The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - PREVIEW： Epochs #220

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome back to Epochs. If you remember last time we left off with the voyage of Magellan

00:00:19.020 just as it had left mainland Spain. So let's just continue the story straight from there.

00:00:25.060 We'll be using the account of Antonio Pigafetta who was actually there as well as the analysis of

00:00:33.220 Lawrence Berger in his great book Over the Edge of the World. Okay we're told this quote on the 10th

00:00:39.360 of August Antonio Pigafetta recorded in his diary quote the fleet having been furnished with all

00:00:45.620 that was necessary for it and having in the five ships people of diverse nations to the number of

00:00:51.320 237 in all was ready to depart from Seville and firing all the artillery we set sail with the

00:00:57.860 stay sail only. Pigafetta's headcount probably omitted 20 crew members who were also on board

00:01:03.700 so it is closer to 260 odd guys maybe one or two more even. We told only Magellan remained behind

00:01:11.000 making last minute provisions and he would join the fleet shortly before its final departure

00:01:15.740 from Spain. So they sailed out of Seville down the river the Guadalquivir River right to the very edge

00:01:22.220 right to the Atlantic coast where there's a place called San Luca de Barrameda and that really is

00:01:27.580 their final pushing off point. Bergering tells us quote beyond the huddled town of San Luca de Barrameda

00:01:33.520 lay the churning waters of the Atlantic. To Magellan and his crew the body of water was known simply as

00:01:38.960 the ocean sea believed to girdle the entire globe. At the sight of these seething green waters every

00:01:45.320 sailor's pulse quickened. Their lives depended on conquering this element. Many ships had departed

00:01:50.700 from San Luca de Barrameda and some had been fortunate enough to return from distant ports

00:01:56.400 and newly discovered lands but none had circumnavigated the entire world. Magellan took command of his fleet

00:02:03.100 just before departure and made sure that his sailors led a pious existence during what might be their

00:02:09.740 last days on land. Pigafetta tells us. A few days later the captain general went along the said river

00:02:15.100 in his boat and the masters of other ships with him and we remained for some days at the port to

00:02:20.540 hear mass on land at a church named Our Lady of Barrameda where the captain general ordered all those of

00:02:26.580 the fleet to confess themselves before going further in which he showed the way to others. Moreover he would

00:02:32.440 not allow any woman whoever she might be to come onto the fleet and to the ships for many good

00:02:37.820 reasons. So there's a thing about women's stowaways on ships very very common actually even these

00:02:45.260 relatively small 16th century ships all the way up through the 17th 18th 19th century you wouldn't

00:02:50.680 think they could be stowed away in secret but often they were. The poor plight of these women obviously

00:02:56.620 being used for physical purposes. Quite often I'm thinking in sort of the 19th century

00:03:02.000 the captains or the senior officers knew that there was a woman or more than one stowed away

00:03:07.540 somewhere deep in the belly of the ship and they sort of turned a blind eye to it because it kept the

00:03:13.520 men a bit calmer than they might otherwise have been. But quite often a captain would absolutely insist

00:03:20.300 that there were no women aboard and anyway Magellan goes for that option. Bergerine continues saying quote

00:03:26.000 Magellan's autocratic style extended beyond religious observance. To stifle dissent

00:03:31.540 Pigafetta writes Magellan concealed the ultimate goal of the expedition from his rank and file sailors.

00:03:37.100 What a thing to do. Don't even tell them he's going to attempt to circumnavigate the globe or at least

00:03:41.400 round the bottom of South America. They just know they're going to at some point head across the

00:03:46.480 Atlantic and sail down the west coast of Africa and head across the Atlantic. That's all they really know.

00:03:50.780 Pigafetta tells us this quote he Magellan did not wholly declare the voyage that he wished to make.

00:03:56.000 Lest the people from astonishment and fear refused to accompany him on so long a voyage as he had in

00:04:01.540 mind to undertake in view of the great and violent storms of the ocean sea whither he would go.

