The Secrets of the Dead episode, “Magellan’s Crossing,” originally aired December 20, 2021, was a pretty straightforward account of Magellan’s ill-fated voyage across the Atlantic, then across the Pacific and finally around ther world – though Magellan himself didn’t live to make the full crossing. Instead he got caught up in an indigenous war between two rival lings on islands that are now part of Indonesia, and he was killed in battle by a native chief after he had deliberately told the natives allied with Spain not to participate but just to watch. The purpose of Magellan’s expedition was to find an alternate route to the Spice Islands, which were crucially important to Eurpopeans because in the days before refrigeration, the only way to preserve food long-term was to smoke it with spices. Like Columbis and a lot of other explorers in the so-called “Age of Discovery,” Magellan was done in as much as anything by the bizarre underetimation common in his time of the size of the world. Ancient Greeks had not only correctly known the world was round but had estimated its correct size within 7.5 percent of the currently known value – Archimedes not only famously measured the world, he did it twice, and his second go-round was even more accurate htan the first. But the medieval explorers of Spain and Portugal thought the world was only two-fifths to one-half its actual size, and when Magellan finally sailed his ships around the cape at Tierra del Fuego (after first stumbling on the Rio de la Plata and mistaking it for the ocean crossing), he thought he was only a few days’ sailing away from the Spice Islands instead of tens of thousands of miles away from them.
After Magellan’s death, what was left of his expedition – it had set out from Spain with five ships and over 200 men, and when it returned there was only one ship and 18 survivors – was commanded by Juan Sebastian Elcano, a Castilian sailor and one of the most unjustly forgotten men in world history. Magellan’s voyage was beset by various catastrophes, including not only his own death en route but at least two mutinies (the first, not mentioned here, involved Magellan’s death sentence against a sailor caught having sex with one of the cabin boys; at the time homosexuality was a capital crime in Spain, as it was through most of Europe, but was more or less tolerated in a don’t-ask-don’t-tell manner on board ships taking long voyages), and Elcano had participated in the second mutiny but Magellan had pardoned him because he needed his skills as a navigator. There was an ironic sequence during which a woman from one of the indigenous communities around Tierra del Fuego complained that the Spaniards had devastated the local population and therefore they weren’t going to celebrate the 500=th anniversary of Magellan’s voyage – only she made her complaint against the Spaniards in Spanish. There were also fascinating political complications to the voyage; Magellan was actually Portuguese (his birth name was Magelhanes) and, like Columbus, had originally approached the King of Portugal for sponsorship money. When the Portuguese king turned him down, Magellan then went to King Charles V of Portugal’s arch-rival, Spain, which got him denounced by the Portuguese as a traitor, while virtually all his officers and crew members were Spanish and they didn’t trust him, either. It’s a fascinating story and one final irony is that, though the one ship that finally made it back to Spain was barely seaworthy and had to be bailed out every day on the last leg of the trip, somehow the cargo of spices it had collected on its way survived intact and was sold off – so Magellan’s voyage was one of the few that actually mademoney for its investors and the Spanish crown.
