Voyages of Discovery (2006): Season 1, Episode 1 - Voyages of Discovery - full transcript
The story of Ferdinand Magellan's voyage of 1519 which resulted in the first circumnavigation of the Earth.
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500 years ago, an unrecognizable ship
arrived in the port of Seville.
Its crew was reduced to just
18 emaciated and starving men.
MOANING, CHOKING
But this ship had just completed
a voyage of huge importance.
It changed the course of history
and shaped the way we live,
even today.
It was 1522, and the
Victoria had just become
the first ship to
circumnavigate the globe.
This voyage opened up
the last great ocean,
created new trade routes and revealed
the true scale of our planet.
It was a triumph of the human
spirit - an epic tale of courage
and endurance, starvation and mutiny,
heroism and death.
And it turned one man,
Ferdinand Magellan, into one
of the most celebrated explorers
in the history of the world.
But behind the legend of this great
voyage of discovery lies another story.
Uno, dos, tres!
This is the Nao Victoria,
a perfect replica
of one of Magellan's ships.
Lost me timing then! Concentrate!
Paul, it is one, two, three!
OK! Thank you, Jose!
That's Jose, the ship's captain.
He's figured out already I can't count.
Uno, dos, tres!
Nearly 500 years on, this modern
replica is circling the globe itself,
to celebrate one of the most
challenging voyages of maritime history
and the men who made that journey.
As an adventurer meself -
you know, I've climbed on Everest,
spent 20 years in the most
remote polar regions -
yet the hardships I've known...
are nothing,
just absolutely nothing, compared
to what those men experienced.
Magellan's epic voyage is legendary.
Yet the real story is rarely told.
He never intended
to circumnavigate the world,
but a series of extraordinary
events turned what
was an ambitious voyage
into a truly historic one.
Magellan's great voyage started
on the 21st of September 1519,
when they set sail from Spain
into the unknown.
And the ship's chronicler,
Antonio Pigafetta,
recorded the moment.
Find the right page...
And he wrote this -
"The fleet, having been furnished...
..with all that was necessary
for it, and having in the five ships
people of diverse nations to the
number of 241 in all, was ready to depart.
And firing all the artillery,
we set sail.
Uno, dos, tres!
For Magellan, the Captain General,
this voyage was the realization
of a dream that had been
five years in the making.
This tough and determined Portuguese
was taking the biggest gamble of his life.
Fame, fortune and survival itself
depended on the outcome of the expedition.
Among the officers of
the fleet was an ambitious
ship's master called
Juan Sebastian Elcano.
This young Spaniard was to play
a crucial role in the epic voyage.
Magellan's goal was purely commercial
- to find a Spanish trade route
to the world's most precious
commodity -
spices.
In the 16th century,
they were worth more than gold,
but, for Spain,
they were unreachable.
In 1494, the Pope
had divided the world
between the two greatest
sea powers on Earth.
Spain had the trading rights
over the Western half of the world,
while Portugal controlled the East,
and with it, the only known route to the
unimaginable riches of the spice islands -
the modern-day Moluccas.
Magellan's bold idea was
to find a westward route
to the Spice Islands,
through Spanish waters.
It was an incredible plan. Such a sea
route had never been sailed before,
and no-one even knew if it existed.
If he COULD find the elusive route,
Spain would become the richest nation
in the world,
and Magellan would share that wealth.
He commissioned a fleet of five
robust trading ships - carracks -
specially designed to navigate the
treacherous waters of the open seas.
Paul, are you sure
you're taking the correct...?
I think I'm doing all
right! It says 260, nearly!
It's close in a global context!
In an earth context?
Yeah, what do you think?
Doing fine.
The steering mechanism was simple -
the rudder connected to a wheel that
was attached to a long wooden shaft.
Holding the course
was all about brute strength.
I'm actually on course at the
minute, but it's not very easy.
You know, on a modern
boat there's a lot of feedback
between the rudder and
the tiller, or the wheel.
This is called a whip-staff arrangement,
and it's not easy to stay on course,
even in calm conditions like this.
I'm on course at the minute.
The course Magellan
was planning would take
him beyond charted
waters into the unknown.
It was a journey that many believed
was impossible.
Hey, I'm just talking about Magellan.
They're off on the fleet
on this great journey
to get all these
incredibly valuable spices.
I just wanna talk to you about how easy
or hard it must have been to get them.
Well, very, very difficult,
because obviously there were
no charts of any description.
And I understand it wasn't even
on the maps those days?
No, there was no maps,
proper maps, really. It was...
We got a map here which is from
about same period. OK.
As you can see, it's a bit of the
Brazilian coast,
few of the islands in the Caribbean
already plotted by Columbus
and his followers.
And then this block of land,
which finishes here.
Oh, crikey, so the...
South of the Cape of Good Hope,
but not much,
so this was an unknown area,
in those days, for the map makers,
you know.
It's incredible. Completely unknown.
What a great act of faith that
there might even be a way through it.
It really was
an incredible leap of faith.
Because as far as anybody knew,
Magellan's proposed route
was completely blocked
by the vast South American continent.
According to accounts from the time,
Magellan claimed he knew of a passage
below the landmass of
South America, and that
would take the fleet
through to the Spice Islands.
Maybe he did know, or maybe the whole
thing was nothing but a supreme gamble.
Whatever the truth,
he kept it close to his chest.
Magellan never revealed the source of
his belief in the existence of a passage.
But it probably came from
rumors that abounded in
the secretive world of
16th-century navigators.
The Captain General did not wholly
declare the voyage which he wished to make,
lest the people, from astonishment
and fear, refuse to accompany him
on so long a voyage
as he had in mind to undertake,
in view of the great and violent storms
of the ocean sea whither he would go.
The decision to keep the crew in
the dark was extremely dangerous
and it would come close
to destroying the entire mission.
So what was it about this obsessive
and determined man
that drove him
to take such an incredible risk?
Manuel Villas Boas
is a direct descendent of Magellan
and a bit of an expert
on his famous ancestor.
In trying to understand
the man himself,
um, how would you describe him?
A man of contrasts, I would say.
He was physically short,
very sure of himself,
not an assuming man.
He's not a man that one sees bragging about
his aristocracy or anything like that.
A man of little words, few words,
a man who obviously
paid attention to his family
and cared about his family.
Very little more is known.
The man disappears
behind the project.
One thing that is known
is that he spent eight years
as a soldier with the
Portuguese fleet in the Indian Ocean.
Here, he earned a reputation as a
fighter, a risk taker and a glory seeker,
but returned home
to less than a hero's welcome.
He arrives back in Portugal and he's
slighted, slighted by the Court.
And he says,
"OK, I've been slighted,
"I'm going to do something which will
prove these people completely wrong."
"I'm going to finish the task that
Columbus started and didn't finish
"and in the process emulate,
"what Vasco Da Gama had done around
Africa, I will do around South America."
In Magellan's youth, these two
great navigators risked everything
in the search for spices
and earned a place in history.
And they inspired Magellan
to claim for himself the
last great untried sea voyage
- around South America.
Achieving this extraordinary ambition
became his obsession.
But he must have had
some self doubts?
He must have.
Leaders of such nature
and of such expeditions
are lonely by definition.
These are lonely jobs.
I don't think he ever let
anybody understand
that he was not quite sure exactly
of the existence of the passage.
When finally he led
the fleet south, it was
the first time he had
ever captained a ship.
His first challenge
was the notorious
Atlantic, an ocean that
had claimed many lives.
On October 3, 1519
the weather worsened.
