The Magellan Myth Uncovered

September 2022

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  Sam Willis 

  From the Society for Nautical Research in partnership with Lloyd’s Register Foundation, I’m Sam Willis. And this is the Mariners Mirror podcast, the world’s number one podcast dedicated to all of maritime history. Hello everyone and welcome to the Mariners Mirror Podcast. Today is a very important day in the entire history of maritime exploration for it is the very day in 1519 that the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan left Spain. Now, although he was Portuguese, it’s important to know that he was sailing on a Spanish expedition in his search for a western route to the Spice Islands. These were the Moluccas Islands in the South Western Pacific, important because this is where nutmeg, mace and cloves were to be exclusively discovered. The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas reserved for Portugal the Eastern routes that went around Africa.  It thus became essential for the Spanish to find a different route, a western route to those islands. What followed is both very well known and poorly understood. For centuries Ferdinand Magellan has been celebrated as a hero and noble adventurer who circumnavigated the globe in an extraordinary feat of human bravery. He was a paragon of daring and chivalry but Magellan in fact, did not attempt, much less accomplish, a journey around the globe, and in his own lifetime the explorer was actually abhorred as a traitor, he was reviled as a tyrant, and he was dismissed as a failure. His real ambitions were in fact focus less on circumnavigating the world or cornering the global spice market as we have been led to believe, but more to do with exploiting Filipino gold. To find out more I spoke to the brilliant historian who has made exactly this case, the fabulous Felipe Fernandez Armesto. He is so good that instead of mentioning his books, I will just mention his prizes.  Awards for work in maritime and imperial history include the World History Association book prize, Spain’s Premo Nacional Investigacion Geografica, the Caird medal, and the John Carter Brown medal. He’s the Vice President of the Hakluyt society, he occupies the William P. Reynolds chair at the University of Notre Dame, where he is a professor of history and concurrently of classics, and of the history and philosophy of science. Those of you who are keen eared will no doubt recognise Felipe’s unique voice from a previous episode, in which we discussed the challenges and rewards of maritime history. A fascinating episode that will give you a strong foundation if you have come to this podcast with little knowledge or experience of the maritime past. As ever, I hope you enjoy listening to him as much as I enjoyed talking with him. Here is the remarkable Felipe.

   

  Sam Willis 

  So Magellan, why don’t we start with a straight face as possible? Can you tell me what the myth of Magellan is?

   

  Philippe Fernandez Armesto 

  That he was the first circumnavigater of the world, which he wasn’t, that he was the first to conceive the circumnavigation of the world, which he never did, that he was a kind of trailblazer of science and geography, about which he knew absolutely nothing. And that he was an exemplary amongst the most evil colonialism and wicked explorers w ho imposed European culture on the rest of the world. That he was a kind of exemplary case which is the absolute opposite of the truth, he was possibly even more bloody, ruthless and malevolent than your average conqueror and spreader of white power around the world. And I suppose the biggest myth of all is that he was some tremendous success, that he achieved something wonderful. The absolute reverse is true, he failed in just about everything that he ever attempted to do. And the amazing thing is he’s a great hero, whereas all these other other dead white male explorers executed and reviled, Magellan somehow escaped and  there is still just about  everything you can imagine is named after him, from spaceships and a yacht right down to stuff that he had absolutely nothing to do with, like scientific instruments and health remedies. And it’s quite extraordinary that you wouldn’t find another dead white explorer whose name seems to have so much positive resonance, and what did he do to deserve it? Oh, pretty much nothing. I mean, he wasn’t of course totally evil, he had tremendous quantities of courage and perseverance, perhaps to a foolhardy degree, but nice guy absolutely not.

   

  Sam Willis 

  No. How did all come about then, this mountain of misinformation?

