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The greatest voyage in maritime history
Magellan, Elcano and the first global circumnavigation
The last two months of their journey must have been a nightmare, for Victoria was little more than a floating wreck and its crew the living dead
The route of the first circumnavigation of the world, Battista Agnese, c 1544. Image courtesy Library of Congress
There is no doubt that the greatest voyage in maritime history is the first circumnavigation of the world by Ferdinand Magellan and Juan Sebastian de Elcano in the Spanish ship Victoria. This voyage was completed almost 500 years ago and lasted three years, from when they left the Castilian port of San Lucar de Barrameda on 10 August 1519 until their return on 6 September 1522. Ian Burnet traces this expedition that changed our understanding of the globe.
AFTER CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS reached the Americas, the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas between Spain and Portugal bisected the world along a line of demarcation in the Atlantic Ocean halfway between the Portuguese-claimed islands of Azores and the island of Hispaniola reached by Columbus. The two Iberian powers had conveniently divided the world in half and the treaty allowed Spain to claim any territory discovered to the west of this line and Portugal any territory discovered to the east. In the 15th century the aromatic spices of cloves and nutmeg, grown only in the remote Spice Islands of present-day Indonesia were, after they reached Europe, said to be worth their weight in gold and counted as some of the most valuable of traded commodities. The Portuguese and the Spanish were now in a race to reach the Spice Islands and to claim them for themselves, by sailing in opposite directions around the world and across the Indian and Pacific Oceans respectively – even though neither of them could accurately measure longitude or knew in whose supposed half of the world the Spice Islands were actually located.
Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope to India in 1497. The Portuguese captured Goa in 1509 and then Malacca in 1511, before following the traditional Malay trade routes to the Spice Islands in 1512. This Portuguese map, pictured above, from the Atlas Miller shows the Atlantic and Indian Oceans bounded by land and depicts the known world before the departure of Ferdinand Magellan and his Armada de Moluccas in 1519.
Magellan’s Armada de Moluccas In 1519 five vessels departed Spain seeking a route around South America to the Pacific Ocean. The five ships, Trinidad, Victoria, San Antonio, Concepción and Santiago, all painted black and crewed by 237 men under the command of Ferdinand Magellan, left San Lucar de Barrameda on 10 August 1519 heading into the South Atlantic. Their purpose was to find a western route to the Spice Islands of Eastern Indonesia, which were the world’s only source of cloves and nutmeg. Understanding of the world’s geography had changed since Columbus first reached the Americas in 1492. The Spanish explorer Vasco Balboa had crossed the Isthmus of Panama in 1513 and seen the great expanse of the Pacific Ocean laid out before him. Furthermore, in 1515 a Spanish expedition commanded by Juan Diaz de Solis had explored down the South American coast, reaching as far south as the entrance to the Rio de la Plata between Uruguay and Argentina. They returned believing this could be the entrance of a western passage to the Pacific Ocean.
By March 1520, the Armada de Moluccas had reached 49 degrees south, the days were getting shorter, the temperatures colder and the storms more ferocious, so to continue would have put the whole expedition at risk. Magellan decided it would be prudent to winter in a sheltered Argentinian bay he named Port St Julian. In August 1520, after more than five months of winter, the ships of the Armada de Molucca resumed their voyage south, and after only three days sailing reached a small inlet leading into a series of westward-trending bays.
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01 Map of the known world from the Atlas Miller, Lopo Homen, 1519. Image courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France
02 Map of the Pacific Ocean showing the Spice Islands, Battista Agnese, c.1544. Image courtesy Library of Congress
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Subsequently named the Straits of Magellan, this series of interlinking waterways extend for 660 kilometres between the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans.
By the time the armada entered the Pacific Ocean, Santiago had been lost to shipwreck and San Antonio had turned back to Spain. Not knowing the size of the Pacific, Magellan believed it could be crossed in one month, a time similar to the crossing of the Atlantic by Christopher Columbus. In fact it took Trinidad, Victoria and Concepción three months to cross the Pacific and many of the crew had died from scurvy by the time they reached the Philippines in April 1520. Their time in the Philippines was a disaster because Magellan and eight of his crew were killed when he tried to establish his authority over a chief on the island of Mactan, then 27 crew members were killed in a massacre on Cebu and they were forced to scuttle one of their ships. Without Magellan’s determined leadership the two remaining ships, Victoria and Trinidad, took until November 1521 to finally reach the clove island of Tidore. After a month of recuperation and the loading of spices, the ships and their precious cargo were ready to leave for Spain, with João Lopez Carvalho in command of Trinidad and Juan Sebastian de Elcano in command of Victoria. As they moved out from the harbour, Trinidad began taking on water and the flagship of the Armada was on the verge of sinking. It had fallen into a state of disrepair through sheer neglect and would need extensive repairs. The northerly monsoon had begun and the two captains decided that Victoria should immediately depart westwards for the Cape of Good Hope and that after repairs Trinidad would attempt to sail eastwards back across the Pacific to the port of Darien in Panama.