"Many furious squalls, the wind and
currents of water struck us head on
"and as we could not
advance, and in order that the
ships might not be wrecked,
all the sails were struck
"and in this manner did we wander
hither and yon on the sea,
"waiting for the tempest to cease,
for it was very furious."
I've been at sea in
some really foul weather,
but it's always been
on a modern boat.
And with that modern safety net that
we have, satellite phones,
satellite communication, satellite
GPS, even emergency beacons -
you press the button
and you can get some help.
Old boats like this, Magellan's
boats, they had none of that.
The sense of risk
must have been absolutely enormous.
On a ship like this, in big seas,
there's a lot of rolling going on.
They're quite rounded
these hulls, like an upturned shell
and they just roll a lot.
I mean, it's not bad weather
at the moment, heaven
knows what it'd be
like in a really big storm.
Magellan was sailing through some of
the most dangerous seas in the world.
It's a great day's sailing
for me, it's exciting,
but for Magellan's men
crossing the Atlantic,
conditions would have been much worse
than this - truly frightening.
It must have felt as if the storms
were never gonna end.
The ships were already showing signs of
wear and tear, they were getting battered.
In one particular storm, the wind was so
strong that, even with the sails rolled up,
the wind got in there
and ripped the sails to shreds.
Of course, Magellan was passionate
about this voyage, he's a driven man,
but the men were at
their wits end, exhausted
and the sense of
fear of the unknown.
It's no surprise to
me that they began
praying for some kind
of divine intervention.
And, you know, that's
exactly what they did get.
"During these storms, the body of St
Anselm approached us several times
"on a night which was very dark
in the time of bad weather.
"The said Saint appeared in the form of a
lighted torch at the height of the main top
"and remained there more than two hours
and a half, for the comfort of us all.
"For we were in tears, expecting
only the hour of death
"and when the holy light was about to leave
us, it was so bright in the eyes of all
"that we were for more than a quarter of
an hour as blind men calling for mercy."
This strange and dramatic phenomenon
is called St Anselm's or St Elmo's fire.
I have seen this phenomena. Bringing
boats back across the Atlantic,
I've seen this bright light
at the mast.
Really surprising,
thought it might be a little
flash, but it hangs
around for over a minute.
What actually happens
is in a big thunderstorm,
the clouds become
highly negatively charged
and, in the end, the
whole voltage tension adds
up to about 30,000 volts
per square centimeter.
And then it all discharges
in a spectacular fashion
from the ends of masts
and ends of pointy bits on a boat.
Now when these men saw this, they noticed
that it always came near the end of a storm
and it does, it always occurs
towards the end of a storm.
So, naturally, they would think, this is
a great sign, this is divine intervention.
SAILORS SHOUT
Divine intervention or not, these men
were at the end of their physical limits
and as any modern-day explorer
will tell you,
it's not the exhausted body that
gets you in the end, it's the mind.
This perceived visitation from a
saint would have a profound effect
and it would have pushed them on
through their ordeal.
Almost four months after
leaving Spain, the battered
fleet approached the
coast of South America.
They made landfall at
a wild bay near a place
that would one day
become Rio de Janeiro.
From here, they followed
the sweeping coast south
and along the way, Pigafetta recorded
many strange and wonderful things.
"There are an infinite
number of parrots.
"Also, some little capped monkeys,
having almost the appearance of a lion.
"Also flying fish, so many of them
that it seemed it was an island in the sea.
"And men and women who paint themselves
with fire all over their bodies and faces
"and eat the flesh
of their enemies."
Eventually, they reached
the very edge of the known world.
35 degrees south, as
far down the coast of
South America as any
westerner had ever been.
Evidence suggests this was where
Magellan expected to find the passage.
The coastline turned sharp west and
there seemed to be no land to the south.
"Which place was formally named
Cape St Mary
"and it was thought from thence
there was a passage to the Sea of Sur,
"the South Sea."
After 15 days of exploration,
the dreadful truth dawned.
This was not the fabled passage,
but a gigantic inlet
that stretched around 300 kilometers
inland and was almost 200 wide.
It was the mouth of the River Plate.
It was a disaster.
Magellan had sailed into a dead end.
Now his certainty about
the passage was shot to pieces.
But turning back was unthinkable.
He made an extraordinary decision - to
step over the edge of the known world.
To sail on where no other European
had gone before.
Blindly, he headed south along the
desolate coast that he named Patagonia,
into some of the wildest seas
in the world and into winter.
On the Nao Victoria, I
asked Enrique Barrigan
what it must have been
like for Magellan's men.
Enrique. How are you? Well.
What were conditions like
here on deck?
Well, now we are 20 people, but
at that time, there were 40 or 45.
Right. So there were
plenty of people and,
as you may know, we
have beds for all of us,
but they didn't have them.
They just had to find a place
on the deck to sleep.
Right out here on deck? 45 of 'em?
Sure. And we've been rolling, we've had
a fair bit of water across the deck here...
So imagine when there were storms
and bad weather,
the water comes in the whole time,
on the deck, always wet.
So imagine how it was, it was
really, really hard for them.
Wow.
And it was about to get even harder.
There are hundreds, if not thousands
of possible routes through.
I mean many of them would be
small inlets, some great rivers,
some huge blind bays and they
would all have to be checked out.
I can't imagine how hard it would
be in poor weather to get part way up
and turn these boats, which
aren't very maneuverable,
turn 'em around and
head them out to sea.
They continued south for three
months, with no sign of a way through.
Supplies were running low
and the days were growing shorter.
On March 31, 1520 just a few
days sailing from Antarctica,
they sought shelter
in a bay they called St Julian.
The men were cold,
hungry and exhausted
and morale had hit rock bottom.
When Magellan reduced rations,
it was the final blow.
His captains presented him with a
petition demanding to return to Spain.
This was not an option
for a man who had gambled
everything on finding the
passage through South America.
HE LAUGHS
Capitan?
The expedition
was now in the gravest jeopardy.
Magellan had lost
the hearts and minds of
some of his captains
and, therefore, his men.
The cold, the hunger, the lack of
faith in their cagey Captain General,
all added up
to just one thing - mutiny.
SAILORS SHOUT
One of the ringleaders was Gaspar
Casada, Captain of the Conception,
who promised the men they would return
to Spain once Magellan was out of the way.
Magellan was isolated.
He had to act quickly. Caballeros.
He dispatched his loyal master at
arms to one of the mutinous captains.
Capitan Mendoza, tengo un mensaje
para usted Del capitan general.
With a special message.
Es un pequeno mensaje.
Muy especial.
Ah!
The captain dispatched,
the leaderless crew quickly caved in.
Magellan took control of the ship and
then blocked the other ships from escaping
and from this position,
he was able to quell the mutiny.
But he had to reassert his authority
quickly and convincingly.
Perros portugueses, soltarme!
He made a brutal example
of the treacherous Captain Casada.
Portugueses...
Vuestras familias y vuestras casas
Se pudren en El fondo Del mar!
En El fondo Del mar!
There could be no doubt, the
Captain General was back in charge.
With the mutineers
put in their place, it
was time to try and
settle in for the winter.
An incredibly dismal experience.
Food
would have been extremely scarce.
I know what it's like - I've been short
on food on expeditions a few times.
One occasion of note, I remember
being high on a mountain in Alaska,
and food being so short
after many days,
we spent four days in an ice cave
living on soup made out of toothpaste.
Conditions became even worse.
One of the fleet, the Santiago
was smashed to pieces on the rocks,
but nothing seemed to sway Magellan
from his obsession.
After seven months
waiting out the winter, it was
finally time to move on and
look for the elusive passage.