   

  Felipe Fernandez Armesto 

  Well, I suppose it all dates back to a period in which people loved heroes, the period in which  heroism was the object really of historical inquiry and of hagiography, they  were looking for these people who would be exemplary, who would be models to admire and the facts that didn’t fit tended to get sidelined or overlooked, and of course, in the case of Magellan this really started tremendously early because the main chronicler of his voyages, sidekick Antonio Pigafetta, absolutely adored him and made him the hero of a tremendously successful account of the voyage which almost monopolised peoples’ attention for centuries and his role as someone after whom people name things  from telescopes and stars and species and it all really starts.  Amazingly, early in the 17th century he’s already a sort of go to guy for naming things that you think are of important scientific resonance. And of course the circumnavigation of the world was the outcome of the voyage that he launched, he never intended to circumnavigate the world, he didn’t  navigate the world after his death in the Philippines, his successors completed that voyage already more by luck than judgement, but that sort of landmark moment gave him a sort of label that people could attach to him. So Magellan became this cynosure of people who worship his science and the advance of knowledge of the world. What he did to contribute to that himself was like so many other great saints and heros, pretty much zero. It’s stuff that other people attribute to him.

   

  Sam Willis 

  Let’s take it back to what he was intending to do and locate this voyage in the history of  the  East and the spice trade.

   

  Philippe Fernandez Armesto 

  Well, very controversial and very hard to pin this down, because, of course, what he officially was commissioned to do was to approach the great spiceries of the Moluccas, the Islands in the East that produce nutmeg and mace and cloves and were pretty much the world’s only source of those  endlessly valuable spices. So that was the official objective of the voyage.  And what was original about the project was that he was going to sail west in order to reach these islands at the extremity of the morning; that was the official brief. And very often explorers had something completely different in mind from what they were supposed to do, what to get the money you need to do X, what they really want to do is Y.  Actually the  evidence I think is really overwhelming that Magellan wasn’t intended to go there at all, his own personal objective was to go to the Philippines. Rumour had it, and to some extent this is valid,  there was an enormous amount of gold. Here It wasn’t spices, it was gold. And what he wanted to do was to create a fief for himself in the Philippines in the way that no other explorers had created fiefs and Columbus and the West Indies. Cortes who was a contemporary of Magellan’s, and actually their voyages conflict and almost coincide on something very similar and in Mexico creates great fief for himself that’s the sort of thing that would go on and was really after the Philippines the Spice Islands are a compete delusion because he if he’d got there he would have found that they were in the Portuguese zone of the world according to the carve up that the Pope had done between Spain and Portugal said he would never have been able to make any use of this discovery over western routes to the Philippines even if he had achieved it. The Western routes to the spice islands even if he had achieved it, be his real objective is  the Philippines. All I think he was hoping to do was that the he’d make an immense fortune outo f all this gold and, and possibly their rule a fief that was so far away from any other colonial administrator that  he’d be pretty much free to do what he he wanted. And the inspiration for this wasn’t you know scientific wasn’t geography. It didn’t arise from any experience of navigation. He knew very little about the sea. It arose from his reading and chivalric romance; he was like so many explorers of the time he was fixated on his own social advancement. He had come from a very minor, noble family he was orphaned very young, he’d been brought up at court, he was in the  bottom ranks of the Portuguese nobility had no money he was seeking a route of escape, a route of social ambition. He modelled himself on romances of, of chivalry. And that was what he was really, after he wanted to be a hero, he wanted to be like one of these storybook guys whom he read about and whom he alludes to, in surviving fragments of what we knew, he said and, and wrote, so really, in a way, you know, where he was gearing and what he was doing the secondary the important thing was to arrive and to achieve this, the social ambition, which was by nomeans uncharacteristic of explorers and conquistadores of the day, I think that you can if you read the works, you can nearly always find some inspiration, some self modelling on this tradition of the chivalric hero, a guy who, usually he’s a foundling he’s down on his luck, he’s on his uppers, but by tremendous, you know, virtual prowess, he recovers his birthright and becomes, you know, great lord, king, ruler, prince, whatever.

   

  Sam Willis 

  Do you think – having been brought up in the Portuguese court – he was surprised by them, rejecting his proposal for the the original voyage?

