The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - PREVIEW： Epochs #225

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome back to Epochs, where I shall be continuing the story, the incredible

00:00:18.220 story of Magellan's first circumnavigation of the globe. I shall be reading from Lawrence

00:00:22.380 Bergreen over the edge of the world, but also a bit more from just straight up from Pigafetta

00:00:26.880 himself. So if you remember last time we left off with the mutiny in Port St. Julian in

00:00:32.940 the winter, which is the summer months for us, July, August. I bet that's the winter in

00:00:37.540 the Southern Hemisphere. So there's still more things that happen before we get through

00:00:41.360 to the strait itself, so we must mention those. A few key events. So they stayed for months

00:00:47.060 in Port St. Julian, really was months, five months or so. And at a certain point Magellan

00:00:52.020 realizes that what he could do is take one or two of his ships and send them at least

00:00:57.400 a little bit further south, a few miles further south, just to explore, just as a type of

00:01:02.540 reconnaissance, just to see if maybe the strait is only a few miles further southward down the

00:01:07.540 coast. And even if it's not, he decided it was worth the reconnaissance, just to see if

00:01:13.020 there was sort of a better port, a better inlet, or if there was, you know, better hunting grounds

00:01:18.800 or anything like that. So he decides to send one of his ships, which already immediately

00:01:23.820 you can see is a bit of an odd decision. It's not really all that safe to send one ship because

00:01:31.320 quite often these ships can help each other out. And if one looks like it might be dashed

00:01:35.100 against the rocks or something, at least the men might have some escape. But he sent one

00:01:39.380 ship, Santiago. He sends it off further south just on a type of reconnaissance. And it was

00:01:45.360 under the command of Juan Serrano, who was definitely a Magellan loyalist, Juan Rodriguez

00:01:51.140 Serrano. But he sends them off with, again, a bit of an odd decision, it seems, in hindsight,

00:01:56.680 with minimal provisions on board. People have argued over exactly why Magellan decided to

00:02:02.600 do that. Some say that maybe it was because he feared that if he gave them a ship full of

00:02:06.240 provisions, even though Serrano was a Magellan loyalist, he might suffer a mutiny of his own.

00:02:12.740 And the men, the mutineers, would just sail back to Spain. If they had enough provisions

00:02:17.540 on board, they could do that. Whereas if there aren't enough provisions, there's only provisions

00:02:21.220 for a few days or something. Then they're still sort of tired to the rest of the Armada and Port

00:02:27.860 St. Julian. So anyway, he sends Magellan orders Santiago with not many provisions to go south

00:02:34.560 on its own. And so it sails off and it goes something in the order of 60 miles. Just a quick

00:02:40.260 note, just say, whenever we mention how many miles they've got and all that sort of thing.

00:02:44.340 It's always a little bit sketchy because they talked about things more often in leagues and

00:02:50.260 their cartography, their ability to make maps. Although pretty damn good, I think, for the

00:02:58.420 16th century, it's still nothing like modern, the modern ability. And then when we try to

00:03:04.080 marry up descriptions that people like Pigafetta make with the real coastline, that's also a bit

00:03:10.480 sketchy. It's quite good, but it can be a bit sketchy because maybe their descriptions aren't

00:03:14.720 perfect. Maybe the coastline has actually changed in appearance over the centuries. So although we

00:03:20.160 can be fairly certain where most of the things are that they talk about, we can be fairly certain

00:03:25.040 that they went, for example, 60 miles. It's still a little bit, take it with a pinch of salt, a bit.

00:03:31.200 It will always be, these things are kind of approximate. Anyway, the Santiago sails about

00:03:35.840 60 miles south of Port St. Julian, roughly, and it comes up to the mouth of another giant river,

00:03:41.200 what is later called, or they call the Santa Cruz, is now still called Santa Cruz. Giant river,

00:03:46.160 but the mouth of it, as it pours into the Atlantic, is like three miles wide, something like that. A big,

00:03:51.280 big, big, big river. And around there, they do realize that there's plenty of food. There's very

00:03:56.240 good fishing to be had there. And Serrano and the Santiago decide that they find a little bit,

00:04:03.120 a little bit south of the mouth of, well, a few more miles south of the mouth of the Santa Cruz river.