The four surviving ships
pushed further south
along the uncharted
Patagonian coastline,
trying every possible inlet
without success.
Finally,
Magellan's men spotted a clue.
Whalebones. This was a great sign
as it indicated a possible
migration route through
to the open sea that
everybody hoped lay ahead.
"On the 21st of October, 1520
we found by a miracle, a strait,
which we called
The Cape Of The 11,000 Virgins.
After nearly a year, they'd found an inlet
and it reached deep into the interior.
And something even more exciting...
..the water tasted salty,
so it must mean that
somehow the inlet must
connect with another salt sea.
Hoping that this might,
at last, be the way
through to the East,
the whole fleet set off.
At the western end was a long
narrow passage leading to a bay
and another passage beyond that.
They headed on into the straits.
What they found was an extraordinary
maze of islands and potential dead ends.
"This strait was a circular
place, surrounded by mountains
"and to most of those in the ships,
it seemed that
"there was no way out of it.
Uno, dos, tres.
Uno dos, tres.
As the endless search
continued, Magellan's men became
convinced that this was
yet another hopeless quest.
Uno, dos, tres.
Uno dos, tres.
It was in these straits
that Magellan lost his
second ship, but this time
it wasn't due to weather.
The San Antonio headed back to Spain
in an act of rebellion.
It was a devastating blow.
The San Antonio was carrying
most of the provisions that Magellan
was relying on for the journey ahead.
He ordered the remaining three ships
to proceed northwest by west.
It was a terrifying
journey through a strait
we now know to be
530 kilometers long.
It took 38 frustrating
days of searching before
Magellan finally got the
news he'd been waiting for.
Capitan, Capitan!
Capitan!
Capitan!
Ahead was the open sea.
He had found the fabled passage.
"The Captain General wept for joy
and called it Cape Deseado,
"for we had been desiring it
for a very long time."
In that proud moment, Magellan
must have realized, without doubt,
he now stood shoulder
to shoulder with his great
boyhood heroes, Columbus
and Vasco da Gama.
His dreams had come true.
Even in this moment of personal
triumph, Magellan could hardly have
guessed at the historic significance
of finding the passage.
For 400 years, his route,
the Magellan Strait,
would be the major shipping route
through to the Pacific.
It was only bettered when the Panama
Canal was blasted out of the land in 1914.
It was an astonishing
discovery, but Magellan and his
men hoped it was the prelude
to something even greater -
the western route
to the riches of the Spice Islands.
On November 28th 1520,
Magellan led the fleet north.
The weather was good and the sea so calm,
he named it the Pacific, the peaceful sea.
The sky was huge
and the horizon stretched endlessly.
Even the sky at night was different.
These God-fearing sailors
wondered at the Southern
Cross and noticed something
strange in the heavens.
"There are several small stars, clustered
together in the manner of two clouds
"and in the middle of them are two stars
not very bright and they move slightly."
Nearly 400 years later,
these stellar clusters were
identified as two of the
closest galaxies to the earth.
The Magellanic clouds have
helped astronomers work out
the scale of the universe
and witness the death of stars.
On December 18 1520, the fleet turned
northwest into the heart of the Pacific.
Unknowingly, Magellan
had just made a serious error.
He thought it was within three days'
sailing of the Spice Islands,
but that belief was based on maps
of the then known world.
These were based on the work of the
second century scholar Ptolemy,
who estimated the circumference
of the earth to be 29,000 kilometers.
The Captain General was
about to discover the hard
way that Ptolemy was out
by over 11,000 kilometers.
This missing area, 28% of the world's
circumference, is the Pacific.
Magellan was leading his men
into a vast, empty ocean.
On the modern Nao
Victoria our captain, Jose, has
some idea of what that
journey must have been like.
You've crossed the Pacific many
times - you've crossed it on here.
You, of anybody, would
understand what Magellan's
men would have gone
through, to have entered
the biggest ocean in the world
and not known how big it was,
and just day after day after day
of uncertainty.
I can imagine how much they suffered
and what went through their minds.
Not knowing when
they were going to reach any land.
If they were going to reach
any land.
So it must have been very,
very tough on them and
probably the weaker
men must have felt that
their head was going
off and the lack of food...
The food diminishing,
scurvy setting in.
The water now seemed foul because
the wood contaminates the water.
It must have been very,
very hard for them,
but, obviously,
the command of Magellan is a very
strong man and very tough with the crews.
He probably kept
the whole thing going on.
Uno, dos, tres. Uno, dos, tres.
The weeks passed, the emaciated
crews began to starve again.
Their accounts make
disturbing reading.
"We ate the ox hides
which were under the mainyard
"so that the yard
should not break the rigging.
"And we ate old biscuits
turned to powder,
"all full of worms and stinking of
urine which the rats had made on it.
"And of the rats, which
were sold for half an
ecu apiece, some of
us could not get enough.
HE SINGS
"I believe that never more will any
man undertake to make such a voyage."
By late January 1521,
Magellan had led the fleet northwest
across thousands of kilometers
of open ocean, without relief.
"We saw no land,
except two small uninhabited islands
"where we found only birds and trees
"and there is no place for anchoring
because no bottom can be found."
Months later, with no land in sight,
even Magellan must have had doubts.
But almost five months and 20,000
kilometers after they exited the straits,
they finally made landfall, at about
ten degrees north of the equator,
in a place
we now call the Philippines.
In an astonishing feat of navigation,
Magellan had led the fleet to safety.
The Spice Islands were now no more
than a few days sail to the south.
It seemed his great gamble
would pay off.
The islands of the Philippines
must have looked like paradise.
There was fresh water,
lush rainforests filled with fruit
and the local people
seemed to welcome them.
Magellan set about
securing the route to the Spice
Islands by claiming
the Philippines for Spain.
His most effective tool
was Christianity.
He knew that to convince these
people to adopt this religion,
he had to persuade them
it was worth their while.
One of the arguments he used was of the
invincibility which would derive from it,
and this invincibility was demonstrated
by the strength of his armament.
The blast of the cannons terrified the
natives and gave a measure of his power.
When attempting and
succeeding in baptizing,
Christianizing, the
local inhabitants,
Magellan is at the same time ensuring
that through this religious conversion
they implicitly accept their status
as subordinate to the Spanish crown,
seen here as the ultimate symbol
of worldly authority
and religious reach.
Tight, structured framework with which
to live by. Oh, yes. Live by these rules.
Live by these rules, submit yourself to
these people and you will be invincible.
So would it have been perhaps like
a colonization?
The very beginnings,
the foundations of colonization.
It would have taken
many decades for the
following Spanish fleets
to effectively transform
the Philippines into
a Spanish colony, but
that was the foundation
upon which they built.
Confident of his faith and
his invincible weaponry,
the Captain General
made a fateful decision.
To show his support
for a local chief,
he decided to attack the
rival chief of Mactan Island,
Lapu-Lapu, who had refused to be
baptized into the Christian faith.
Aboard the Victoria, on
the evening before the
attack, his men were
relaxed and confident.
But, on Mactan Island, Lapu-Lapu was
taking Magellan's threats seriously.
He summoned his most ferocious
warriors and invoked the gods of war.
The events that followed
are replayed every year
in the place where Magellan
and Lapu-Lapu confronted each other.
It was a clash of cultures
and religion.
For Filipinos, it symbolizes
the struggle for independence.
Before the battle, Magellan sent
emissaries across these peaceful waters
to try to get Lapu-Lapu to submit
to Christianity and to Spanish rule.
Once more he refused.