   

  Philippe Fernandez Armesto 

  Well, he has history with the, with the king of, Portugal, his demands were always  beyond what seemed reasonable, given his background his poverty , his lack of distinction, eminence or experience. I mean, he graduates   from his educational at thePortuguese court without any particular  qualifications, and without any academic merit. He’s in the squirearchy, I mean, he’s  of nominally noble birth but  in order to achieve nobility would have had to accomplish great deeds. And yeah, many of these sort of graduates of the court school if you  put it like that did did achieve greatness, they did go off and commit great deeds of valour and so on. But, again, we never really made it he goes out to fight in India and on the east coast of, of Africa really as soon as he’s graduated from his education at court. But he doesn’t achieve any particular distinction. I mean, there are one or two stories  about him which, you know, are possibly subsequent fabrications, back projections in order to ry and epxlain his later ascent. But pretty much you know  his record is very humble. And I think if you look at what he was really trying to do whilst he was out in the Indian Ocean is he was really trying to make money. And that was a failure as well every time he invested in a cargo something disastrous happened. And so he then returns to Portugal pretty much still  with nothing and yet he makes some further demands on the King who you know, if I’m allowed to say this without besmirching your tape recorder the king’s pretty pissed off. That’s really the reason why he goes off and seeks employment and in Spain, he feels he’s not appreciated and we can’t get on there; he does make a little bit of money flogging horses that the Portuguese had captured on a campaign in Morocco. He never really breaks through into the the wealth and fame that he thought was his birthright as a minor seignon of the Portuguese nobil ity. And that’s what makes him go off to Spain to seek his his fortune, and he seems ready to extemporise this plan of going and discovering a new route to the spice islands in an effort to find some sort of project that he  can you can submit to the Spanish court that will justify their investing in

   

  Sam Willis 

  Do you think us consumers of history out there bear responsibility for wanting to believe in this myth of greatness?

   

  Philippe Fernandez Armesto 

  I don’t think people want that anymore. I mean, I think that was, you know, a habit of the 19th century a Carlislian search for heros to worship. We seem to have lost that desire. On the contrary, now, you know, we want them all to have feet of clay and we tear thier statues down. Well, that always seems to me to be an extremely unfeeling and often unthinking fashion; in a wayI wish we were a little bit perhaps more susceptible to the notion of heroism or at least of of sanctity, we now seem you know just to if we feel any respect for someone, we start looking to replace it with obloquy. So I don’t think we really need that kind of hero worship anymore. And that may be why it’s not possible to look at these characters with a little bit more objectivity. Well, now you know,I certianly don’t advocate going to the other extreme, tearing down their statues, or reviling them for you know, even worse things that they didn’t do, which will seem to be what we mainly do, especially with these, these poor old dead white explorers.

   

  Philippe Fernandez Armesto 

  So I mean, we’ve heard all of these things that that Magellan didn’t do. Why does his story remain important and relevant?

   

  Philippe Fernandez Armesto 

  Well, of course, he was the first person as far as we know to lead an expedition across the Pacific. From east to west. Obviously, you know people had epxlored parts of the Pacific in that direction. Before there are controversies about inca raft  raft builders sailing out into the into the Pacific, but pretty much all the explorations that we know about had happened in the other direction. Essentially, Polynesian navigators sailing into the south, southeast trade winds and the reason they did that, of course, was I mean, if you want to go somewhere sail into the wind because then at least you can go back, whereaas if you sail with the wind as Magellan did, the chances of you’re getting back are rather remote. So you know it’s absolutely a very heroic endeavour. In fact, possibly in a sense more heroic than, than people commonly suppose because by the time Magellan got to the Pacific, his mission was effectively over there was no chance by that stage of his achieving finding a profitable route to his supposed destination, which was the spice islands that was simply out of the question. And he carried on I think, in that spirit of, of pig headedness. And refused to accept reality, which is very often characteristic of people who make breakthroughs in the history of exploration; you have to be slightly potty to want to do these things in the first place.

   

  Sam Willis 

  It’s quite counter-intuitive so often with maritime exploration, you have to go in completely the wrong direction to find find the best winds, which will then take you take you where you need to go.