00:04:07.280 Bergerine tells us that that really needs to be clarified because it wasn't a complete secret

00:04:12.160 because the Armada was known at the time before they left as the Armada de Meluca. So the idea that

00:04:19.360 they were going to go to the Spice Islands or in some way at the very least, very very least, that the fleet

00:04:24.600 was in some way going to be associated with the Spice Islands. So it couldn't necessarily have been

00:04:30.140 a complete secret. Nonetheless, this thing has always attached itself to Magellan's voyage that a lot of the men

00:04:36.260 embarked upon it under false or fake assumptions. Well, Bergerine says, yet everyone realised that the fleet

00:04:43.060 was bound for the Spice Islands. It was even called the Armada de Meluca. Perhaps Pigafetta meant that Magellan

00:04:48.760 wished to keep his plans to find a strait, a waterway leading to the east, to himself until it was too

00:04:54.700 late for disloyal crew members to desert. Inevitably, the plan meant trouble because once the fleet

00:05:00.200 encountered storms, then uncharted waters and finally a search for an unknown strait, the men whom he had

00:05:06.440 hoodwinked into coming along were likely to rise up in rebellion against him. In the pages of his diary,

00:05:11.980 Pigafetta confided another of the far more troubling reasons for Magellan's unusual secrecy.

00:05:17.020 And these are Pigafetta's words. The masters and captains of the other ships of his company

00:05:21.300 loved him not. I do not know the reason unless it be that he, the captain general, was Portuguese

00:05:27.000 and they Spaniards and Castilians, which peoples have long borne ill will and benevolence towards

00:05:33.020 each other, end quote. So remember here, Pigafetta is, he's actually an Italian. He's a Venetian,

00:05:39.860 I believe. He's certainly not Spanish or Portuguese. And he is, once again, if you remember from last time,

00:05:44.700 he is a Magellan loyalist. So this voyage will, again, kind of inevitably split up into different

00:05:52.300 parties, those that remain loyal to Magellan under almost any circumstances and those that don't.

00:05:57.380 So just bear in mind that Pigafetta is one of those that does remain loyal. Okay. Then we're told a lot

00:06:04.800 about, I won't go into too much detail about this because it isn't that interesting, but all sorts of

00:06:09.260 different signals and regulations that Magellan put in place to try and make sure they don't,

00:06:14.760 they don't sail apart from each other during the night and various, various things like that.

00:06:19.460 And the system of watches involved, uh, various regulations. And Magellan is a bit of a taskmaster,

00:06:24.800 as we've said. Um, he's got quite strong, very strict rules as he's only really right on ship,

00:06:30.760 but you can go too far with it. Right. Um, uh, but he's a stickler for the rules and his rules,

00:06:36.980 no one else's rules, only his. Okay. By the 20th of September, 1519, they do, they do strike out

00:06:44.180 into the Atlantic. Well, first they go down the West African coast. Uh, one of the big things to

00:06:50.780 mention here is that King Manuel of Portugal, not satisfied with his attempts to just try and convince

00:06:56.340 Magellan not to go, just to try and undermine the entire project, uh, politically and interpersonally.

00:07:03.180 He has now apparently sent out, uh, ships, Portuguese ships to try and hunt down and even intercept

00:07:10.020 Magellan's fleet. Um, so on top of everything else, Magellan is, is sort of, you know, in a sense,

00:07:15.780 he's on the run from any Portuguese ships and the Atlantic largely at this time is supposed to be,

00:07:22.660 uh, kind of a Portuguese sphere of interest. So as I say, on top of everything else, he's got to try and

00:07:28.780 evade any sort of Portuguese counter fleet. Pigafetta says, when the hour had arrived in which

00:07:35.720 they had to make sail, the pilot ordered the men to raise all but one of the anchors and to attach

00:07:41.200 the cable on the last anchor to the capstone. And with the yards and sails aloft, he ordered two

00:07:46.560 apprentices to climb the foremast and stand ready to unfurl the sails when and as they were ordered

00:07:52.140 and directed. Okay. Burgreen says, quote, amid the intricately choreographed flurry of activity

00:07:57.800 aboard the ships, officers shouted orders, but their words at this crucial moment sounded more

00:08:03.400 like prayers than commands. And, uh, Pigafetta says, and if the special pilot for the sandbar said

00:08:09.040 that it was time to make sail, the ship's pilot would call out the following to the two men aloft

00:08:13.940 on the yard. Ease the rope of the foresail in the name of the Holy Trinity, Father and Son and Holy

00:08:19.080 Spirit, three persons in one single true God, that they may be with us and give us good and safe voyage

00:08:24.740 and carry us and return us safely to our homes. End quote. With these words ringing in their ears,

