The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - PREVIEW： Epochs #226 ｜ Magellan： Part VII

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome back to Epochs, where once again I shall be continuing my story, the narrative

00:00:18.720 of Ferdinand Magellan's terrifying circumnavigation of the globe, the first man ever to sail around

00:00:25.080 the world. Last time, if you remember, I think we left off just about where his four remaining

00:00:30.260 ships had found the inlet or the mouth, the opening to the Straits of Magellan. Obviously

00:00:36.940 now they're called the Straits of Magellan, then it was just an uncharted strait. They

00:00:41.480 were looking for a way through South America to get to the ocean on the other side. They

00:00:45.920 knew there would be an ocean on the other side, the Pacific, but no one had ever really

00:00:50.400 gone, no one at all had gone round the bottom of South America, which actually Drake does

00:00:55.620 a bit later in the century. What is it, the 1570s? Drake does that? Drake doesn't take the

00:01:00.620 Straits through Magellan, he just sails all the way around the entire bottom of South America.

00:01:06.340 But Magellan's looking for the fastest way through, convinced that there's a straight through,

00:01:11.000 which there is, and so they've found it now. They're reasonably sure. There's various ways

00:01:16.580 to tell the way the tide flows and if the water is deep enough and if it's salty, if it's fresh

00:01:26.800 water, then it almost certainly won't be a straight through to another ocean. There's various ways

00:01:31.640 to tell and they were convinced, rightly, that this was a straight through the South American 1.00

00:01:39.920 continent through to the other side. So let's pick up the story from about there. Or actually,

00:01:45.380 quickly, just to say, I think last time we left off, they hadn't quite reached that straight.

00:01:50.360 So a few little details about how they finally find it. There was a few more weeks from leaving

00:01:55.700 Port St. Julian, if you remember that, there's still a few more weeks sailing down the south

00:01:59.760 coast, sorry, down the east coast of Argentina, southwards. And one of the other survivors,

00:02:05.340 other than Pigafetta, that wrote an account of it was San Martin, and he wrote this, quote,

00:02:10.380 and he's talking about on October the 11th. Quote, an eclipse of the sun was awaited.

00:02:15.280 They already knew when eclipses were going to be. An eclipse of the sun was awaited,

00:02:19.500 which in this meridian should have occurred at eight minutes past 10 in the morning.

00:02:23.360 When the sun reached an altitude of 42 and a half degrees, it appeared to alter in brilliancy

00:02:28.520 and to change to a somber color as if inflamed of a dull crimson, and this without any cloud

00:02:34.320 intervening between ourselves and the solar body. Its clearness appeared as it might

00:02:39.400 in Castile in the months of July and August, when they are burning the straw in the surrounding

00:02:44.100 country. And then throughout October, they experienced more storms. October 1520, we're

00:02:48.780 talking, 1520. Now that region is very, very stormy, extremely stormy, sort of non-stop,

00:02:55.600 almost, an exaggeration, but even in summer. Again, these are the, oh wait, it's not summer,

00:02:59.760 is it? Okay. And so eventually, after more weeks of sailing south, the wind changes and

00:03:04.660 they catch the wind and it blows from the north to the south, where they've had to tack into

00:03:08.580 the wind for the longest time. Now suddenly it's plain sailing and the sails are billowing

00:03:14.100 and they're speeding along, and Magellan is sort of scrutinizing every inlet. And finally,

00:03:19.300 they find a cape with what is called a broad sandbank strewn with skeletons of whales. It's

00:03:25.120 obviously a migration route for the, for whales. And this is, this is the inlet to what later

00:03:31.560 becomes called the Straits of Magellan. And one other person who survived and wrote about

00:03:35.420 it, someone called Vasquito Gallego wrote, quote, as the way became narrower, i.e. this

00:03:40.480 inlet, which they hoped was the strait, but could still be a river. As the way became narrower,

00:03:44.760 we thought it was a river. Continuing that way, we found deep seawater and strong currents

00:03:49.900 appearing to be a strait and the mouth of a big gulf that might be discharging into it.

