish the
voyage steps up. wants of action, Elcano. Elcano
takes command of the Victoria, and this is important.
Elcano was one of the mutineers back at St. Julian.
He was a Basque navigator, tough as nails, but
he had no love for Magellan's ghost. His only
goal now was survival. They eventually find the
Spice Islands, the Moluccas, in November of 1521.
They load up with cloves, but now they have a
problem. The Trinidad is leaking. Badly. It was
clear it couldn't make the long journey home,
so they made this fateful decision to split up.
The Trinidad would stay behind for repairs and
try to go back the way they came, across the
Pacific to Panama, the Spanish route. And the
Victoria, under Elcano, would try to make it
home by sailing west. Which means sailing all
the way around Africa. through Portuguese waters.
This is the part of the story that often gets
skipped, but it was arguably the most dangerous
leg of the entire voyage. It was. Elcano is sailing
a single, rotting ship straight through enemy
territory. He's carrying a cargo of spices that
is worth an absolute fortune, but if the Portuguese
catch him, he and his entire crew will be hanged
as pirates. So it was a stealth mission. It's
a ghost run. They had to avoid all the major
ports. They couldn't stop at the Cape of Good
Hope. They couldn't stop in Brazil. They had
to sail nonstop from Timor all the way to Cape
Verde. And the ship itself is just falling apart.
The pumps were running 24 hours a day just to
keep the Victoria from sinking. And, of course,
the food ran out again. Pigafetta describes men
begging Elcano to just pull into a Portuguese
port and surrender because they would rather
be in a dungeon than die of starvation at sea.
But Elcano refused. He was stubborn. He pushed
them onward. They ate nothing but rice and water
for months. 21 men died on that final leg alone.
They were throwing bodies overboard almost every
single day. But finally, finally, in September
of 1522, a ship appears in the river at Seville.
The Victoria, it looked like a wreck. The sails
were in tatters. The hull was battered. And the
men. How many actually made it back? Out of the
original 270 men who left three years earlier,
only 18 Europeans walked off that ship. 18. 18.
They were so weak they could barely walk. They
marched straight from the ship to a shrine to
give thanks, holding candles, looking like skeletons.
And Elcano is the hero. He gets the coat of arms
from the king. He gets a globe with the Latin
inscription, Primus Circumdedestimi. You first
circumnavigated me. Yes. Elcano got all the glory,
and he immediately used his new platform to absolutely
trash Magellan's reputation. He told the king
that Magellan was a tyrant, that the mutinies
were all Magellan's fault, that the navigational
errors were Magellan's fault. For a while, history
was written by the survivor. But Magellan had
a defender from beyond the grave. Pigafetta.
He was one of those 18 survivors, but he wasn't
a captain, so he wasn't invited to the official
debriefings. But he had his book. He traveled
all around Europe, presenting his detailed journals
to kings and queens, and eventually he published
his account. And because Pigafetta was such a
good writer, not just a sailor, his version is
the one that ultimately stuck. His version was
filled with the human drama, the tragedy, and
crucially... his deep admiration for Magellan.
He portrayed Magellan as this flawed but brilliant
hero and Elcano as a competent but ultimately
uninspired subordinate. And over the centuries,
Pigafetta's narrative won. That's why we know
it as Magellan's voyage and not Elcano's voyage.
It really is a lesson in the power of keeping
a diary. Absolutely. The pen is mightier than
the sword, especially when the guy with the sword
dies halfway through the story. So looking back
at this whole deep dive. What is the real legacy
here? Because on the surface, it seems like a
complete disaster. They lost four of the five
ships, 250 men, and their commander. Tactically,
it was an unmitigated disaster. But scientifically,
it changed everything. For one, they proved the
Earth was round empirically, not just as a theory.
But much more importantly, they revealed the
true scale of our planet. The sheer size of the
Pacific. That was the shock. No one in Europe
understood that the Pacific Ocean covered one
-third of the planet's surface. Magellan's voyage
completely recalibrated the European mind. It
showed them that the world was vastly larger
and vastly more water than they had ever dared
to imagine. It connected the globe in a continuous
loop for the very first time. It did. It was
the beginning of globalization, for better and
for worse. Before we wrap up, I want to leave
our listeners with one last thought. Something
that always nags at me about this whole story.
We talked about Enrique, the slave. Yes, the
man from Malacca. So, the history books give
the title of First Circumnavigator to Elcano.
But if Enrique was indeed from the Malay archipelago,
and he traveled west to Europe with Magellan
years before, and then he traveled west again
with the Armada all the way back to the Malay
archipelago. Then he beat Elcano by about a year
and a half. Exactly. When he stepped off that
ship in Cebu and could speak to the locals, he
had, for all practical purposes, circled the
globe. It is a fascinating argument. We don't
know what happened to him after the massacre
at Cebu. He just disappears from the written
record. But there is a very, very strong case
to be made that the first person to circumnavigate
the world wasn't a Portuguese captain or a Spanish
navigator, but a Malay slave who just wanted
to go home. Which would be the ultimate twist
in a story that is already full of them. It would.
It just reminds us that history is so often just
a matter of who is holding the pen. And that's
it for this deep dive into the chaotic, brutal
reality of Magellan's voyage. We hope you will
never look at a globe the same way again. Thanks
for listening. Keep questioning the map.