00:04:08.320 They find a little inlet, or a little natural harbour, which we're told is even better than

00:04:14.240 Port St. Julian. And Port St. Julian, just naturally speaking, as a natural harbour, was quite a good one.

00:04:19.520 Of course, the weather is cold, but just in terms of to hold a ship safely, it was good. And they

00:04:25.120 find an even better one. Apparently, the fishing is quite good there, and the game to be caught on

00:04:31.360 land is quite good. And there's like seals and penguins and even arctic foxes and arctic hares,

00:04:37.520 or hares and foxes anyway, or sea elephants. But the Santiago decides to stay there for six days,

00:04:45.520 which is, again, a little bit odd. People have wondered, why did Serrano do that? The sort of

00:04:51.920 general consensus is that probably he wasn't breaking his neck to get back to Port St.

00:04:56.400 Julian for a number of reasons. Apart from anything else, it's extremely boring there.

00:05:00.560 They've been there for months and probably going to stay for months more. And it was just boring.

00:05:05.680 And also the atmosphere there would be really bad, really, really bad. I mean,

00:05:11.040 still bordering on mutiny. Even after you've put down a mutiny,

00:05:14.240 it doesn't mean that everyone's now suddenly happy again. No, no. So the atmosphere there.

00:05:18.160 And also, if you're a captain in an armada where there's a more senior admiral or a more

00:05:24.320 senior captain general than you, you've got free reign if you're away from him, right? You're

00:05:29.600 truly your own master. And Magellan, although not a completely insane sadist, still isn't a great

00:05:35.680 master. You still would be a bit scared of him. He does rule with an iron fist. So if you can be away

00:05:43.440 from him, you probably would want to be. And yeah, and they don't seem, they don't think they're in

00:05:48.160 any immediate danger. So why not take their time? Why not be leisurely about it? Take a few days out

00:05:54.320 if you can. And so that's what happens anyway. And they spend that time hunting. But after a few days,

00:06:00.320 they decide they're going to turn back. They have to turn back. And on the 22nd of May,

00:06:06.160 they get hit by a massive storm. And apparently this storm is massive. In fact, it's the worst one

00:06:12.160 that they've experienced on this expedition. And it's the worst one any of the crewmen have ever

00:06:18.960 experienced. So that part of the South Atlantic is some of the worst seas in the world. And yeah,

00:06:24.480 we just told it was the most powerful storm her crew had ever experienced. So there you go. And

00:06:30.400 like the sea is churning. And apparently the ship is sort of bobbing up and down crazily,

00:06:36.960 you know, like a cork. And, you know, it's just a matter of time really, until it's destroyed.

00:06:43.680 And we're told the storm tore the sails. The wind was so strong that it tore the sails. And it battered

00:06:50.720 the rudder just against the waves so badly that the rudder broke or got damaged to the point where

00:06:57.600 they couldn't steer it anymore. So the sails are ripped and the rudder's broken. So you're just

00:07:02.240 completely dead in the water or rather you can't steer the ship or control the ship kind of at all.

00:07:08.720 Certainly not in really, really bad weather. There's just, there's nothing you can do.

00:07:12.160 You're completely at the mercy of the storm, out of control. And well, the situation at sea can't get

00:07:18.000 more desperate than that. And they're quite close to the coastline. Remember, they're not out in the

00:07:22.240 ocean. They've been hugging the coastline. So if the storm sort of throws them against,

00:07:27.760 against the shore, apparently it's a really rocky, very rugged shoreline. If the storm throws the

00:07:33.520 Santiago against that, it will destroy it. It will break it up. And most of the men can't swim. I think

00:07:38.880 I said in an earlier episode that swimming is a rite of passage for small children only really in the

00:07:44.560 modern age. You know, you learn to read or write, do a bit of maths, learn how to ride a bicycle and learn

00:07:49.040 how to swim. All children do that. Nearly all children. Well, that wasn't the case. So if you get

00:07:53.120 thrown into the water and it's deeper than you are tall, you'll probably drown. Bad really, isn't it?

00:07:58.320 There you go. And we're told this was, this sort of thing is, it's every captain's nightmare.

00:08:02.960 And it is really. And the winds and the tide did smash the Santiago against the rocks, basically.

