Five hundred years ago, disease, mutinies and uncharted waters nearly sabotaged the first global circumnavigation of the earth by famed Portuguese mariner Ferdinand Magellan, a fate that an ongoing commemorative voyage battles as the pandemic continues to rage around the world.
The Spanish navy tall ship Juan Sebastian de Elcano – named for a Basque captain who completed the 1519-1522 expedition with only 17 (but not Magellan) of the roughly 240 crewmembers who began it – has been docking around Latin America since leaving Europe last August.
Because of the coronavirus pandemic, visitors are not allowed on board in port and the crew has disembarked in just a few places, including the Chilean island of Dawson in the Strait of Magellan and San Lorenzo island in Peru.
“This was possible after confirming that the environments were completely free” of COVID-19, Lt. Luis Martínez García, the ship’s public information officer says.
The four-mast ship has departed on its trans-Pacific leg of the journey from Manzanillo, Mexico as it continues its 11-month circumnavigation, which is scheduled to end in Spain in July.
Magellan’s expedition for Spanish trade and imperialism opened a westward route from Europe to the Spice Islands, the Maluku archipelago in modern Indonesia. Today, the epic story elicits conflicting, overlapping perspectives on history as well as the rewards and perils of a connected world.
It was “the first action humans took on a literally planetary scale,” says Harvard University professor Joyce Chaplin. “Only by the 19th century was it a safer kind of journey, and this was when it became a popular pastime, as in Jules Verne’s ‘Around the World in Eighty Days.’”
“Now, we worry, like those early circumnavigators, that maybe taking on the entire planet is a deadly business, given how our collective impact on the globe is destroying species and ecosystems,” she continued.
Magellan crossed the strait between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans that has his name in modern Chile, where President Sebastián Piñera recently said the voyage was about “knocking down walls and building bridges, where today ideas, people, knowledge and culture flow freely.″
A daring navigator with Portuguese military experience in Africa and Asia, Magellan was later spurned by Portugal, Spain’s rival, and distrusted by Spanish sailors in his fleet. While Magellan’s expedition exploited Indigenous people, Christopher Columbus is a far more divisive figure today for his role in the violent colonization of the Americas.
Magellan died in an April 27, 1521, in a fight with warriors in what is today the Philippines. In 2018, Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte designated April 27 as a national holiday to honor Lapu-Lapu, the chief whose men killed Magellan – seen by some today as an act of resisting foreign intervention.
The explorer is credited with introducing Christianity in the Philippines, now the largest Roman Catholic nation in Asia.
And by showing that anywhere in the world was reachable over water, Magellan and his crew inadvertently demonstrated the connections shaping humanity today, says Laurence Bergreen, author of “Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe.”
“There was this singular event of 9/11 which the whole world reacted to, and you have the sense that the whole world was in some ways connected and vulnerable in some ways as well,” says Bergreen. “Well, now it’s 20 years later almost, and there’s a pandemic, but it’s sort of the same thing that there are events that occur globally that affect everyone. There’s a sense of a kind of a shared destiny among people who would otherwise not be aware of other people, or really wouldn’t care much about them.″
The Spanish navy vessel on the commemorative trip is a “small city″ with engine power, a satellite system, garbage and wastewater treatment, a medical team, fresh bread every morning, and movies and other leisure activities.
Referring to pandemic disruptions, deputy commander Fernando García says that ″while other nations have canceled or postponed similar trips, Spain keeps it going, emulating the great feat completed 500 years ago.”