   

  Philippe Fernandez Armesto 

  Yes, I certainly always maintain that that’s the the case, you know, you you, really unless you take what ont he face of it is an unreasonable or irrational risk, you don’t make the great breakthroughs in exploration otherwise, it’s incrementally. I’d say Magellan’s an exception to the sort of incremental history of exploration. This is a big single breakthrough. But it’s a breakthrough that he wasn’t attempting to achieve and that he didn’t get credit for in his time, because people refused to accept the truth that his voyage revealed which is that the Pacific is immensley, vastly wide. And in fact, we effectively unnavigable as a means of communication between Europe and the orient that did actually disprove the theory on which his voayge was based, but nobody really gave him credit for that at the time. But I mean, that’s certainly something which you can lay to his credit from when he wasn’t praised for it in his day or for a long time afterwards. And I suppose you do have to give him credit for certain qualities of character. I think he was a very wicked person. Ruthless, unfeeling, uncharitable, egocentric. Prone to delusions of grandeur, which are often very destructive. We see it particularly when he eventually arrives at the at the Philippians. And he kind of elbows the, the missionaries, he has in the expedition out of the out of the way and takes on the task of evangelising them. In this mood of crazed religious exultation, which is…

   

  Sam Willis 

  It was successful, wasn’t it though; getting the Filipinos to become Christians?

   

  Felipe Fernandez Armesto 

  No! He didn’t achieve anything. He gets a lot of people unit and trying to get him out doesn’t and so on but of course, they all forget about that as soon as they’ve got rid of him and it’s only really later big Spanish missionary effort from the 1570s onwards that turns the Philippines into what it is now, the biggest Christian country or nation well really of any true Christian countries, but predominantly Christian countries in East Asia and the other being East Timor but all that really happens later, you can give Magellan for being a forerunner, if you like and saying that you know he made the effort to evangelise but since he knew practically nothing about Christianity himself anyway one slightly wonders what these sort of sermons that he seems to have preached to the nature’s rule about since in his own behaviour, he never displayed any Christian charity whatever so I’m disinclined to hail him as a great missionary when I suppose you know you might perhaps give him some credit for making the effort even if is terribly politically incorrect these days, because we’re very much against people imposing their culture on others, but in that respect, of course, he was simply a man of his time. So you know, intrepidity- this kind of willingness to struggle on against the odds, to keep going when you knew failure was obvious. And of course, in the end, I suppose he does die in a rather self consciously heroic way. My view is that he contrived his own death and that he deliberately contrived it to follow the model of Roland’s death of the Battle of Roncevaux pass he rembers the legend of Roland when he refuses to summon for some help, because you know, he’s he’s determined to die, you know, face in the face of the enemy. I think Magellan deliberately set out to die in his final battle and  that was his unit last bid for the heroism that eluded him all his life and as a dispossessed seon of a minor naval house, besotted by the reading of chivalry, tales of raiment, that was what he’d always wanted, and that was really the only option that was left to him was to die heroically and I don’t know you know, then in some ways you can consider this to be to be admirable foolhardy, slightly crazy but yes, if you are educated in the chivalric tradtions as he was and as most peopleof his social class were and his vocation at the time, well, you definitely see that as a positive.

   

  Sam Willis 

  What about his skill as a navigator?

   

  Philippe Fernandez Armesto 

  Absolutely zero! He didn’t know what he was doing. He of course had a sidekick, who was one of the most extraordinary and kind of if you like, advanced thinkers about navigation at the time, but but this this one point that he and this guy are in  some partnership to try and promote the idea of a voyage that they are going to under take together. But this is like so many great geniuses, the sidekick goes completely insane. And  he’s literally certifiably mad by the standards of the time, and so he has to get left behind and so Magallon really sets out with only the professional pilots provided by the Spanish crown for his expedition to help him find his way around the seas. And broadly speaking, he leaves it to them occasionally, you know, he comes up with criticisms of what they’re doing. But it’s perfectly obvious that these criticisms are quite uninformed. And before he leaves, he writes you know navigational trinkets about you know how he’s going to get to the Spice Islands. But all that is just cribbed from the mad sidekick whom he’s left behind. There isn’t an original line in it. I think really, he knew nothing about navigation.