00:08:10.240 And we're told they just soared into her hull, you know, like a hot knife through butter. There was,

00:08:16.480 there was just no way around it. And, uh, but one saving grace was that the storm was such,

00:08:21.520 and you know, the tides and winds and things were such that not only did it smash Santiago

00:08:26.720 into the rocky shoreline and break it up, but it just kept pushing it even more further,

00:08:33.760 just smashing it into the shore, the rocky shoreline. So the men weren't drowned. They were able to,

00:08:39.840 as the ship was breaking to pieces, essentially jump off straight onto the rocks. You know,

00:08:45.520 a little bit dangerous, but it was probably very dangerous actually, but none of them drowned.

00:08:50.240 But the ship itself was destroyed. Santiago broke up. Well, so that's massive, right? That's a massive,

00:08:55.520 in an armada, inverted commas, of five ships, i.e. a very, very small armada. To lose one ship is,

00:09:02.160 is a big deal. So if you remember, they left Spain with five ships and returned with just one,

00:09:08.240 the Victoria about three years later. So we're down to four. What once were five is now four.

00:09:14.160 And that was the fate of one of them. It's just to be smashed up there, just a bit, just a bit

00:09:18.400 south of the Santa Cruz river off the coast of Argentina or on the coast of Argentina. Just bad

00:09:23.840 weather, really bad weather. And, uh, just to skip ahead slightly on this, just to finish that one,

00:09:28.960 this bit of the story is that nobody blamed Serrano. Um, Magellan didn't. And later when

00:09:35.520 everything was poured over with a fine tooth comb back in Spain years later, exactly what happened,

00:09:40.400 who did what, when no one blamed Serrano for, you know, quote unquote, losing the ship. That's just,

00:09:46.000 that just happens. Sometimes if it's a big enough storm, it's not the captain's fault. It might be,

00:09:51.280 might be the pilot's fault in some small sense for steering them into a storm, but the actual captain,

00:09:57.360 right. It's sort of, it just happens. There's not much you can do about it. So, okay. So five down

00:10:02.800 to four, they were able to, the men of the Santiago were able to rescue a small amount of their wine,

00:10:11.120 hard tack, a biscuit, ship's biscuit and water. They didn't have a great deal to begin with,

00:10:16.320 but they were able to salvage a small amount off of the Santiago, basically as they were jumping off

00:10:21.680 of it, as it was being broken apart, but not much. So now the survivors of the Santiago,

00:10:26.800 it's 37 men. They're now in a really, really, really desperate situation of, of survival.

00:10:32.960 Straight away. It's a survival ordeal, right? They're essentially marooned on a completely alien

00:10:39.200 and very, very rugged, hazardous coastline of, of Argentina, Patagonia, and they've hardly got

00:10:45.280 anything to eat or drink. And you know, unless you're Ray Mears, unless you're a master of bushcraft

00:10:51.680 and survival technique, then you're facing starvation and dying of thirst or dying of

00:10:58.160 hypothermia of exposure very quickly. Because remember, they're really quite far south. It's

00:11:03.360 freezing and it's winter. It's, it's, you know, South Atlantic winter with hardly any food or water

00:11:09.760 and no shelter. Yeah. You're in a survival situation straight away. And so they're about,

00:11:14.240 at this point, about 70 miles, it is back to Port St. Julian. So it's 70 miles across really,

00:11:20.960 really, a really, really difficult landscape. We're told it's basically overwhelming obstacles,

00:11:26.000 snow covered mountains, and they've got to cross the Santa Cruz river itself, which as I mentioned,

00:11:30.880 the mouth of that is three miles wide. Now, massive, estuary, river mouth, delta-type,

00:11:37.520 marshy wetlands, South Atlantic, almost Antarctic wetlands. Yeah, it's difficult, difficult terrain,

00:11:44.880 to say the very, very least. Almost overwhelming. That 70 miles, if they're to trudge back, which is

00:11:50.240 what they decide to do, or have to do, that's going to be an arduous 70 miles. You might think,

00:11:55.920 oh, I could walk 20, 30 miles in a day. It's two or three days hike. No biggie. You know,

00:12:01.600 four or five days hike, maybe. No, no biggie. Well, it is a biggie. It's extremely difficult.

00:12:06.720 So first of all, they wait around for the immediate storm to stop, because, you know,

00:12:12.000 trudging through a storm and darkness, you know, that's sort of a, not a, that's a false economy.