00:08:30.160 the sailors hauled the hemp ropes holding anchors, set the sails and felt the breeze freshen against

00:08:35.340 their faces. The ships picked up speed and the coastline began to recede. There was no turning

00:08:40.240 back now. It would sustain them or it would destroy them all. To reach his goal, Magellan would have to

00:08:45.540 master both the great ocean sea and a sea of ignorance. Because as I said before, they still

00:08:50.840 had all sorts of strange ideas and notions about, about the ocean and about far-flung lands that

00:08:57.980 hadn't been visited or certainly hadn't been explored properly. And, um, well, let's talk a little

00:09:02.900 bit more about some of those ideas. Burgreen says, it was a dream as old as the imagination, a voyage to

00:09:09.060 the ends of the earth. Yet until the age of discovery, it remained only a dream. At the time, Europe was deeply

00:09:14.800 ignorant of the world at large. Magellan undertook his ambitious voyage in a world ruled by superstition,

00:09:20.680 populated with strange and demonic creatures, and reverberating with a longing for religious redemption.

00:09:26.680 To the average person, the world beyond Europe resembled the fantastic realms depicted in The Thousand and

00:09:32.100 One Nights, a collection of tales including the seven voyages of Sinbad the Sailor. Going to sea was the most

00:09:38.380 adventurous thing one could do, the Renaissance equivalent of becoming an astronaut. But the likelihood of death

00:09:43.800 and disaster was far greater. These days, there are no undiscovered places on earth. In the age of the

00:09:49.360 global positioning system, no one need get lost. But in the age of discovery, more than half the world

00:09:54.680 was unexplored, unmapped, and misunderstood by Europeans. Mariners feared they could literally sail

00:10:00.160 over the edge of the world. They believed that sea monsters lurked in the briny depths, waiting to devour

00:10:05.300 them. And when they crossed the equator, the ocean would boil and schooled them to death.

00:10:09.720 Some of the most tenacious ideas about the world at large derived from Pliny the Elder, who died in the

00:10:15.280 eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. His multi-volume encyclopedia, Natural History, rediscovered and

00:10:22.360 widely consulted in the Renaissance, sought to bring together everything that was known about the natural

00:10:27.480 world, mountains, continents, flora and fauna. Pliny's chapters on humankind contained a potent mixture of

00:10:33.800 fact and fantasy. He wrote of a tribe known as the Aramaspe, and this is Pliny now, a people known for

00:10:40.320 having one eye in the middle of their forehead. He currently cited other classical authorities, such as

00:10:45.280 Herodotus, who related tales of, quote, a continual battle between the Aramaspe and Griffins in the vicinity

00:10:51.820 of the latter's mines. The Griffins had gold mines. The Griffin is a type of wild beast with wings, as is

00:10:58.620 commonly reported, which digs gold out of tunnels. The Griffins guard the gold and the Aramaspe try to

00:11:04.580 seize it, each with remarkable greed. Pliny meant this vivid description literally, and while it might

00:11:10.100 have generated some scepticism among naturalists of Magellan's time, it was generally accepted as fact,

00:11:16.780 as was Pliny's curious description of forest dwellers who have their feet turned back behind their legs.

00:11:22.320 They run with extraordinary speed and wander far and wide with the wild animals. India offered

00:11:27.600 particularly fertile ground for extraordinary creatures. Pliny evoked, men with dogs' heads, who are

00:11:33.240 covered with wild beast skins. They bark instead of speaking, and live by hunting and fowling, for which

00:11:39.200 they use their nails. At one time, says Pliny, over 120,000 of these hominids flourished throughout India.

00:11:45.360 Pliny assured his readers that wonders never ceased in the natural world. The result of his labours was a Ripley's

00:11:51.980 believe it or not catalogue tinged with the classics. That women have changed into men is not a myth, he wrote.

00:11:57.820 We find in historical records that a girl at Cassinium became a boy before her parents' very eyes.

00:12:04.480 To emphasise this point, Pliny claimed to have first-hand knowledge of the phenomenon. Pliny again.

00:12:09.160 In Africa, I myself saw someone who became a man on his wedding day. End quote.

00:12:14.220 There are more. He claimed that people in Eastern Europe had two sets of eyes, backward-facing heads, or no heads

00:12:19.980 at all. In Africa, Pliny wrote, lived people who combined both sexes in one body, yet managed to reproduce.