00:03:55.120 Burgreen says, Magellan ordered his ships to sail into the gulf, and when they were well

00:03:59.680 within its embrace, he saw it, the outlet leading west, just as he prayed it would.

00:04:05.240 Magellan had finally found the strait. On October the 21st, Albo, the pilot, recorded the great

00:04:10.780 event in his log. And this is Albo writing, we saw an opening like a bay, and it has to

00:04:15.820 be the entrance. On the right hand, a very long spit of land, and the cape which we discovered

00:04:20.820 before this spit is called the Cape of the 11,000 Virgins, and the spit of land is in

00:04:26.500 52 degrees latitude, 52 and a half longitude, and from the spit of land to the other part,

00:04:32.400 there may be a matter of five leagues. Burgreen goes on. This is what he saw, a series of mounds

00:04:37.220 covered with tufts of grass, rising approximately 130 feet from the water. A later explorer described

00:04:43.380 the cape as, three great mountains of sand that look like islands but are not. There was no mistaking

00:04:48.500 the strait for a bay or an inlet. A broad waterway cut deep into the impenetrable landmass along which

00:04:54.520 the fleet had been sailing for months. Pigafetta exalted at the sight of the waterway. And this is

00:04:59.620 Pigafetta. After going and setting course to the 52nd degree toward the said Antarctic pole,

00:05:06.100 on the festival of the 11,000 Virgins, we found by a miracle the strait which we called the Cape of

00:05:11.560 the 11,000 Virgins. After all the ordeals suffered by the Armada, the discovery of the strait did lay claim

00:05:17.860 to being a miracle. Now people have often wondered, why did Magellan, why was Magellan so convinced that

00:05:23.540 such a strait even existed? And people, historians, scholars, have argued over that ever since.

00:05:30.120 And, you know, it's not entirely clear. You know, we don't know exactly what Magellan did or didn't

00:05:35.280 know what he was party to. But, you know, people have obviously poured over this story in extraordinary

00:05:40.940 detail over the years. And, you know, we know what he's likely to have known. There was various

00:05:46.920 chroniclers and various explorers before. There was someone called Martin of Bohemia or Martin

00:05:52.940 Behame, which he had a famous, he had made a famous globe and a famous chart. And for some reason, even

00:05:58.580 though he'd never been there, said there was a strait through there. There was also someone else called

00:06:03.060 Johannes Schroener, who was a Nuremberg mapmaker, who also had shown that there was a strait somewhere

00:06:09.200 there. And so whatever, you know, Magellan almost certainly, almost certainly would have known of

00:06:13.940 these people. It was sort of his job to be aware of things like this. But then other scholars say,

00:06:18.680 no, he would never have met Martin of Bohemia. And there's no evidence that he ever saw his maps or

00:06:25.880 his globe. So we can't say that for sure. But for whatever reason, Magellan was convinced, I mean,

00:06:30.940 maybe it was the case that he just needed it to be there. You know, you fake it till you make it.

00:06:35.240 He just really, really hoped that such a thing existed. But well, it proved to be real. Because

00:06:42.220 it could have been the case. It's like the Northwest Passage, the famous Northwest Passage

00:06:46.400 through Canada sort of doesn't exist. But people thought it might all the way up to what, the 19th

00:06:52.720 century. But there is one through South America in any way. You could go all the way around if you

00:06:56.880 really wanted to, like Drake. Bergering says, quote, now that Magellan had finally found the strait,

00:07:01.080 he faced 300 miles of nautical nightmare, end quote. So yeah, we'll put up maps so you can see.

00:07:06.940 It's one thing to have found this big sort of inlet. It's another thing to actually work your way

00:07:12.540 through it, because it's sort of a maze, a maze of waterways and fjords. It's not just straight

00:07:18.960 through. You don't just keep sailing west. Keep heading west and you'll definitely find the Pacific.