00:12:17.040 Probably get yourself in more trouble than not doing that. And they hoped that more of the wreck

00:12:22.640 would wash ashore. And they knew they had to cross the Santa Cruz. And they thought they

00:12:27.680 would build a raft to do that. You can't really swim it. Most of them can't swim at all. And even

00:12:32.880 if you, one or two of them can swim, they're not that strong of a swimmer. You'd have to be

00:12:37.040 an extremely strong swimmer to even dream of that. So that's not really on the cards either. So they

00:12:42.000 figured they're going to need to have to build a raft to cross that. And if they can salvage planks,

00:12:47.440 any sort of planks from the destroyed Santiago, that will really help them. But they're only able

00:12:52.800 to salvage a few and certainly not enough to build a big enough raft to get 37 men on it. You know,

00:12:58.960 that would be a big raft. So they wait around a bit to try and salvage things from the wreck,

00:13:03.120 but they don't really get much or certainly not enough from it. Um, and certainly not any more

00:13:09.040 food or wine or fresh water. And so we told over the next day or two, they, they just, they

00:13:14.640 finish their small amount of heart attack they've salvaged and they just eat local vegetation,

00:13:20.880 whatever that means, local vegetation, just anything they can lay their hands on,

00:13:24.640 which might be edible really. And, uh, and shellfish. Apparently you can, you know,

00:13:29.120 just find shellfish. Then that's, that's manna from heaven, right? Most people know what muscles

00:13:34.720 or oysters or something like that look like, or even limpets or something. Just pick them up,

00:13:39.280 pry them open and eat them raw. A bit gross, but it's food. It's the difference between life and death.

00:13:44.080 You're definitely going to just down raw oysters. No problem. And so they spent four wretched days

00:13:50.480 there hoping to pick up flotsam and jetsam from the wreck. They don't really get any. So that's kind

00:13:56.240 of four days wasted, four days out in the open, four days becoming more dehydrated and more hungry.

00:14:03.040 Eventually they sort of realized they've got to move off. They've got to start this, this sort of

00:14:08.000 overwhelming trek for survival. And so for a couple of days, they trek about 10 miles and they get to the

00:14:13.680 Santa Cruz river. And they just realized that they haven't got enough planks that they salvage.

00:14:19.040 They haven't got the ability to cut down more trees and make more planks or anything like that.

00:14:25.120 So there's no way they can ferry all the men across. And in fact, the tiny raft they do fashion can only

00:14:31.760 really hold two men. So they pick their two strongest men and we're told, or rather we're not told the names

00:14:38.160 of those two men, but you can only imagine they're the two hardiest, probably the two strongest,

00:14:42.880 the two most likely to survive. And they pick those two and send them on this raft. And you know,

00:14:48.000 the accounts are like essentially that there's one thing to be hardy and brave, but you've also got to

00:14:53.600 be lucky to make that crossing across the mouth of the Santa Cruz in winter. You would have to get a

00:14:58.800 bit lucky to not be capsized and to not be, you know, thrown over and one reason or another fail to do it,

00:15:04.960 to be washed out to sea, have to get a bit lucky. But these are experienced seamen. So you can only

00:15:09.200 imagine they sort of had a bit, a bit more naus than the average person these days. You know,

00:15:14.640 I wouldn't know the right time of day or the right tides to pick or anything like that, but they

00:15:19.040 obviously did. And the two men got across, the two men got across, but then it's another 60 miles.

00:15:24.640 They've got to trudge across mountains and difficult terrain to get back to Port St. Julian.

00:15:29.840 And only then can Magellan and the rest of the armada send a rescue force. So the other 35 men

00:15:37.040 that have just stayed on the, on the southern side of the Santa Cruz, they've just got to sit

00:15:42.240 there and wait and hope, just hope that those two men, their mission is successful. Just sitting there

00:15:47.520 in freezing weather, basically slowly starving. Again, there's a little bit of local vegetation and,

00:15:54.000 you know, shellfish, but slowly starving and freezing. So those two men do make it though.