00:12:26.840 People who survived without eating, people with ears large enough to blanket their entire bodies, and people

00:12:32.140 with equine feet. In India, he said, there were people with six hands. These marvellous accounts were

00:12:38.080 subsequently retold by various respected chroniclers, and widely credited up through Magellan's time.

00:12:44.360 In the open waters of the ocean lurked even more bizarre creatures, whales and sharks, six-foot-long

00:12:49.580 lobsters, and three-hundred-foot-long eels. Sailors had no way of telling which of Pliny's descriptions

00:12:54.900 were reliable and which were fantasies. They were just as ignorant about major land masses. Only three

00:13:00.880 continents were known to Europeans at the era, Europe, Asia, and Africa, although it was suspected that more

00:13:06.780 would be discovered. The existence of an illusory island, Terra Australis, the south end, was accepted

00:13:13.640 as fact, and long before Magellan's voyage, this landmass was said to lurk in the southern hemisphere,

00:13:19.300 where its vast size supposedly counterbalanced the continents in the northern hemisphere.

00:13:24.140 Highly schematic medieval maps depicted the three known continents as separated by two rivers,

00:13:30.360 the Nile and the Don, as well as the Mediterranean, all of them surrounded by the Great Ocean Sea,

00:13:36.060 into which other seas and rivers flowed. This diagram resembles a T inside of an O, so medieval maps

00:13:43.020 of this genre are referred to as T-in-O maps. To remain consistent with religious traditions,

00:13:49.400 T-in-O maps located Jerusalem at dead centre, with paradise floating vaguely at the top. To

00:13:55.420 complicate matters, Asia occupied the northern hemisphere of this map, with Europe and Africa

00:14:00.120 sharing the southern. In some versions of the medieval map, the ocean sea flowed out into space,

00:14:05.640 one could not navigate with such maps, or locate points on the compass on it, or plot realistic

00:14:10.820 routes. They offered a conceptual model rather than an actual representation. As such, they were

00:14:17.000 utterly useless to Magellan." So yeah, there are lots and lots of maps. I'm fascinated, as are most

00:14:23.540 history nerds, by the history of maps and cartography, what the ancient people or medieval or pre-modern

00:14:29.060 people, how they did their maps. The Mappamundi is a very famous one from the British Isles and

00:14:36.680 absolutely fascinated by them. But as Burgreen says there, they're not a modern map in the sense that

00:14:42.540 you can actually use it, certainly not in any accurate way, to actually navigate and travel.

00:14:48.380 I mean, in the vaguest, vaguest sense, you can. You know, like the cities along a coastline will be in

00:14:54.400 order, right? And the coastline, especially well-known coastlines, will be relatively kind of

00:14:59.940 accurate. But as for knowing exactly where you are on the globe, you know, it's no good. They won't work.

00:15:06.720 And that is exactly what people like Magellan and all navigators need. Okay, a few more details about a few

00:15:13.080 more fantastical things they thought they might come into contact with. There's this idea of Presta

00:15:18.080 John. Presta is sort of an archaic way of saying presbyter or priest. They thought that there was

00:15:25.140 this person called, a complete fiction, called Presta John, who lived way out in the Far East,

00:15:30.760 in like China, Central Asia or China. And he was a Christian king, a great and powerful Christian king

00:15:36.120 that one day might help them in their fight against the Muslims. And it was just a sort of

00:15:41.840 comforting thought that there might be this super powerful king, like Kubla Khan or Genghis Khan style

00:15:48.820 powerful Christian king in the Far East, in the Orient. And if, you know, if you could ever hook

00:15:54.020 up with him or get to his court, it would be, you know, it would be a safe port and all that sort of

00:15:59.740 thing. Of course, it was just wrong. It's just a misconception. There's also the idea of the fountain

00:16:04.100 of youth. This was a big thing that a lot of people believed at that time, that somewhere there was this

00:16:09.940 fountain of youth. And if you drunk the waters, then you would become young again. So Burgreen

00:16:15.920 tells us, in 1513, only six years before Magellan undertook his circumnavigation,

00:16:20.860 Juan Ponce de Lyon set out to find the fountain of youth. Peter the martyr, another trusted authority

00:16:27.300 of the Renaissance, described the fountain of youth as a spring of running water of such marvellous

00:16:32.260 virtue that the water thereof, being drunk, perhaps with some diet, makes old men young again.

