First, an explanation: In the past, I’ve been publishing the letter I wrote and the link to the article on the pages of the Denton Record Chronicle, which now seems redundant. And it is. From now on I will publish the link (below), and use this space to provide some further notes on the subject for those that might be interested. Unfortunately, I’m limited to five hundred words on the essay an it’s not always posible to tell everything I would like to.
When I was a kid, Magellan was portrayed as a great man, an explorer, a daring, dashing, “all or nothing” hell bent Caballero out to discover the world, become famous and with a bit of luck, get rich. All things that to a ten year old seemed fantastic. And it turns out they were. “Fantastic”, as in fanciful, highly doubtful and not believable.
I say this not to take away whatever glory Magellan has earned, but to set the record straight. For one, his circumnavigation of the world never happened: he never got back to his starting point. But again, like many things in history, this is not that simple. As follows: He first went to the Spice Island like everyone else at the time, by sailing east, around Cape Town in Africa, across the Indian Ocean and then to the Malay archipelago north of Australia and some islands now known as the Moluccas. There, he loaded up with spices, bought a slave who he named Enrique and sailed back to Spain. Ten years later he sailed west around the tip of South America, across the Pacific Ocean and northwest to the Philippines—no easy feat, by any means.
But the Philippines is not the Moluccas and he didn’t go in one direction, he went east first, then waited ten years before going west and never got back to his starting point. The Philippines is not the Moluccas. I know, I’m being technical, but so be it.
What’s more, and the reason I doubt the account of his death by poison arrow, is that the crew of eighteen that made it back, reported seeing 12’ to 15’ giants along the coast of Tierra del Fuego, on both sides of what is now known as The Strait of Magellan, a belief that was not refuted until late in the eighteenth century. The name Patagonia derives from Patagones, same as Big Foot, ergo, giants with big feet.
History, it turns out, is not black and white, it never is, never has been, but it is fun.
mt
14 thoughts on “Guest Essay, on Setting the record Straight . . . Denton Record Chronicle, 10-7-18”
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