00:15:59.680 It took them 11 days, 11 harrowing days where they ate ferns and roots, suffering greatly in the

00:16:06.400 freezing weather across frozen hills and mountains. And when they made it into Port St. Julian,

00:16:11.360 apparently the, the, the, the rest of the men there barely recognized them. They must have looked

00:16:16.720 extremely bedraggled and well, you know, dehydrated, starving, dying of exposure and, you know,

00:16:23.360 maybe had hypothermia, early hypothermia. They, they, they looked a state that they were barely

00:16:29.200 recognizable. Okay. So Magellan kind of almost immediately or as soon as possible attempt to

00:16:34.960 rescue. And he sends a 24, a 24 man rescue party across land following the same route that these

00:16:42.080 two men have taken. Two men describe the route to them. It's basically just hug the coastline

00:16:46.880 essentially and heads out. You'll, you'll find a massive river and they're on the other side of

00:16:50.880 the river. You sort of can't miss it almost. So Magellan sends these 24 men with carrying lots

00:16:55.840 of wine and hardtack with them. And Pigafetta says this about it, quote, the way there was long,

00:17:01.840 24 leagues and the path was very rough and full of thorns. The men were four days on the road,

00:17:08.160 sleeping at night in the bushes. They found no drinking water, but only ice, which caused them

00:17:13.680 great hardship, end quote. So that's one thing to say in a survival situation. If you're in an extremely

00:17:18.640 cold place where there's ice or snow and you're dying of thirst or dehydration, you can eat snow

00:17:25.040 or you can put ice in your mouth and it melts and you get water. So, okay, that helps you out

00:17:30.160 with dehydration, but it really doesn't help with hypothermia. So yeah, it's not, it's not ideal.

00:17:35.920 If you can't make a fire and melt the ice or melt the snow and make, you know, normal water or even

00:17:40.480 warm water, you can't do that. Then you've got to be extremely careful eating ice or snow if you're in

00:17:45.200 a survival situation, put it that way. But eventually this party of 24 reached them and

00:17:50.160 we're told it was a pathetic reunion because at least the original crew of the Santiago are on

00:17:55.680 their last legs. You know, they can barely sort of raise a cheer that they're being rescued.

00:18:00.240 Well, because they're, you know, they're dying. We're told they were exhausted men at the end of

00:18:04.160 the world, suffering intensely, expecting to die at any time, united only in the cause of survival,

00:18:10.880 as unlikely as the prospect seemed. So they'd resign themselves to death. And even when you're

00:18:16.240 rescued, it's a bit like, yeah, you know, I'm not going to die today, perhaps, but it's still,

00:18:21.520 still staring down the barrel of continued hardship, extreme hardship. But anyway, they ferry them

00:18:27.680 back and forth across the Santa Cruz and get them, you know, give them wine and hardtack to sort of

00:18:33.600 renew their energy a bit. And, and miraculously, they all get back to Fort St. Julian without a man dying.

00:18:39.440 Really quite remarkable, really remarkable. But the, but remember the sent the ship,

00:18:43.840 the Santiago has been lost. So no one died, but they've lost a whole ship. So it's pretty bad

00:18:48.880 in the grand scheme of things. Zooming out for the expedition as a whole, losing one of their five

00:18:53.920 ships is kind of disastrous. One of the other accounts, other than Pigafetta, de Mafra wrote,

00:18:59.920 the loss of the ship was much regretted by Magellan, although it was not the pilot's fault,

00:19:04.640 because along this coast, the sea rises and eight fathoms. And this was the cause of the calamity,

00:19:10.640 so that the ship found itself high and dry." End quote. So once again, no one's particularly to blame.

00:19:16.800 It's just that the nature of the conditions off the Atlantic coast of Argentina are pretty extreme.

00:19:23.120 They're pretty extreme. Burgreen says that Magellan was less worried about the mutiny now, at this

00:19:28.960 point, and more worried about the, the emotional or the psychological damage that losing one of the

00:19:35.440 ships would cause. Because, you know, in their mind, it's that God doesn't favour them. You know,

00:19:41.680 their ship got wrecked because God wanted it that way. You know, that's how they viewed a lot of things,

00:19:46.720 most things really. You know, anything big like that, good or bad, you know, if something amazingly

00:19:52.720 fortuitous happens to them, it's because God is smiling on them, and God wants it that way.