00:07:23.960 No, it's a feat of navigation and sort of intuition and skill to find your way through it. You could

00:07:31.580 spend years exploring every which way. And you know, Magellan doesn't have years. So you've got

00:07:37.720 to do it in the most efficient, most professional way. And well, he kind of does. It's sort of

00:07:42.180 remarkable, really. Again, when you look at it on a map, sort of a satellite map, again,

00:07:46.180 it looks straight, it looks relatively straightforward. You know, it's a pretty clear way through,

00:07:50.340 almost at a glance. But yeah, that's looking at it from space. If you're actually there at sea level,

00:07:56.580 you don't know which way to go. You just don't know which way to go. Any way could have been the

00:08:01.200 right way or a dead end. But one of the things they do know is that quite often the Straits are

00:08:04.900 quite deep, particularly near the Atlantic still. Pigafetta wrote, in this place, i.e. still right at the

00:08:10.460 beginnings of the Straits, in this place, it was not possible to anchor because no bottom was found.

00:08:15.980 Therefore, it was necessary to put cables ashore of 25 or 30 cubits in length, in order to not just,

00:08:22.420 you know, at night or something, just be washed back out to sea and lost. But they couldn't find

00:08:26.760 the bottom. Their anchors, the cables, the tethers, the ropes that held their anchors weren't long

00:08:32.160 enough. So that tells you something, doesn't it? Bergerine says, quote, Magellan was gripped with

00:08:36.460 the conviction that he had found the waterway to the Spice Islands. He ordered Albo to record the 0.95

00:08:41.980 Straits twists and turns as accurately as possible. And this is some of Albo's words. Again, he wrote,

00:08:47.980 Within this bay we found a strait which may be a league in width, and from its mouth to the spit

00:08:52.980 you look east and west, and on the left-hand side of the bay there is a great elbow within which

00:08:58.300 are many shoals. But when you are in the strait, take care of some shallows, less than three leagues

00:09:04.000 from the entrance of the straits, and after them you will find two islets of sand, and then you will

00:09:09.660 find the channel open. Proceed in it at your pleasure without hesitation. Passing this strait

00:09:15.640 we found another small bay, and then we found another strait, and the same kind as the first,

00:09:20.460 and from one mouth to the other runs east and west, and the narrow part runs northeast and southwest.

00:09:26.000 And after we had come out of the two straits of narrows, we found a very large bay, and we found

00:09:31.020 some islands, and we anchored at one of them. Bergerine. No doubt Albo had specific landmarks in mind, 0.99

00:09:36.420 as he wrote, but the strait defied even this precise chronicler, and his directions proved

00:09:41.360 difficult for subsequent visitors to interpret. You know, it's such a mangled mess of broken

00:09:47.660 landscape. Not a mess, I mean it's beautiful, bleak and beautiful, but as far as navigating through

00:09:52.700 the straits, just like this terrible mess. And even though they, and later people describe it quite well,

00:09:58.600 it's very very difficult from their descriptions to actually piece together exactly the route they took.

00:10:04.200 So they plunge straight into it, they head straight into it. You know, as far as Magellan is concerned,

00:10:08.820 his mindset always is, right up to the end, is definitely, definitely just plough ahead,

00:10:15.140 you know, kind of regardless of any danger, or the odds against them, or the difficulties of the

00:10:19.880 task ahead. Just plough straight into it. I mean, it's the mindset you would need, isn't it, to plot

00:10:25.840 uncharted waters. There's no other way of doing it. Pigafetta says, quote,

00:10:30.700 within days, the straits gloomy enchantment impressed itself on the crew, and they negotiated

00:10:35.980 its frigid waters. They observed thickly vegetated, forbidding shores sliding past,

00:10:41.840 cloaked in eerie shadows. And so there's one thing to say, this is one of my favourite parts

00:10:46.820 of the Magellan story, certainly one of my favourite parts of Lawrence Bergring's book,

00:10:51.640 Over the Edge of the World, is that the land of Tierra del Fuego is part of Chile these days,

00:10:57.640 I believe. Well, it is. And I'm fascinated by that. I'm fascinated by sort of Antarctica.