And so at dawn on the 27th April
1521, Magellan and 50 of his men
arrived on the beach at Mactan to do battle
against Lapu-Lapu and 1,000 of his men.
Although he was heavily outnumbered,
Magellan felt certain of victory
because of his superior
Spanish weapons and his armour.
In fact, he was so confident
of victory that he'd given
a direct order to his other captains
to not get involved in the fighting.
But he'd made a fatal mistake.
He'd arrived at low
tide, which meant his
ships were right out
there in the deep water
and Magellan and his
men had had an exhausting
half-mile wade
through the shallows.
His cannon were out of range.
As the battle ensued,
Magellan's men soon started
running out of ammunition
and Lapu-Lapu's men surged forward.
They spotted Magellan.
"One of them with a
large javelin thrust it
into his left leg, whereby
he fell downward.
"On this, they all at once rushed on
him with lances of iron and of bamboo."
Magellan fought a brave fight,
he hung on for a long time.
Eventually, completely outnumbered,
he was just slaughtered.
"They slew our mirror, our light,
our comfort and our great guide."
Magellan never circumnavigated the globe,
he didn't even reach the Spice Islands.
His dreams ended here
in the Philippines.
This was a complete tragedy
which terminates everything, his
entire dream, his planning, his voyage,
all the dramas of the
navigation through the
various oceans, end
here, and end here totally.
So what do you think?
If Magellan had won this battle,
how would the expedition
have turned out in the end?
Had he not died and had he found the
Spice Islands, which were very near,
my guess is that he would have
come back the same way he went,
through the Pacific, which had been,
never been done before,
and it is most likely,
knowing the ocean,
that he might have lost
the entire fleet and himself,
and, with that, nothing would have
remained of this epic voyage.
Magellan's dreams may have died in
the Philippines, but his legacy lives on.
In this dusty little shrine, you
can still see the cross he raised,
so hopefully when he first
arrived on these islands.
It's one of the holiest relics in one of
the most Catholic countries in the world.
It might have been the only relic
of Magellan's voyage
if another man hadn't seized
the chance of fame and fortune.
Magellan's death could have spelled the end
for the expedition, but the remaining men
knew the Spice Islands were so close,
they could almost smell the spices.
Reduced to two ships, the survivors
set off to find the islands.
Taking command of the Victoria was a
popular new leader, Juan Sebastian Elcano.
Senores, a las Mollucas!
History was to deny him
his rightful role in this epic story.
Elcano brought good fortune, for, at
last, they sighted the Spice Islands.
The 28,000-kilometer
journey had cost the lives
of over 100 men, including
the Captain General,
but the surviving
crew finally reached the
Spice Islands and
realized Magellan's dream.
This is what it's all about, spices.
These are cloves? They
are the flowers of the
clove plant. They
don't look very familiar.
They are, we see them
more like this, the dried ones.
Smells just like my mum's apple pie.
Yes, they're aromatic. But, do
you know, I can't help but think,
Augusto, is that holding these in
my hand, seems hard to believe
that the men went to such risk
and pain and suffering
for something that seems,
to be honest, completely ordinary.
And how much would they have
been worth. I mean, pound for pound?
Well, a pound for a pound,
it could command a high price.
Imagine a clove tree
could produce only seven
pounds per tree and that
they still have to dry them
and therefore the dried ones
would be very expensive.
And in relation to gold?
How about that? Well, they'll be
worth weight more than gold itself.
So pound for pound... Pound for
pound, yes. Worth more than gold.
And a bag like that, excuse me,
that'd set a man up for life, right?
Yes.
Well, put like that, I guess
they don't seem quite so ordinary.
Elcano and his men understood the value of
the tonne of spices loaded onto each ship
and they knew that to make their fortunes,
they had to get them back to Spain.
The remaining two ships had to make
a choice,
between returning the way
they'd come, or continuing
west, taking their
chances in enemy waters.
One chose to go east
and the other west.
The Trinidad headed eastwards
across the Pacific,
but it didn't get far before
it fell into Portuguese hands.
The precious cargo was seized, the
ship burned and the crew thrown into jail.
Elcano sailed west on the Victoria.
Spain was about 20,000
kilometers away and the entire
route lay in the Portuguese
sphere of influence.
To avoid capture, he navigated
vast tracts of uncharted waters.
Two months, and almost 5,000 kilometers
later, they encountered terrible storms.
The storms those men went through
were so powerful
that it actually broke this mast
and, like everything
that broke on the ship,
it had to be repaired
with what they had at sea.
But not only that,
Elcano and his men began to run
dangerously low on rations again.
I can't imagine what it would be like
to work a ship like
this, which needs a lot
of manual labor, and
be that low on energy.
The starving men
began to develop scurvy.
"Above all our other misfortunes,
"the worst was that the gums of the
upper and lower teeth of our men
"swelled so much
that they could not eat.
"25 or 30 men fell sick,
of whom 19 died."
Scurvy is caused by a lack of vitamin
C and here was the terrible irony.
The crew were sitting on a cargo
of cloves and what they didn't know
was that it contained vitamin C
and this would have saved them.
As the ship headed
back to Spain, more than
half of them would die
of scurvy or starvation.
Elcano escaped the scurvy because
he ate spoonfuls of quince jelly.
Unknown to him, this contained enough
vitamin C to protect him from the disease.
It's probably what enabled
Pigafetta to keep writing his diary.
Without this, we would never have
known of Elcano's great feat of navigation.
He led the Victoria
across vast oceans,
past the Cape of Good Hope and the
Cape Verde Islands back to Spain.
Of the 241 men who began the journey,
only a handful returned with him.
They lived to tell the remarkable
tale of the Spanish sailor
who finished the journey Magellan
had started three years before.
Pigafetta.
Sevilla.
"On Monday 8 September 1522, we
cast anchor near the Mole of Seville
"and we were only 18 men, for the most
part sick, of the 60 who had left Molluca."
The Victoria became the first
ship to circumnavigate the globe.
It had turned what until
then was just pure theory -
that the earth was round -
into an indisputable fact.
Elcano was honored with a
special coat of arms, declaring
him to be the first man
to sail round the world.
Five centuries later, sailing round the
globe is still a remarkable achievement.
As the modern Victoria returns to Seville
at the end of its 40,000-kilometer journey,
its crew are greeted as
heroes after more than 500
days at sea on a journey
they will never forget.
I still can't believe that
we circumnavigate the whole world.
I cannot imagine right now, but I'm
sure it has changed completely my life.
A realization of my dreams
to the utmost.
The voyage of the original
Victoria may have made
history, but it didn't fulfill
the hopes of the crew.
They never made their fortunes.
The cargo of spices was sold
and the proceeds seized
by the King of Spain to cover
the loss of the rest of the fleet.
The chronicler, Pigafetta,
was snubbed by the
Spanish court and
returned to his native Italy.
His diaries remain the definitive
record of the great voyage.
Elcano attempted
a second circumnavigation
to claim the Spice Islands for Spain
four years later, but he didn't make it.
Crossing the Pacific,
he died of scurvy.
As for Ferdinand Magellan himself,
although he never completed
the voyage, the popular
perception is that he
was the first person to
circumnavigate the world.
Unless, that is, you go to Spain
and they'll tell you the first person
who sailed round the world
was Juan Sebastian Elcano.
But does it really matter?
After all, they're both great men.
Magellan had what it took to dream up
such a daring voyage and make it happen.
And Elcano had the strength
and tenacity to finish it.
They and the men who
sailed with them shared
one of the greatest
voyages of discovery.