00:19:57.200 If something really bad happens, a disaster or a catastrophe of some type, it's because the God,

00:20:01.440 the gods or God, the saints, have deigned that that is the way it should be. So yeah, it's a big hit on morale,

00:20:09.360 if nothing else. And you know, that's certainly not lost on Magellan. So he has to have a bit of a reshuffle

00:20:14.880 of the senior people in the Armada, right? He only needs three other captains now, because obviously

00:20:20.880 he captains Trinidad. So there's only three other ships other than Trinidad. So there's one less

00:20:26.000 captain needed, and he has to shuffle the surviving crew of Santiago among the other ships. So he just

00:20:31.920 has to do an organisation chart reshuffle of who's where and who's leading what and all that sort of

00:20:38.720 thing, which he does do. And he puts even more of his loyalists and his relatives and Portuguese

00:20:45.840 people in charge of various things. And that doesn't go down well with the majority of the

00:20:51.520 rank and file who aren't Portuguese. So he makes his cousin, Mesquita, Alvaro de Mesquita,

00:20:57.200 one of the captains. And he makes his brother-in-law, Barbosa, captain of Victoria. And Serrano,

00:21:03.520 he's one of his loyalists. He makes the new captain of Concepcion. So yeah, he's just packing

00:21:09.040 all the senior positions with members of his family and Portuguese people now. So it's sort of

00:21:14.400 what the Castilians and the Spanish always feared, always suspected, always accused Magellan of doing

00:21:21.200 from the off. And now he's just sort of really doing it. He's actually leaning into that and it's

00:21:26.720 becoming a reality. Perhaps, you know, it's easy to argue though, isn't it, that Magellan sort of has to

00:21:31.760 do this. He's facing mutinies. He's already had one big, big mutiny and there may well be more.

00:21:36.960 If he's facing those, he's sort of probably got to do this, take these sorts of measures.

00:21:42.640 He needs all the loyalists he can in all the key positions that he can.

00:21:47.600 So it's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy that the Castilians or the Spanish paranoia

00:21:52.480 becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So that's what he does. And just a quick paragraph here from

00:21:57.040 Burgreen, he says, quote,

00:21:58.240 In fact, Magellan's appointment of his relatives as captains served to fuel the silent resentment

00:22:03.760 of many crew members, even those from Portugal. When they finally returned to Spain, small number

00:22:09.200 that did, they could tell vivid tales of Magellan's insolence towards the Spanish captains, his shameless

00:22:15.040 nepotism, his reckless seamanship culminating in the needless loss of Santiago. That's not really

00:22:20.720 fair, but maybe it was a bit reckless to send Santiago off on its own at least. And most blatant

00:22:25.840 of all, the drawing and quartering of Gaspar de Cusada. All of these grievances remained urgent

00:22:31.920 in the minds of many seamen as they awaited a time and place to act on them, end quote.

00:22:36.720 Yeah, so as mentioned in the last episode, the way Magellan dealt with some of the mutineers,

00:22:41.760 you know, torturing them and killing a few. No one's going to forget that. Anyone that didn't

00:22:45.760 like Magellan in the first place or even had even a vague suspicion of Magellan in the first place,

00:22:50.640 they won't forget that ever. And if any of them make it back to Europe, they will certainly tell

00:22:55.840 tales about that, you know, not fictional tales. They'll just say what Magellan did.

00:23:00.640 Okay, so there's a few months left to be spent in Port St. Julian, and it was a very, very dull few

00:23:06.800 months. I mean, there's nothing to do. You've just got to sit there and wait for winter to end.

00:23:10.640 And they're so far south that often the days, the daylight is only like about four hours.

00:23:16.240 So the vast majority of the time is in darkness. So you're just sitting there on your ship in

00:23:21.280 darkness, counting the hours, day in, day out for weeks and months on end. We're told that some that

00:23:27.440 could read, you know, this is when they would read things like Marco Polo and the travels of

00:23:31.520 Sir John Mandeville, mentioned that I think in episode one or two of this series. Not everyone could

00:23:35.760 read, but you know, those that could would read it. And those that could read would read aloud to those

00:23:40.560 that were illiterate often. And there's, you know, a little bit of hunting is possible. We're told

00:23:47.040 men would often go looking for mussels, foxes, sparrows, rabbits they would hunt for. But even that

00:23:53.120 is like sort of quite minimal. It's the winter, so they don't go and they don't go on shore all that

00:23:58.800 often. So it's just very, very boring. And you might think just listening to that, well, so what?