00:16:37.300 According to tradition, the fountain of youth was located on the island of Bimini in the Bahamas.

00:16:42.280 On the strength of his reputation as a soldier, nobleman and participant in Columbus's second

00:16:46.920 voyage to the New World, Ponce de Lyon received a commission from King Ferdinand to claim Bimini

00:16:52.760 for Spain. In a fruitless search, Ponce de Lyon explored the Bahamas and Puerto Rico, but his failure

00:16:58.480 to find the fountain of youth did not put the myth to rest. As later 1601, the respected Spanish historian,

00:17:04.940 Antonio de Herrera Silias, wrote confidently about the fountain's great efficacy in restoring youth

00:17:11.680 and potency to young men. Although his quest seems fanciful and absurd today, Ponce de Lyon was a man

00:17:17.360 of his times. Superstition governed popular impressions and even scholarly accounts of the

00:17:22.960 world at large. A work published in 1560 contained descriptions of various sea monsters infesting the

00:17:29.060 oceans. One, known as the Whirlpool, was said to have a human countenance. Another, supposedly sighted

00:17:35.640 in 1531, had hideous scaly skin. There were others, the satyr of the sea, the Rosemarus, which rivalled an

00:17:43.280 elephant in size, and the wondrous Scolopendra and its face of flames. Voyagers across the sea,

00:17:49.940 especially those attempting to circumnavigate the globe, could expect to encounter all these creatures

00:17:54.560 and more in the course of their journey. So something to say is that even though they are still

00:17:59.500 superstitious, and I don't necessarily mean that word as an outright pejorative, being ignorant,

00:18:06.040 you know, there's nothing necessarily wrong with being ignorant, right? I'm ignorant of knitting.

00:18:11.440 I don't know how to knit, right? There's nothing wrong with not knowing something necessarily.

00:18:16.120 And it's not your fault often if there's no way of knowing something. But still, they were, it is the right word,

00:18:20.620 they were ignorant of the world at large in all sorts of senses, in all sorts of ways. But still,

00:18:25.620 certainly the officers or the learned, the people that could read, would have read as much as they

00:18:29.660 possibly could about these things. And a lot of them had already done a lot of travelling, you know,

00:18:33.860 Magellan had been out to the Indian Ocean, he'd been to India for years and years on end, remember,

00:18:38.060 he'd spent eight or nine years out in India. So it's not like he was green, it was not like he never

00:18:43.460 left Europe before, anything like that. And people that could read would, would read anything or everything

00:18:48.940 they could of others that had done fantastic travels. Two of the biggest ones at the time were the accounts of

00:18:55.740 Marco Polo, or his book was called The Travels of Marco Polo. And he's long before this period. I mean, that dates from

00:19:02.100 the late 13th century, very, very early 14th century. So, you know, a while ago now. And Marco Polo, whether he was a

00:19:09.380 habitual liar, or whether he did do all the things and see all the things that he said he did, one way or another, he

00:19:15.640 certainly had travelled far and wide. Many people do question some of the things, or a lot of the things Marco Polo

00:19:21.740 said. Still, it was one of the very, very few accounts that someone like Columbus, or Magellan, or de Garma, would

00:19:29.260 certainly have read. And there was also The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. And I'll let Burgreen tell us a little bit

00:19:35.280 about Mandeville. He says, quote, Sir John Mandeville served as the other great traveller and storyteller of the era.

00:19:41.360 With suave assurance, he deftly mixed accounts from ancient authors with what he claimed were his

00:19:47.540 personal experiences. But Mandeville was actually a compiler rather than a traveller, and he drew much

00:19:52.980 of his material directly from Speculum Mundi, a medieval encyclopedia, which contained extracts from

00:19:59.760 Pliny and Marco Polo, among other authorities. As a finishing touch, he wove long passages from the

00:20:06.140 Pester John letters into his account and passed it off as his own work. Mandeville told jaw-dropping

00:20:11.980 stories of his pilgrimages to the Holy Land, an unlikely event. He probably never got any further

00:20:17.300 than a noble's well-stocked library. He claimed he traversed India, which he said was filled with

00:20:22.620 yellow and green people, visited Pester John's kingdom without giving comprehensible directions,

00:20:28.260 and even made it all the way to the borders of paradise, but failed to enter because he considered