The two ships would now be alone on the high seas with no mutual support in case of shipwreck, encounters with the Portuguese or just the failure of their worm-ridden vessels. The decision by the two captains to return separately and in opposite directions meant their chances of ever returning to Spain had gone from little to almost none, and Trinidad only made it as far as the Philippines.
In the 15th century the aromatic spices of cloves and nutmeg were some of the most valuable of traded commodities
01 A very early Portuguese depiction of the Moluccan clove islands, with Tidore (where Elcano landed in the sole surviving ship of the Magellan expedition) second from the left. Note the simplified depiction of clove plantations up the sides of the exaggerated volcanic cones. Image courtesy Jeffrey Mellefont 02 View from Ternate showing the islands of Maitara in the centre and Tidore in the background. The site of Elcano’s landing is visible on the distant shoreline at the left. Image courtesy Jeffrey Mellefont
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A floating wreck and the living dead Victoria sailed from Tidore on 21 December 1521 with 60 crew on board. Rounding the Cape of Good Hope against the prevailing winds was an ordeal: a fierce storm brought down their foremast and the voyage took them seven weeks of constant struggle with gigantic waves that threatened to sink their leaking and worm-ridden ship. Back in the Atlantic, Victoria sailed a north-westerly course for two months, until in June 1522 they crossed the equator. With their food supplies already consumed, the effects of scurvy were inevitable and within the space of these two months, 21 of the crew died. With nothing left to eat and with the weak and exhausted crew dying around him, Elcano took the risk of putting Victoria into the port of Santiago in the Cape Verde Islands. This was Portuguese territory and they had to invent a story that they were a stormbattered Spanish cargo ship seeking refuge. Elcano sent some of the crew ashore in a longboat to obtain desperately needed food and water. The Spanish only had cloves to trade for food and the Portuguese authorities soon became suspicious of the true nature of their voyage. While making a second trip ashore in the longboat, 13 of the crew were detained by the Portuguese. Fearing they would soon all be arrested, Elcano hurriedly weighed anchor and set sail for Spain with only 21 men remaining on board. The last two months of their journey must have been a nightmare, for Victoria was little more than a floating wreck and its crew the living dead. The survivors were forced to man the pumps 24 hours a day to keep the vessel afloat. Working the sails to keep the ship on course drained the rest of their energy, and three more men died of hunger and fatigue. It is impossible to describe how they must have felt as they approached Spain, for all would have despaired many times during their voyage around the world of ever sighting their homeland again. History has described their return as triumphant, but the condition of Victoria and its wretched crew must have been a pitiful sight. Of the five ships and 237 men of the Armada de Molucca that departed from San Lucar de Barrameda three years earlier, Victoria and its 18 survivors had achieved the greatest voyage in maritime history – the first circumnavigation of the globe – and the maps of the world were to change forever. These thin and ragged sailors had measured the true dimensions of our planet and turned the concept of a spherical earth by the Greek astronomers, such as Eratosthenes and Ptolemy, into a hard-won reality. The skill of their captain Juan Sebastian de Elcano had brought them home, but they would have wished that Magellan were still with them, for without his vision and determination Victoria would never have found the Straits of Magellan nor crossed the Pacific Ocean.
Juan Sebastian de Elcano was exalted as a returning hero. The King of Spain rewarded him with the promise of an annual pension of 500 ducats and granted him a coat of arms displaying two crossed cinnamon sticks, three nutmegs and 12 clove buds. But Elcano’s triumph would fade into history. Sadly today, there are many who think that Magellan was the first ship’s captain to circumnavigate the world.
More details of this voyage can be found in Ian Burnet’s book Spice Islands (Rosenberg Publishing, 2011)
Ian Burnet has spent 30 years, living, working and travelling in Indonesia. His fascination with the diverse history and culture of the archipelago is reflected in his books on Indonesia and maritime history: Spice Islands, East Indies, Archipelago – A Journey Across Indonesia, Where Australia Collides with Asia, The Tasman Map and his latest work, Joseph Conrad’s Eastern Voyages.