The voyage that would define
the shape and size of our earth,
and its oceans and
change the geographical,
spiritual and political
landscape forever.
---
500 years ago, an unrecognizable ship
arrived in the port of Seville.
Its crew was reduced to just
18 emaciated and starving men.
MOANING, CHOKING
But this ship had just completed
a voyage of huge importance.
It changed the course of history
and shaped the way we live,
even today.
It was 1522, and the
Victoria had just become
the first ship to
circumnavigate the globe.
This voyage opened up
the last great ocean,
created new trade routes and revealed
the true scale of our planet.
It was a triumph of the human
spirit - an epic tale of courage
and endurance, starvation and mutiny,
heroism and death.
And it turned one man,
Ferdinand Magellan, into one
of the most celebrated explorers
in the history of the world.
But behind the legend of this great
voyage of discovery lies another story.
Uno, dos, tres!
This is the Nao Victoria,
a perfect replica
of one of Magellan's ships.
Lost me timing then! Concentrate!
Paul, it is one, two, three!
OK! Thank you, Jose!
That's Jose, the ship's captain.
He's figured out already I can't count.
Uno, dos, tres!
Nearly 500 years on, this modern
replica is circling the globe itself,
to celebrate one of the most
challenging voyages of maritime history
and the men who made that journey.
As an adventurer meself -
you know, I've climbed on Everest,
spent 20 years in the most
remote polar regions -
yet the hardships I've known...
are nothing,
just absolutely nothing, compared
to what those men experienced.
Magellan's epic voyage is legendary.
Yet the real story is rarely told.
He never intended
to circumnavigate the world,
but a series of extraordinary
events turned what
was an ambitious voyage
into a truly historic one.
Magellan's great voyage started
on the 21st of September 1519,
when they set sail from Spain
into the unknown.
And the ship's chronicler,
Antonio Pigafetta,
recorded the moment.
Find the right page...
And he wrote this -
"The fleet, having been furnished...
..with all that was necessary
for it, and having in the five ships
people of diverse nations to the
number of 241 in all, was ready to depart.
And firing all the artillery,
we set sail.
Uno, dos, tres!
For Magellan, the Captain General,
this voyage was the realization
of a dream that had been
five years in the making.
This tough and determined Portuguese
was taking the biggest gamble of his life.
Fame, fortune and survival itself
depended on the outcome of the expedition.
Among the officers of
the fleet was an ambitious
ship's master called
Juan Sebastian Elcano.
This young Spaniard was to play
a crucial role in the epic voyage.
Magellan's goal was purely commercial
- to find a Spanish trade route
to the world's most precious
commodity -
spices.
In the 16th century,
they were worth more than gold,
but, for Spain,
they were unreachable.
In 1494, the Pope
had divided the world
between the two greatest
sea powers on Earth.
Spain had the trading rights
over the Western half of the world,
while Portugal controlled the East,
and with it, the only known route to the
unimaginable riches of the spice islands -
the modern-day Moluccas.
Magellan's bold idea was
to find a westward route
to the Spice Islands,
through Spanish waters.
It was an incredible plan. Such a sea
route had never been sailed before,
and no-one even knew if it existed.
If he COULD find the elusive route,
Spain would become the richest nation
in the world,
and Magellan would share that wealth.
He commissioned a fleet of five
robust trading ships - carracks -
specially designed to navigate the
treacherous waters of the open seas.
Paul, are you sure
you're taking the correct...?
I think I'm doing all
right! It says 260, nearly!
It's close in a global context!
In an earth context?
Yeah, what do you think?
Doing fine.
The steering mechanism was simple -
the rudder connected to a wheel that
was attached to a long wooden shaft.
Holding the course
was all about brute strength.
I'm actually on course at the
minute, but it's not very easy.
You know, on a modern
boat there's a lot of feedback
between the rudder and
the tiller, or the wheel.
This is called a whip-staff arrangement,
and it's not easy to stay on course,
even in calm conditions like this.
I'm on course at the minute.
The course Magellan
was planning would take
him beyond charted
waters into the unknown.
It was a journey that many believed
was impossible.
Hey, I'm just talking about Magellan.
They're off on the fleet
on this great journey
to get all these
incredibly valuable spices.
I just wanna talk to you about how easy
or hard it must have been to get them.
Well, very, very difficult,
because obviously there were
no charts of any description.
And I understand it wasn't even
on the maps those days?
No, there was no maps,
proper maps, really. It was...
We got a map here which is from
about same period. OK.
As you can see, it's a bit of the
Brazilian coast,
few of the islands in the Caribbean
already plotted by Columbus
and his followers.
And then this block of land,
which finishes here.
Oh, crikey, so the...
South of the Cape of Good Hope,
but not much,
so this was an unknown area,
in those days, for the map makers,
you know.
It's incredible. Completely unknown.
What a great act of faith that
there might even be a way through it.
It really was
an incredible leap of faith.
Because as far as anybody knew,
Magellan's proposed route
was completely blocked
by the vast South American continent.
According to accounts from the time,
Magellan claimed he knew of a passage
below the landmass of
South America, and that
would take the fleet
through to the Spice Islands.
Maybe he did know, or maybe the whole
thing was nothing but a supreme gamble.
Whatever the truth,
he kept it close to his chest.
Magellan never revealed the source of
his belief in the existence of a passage.
But it probably came from
rumors that abounded in
the secretive world of
16th-century navigators.
The Captain General did not wholly
declare the voyage which he wished to make,
lest the people, from astonishment
and fear, refuse to accompany him
on so long a voyage
as he had in mind to undertake,
in view of the great and violent storms
of the ocean sea whither he would go.
The decision to keep the crew in
the dark was extremely dangerous
and it would come close
to destroying the entire mission.
So what was it about this obsessive
and determined man
that drove him
to take such an incredible risk?
Manuel Villas Boas
is a direct descendent of Magellan
and a bit of an expert
on his famous ancestor.
In trying to understand
the man himself,
um, how would you describe him?
A man of contrasts, I would say.
He was physically short,
very sure of himself,
not an assuming man.
He's not a man that one sees bragging about
his aristocracy or anything like that.
A man of little words, few words,
a man who obviously
paid attention to his family
and cared about his family.
Very little more is known.
The man disappears
behind the project.
One thing that is known
is that he spent eight years
as a soldier with the
Portuguese fleet in the Indian Ocean.
Here, he earned a reputation as a
fighter, a risk taker and a glory seeker,
but returned home
to less than a hero's welcome.
He arrives back in Portugal and he's
slighted, slighted by the Court.
And he says,
"OK, I've been slighted,
"I'm going to do something which will
prove these people completely wrong."
"I'm going to finish the task that
Columbus started and didn't finish
"and in the process emulate,
"what Vasco Da Gama had done around
Africa, I will do around South America."
In Magellan's youth, these two
great navigators risked everything
in the search for spices
and earned a place in history.
And they inspired Magellan
to claim for himself the
last great untried sea voyage
- around South America.
Achieving this extraordinary ambition
became his obsession.
But he must have had
some self doubts?
He must have.
Leaders of such nature
and of such expeditions
are lonely by definition.
These are lonely jobs.
I don't think he ever let
anybody understand
that he was not quite sure exactly
of the existence of the passage.
When finally he led
the fleet south, it was
the first time he had
ever captained a ship.
His first challenge
was the notorious
Atlantic, an ocean that
had claimed many lives.
On October 3, 1519
the weather worsened.
"Many furious squalls, the wind and
currents of water struck us head on
"and as we could not
advance, and in order that the
ships might not be wrecked,
all the sails were struck
"and in this manner did we wander
hither and yon on the sea,
"waiting for the tempest to cease,
for it was very furious."
