MAGELLAN AND ELCANO – AROUND THE WORLD IN ••• THREE YEARS

There is still fun to be had pretending everyone thought the world was flat until Columbus crossed the Atlantic, that ocean blue, in 1492, but pretence it is. In the sixth century BC Pythagoras knew the world was shaped like a globe. Aristotle said the same a couple of centuries later, pointing out that constellations in the southern sky grew higher for a person travelling south. Goodness knows how long ago the ancients first looked at an eclipse of the moon and saw that Earth’s shadow upon it was curved instead of straight. Eratosthenes in the third century BC … then Ptolemy … then the Venerable Bede in the 700s AD … on and on it goes, one observer after another recording that the Earth was and is a ball and not a plate.

Almost harder is to envisage the world as Europeans really did up until around the turn of the fifteenth century. Even the learned counted only three continents – Africa, Asia and Europe – grouped tight around the Mediterranean Sea. Jerusalem was, for most, the geographical centre of that world, like the maker’s decal on the ball. (Vikings had crossed the Atlantic half a millennium before, but that fact had evidently slipped from everyone’s memory.)

It may be that the knowledge hiding in plain sight – that a ship might sail west and end up in the east – was simply overlooked until it was needed. That need came when those on Europe’s Atlantic façade, with their backs against the blue wall of the sea, had to come to terms with how the overland routes into the east were coming up against the buffers – of Muslims in the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean, of confident Russia further north. Europe was full of people, and the roads east were increasingly blocked with them.

Ship design had come on apace – with proper rudders, multiple masts, sails jib and lateen (from Latin) – so that sailors could tack against the wind instead of only waiting for wind at their backs. By the fifteenth century the ship’s compass had been at play in Europe for 200 years or more and there were tables recording the position, at noon each day, of the sun and the Pole Star over the horizon in northern latitudes.

Matters political were complicated by the Treaty of Tordesillas, in 1494, by which the Pope had given Portugal the trading rights to everything in the east, while Spain had all in the west.

For the fun of it this time, the moment that matters is made of the money troubles faced in the second decade of the sixteenth century by Castilian ship’s captain Juan Sebastián Elcano. As a younger man he had been a soldier helping to press Spanish claims in the Italian Wars, and also in Algeria in North Africa. Seeking a more peaceful life he later settled in Seville and became captain of a merchant ship. A soldier he was, a sailor he was, a businessman he was not, and all too soon he had borrowed too much money from a variety of aggressive companies and sponsors.

Pressed to settle his debts, he gave up his ship. The ship, however, was not his to sell, and by its surrender he had broken the laws of Spain. The moment came when he threw himself upon the mercy of Charles I, who agreed to pardon him on condition he join an expedition just then being put together on his behalf by the Portuguese mariner Ferdinand Magellan.

Having run out of options, Elcano agreed and signed on as a master aboard one of a fleet of five ships destined to depart into the west in search of the Spice Islands … which lay, as everyone knew, in the east.
They set sail from Seville on 10 August 1519 – the flagship Trinidad, the San Antonio, the Concepción, the Santiago and the Victoria. Magellan – fiery, bellicose and committed to the sort of brutal discipline required to keep hundreds of men in line for years at sea – is the man named by most as first to circumnavigate the globe. He took them on an odyssey and no mistake: via Tenerife, Cape Verde and Sierra Leone, across the Atlantic to Brazil, to the Plata estuary and then to Patagonia where the Santiago was lost. Then the San Antonio fled for home, making it back to Spain and claiming the rest had foundered. Magellan found and then led the remaining three through the 350-mile-long strait that bears his name.

They took a hundred days then to cross the vastness – 64 million square miles of ocean they called Pacific. By 15 March 1521 they were in the Philippines – and there Magellan’s nature had him pick a fight that cost him his life, on 27 April, and those of several of his crew. The little flotilla limped onwards without him and them. By the time they left Borneo on 8 July they had insufficient men for three ships and so burned the Concepción.

Elcano (he that was among them only on account of bad debts) was, by desperate men, made captain of the Victoria on 16 September. On 8 November, two years and three months after leaving Seville, the two surviving vessels arrived in Maluku, in the Spice Islands. Suitably loaded with their prized cargo of spices, they took their leave of the islands and of the severely leaking Trinidad, later lost as well. Elcano was in charge of the whole exploit by then and plotted a course west, to Spain. After a month and a half they rounded the Cape of Good Hope (on 19 May 1522), and, after yet more hardship and death, returned to Seville on 8 September.

They had been gone for three years and Elcano, rather than Magellan, was the captain at the end of it all. A debtor he had been but now a hero (even if no one remembers his name now). There were eighteen other Europeans left alive to tell their tales, and four from Maluku.
For what it is worth, King Charles was impressed enough to let Elcano augment his own coat of arms with the legend You Went Around Me First.

And so he had.

Source ~ “The Story of The World in 100 Moments” by Neil Oliver

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