00:11:02.640 I'm fascinated by sort of the high Himalayas, places that are dangerous and very, very bleak,

00:11:09.060 but also beautiful. And some of the descriptions, Bergring and people like Pigafetta and Albo

00:11:14.880 tell us, are lovely. It's sort of not top of my bucket list to go and visit in real life,

00:11:20.440 but if I had endless money and time to go travelling, I would love to see that part of the world.

00:11:26.060 You know, very forbidding, very sort of oppressive. If you were in a real survival situation,

00:11:31.720 you know, without all the modern, without all the mod cons of the modern world, it would be

00:11:36.260 something maybe terrifying, but still definitely sort of undeniably beautiful. We told all about

00:11:42.200 how Magellan and his men were worried about any indigenous cannibals turning up, although this

00:11:48.840 land at this point is almost entirely uninhabited by a people, almost entirely. They certainly see 1.00

00:11:55.020 hardly any, or no one, really. We know that there would have been a few scattered indigenous

00:12:00.240 peoples around, but hardly any, and Magellan doesn't really see any. He sees a little bit

00:12:04.560 of evidence of some that might have been around, might have been around a long time ago, but

00:12:07.880 they don't encounter any, quote-unquote, Indians in the land of Tierra del Fuego. And that's 1.00

00:12:13.860 what Magellan called it, Tierra del Fuego, the land of fire, because at one point he sees,

00:12:18.980 or they all see, some smoke, quite a far way inland, quite a long way away from where they're

00:12:24.340 sailing, they see smoke rising up. And they think that's indigenous peoples, but it wasn't, 0.96

00:12:29.600 almost certainly wasn't. It seems like it must have been a lightning strike or something,

00:12:34.200 because, and that's why they called it the land of fire, because they saw this smoke,

00:12:38.620 which was a fire. And it must have been a natural fire, most historians think, because there's just

00:12:44.340 very, very little evidence of peoples or any settlements in that region, certainly at that

00:12:49.820 time. But we don't really know. It's a little bit inexplicable why Magellan and his men saw smoke on

00:12:56.300 the horizon, but that's what they saw. And because of that, they called it the land of fire, but it's

00:13:00.480 not lost on anyone. That's not a very good name for it. It's a land of storms. It's a land of wind

00:13:07.320 and storms and rain and ice and snow and glaciers. It's, I mean, perhaps they were being ironic. I

00:13:14.700 mean, they must have been being ironic. It's sort of the furthest thing from the land of fire. It's

00:13:18.640 a land of sort of endless, bitter, relentless wind and storms. Well, Berggren says that Tierra del

00:13:26.380 Fuego covers more than 28,000 square miles of glaciers, lakes and moraines. So yeah, it's something

00:13:31.920 closer to Antarctica than to a desert, you know, land of fire. You might think it's something like

00:13:37.480 a desert. It's just, it's just a funny, odd, inappropriate name to call it. I mean,

00:13:43.020 Berggren describes it thusly. He says, quote, gloomy, ragged, low hanging clouds scudded over the

00:13:49.400 mountains, hugging the fields through which the ships expectantly glided. Occasionally the laden

00:13:56.060 mists parted to allow sunlight gleaming with painful brilliance to stream down on the impenetrable

00:14:01.900 land and the surging water. So one thing to say is that the waters are very, very calm.