   

  Sam Willis 

  It’s worth remembering this is an age where a lot of it was guesswork and chance anyway and I suppose people are out sort of reluctant to to put chance into historical narratives. Do you think that’s fair?

   

  Philippe Fernandez Armesto 

  Well, I would certainly put chance into it. History is a complete mess. It has no direction. There is nothing like progress or cycliscism or providence, you know, and all the things that people have said guide history, there isn’t really even causation, because it’s very rarely do you find two you know sort of events wher you can say, well, x really caused y either because the evidence is in sufficient or because there are lots of other possible explanations of why it happened. So like, you know, I think history the reason I like it – is a complete mess.

   

  Sam Willis 

  Me too revelling in the chaos.

   

  Philippe Fernandez Armesto 

  Precisely. That’s right, exactly right.

   

  Sam Willis 

  It makes it much more human much more kind of understandable and relevant to us as well.

   

  Philippe Fernandez Armesto 

  Yes, of course, it doesn’t make it understandable in a scientific sense. But yes, it gives you the sort of gut feeling that you can see that that’s how it was because that;s what your own life’sl ike! We all live in this sort of spiral of events, you know multiple heat indices in which you know nothing seems to be going in any predictable direction. And that’s the reality of the of the past, and obviously in Magellan’s case everything that happened on that voyage was was contingent on so  much else. And you can’t honestly say, except for I suppose once Magellan fights, struggles his way through the Strait that now bears his name. And he arrives, you know, on the threshold of what we now call Pacific at that moment, I suppose you know, it’s his. You can call it interpidity or pig headedness, it’s his unwillingness to accept – the sensible thing at that point was to turn around and go back – that keeps him going. And I suppose that is one moment where you can say that kind of human caprice reallysort of impacted on the course of the history of the of the world, but normally  can’t detect the course history. You can’t quite say specific amount, what constitutes the supposed turning points? So I think it’s all you know, pretty much of a mess. And except in that one, that one moment, and I think Megallan’s life illustrates just how messy history is. And when you think you know what was he really attempting – he never thought about circumnavigating the world he probably never really was never really focused on getting to the Spice Islands which was where the King of Spain nominally sent him. Magellan’s own  objective was the Philippines he didn’t have you know a sort of vision of the world with which he is commonly credited his his notional shape and size of the world was  was very close to that of Columbus and Vespucci. I think he was expecting the world to be very much smaller than it is. So already, almost everything that people associate with him has become associable with him adventitious by hazard and has got  nothing to do with what he was trying to achieve or what he had in mind. There you can see you know, how messy history is that things really work out not only in ways that you can’t predict in advance, but that it’s very hard to make sense of retrospectively.

   

  Sam Willis 

  It’s a wonderful place to finish, Felipe thank you very much indeed for speaking to me.

   

  Philippe Fernandez Armesto 

  On the contrary Sam it’s very kind of you to take an interest.

   

  Sam Willis 

  Many thanks for listening everybody. Now please make sure this is not the last thing you do to interact with our brilliant podcast. Above all, please make sure that you check out the Mariners Mirror Podcast’s YouTube page, where you will find some truly amazing videos bringing the maritime world to life in ways you have never seen before. There are fantastic 3d animations hand drawn maps of battles brought to life, figureheads animated, the world’s best ship models filmed with the latest camera technology and in incredible high definition. Please remember that the pod comes from both the Society for Nautical Research and the Lloyd’s Register foundation. You can find them both online, the Society for Nautical Research at snr.org.uk where you can join the society I’d urge you all to do so for the amazing benefits that membership brings. And the history and education centre of the Lloyd’s Register foundation can be found at hec.lrfoundation.org.uk. Well worth a visit. You can find the Society for Nautical research on Instagram and Twitter and Facebook and please tell your friends and please leave us a review and rating on iTunes if you do so I promise I will read it out.

Category: Exploration | Middle Ages | Seapower | Maritime Disasters | Age of Sail | Navigation