Magellan’s Voyage (October 1969 | Volume: 20, Issue: 6)

Magellan’s Voyage

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Authors: Antonio Pigafetta

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October 1969 | Volume 20, Issue 6

The Nancy-Libri-Phillipps-Beinecke-Yale manuscript of Pigafetta’s narrative is being published at this time by the Yale University Press, under the title Magellan’s Voyage , in two volumes at $75 the boxed set. One volume is a facsimile of the manuscript, with initial illuminations and maps in full color. The other consists of a fully annotated English translation by R. A. Skelton, former Keeper of Maps in the British Museum, and an introduction, also by Mr. Skelton, from which the above excerpt is taken. —The Editors

The first circumnavigation of the globe by a sailing ship was an event much more astonishing to the minds of men in 1522 than, to the modern mind, the first orbiting of the earth by a man-made satellite in 1957. But when the Portuguese captain Ferdinand Magellan sailed with his Spanish fleet of five small ships—the Santo Antonio , the Trinidad , the Concepción , the Victoria , and the Santiago —from the port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda in September, 1519, he had not conceived a voyage round the world. By a westward navigation he expected to reach the Moluccas, or Spice Islands, which the Portuguese had attained from the Indian Ocean while he was still in their service. Not for the first or last time in the history of discovery, it was the discrepancy between what the venturer expected and what he found that greatly enriched human experience and knowledge.

To the world map Magellan added the Pacific Ocean, which occupies one third of the earth’s surface, with an area exceeding that of all the land areas of the globe. Although the westward passage that he pioneered through the strait named for him was not to become a regular trade route, he discovered the wind systems that controlled navigation in the South Pacific. The reports on the island peoples of the ocean and its archipelagos carried home by the survivors of the expedition opened to the eyes of Europeans a window on a new and strange cultural world. The Portuguese monopoly of information on the eastern seas and on operations there was broken, and a new factor in the geopolitical rivalry of Spain and Portugal emerged.

Considered in the light of its influence on the course of history, the most precious cargo brought back in the Victoria —the only ship of Magellan’s little fleet to complete the circumnavigation and return home—was not the load of cloves in her hold but the information carried in the memories or notebooks of the eighteen European survivors. The longest and most valuable narrative of the voyage was written not by a professional seaman but by a young Italian, Antonio Pigafetta, who joined the expedition as a volunteer in the flagship Trinidad when she sailed and was aboard the Victoria when she berthed in 1522. To his task of recording he