00:14:06.560 You know, they've been used to for months now having to brave the South Atlantic. Massive

00:14:11.260 waves, terrible, terrible seas. Well, these straits obviously are nothing like that. They're

00:14:16.440 pretty placid. They're almost like a swimming pool, placid. So that's nice. That's a welcome

00:14:21.900 relief, of course. You know, you can just glide through them. And they're so far south, just

00:14:26.480 to say that it's, it's dark most of the time. A bit later somewhere, I think I've got the

00:14:30.800 quote, they've only get sort of about three hours of sunlight a day. So it's sort of dust. It's not

00:14:36.240 necessarily pitch black, like the middle of the night, but it's sort of dusk or dark nearly the

00:14:41.600 whole time. And they've got to sail during at least some of those hours, which is a little bit

00:14:47.820 worrying. Usually these fields and straits are relatively wide. You're not sort of, you know,

00:14:53.260 you're not sort of having to worry and deep. So you're not necessarily having to worry too much

00:14:58.400 about hitting the sides or running into shoals or sandbanks. Nonetheless, sailing at night in

00:15:04.660 unknown waters, just in and of itself is, you know, not really fun. You'd rather not do that.

00:15:09.900 But there's very little light. That's how far south they are. Bergerin continues, quote,

00:15:13.500 the sunlight, when it managed to break through, could be pitiless at this low latitude and appear

00:15:18.560 to illuminate the landscape with a grey polarised radiance. Striations of light played over the

00:15:24.060 stony beaches and the glaciers, frosting the mountaintops. Although Magellan traversed the

00:15:29.300 strait at the warmest time of year, when the wind, for all its bite, was at its lightest and the

00:15:35.160 snows had receded, the enormous glaciers were plentiful and awe-inspiring. Snow nearly always

00:15:41.100 fell atop the glaciers. They were endlessly renewing themselves. And at lower altitudes, the ice melted

00:15:47.020 into narrow waterfalls, cascading over the granite outcroppings into the fjords. Invisible to the

00:15:52.920 sailors, the glaciers extended across the landscape, running through 30 miles of mountains before

00:15:58.540 shearing off at the water's edge. As they continued to sail through the strait, Magellan's crew observed

00:16:03.900 a solid wall of ice rising majestically before them, 200 feet, 500 feet and more. They were ancient

00:16:10.440 edifices, these glaciers, some of them 10,000 years old, and they looked it, with their grimy faces

00:16:15.960 deeply pockmarked and weathered. Consisting of packed snow and ice, the glaciers never rested.

00:16:20.920 They cracked, they groaned, they roared, and they threatened to decompose and tumble onto the

00:16:27.420 beaches and the water below. Their crystalline towers leaned out over the water in irregular

00:16:32.140 columns, like rotting teeth in a decaying jaw. They inclined ever more precipitously over the

00:16:37.640 placid water, until one column after another, warmed by the sun and buffeted by the wind,

00:16:43.120 carved and collapsed amid a cloud of icy dust with its shattering report, followed by a drum-like

00:16:48.700 roll of thunder, low and resonant, announcing destruction. Again, the land of fire is not

00:16:54.420 really an apt name, is it? Berggring goes on. To everyone's surprise, the glaciers were neither

00:16:59.280 white nor grey, but a light, almost iridescent blue, that in the crevasses and seams darkened to

00:17:05.660 a deep azure. The countless chunks of ice broken off from the glaciers, some as large as a whale,

00:17:11.080 others as small as a penguin, had the same enigmatic bluish cast as they bobbed past the ships,

00:17:17.520 an armada of sculpted ice drifting towards a mysterious location, end quote. Yeah, you get

00:17:22.740 that in Antarctica as well. The type of, you know, ultra-pure ice, it's the deepest blue colour.

00:17:30.180 It's to do with light and the way light refracts through water or frozen water. Sometimes you get

00:17:35.520 this sort of amazingly blue ice. Here's a little description of it from a chap called Francis

00:17:41.660 Pretty, who sailed with Sir Francis Drake about 60 years later. He said, quote,

00:17:46.620 The land on both sides is very huge and mountainous, the lower mountains whereof,

00:17:51.200 although they be monstrous and wonderful to look upon for their height. There are others which in

00:17:55.760 height exceed them in strange manner, reaching themselves above their fellows so high that between

00:18:01.400 them did appear three regions of clouds. This strait is extremely cold, with frost and snow

00:18:06.840 continually. The trees seem to stoop with the burden of the weather, and yet are green continually,

00:18:12.740 and many good and sweet herbs do very plentifully grow and increase under them, end quote. So yeah,

00:18:18.280 absolutely windswept. There's certain trees, you can find it actually all over the coastlines

00:18:22.520 throughout the world, where there's certain winds that just continually blow in one direction,

00:18:27.260 and the trees are sort of completely slanted one way, where they're just endlessly buffeted by a wind

00:18:33.760 that always blows in the same direction. We've got an account here from a historian, Samuel Morrison,

00:18:39.160 who sailed through that way in 1972, so a modern account, and he wrote this.