I've been at sea in
some really foul weather,
but it's always been
on a modern boat.
And with that modern safety net that
we have, satellite phones,
satellite communication, satellite
GPS, even emergency beacons -
you press the button
and you can get some help.
Old boats like this, Magellan's
boats, they had none of that.
The sense of risk
must have been absolutely enormous.
On a ship like this, in big seas,
there's a lot of rolling going on.
They're quite rounded
these hulls, like an upturned shell
and they just roll a lot.
I mean, it's not bad weather
at the moment, heaven
knows what it'd be
like in a really big storm.
Magellan was sailing through some of
the most dangerous seas in the world.
It's a great day's sailing
for me, it's exciting,
but for Magellan's men
crossing the Atlantic,
conditions would have been much worse
than this - truly frightening.
It must have felt as if the storms
were never gonna end.
The ships were already showing signs of
wear and tear, they were getting battered.
In one particular storm, the wind was so
strong that, even with the sails rolled up,
the wind got in there
and ripped the sails to shreds.
Of course, Magellan was passionate
about this voyage, he's a driven man,
but the men were at
their wits end, exhausted
and the sense of
fear of the unknown.
It's no surprise to
me that they began
praying for some kind
of divine intervention.
And, you know, that's
exactly what they did get.
"During these storms, the body of St
Anselm approached us several times
"on a night which was very dark
in the time of bad weather.
"The said Saint appeared in the form of a
lighted torch at the height of the main top
"and remained there more than two hours
and a half, for the comfort of us all.
"For we were in tears, expecting
only the hour of death
"and when the holy light was about to leave
us, it was so bright in the eyes of all
"that we were for more than a quarter of
an hour as blind men calling for mercy."
This strange and dramatic phenomenon
is called St Anselm's or St Elmo's fire.
I have seen this phenomena. Bringing
boats back across the Atlantic,
I've seen this bright light
at the mast.
Really surprising,
thought it might be a little
flash, but it hangs
around for over a minute.
What actually happens
is in a big thunderstorm,
the clouds become
highly negatively charged
and, in the end, the
whole voltage tension adds
up to about 30,000 volts
per square centimeter.
And then it all discharges
in a spectacular fashion
from the ends of masts
and ends of pointy bits on a boat.
Now when these men saw this, they noticed
that it always came near the end of a storm
and it does, it always occurs
towards the end of a storm.
So, naturally, they would think, this is
a great sign, this is divine intervention.
SAILORS SHOUT
Divine intervention or not, these men
were at the end of their physical limits
and as any modern-day explorer
will tell you,
it's not the exhausted body that
gets you in the end, it's the mind.
This perceived visitation from a
saint would have a profound effect
and it would have pushed them on
through their ordeal.
Almost four months after
leaving Spain, the battered
fleet approached the
coast of South America.
They made landfall at
a wild bay near a place
that would one day
become Rio de Janeiro.
From here, they followed
the sweeping coast south
and along the way, Pigafetta recorded
many strange and wonderful things.
"There are an infinite
number of parrots.
"Also, some little capped monkeys,
having almost the appearance of a lion.
"Also flying fish, so many of them
that it seemed it was an island in the sea.
"And men and women who paint themselves
with fire all over their bodies and faces
"and eat the flesh
of their enemies."
Eventually, they reached
the very edge of the known world.
35 degrees south, as
far down the coast of
South America as any
westerner had ever been.
Evidence suggests this was where
Magellan expected to find the passage.
The coastline turned sharp west and
there seemed to be no land to the south.
"Which place was formally named
Cape St Mary
"and it was thought from thence
there was a passage to the Sea of Sur,
"the South Sea."
After 15 days of exploration,
the dreadful truth dawned.
This was not the fabled passage,
but a gigantic inlet
that stretched around 300 kilometers
inland and was almost 200 wide.
It was the mouth of the River Plate.
It was a disaster.
Magellan had sailed into a dead end.
Now his certainty about
the passage was shot to pieces.
But turning back was unthinkable.
He made an extraordinary decision - to
step over the edge of the known world.
To sail on where no other European
had gone before.
Blindly, he headed south along the
desolate coast that he named Patagonia,
into some of the wildest seas
in the world and into winter.
On the Nao Victoria, I
asked Enrique Barrigan
what it must have been
like for Magellan's men.
Enrique. How are you? Well.
What were conditions like
here on deck?
Well, now we are 20 people, but
at that time, there were 40 or 45.
Right. So there were
plenty of people and,
as you may know, we
have beds for all of us,
but they didn't have them.
They just had to find a place
on the deck to sleep.
Right out here on deck? 45 of 'em?
Sure. And we've been rolling, we've had
a fair bit of water across the deck here...
So imagine when there were storms
and bad weather,
the water comes in the whole time,
on the deck, always wet.
So imagine how it was, it was
really, really hard for them.
Wow.
And it was about to get even harder.
There are hundreds, if not thousands
of possible routes through.
I mean many of them would be
small inlets, some great rivers,
some huge blind bays and they
would all have to be checked out.
I can't imagine how hard it would
be in poor weather to get part way up
and turn these boats, which
aren't very maneuverable,
turn 'em around and
head them out to sea.
They continued south for three
months, with no sign of a way through.
Supplies were running low
and the days were growing shorter.
On March 31, 1520 just a few
days sailing from Antarctica,
they sought shelter
in a bay they called St Julian.
The men were cold,
hungry and exhausted
and morale had hit rock bottom.
When Magellan reduced rations,
it was the final blow.
His captains presented him with a
petition demanding to return to Spain.
This was not an option
for a man who had gambled
everything on finding the
passage through South America.
HE LAUGHS
Capitan?
The expedition
was now in the gravest jeopardy.
Magellan had lost
the hearts and minds of
some of his captains
and, therefore, his men.
The cold, the hunger, the lack of
faith in their cagey Captain General,
all added up
to just one thing - mutiny.
SAILORS SHOUT
One of the ringleaders was Gaspar
Casada, Captain of the Conception,
who promised the men they would return
to Spain once Magellan was out of the way.
Magellan was isolated.
He had to act quickly. Caballeros.
He dispatched his loyal master at
arms to one of the mutinous captains.
Capitan Mendoza, tengo un mensaje
para usted Del capitan general.
With a special message.
Es un pequeno mensaje.
Muy especial.
Ah!
The captain dispatched,
the leaderless crew quickly caved in.
Magellan took control of the ship and
then blocked the other ships from escaping
and from this position,
he was able to quell the mutiny.
But he had to reassert his authority
quickly and convincingly.
Perros portugueses, soltarme!
He made a brutal example
of the treacherous Captain Casada.
Portugueses...
Vuestras familias y vuestras casas
Se pudren en El fondo Del mar!
En El fondo Del mar!
There could be no doubt, the
Captain General was back in charge.
With the mutineers
put in their place, it
was time to try and
settle in for the winter.
An incredibly dismal experience.
Food
would have been extremely scarce.
I know what it's like - I've been short
on food on expeditions a few times.
One occasion of note, I remember
being high on a mountain in Alaska,
and food being so short
after many days,
we spent four days in an ice cave
living on soup made out of toothpaste.
Conditions became even worse.
One of the fleet, the Santiago
was smashed to pieces on the rocks,
but nothing seemed to sway Magellan
from his obsession.
After seven months
waiting out the winter, it was
finally time to move on and
look for the elusive passage.
The four surviving ships
pushed further south
along the uncharted
Patagonian coastline,
trying every possible inlet
without success.