00:20:33.400 himself untrustworthy. He naturally claimed to have found the fountain of youth in the course of his

00:20:38.180 travels and imbibed three draughts of its life-giving waters. And these are his words he's supposed to

00:20:43.660 have said. And evermore since that time, I feel me the better and the wholer. So again, if your job is

00:20:49.900 to actually travel the world, to actually circumnavigate the globe, you're not probably, well, you won't be

00:20:56.360 served all that well by the stories of Mandeville or Polo. I mean, some of them might help. There's

00:21:02.980 certainly elements in Marco Polo which are true, but if you just want pure fact, pure reality,

00:21:08.960 they're probably going to steer you further wrong than right. Okay, enough of that. Let's carry on

00:21:14.320 with the actual voyage of Magellan, because things are rocky politically within the ships, straight away,

00:21:21.600 basically straight away. But Magellan is blessed with some good weather to begin with, which stops

00:21:26.780 the men and the rival captains from sort of, you know, truly immediately bringing things to a head.

00:21:32.800 Bergering tells us, fair weather favoured the Armada de Maluca and gusts carried the black ships

00:21:37.880 southwest to the Canary Islands off the coast of Western Sahara. Pigafetta says, we left Sanlúcar on

00:21:44.840 Tuesday, September 20th on the said year, laying a course by the southwest wind. And on the 26th of

00:21:51.780 the said month, we arrived at an island of the Grand Canary named Tenerife, where we remained for

00:21:57.920 three and a half days to take in provisions and other things which we needed, end quote. So even

00:22:03.160 though, you know, the Canaries aren't very far from Spain, that really is the last time, that will be

00:22:09.720 the last possible moment when you can take on, you know, fresh water, extra food, anything at all.

00:22:15.880 Because from this point on, it's just open ocean. So, right, leaving Seville isn't the last. Even

00:22:22.080 leaving Sanlúcar isn't the last. But when you push off from Tenerife, that's going to be it. Or the

00:22:29.080 Cape Verde Islands. Bergering, quote, for centuries, this group of seven volcanic islands, Grand Canary,

00:22:35.280 Fuerteventura, Lanzarote, Tenerife, La Palma, Gomera and Herero,

00:22:39.720 had served as a stopover for ships bound to and from the Iberian Peninsula. They were known to

00:22:45.160 Pliny, and classical historians may have been referring to the Canaries when they wrote of

00:22:50.360 the Fortunate Islands. Later, a succession of Arab and European voyagers, carried by strong,

00:22:55.640 favorable winds, frequently called on the Canaries to replenish their supplies, convert the islanders,

00:23:01.560 or capture slaves. The islands began to appear on maps in 1341. At the time of Magellan's arrival,

00:23:07.320 in late September 1519, the Canaries glistened in the waters of the Atlantic. While there,

00:23:13.480 Pigafetta confirmed an ancient story about the Canaries. This is Pigafetta.

00:23:17.640 Know that among the other islands that belong to the said Grand Canary, there is one where no drop

00:23:22.600 of water coming from spring or river is found, save that once a day, at the hour of noon, there

00:23:28.040 descends from heaven a cloud which encompasses a great tree in the said island. Then all its leaves

00:23:33.800 fall from it, and from the leaves is distilled a great abundance of water, that it seems a living

00:23:39.160 fountain. And from this water, the inhabitants of the said place are satisfied, and the animals both

00:23:44.760 domestic and wild." This observation marked the first time that Pigafetta tested his first-hand

00:23:51.080 experience against the claims of ancient writers, in this case Pliny, who had written of a magical

00:23:56.920 fountain in the Canaries with no source. It seemed to Pigafetta that there was a natural source of

00:24:01.960 water, a rain cloud. Though hardly a revolutionary insight, the comment set Pigafetta apart from sages

00:24:08.600 such as Pliny and Marco Polo, who relied on hearsay or the artful blending of hearsay and fact. If

00:24:14.920 Pigafetta had any idea of emulating Polo, he gave up that notion now. Instead of embellishing time-worn

00:24:21.080 legends about the world, he would represent phenomena as he observed them with his own eyes, and he would

00:24:27.080 test the legends against what he actually saw and experienced. With this entirely factual approach,

00:24:32.920 Pigafetta broke with a tradition that reached back to antiquity." So that's great. That's one of the

00:24:38.520 reasons why Magellan's voyage, well, why Pigafetta's account of Magellan's voyage, let's say, is so good.