00:24:05.680 Get over it. Big deal. But that can sort of send you mad. It's possible, it's possible to suffer from

00:24:11.840 a type of cabin fever. I don't know, most people these days, we don't, no one really suffers from

00:24:16.800 anything like that. We're bombarded by, with TV and the internet and your phone. We're all bombarded by

00:24:24.400 so much information, so much stimulus, that the idea of becoming so bored that you might lose your mind

00:24:31.440 is alien to us, isn't it? It's just not going to happen. The second you're even the tiniest bit bored,

00:24:37.120 you've got thousands of different things you could do or watch or think about, haven't we?

00:24:41.440 Whereas imagine a world where it's like, it's the same vista before you, the same small cabin,

00:24:47.440 the same deck, the same people, and it's never changing. There's no new stimulus. None. Yeah,

00:24:53.440 you can send you a bit stir crazy. At one point, Magellan sends a small band of four armed men

00:25:00.000 into the interior. He basically says, you know, head inland and there's like a mountain nearby,

00:25:04.720 a few miles away, or in sight, there's a mountain. He says, head up there, summit that mountain and

00:25:09.440 see what you can see on the other side. You never know, it might be some sort of paradise on the other

00:25:13.520 side. You might see verdant meadows or something. You might see like a herd of animals we can hunt and

00:25:19.040 eat or something, you know, something to do at least. You've got the energy to do it. So go do

00:25:23.680 that. So he sends them off, but apparently the going is too hard. So they summit a slightly nearer,

00:25:29.440 slightly easier mountain, but they don't see anything on the other side or nothing of note.

00:25:33.680 It's just, it's just a pitiless barren mountain scape as far as they can see. So very unforgiving

00:25:39.760 landscape. Apparently on shore though, they did construct, they didn't construct a big building

00:25:44.160 of any type. They all stay on ship, but what they did construct on the shore at Fort St.

00:25:48.560 Julian was, we're told a small stone enclosure for a forge. So they built a small, a small forge.

00:25:55.600 And that was to be used to help repair ships, metal fittings, anything that was made of metal

00:26:02.720 that needed repair. You'd need, you know, you'd need a hot, a hot fire, a furnace or a kiln to be hot

00:26:09.680 enough to, you know, melt metals. So they built that. That was the only thing they built. They didn't

00:26:15.120 bother building any sort of permanent or even semi-permanent cabin for the men to stay in.

00:26:20.800 They all stayed aboard the ships. And we're told several of the sailors suffered crippling frostbite

00:26:26.000 on their fingers. Despite anything and everything, if it's cold enough, people get frostbite. It's

00:26:31.280 interesting if anyone's watched any of my other content talking about Scott of the Antarctic,

00:26:36.160 Captain Scott or Shackleton. Different people suffer from frostbite differently. The same type

00:26:41.920 of person, same age, same weight, same general health are exposed to the same amount of extreme

00:26:49.680 cold. And one guy might get frostbite and the other one not. And there doesn't seem to be much rhyme or

00:26:54.480 reason to it. Just some people are slightly more susceptible to frostbite than others. Same with

00:26:58.960 altitude sickness. Some people, there doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to it. Some people will get

00:27:03.680 altitude sickness worse than others or quicker, easier than others. So yeah, it was so cold that

00:27:09.520 some of these men, despite you can only imagine their best efforts, still got frostbite in their

00:27:14.240 fingers. Frostbite is basically when the blood inside your body freezes hard and it affects your toes,

00:27:20.560 the tips of your toes and the tips of your fingers, maybe the tip of your nose first. And you know,

00:27:25.520 it will spread, it will get worse and worse and worse. It starts usually in the tips of your toes,

00:27:29.440 tips of your fingers and the very tip of your nose. So it seems like some of them got a touch

00:27:33.360 of it in their, in their fingers. And it's extremely painful. Apparently it's just really, really,

00:27:38.480 really painful. Well, to the point where Sir Ranulf Fiennes, the explorer, he got frostbite,

00:27:44.000 he got quite badly frostbitten fingers and he sawed them off himself. He sawed bits of his own fingers

00:27:50.240 off, some of his own fingers off, rather than suffer the pain of frostbite. That's how painful it is.

00:27:56.720 If you enjoyed that preview, please consider heading over to lotusseaters.com

00:28:00.800 to watch the full unabridged video.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - August 24, 2025

PREVIEW： Epochs #225 ｜ Magellan： Part VI

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