Finally,
Magellan's men spotted a clue.
Whalebones. This was a great sign
as it indicated a possible
migration route through
to the open sea that
everybody hoped lay ahead.
"On the 21st of October, 1520
we found by a miracle, a strait,
which we called
The Cape Of The 11,000 Virgins.
After nearly a year, they'd found an inlet
and it reached deep into the interior.
And something even more exciting...
..the water tasted salty,
so it must mean that
somehow the inlet must
connect with another salt sea.
Hoping that this might,
at last, be the way
through to the East,
the whole fleet set off.
At the western end was a long
narrow passage leading to a bay
and another passage beyond that.
They headed on into the straits.
What they found was an extraordinary
maze of islands and potential dead ends.
"This strait was a circular
place, surrounded by mountains
"and to most of those in the ships,
it seemed that
"there was no way out of it.
Uno, dos, tres.
Uno dos, tres.
As the endless search
continued, Magellan's men became
convinced that this was
yet another hopeless quest.
Uno, dos, tres.
Uno dos, tres.
It was in these straits
that Magellan lost his
second ship, but this time
it wasn't due to weather.
The San Antonio headed back to Spain
in an act of rebellion.
It was a devastating blow.
The San Antonio was carrying
most of the provisions that Magellan
was relying on for the journey ahead.
He ordered the remaining three ships
to proceed northwest by west.
It was a terrifying
journey through a strait
we now know to be
530 kilometers long.
It took 38 frustrating
days of searching before
Magellan finally got the
news he'd been waiting for.
Capitan, Capitan!
Capitan!
Capitan!
Ahead was the open sea.
He had found the fabled passage.
"The Captain General wept for joy
and called it Cape Deseado,
"for we had been desiring it
for a very long time."
In that proud moment, Magellan
must have realized, without doubt,
he now stood shoulder
to shoulder with his great
boyhood heroes, Columbus
and Vasco da Gama.
His dreams had come true.
Even in this moment of personal
triumph, Magellan could hardly have
guessed at the historic significance
of finding the passage.
For 400 years, his route,
the Magellan Strait,
would be the major shipping route
through to the Pacific.
It was only bettered when the Panama
Canal was blasted out of the land in 1914.
It was an astonishing
discovery, but Magellan and his
men hoped it was the prelude
to something even greater -
the western route
to the riches of the Spice Islands.
On November 28th 1520,
Magellan led the fleet north.
The weather was good and the sea so calm,
he named it the Pacific, the peaceful sea.
The sky was huge
and the horizon stretched endlessly.
Even the sky at night was different.
These God-fearing sailors
wondered at the Southern
Cross and noticed something
strange in the heavens.
"There are several small stars, clustered
together in the manner of two clouds
"and in the middle of them are two stars
not very bright and they move slightly."
Nearly 400 years later,
these stellar clusters were
identified as two of the
closest galaxies to the earth.
The Magellanic clouds have
helped astronomers work out
the scale of the universe
and witness the death of stars.
On December 18 1520, the fleet turned
northwest into the heart of the Pacific.
Unknowingly, Magellan
had just made a serious error.
He thought it was within three days'
sailing of the Spice Islands,
but that belief was based on maps
of the then known world.
These were based on the work of the
second century scholar Ptolemy,
who estimated the circumference
of the earth to be 29,000 kilometers.
The Captain General was
about to discover the hard
way that Ptolemy was out
by over 11,000 kilometers.
This missing area, 28% of the world's
circumference, is the Pacific.
Magellan was leading his men
into a vast, empty ocean.
On the modern Nao
Victoria our captain, Jose, has
some idea of what that
journey must have been like.
You've crossed the Pacific many
times - you've crossed it on here.
You, of anybody, would
understand what Magellan's
men would have gone
through, to have entered
the biggest ocean in the world
and not known how big it was,
and just day after day after day
of uncertainty.
I can imagine how much they suffered
and what went through their minds.
Not knowing when
they were going to reach any land.
If they were going to reach
any land.
So it must have been very,
very tough on them and
probably the weaker
men must have felt that
their head was going
off and the lack of food...
The food diminishing,
scurvy setting in.
The water now seemed foul because
the wood contaminates the water.
It must have been very,
very hard for them,
but, obviously,
the command of Magellan is a very
strong man and very tough with the crews.
He probably kept
the whole thing going on.
Uno, dos, tres. Uno, dos, tres.
The weeks passed, the emaciated
crews began to starve again.
Their accounts make
disturbing reading.
"We ate the ox hides
which were under the mainyard
"so that the yard
should not break the rigging.
"And we ate old biscuits
turned to powder,
"all full of worms and stinking of
urine which the rats had made on it.
"And of the rats, which
were sold for half an
ecu apiece, some of
us could not get enough.
HE SINGS
"I believe that never more will any
man undertake to make such a voyage."
By late January 1521,
Magellan had led the fleet northwest
across thousands of kilometers
of open ocean, without relief.
"We saw no land,
except two small uninhabited islands
"where we found only birds and trees
"and there is no place for anchoring
because no bottom can be found."
Months later, with no land in sight,
even Magellan must have had doubts.
But almost five months and 20,000
kilometers after they exited the straits,
they finally made landfall, at about
ten degrees north of the equator,
in a place
we now call the Philippines.
In an astonishing feat of navigation,
Magellan had led the fleet to safety.
The Spice Islands were now no more
than a few days sail to the south.
It seemed his great gamble
would pay off.
The islands of the Philippines
must have looked like paradise.
There was fresh water,
lush rainforests filled with fruit
and the local people
seemed to welcome them.
Magellan set about
securing the route to the Spice
Islands by claiming
the Philippines for Spain.
His most effective tool
was Christianity.
He knew that to convince these
people to adopt this religion,
he had to persuade them
it was worth their while.
One of the arguments he used was of the
invincibility which would derive from it,
and this invincibility was demonstrated
by the strength of his armament.
The blast of the cannons terrified the
natives and gave a measure of his power.
When attempting and
succeeding in baptizing,
Christianizing, the
local inhabitants,
Magellan is at the same time ensuring
that through this religious conversion
they implicitly accept their status
as subordinate to the Spanish crown,
seen here as the ultimate symbol
of worldly authority
and religious reach.
Tight, structured framework with which
to live by. Oh, yes. Live by these rules.
Live by these rules, submit yourself to
these people and you will be invincible.
So would it have been perhaps like
a colonization?
The very beginnings,
the foundations of colonization.
It would have taken
many decades for the
following Spanish fleets
to effectively transform
the Philippines into
a Spanish colony, but
that was the foundation
upon which they built.
Confident of his faith and
his invincible weaponry,
the Captain General
made a fateful decision.
To show his support
for a local chief,
he decided to attack the
rival chief of Mactan Island,
Lapu-Lapu, who had refused to be
baptized into the Christian faith.
Aboard the Victoria, on
the evening before the
attack, his men were
relaxed and confident.
But, on Mactan Island, Lapu-Lapu was
taking Magellan's threats seriously.
He summoned his most ferocious
warriors and invoked the gods of war.
The events that followed
are replayed every year
in the place where Magellan
and Lapu-Lapu confronted each other.
It was a clash of cultures
and religion.
For Filipinos, it symbolizes
the struggle for independence.
Before the battle, Magellan sent
emissaries across these peaceful waters
to try to get Lapu-Lapu to submit
to Christianity and to Spanish rule.
Once more he refused.
And so at dawn on the 27th April
1521, Magellan and 50 of his men
arrived on the beach at Mactan to do battle
against Lapu-Lapu and 1,000 of his men.