00:24:45.720 Because it looks like, or it seems like, even under, you know, close scrutiny, Pigafetta is very rarely,

00:24:51.800 if ever, lying. Sometimes, or often, he will omit something. If it's something embarrassing to Magellan,

00:24:58.200 he will just omit it entirely. Okay, there's that. And it seems like sometimes he might have ever so

00:25:04.200 slightly exaggerated something here or there. But as for just making up things whole-cloth,

00:25:09.720 making up fanciful things, like a Fountain of Youth or something, or he'd visited Prester John's

00:25:16.200 court, or he'd found his way to the Gates of Paradise or something. There's nothing like that.

00:25:20.120 There's nothing like that. And things he does tell us, you know, we can confirm are true, you know,

00:25:26.760 in later centuries, when Southeast Asia was fully explored. Pigafetta's accounts are essentially

00:25:33.800 reliable, almost entirely reliable, which is nice, right, for us, for the historian.

00:25:39.000 It's nice to know that we don't have to sort of question every tiny thing, like Herodotus. And I

00:25:44.120 don't blame Herodotus. He did say right at the beginning of his book, I'm only telling you what I've

00:25:48.520 heard. I'm only a compiler. Don't ask me if it's true or not. I'm just telling you what I've heard.

00:25:53.640 So Pigafetta's not doing that. So that's good, isn't it? So Magellan gets his final,

00:25:58.360 his final provisions in the Canaries. And they were bad ones. He got duped, he got fooled,

00:26:05.240 which is really bad because, you know, every ounce of food or water is really important.

00:26:10.520 And if the numbers are out, the figures are out, then you could be in trouble real quick.

00:26:15.560 Bergering tells us this, quote,

00:26:16.920 During those brief days in the Canaries, Magellan busied himself with the final provisioning of his

00:26:22.120 fleet. He worked quickly, too quickly, as he would later discover to his horror,

00:26:26.760 for the merchants and chandlers of the Canaries, practiced in deception, swindled Magellan by

00:26:32.360 falsifying their bills. They vastly overestimated the amount of supplies they sold to the fleet,

00:26:37.160 and what they did sell was in poor condition. This type of cheating was common and very dangerous to

00:26:42.520 the expeditions, whose lives depended on the food acquired in the Canaries. Although Magellan

00:26:47.960 was normally meticulous in preparing his ships, this time he was too trusting of his suppliers.

00:26:53.320 After three busy days in one of Tenerife's harbours, Pigafetta wrote, quote,

00:26:58.040 We departed thence and came to a port called Monte Rose, where we remained two days to furnish ourselves

00:27:04.520 with pitch, which is a thing very necessary for ships. Bergering goes on. While there,

00:27:08.600 Magellan heard disturbing news, the King of Portugal had dispatched not one, but two fleets of caravans

00:27:14.360 to arrest him, a drastic measure, but not without precedent. A generation earlier, Manuel's father

00:27:19.720 had sent ships to intercept Columbus. Magellan also received a secret communique from his father-in-law,

00:27:25.640 Diogo Barbosa, warning that the Castilian captains of the Armada de Moluca planned to mutiny at the very

00:27:31.960 first chance. They might even kill Magellan to attain their goal. Keep a good watch, Barbosa admonished.

00:27:37.960 The ringleader's name came as no surprise to Magellan, Juan de Cartagena, the Castilian with

00:27:43.960 blood tyres to Bishop Fonseca, his illegitimate son. In his reply to Barbosa, Magellan insisted

00:27:50.040 he had accepted command of the fleet, come what may, but he promised that he would work closely with

00:27:55.320 his captains for the good of the fleet and of Spain. Barbosa showed these conciliatory words to the

00:28:00.840 Casa de Contracción and Magellan won praise for gracious sentiments, at least in the short term.

00:28:07.720 Despite this display of diplomacy, Magellan's concern about the safety of his fleet and his own life

00:28:13.160 could only have increased as he contemplated the Portuguese ships in hot pursuit. Unwilling to give

00:28:18.440 his rebellious captains further calls for alarm, he kept both warnings to himself.

00:28:22.840 If you enjoyed that preview, please consider heading over to lotusseaters.com to watch the full unabridged video.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - July 20, 2025

PREVIEW： Epochs #220 ｜ Magellan： Part III

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