00:18:44.640 One seems to be entering a completely new and strange world, a veritable never-never land. The

00:18:50.220 strait never freezes except along its edges, and the evergreen Antarctic beach with its tiny matted leaves

00:18:56.480 grows thickly along the lower mountain slopes. The middle slopes support a coarse grass, which turns

00:19:02.760 bronze in the setting sun, and above the higher peaks are snow-covered the year-round. When it rains

00:19:08.240 in the strait, it snows at 6,000 feet, end quote. Vergreen goes on. Although the sky was generally

00:19:13.980 overcast, especially at night, it cleared at brief intervals to reveal a dazzling array of constellations

00:19:19.920 competing for attention with an unnaturally brilliant Milky Way. The familiar Orion's belt,

00:19:26.200 the Big Dipper, mingled with the unfamiliar constellations of the Southern Hemisphere,

00:19:30.760 especially the Southern Cross, whose presence reinforced Magellan's conviction that the Almighty

00:19:35.420 was looking over the entire venture, even here at the end of the world. You know, there'd been

00:19:40.060 enough exploring in the Southern Hemisphere by this point that they were aware of the Southern

00:19:44.920 constellations. It wasn't an entirely new thing to them. Although later, we'll talk all about the

00:19:49.820 Magellanic Cloud, which is named after Magellan, which you only see in the Southern Hemisphere,

00:19:55.080 I understand. Vergreen continues, quote. Once the Armada had negotiated the first two narrows within

00:20:00.300 the strait, Magellan became increasingly cautious about the hazards ahead and decided to scout the

00:20:05.540 strait's uncharted waters. The Captain General sent his cousin, Alvaro de Mosquita, to go in his vessel,

00:20:11.300 San Antonio, through that mouth in order to find out what was inside, while he and the other ships

00:20:16.540 remained anchored in the wide part of the entrance until they knew what was what, Vasquido Galigo

00:20:22.000 noted. Actually, Magellan dispatched two ships, the other was Concepcion, but San Antonio took most of

00:20:28.240 the risks, Galigo goes on. Alvaro de Mosquita went for 50 leagues up the strait, and in some parts he found

00:20:34.760 it so narrow that between one shore and the other, there was no more distance than one Lombard shot, which is

00:20:40.180 still fairly decent, you know, like you're not, wouldn't necessarily be scared of being crushed or

00:20:45.080 anything, but you know, pretty close also, if you're used to channels that are, you know, hundreds and

00:20:50.180 hundreds of meters wide. And the strait turned towards the west whence the sea currents came in

00:20:54.840 full force, so strong that they could not go on except with difficulty, Galigo remembered. Mosquita

00:21:00.740 turned back, saying that he thought that the great water came out of a big gulf, and his advice was to go in

00:21:06.880 search of its end and see the mystery, because not without reason came that water with such force

00:21:12.120 from that direction, end quote. And he's quite right. Again, these very, very experienced sailors

00:21:17.280 knew their business, and they could quite often tell when they're on the right track. I mean, it's

00:21:24.220 not, it's kind of surprising, it's kind of not surprising that Magellan's able to navigate his way

00:21:29.620 through this maze of fjords first time, relatively quickly, because they were very, very good at their

00:21:36.540 job. It was exactly the sort of thing that they were sort of born to do. So the other two ships,

00:21:41.420 Victoria and Trinidad, sort of stay put relatively near the Atlantic side of the strait, while the two

00:21:47.540 other ships go off to explore San Antonio and Conception. And Magellan stays with Trinidad, you know,