Although he was heavily outnumbered,
Magellan felt certain of victory
because of his superior
Spanish weapons and his armour.
In fact, he was so confident
of victory that he'd given
a direct order to his other captains
to not get involved in the fighting.
But he'd made a fatal mistake.
He'd arrived at low
tide, which meant his
ships were right out
there in the deep water
and Magellan and his
men had had an exhausting
half-mile wade
through the shallows.
His cannon were out of range.
As the battle ensued,
Magellan's men soon started
running out of ammunition
and Lapu-Lapu's men surged forward.
They spotted Magellan.
"One of them with a
large javelin thrust it
into his left leg, whereby
he fell downward.
"On this, they all at once rushed on
him with lances of iron and of bamboo."
Magellan fought a brave fight,
he hung on for a long time.
Eventually, completely outnumbered,
he was just slaughtered.
"They slew our mirror, our light,
our comfort and our great guide."
Magellan never circumnavigated the globe,
he didn't even reach the Spice Islands.
His dreams ended here
in the Philippines.
This was a complete tragedy
which terminates everything, his
entire dream, his planning, his voyage,
all the dramas of the
navigation through the
various oceans, end
here, and end here totally.
So what do you think?
If Magellan had won this battle,
how would the expedition
have turned out in the end?
Had he not died and had he found the
Spice Islands, which were very near,
my guess is that he would have
come back the same way he went,
through the Pacific, which had been,
never been done before,
and it is most likely,
knowing the ocean,
that he might have lost
the entire fleet and himself,
and, with that, nothing would have
remained of this epic voyage.
Magellan's dreams may have died in
the Philippines, but his legacy lives on.
In this dusty little shrine, you
can still see the cross he raised,
so hopefully when he first
arrived on these islands.
It's one of the holiest relics in one of
the most Catholic countries in the world.
It might have been the only relic
of Magellan's voyage
if another man hadn't seized
the chance of fame and fortune.
Magellan's death could have spelled the end
for the expedition, but the remaining men
knew the Spice Islands were so close,
they could almost smell the spices.
Reduced to two ships, the survivors
set off to find the islands.
Taking command of the Victoria was a
popular new leader, Juan Sebastian Elcano.
Senores, a las Mollucas!
History was to deny him
his rightful role in this epic story.
Elcano brought good fortune, for, at
last, they sighted the Spice Islands.
The 28,000-kilometer
journey had cost the lives
of over 100 men, including
the Captain General,
but the surviving
crew finally reached the
Spice Islands and
realized Magellan's dream.
This is what it's all about, spices.
These are cloves? They
are the flowers of the
clove plant. They
don't look very familiar.
They are, we see them
more like this, the dried ones.
Smells just like my mum's apple pie.
Yes, they're aromatic. But, do
you know, I can't help but think,
Augusto, is that holding these in
my hand, seems hard to believe
that the men went to such risk
and pain and suffering
for something that seems,
to be honest, completely ordinary.
And how much would they have
been worth. I mean, pound for pound?
Well, a pound for a pound,
it could command a high price.
Imagine a clove tree
could produce only seven
pounds per tree and that
they still have to dry them
and therefore the dried ones
would be very expensive.
And in relation to gold?
How about that? Well, they'll be
worth weight more than gold itself.
So pound for pound... Pound for
pound, yes. Worth more than gold.
And a bag like that, excuse me,
that'd set a man up for life, right?
Yes.
Well, put like that, I guess
they don't seem quite so ordinary.
Elcano and his men understood the value of
the tonne of spices loaded onto each ship
and they knew that to make their fortunes,
they had to get them back to Spain.
The remaining two ships had to make
a choice,
between returning the way
they'd come, or continuing
west, taking their
chances in enemy waters.
One chose to go east
and the other west.
The Trinidad headed eastwards
across the Pacific,
but it didn't get far before
it fell into Portuguese hands.
The precious cargo was seized, the
ship burned and the crew thrown into jail.
Elcano sailed west on the Victoria.
Spain was about 20,000
kilometers away and the entire
route lay in the Portuguese
sphere of influence.
To avoid capture, he navigated
vast tracts of uncharted waters.
Two months, and almost 5,000 kilometers
later, they encountered terrible storms.
The storms those men went through
were so powerful
that it actually broke this mast
and, like everything
that broke on the ship,
it had to be repaired
with what they had at sea.
But not only that,
Elcano and his men began to run
dangerously low on rations again.
I can't imagine what it would be like
to work a ship like
this, which needs a lot
of manual labor, and
be that low on energy.
The starving men
began to develop scurvy.
"Above all our other misfortunes,
"the worst was that the gums of the
upper and lower teeth of our men
"swelled so much
that they could not eat.
"25 or 30 men fell sick,
of whom 19 died."
Scurvy is caused by a lack of vitamin
C and here was the terrible irony.
The crew were sitting on a cargo
of cloves and what they didn't know
was that it contained vitamin C
and this would have saved them.
As the ship headed
back to Spain, more than
half of them would die
of scurvy or starvation.
Elcano escaped the scurvy because
he ate spoonfuls of quince jelly.
Unknown to him, this contained enough
vitamin C to protect him from the disease.
It's probably what enabled
Pigafetta to keep writing his diary.
Without this, we would never have
known of Elcano's great feat of navigation.
He led the Victoria
across vast oceans,
past the Cape of Good Hope and the
Cape Verde Islands back to Spain.
Of the 241 men who began the journey,
only a handful returned with him.
They lived to tell the remarkable
tale of the Spanish sailor
who finished the journey Magellan
had started three years before.
Pigafetta.
Sevilla.
"On Monday 8 September 1522, we
cast anchor near the Mole of Seville
"and we were only 18 men, for the most
part sick, of the 60 who had left Molluca."
The Victoria became the first
ship to circumnavigate the globe.
It had turned what until
then was just pure theory -
that the earth was round -
into an indisputable fact.
Elcano was honored with a
special coat of arms, declaring
him to be the first man
to sail round the world.
Five centuries later, sailing round the
globe is still a remarkable achievement.
As the modern Victoria returns to Seville
at the end of its 40,000-kilometer journey,
its crew are greeted as
heroes after more than 500
days at sea on a journey
they will never forget.
I still can't believe that
we circumnavigate the whole world.
I cannot imagine right now, but I'm
sure it has changed completely my life.
A realization of my dreams
to the utmost.
The voyage of the original
Victoria may have made
history, but it didn't fulfill
the hopes of the crew.
They never made their fortunes.
The cargo of spices was sold
and the proceeds seized
by the King of Spain to cover
the loss of the rest of the fleet.
The chronicler, Pigafetta,
was snubbed by the
Spanish court and
returned to his native Italy.
His diaries remain the definitive
record of the great voyage.
Elcano attempted
a second circumnavigation
to claim the Spice Islands for Spain
four years later, but he didn't make it.
Crossing the Pacific,
he died of scurvy.
As for Ferdinand Magellan himself,
although he never completed
the voyage, the popular
perception is that he
was the first person to
circumnavigate the world.
Unless, that is, you go to Spain
and they'll tell you the first person
who sailed round the world
was Juan Sebastian Elcano.
But does it really matter?
After all, they're both great men.
Magellan had what it took to dream up
such a daring voyage and make it happen.
And Elcano had the strength
and tenacity to finish it.
They and the men who
sailed with them shared
one of the greatest
voyages of discovery.
The voyage that would define
the shape and size of our earth,
and its oceans and
change the geographical,
spiritual and political
landscape forever.