00:21:54.520 his flagship. And they go off and they're gone for days, basically. And anyone who remembers the days

00:22:00.900 before mobile phones, you know, I'm old enough to remember that when I was a kid, a lot of people

00:22:04.940 listening to this will be old enough to remember that even in like, you know, even in the 1990s,

00:22:10.480 you'd have to rendezvous with people, right? You say, I'll meet you at this station under the clock,

00:22:16.720 I'll meet you at Waterloo station under the clock, like in months time, in two years time,

00:22:20.740 at noon, or I'll meet you outside McDonald's on Saturday at half past one in the afternoon.

00:22:25.500 And you just had to rendezvous, you wouldn't speak to them again. So you just had to rendezvous

00:22:29.380 with them. So we don't, we just don't live in that world now. Younger people have never really 0.64

00:22:33.620 known that. But the second you're supposed to meet someone and they're not there, you phone them,

00:22:37.760 or you text them, right? You message them one way or another, just immediately. Where are you?

00:22:41.960 What's going on? Well, before the days of telecommunications, you just had to wait. You just,

00:22:47.520 you just wait under that clock at Waterloo station. You just wait outside McDonald's

00:22:51.340 and hope you saw them. You might wait for ages, hours and hours, and hopefully you rendezvous and

00:22:56.760 meet up and all's well and good. But sometimes they wouldn't. Sometimes for whatever reason,

00:23:00.520 they couldn't make it. And they couldn't let you know. With the best will in the world,

00:23:03.800 they couldn't let you know. So you just never meet up again. That's totally happened again.

00:23:07.720 Anyone old enough must have known that's happened. I'll meet up with my mates to go to the cinema

00:23:12.160 on this certain day, at a certain time, and they didn't turn up. Or you might be on the other side

00:23:18.300 of that ledger. For whatever reason, you couldn't turn up and you couldn't let them know. So it's

00:23:24.800 too late to write a letter. So anyway, Trinidad and Victoria just wait there for a few days. And

00:23:30.460 you know, they don't know what's happened to them. If something has, if something untoward has

00:23:34.740 happened, if they've got wrecked or got completely lost, they would never know. As far as

00:23:39.280 Magellan is concerned, they would have just disappeared off the face of the earth. Just poof,

00:23:43.460 disappeared into nothing. So they're waiting there and they're taking longer than Magellan

00:23:47.120 thought they would. So it's starting to get a bit worried. But eventually they do come back.

00:23:52.800 And we're told it's a dramatic reunion. That's how Bergering describes it. And Pigafetta wrote

00:23:57.860 about it. He said, quote, we thought that they had been wrecked first by reason of the violent

00:24:03.200 storm. Oh, a storm blew up at this point as well. First by reason of a violent storm. The second,

00:24:07.980 because two days had passed and they had not appeared. And also because of certain smoke

00:24:12.960 signals made by two of their men who had been sent ashore to advise us. And so while in suspense,

00:24:18.700 we saw the two ships with sails full and banners flying to the wind coming towards us. When they

00:24:24.500 neared us in this manner, they suddenly discharged a number of mortars and burst into cheers. Then

00:24:30.260 all together, thanking God and the Virgin Mary, we went to seek the strait further on. I.e. they think

00:24:35.820 they found the way through already. Bergering says, the rejoicing, the triumph over the weather and

00:24:40.620 geography and the feeling of being blessed by divine authority were new to Magellan's men. For

00:24:46.420 the better part of two years, they had been deeply mistrustful of their captain general,

00:24:51.540 divided from one another by language and culture and prone to mutiny. After passing through these

00:24:56.600 ordeals, they had become united and saw in each other not subversion or menace, but the possibility

00:25:02.740 of ultimate triumph. If you enjoyed that preview, please consider heading over to lotusseaters.com

00:25:08.640 to watch the full unabridged video.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - August 31, 2025

PREVIEW： Epochs #226 ｜ Magellan： Part VII

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