Ferdinand Magellan sets sail on the first successful journey to circumnavigate the globe - September 20th, 1519

On this day in 1519, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan set sail with a crew of 270 sailors.on what would ultimately become the first successful voyage around the world.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to This Day in History Class,
a show that proves history waits for no one. I'm
Gabe Bluesier, and today we're exploring the first successful trip
around the world, including who may deserve credit for it

(00:22):
and who definitely doesn't. The day was September fifteen, nineteen.
Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan set sail with a crew of
two hundred and seventy sailors on what would ultimately become

(00:46):
the first successful voyage around the world. However, there are
some important caveats to this story to keep in mind.
For one thing, the main concern of Magellan and his
crew wasn't to make history by circumnavigating the globe. The
real goal of their expedition was to find a westward

(01:08):
route to the Moluccu Islands of modern Indonesia, where they
planned to pillage a fortune's worth of exotic spices. The
other thing worth clarifying is that only some of the
crew managed to sail around the entire globe. The vast majority,
including Magellan himself, did not survive the return trip. But

(01:30):
before we get to the end of the journey, let's
talk a little about how it began. Magellan was born
to a noble Portuguese family in fourteen eighty. In his youth,
he served in the Royal court as a page to
Queen Consort Eleanor and King Manuel the First. At the time,
European aristocrats were enamored with the taste of foreign spices

(01:54):
like nutmeg, cloves, and mace. These new lucrative imports sparked
a needed competition between Portugal and Spain to see who
could discover and claim the best trade routes to the
so called Spice Islands. In fifteen o five, when he
was twenty five years old, Magellan joined a Portuguese military

(02:15):
fleet that was bound for India. Over the next decade,
Magellan would travel to Malaysia, Indonesia, and Morocco as well,
and along the way he learned the basics of navigation
and fought in several naval battles with Spain for control
of routes along the Indian Ocean. In fifteen thirteen, while
fighting Moorish forces in Morocco, Magellan sustained a leg wound

(02:39):
that would leave him with a limp for the rest
of his life. Although he had made a name for
himself in battle. Magellan was soon accused of illegal trading
with the very people he was fighting against. The accusations
were largely unfounded, but they were enough to ruin his
reputation in Portugal and sour his relationship with King may

(03:00):
Well the First. Finally, in fifteen seventeen, after being dismissed
from service to his home country, Magellan joined the competition
and pledged his allegiance to Spain. By that time, Portugal
had gotten the upper hand in the Spice War. It
controlled access to the primary trade routes that led east

(03:20):
from Europe to Indonesia by going around Africa's Cape of
Good Hope. Spain was quickly being boxed out of the
spice trade, but Magellan thought he had a solution. He
went to the King of Spain, Charles the Fifth, and
suggested sailing in the opposite direction, west rather than east.
Magellan believed that going west would lead them to a

(03:42):
strait that was rumored to run through South America. King
Charles was thrilled at the prospect of sticking it to
the Portuguese and agreed to finance a five ship voyage
in search of a westward route to the Spice Islands.
Most people thought the voyage was doomed from the start,
largely on account of all those sea monsters that were

(04:03):
sure to be lurking in the uncharted waters. But one
member of Magellan's crew bolstered confidence in the mission. Eight
years earlier, while helping to invade the Malaysian port city
of Malacca, Magellan took possession of an enslaved man named Enrique.
He was fluent in the Malay language, which made him

(04:24):
an ideal interpreter, and King Charles felt much better about
funding the voyage knowing that Enrique would be going along
to translate. As for the rest of the crew, they
inspired less confidence. Most Spanish sailors had refused to join
an expedition led by a Portuguese man, so instead Magellan

(04:44):
was forced to settle for less experienced crewmen. Many of
them were criminals loaned from prisons, and others joined mainly
as a way to avoid their debt collectors. As you
might expect, the unsavory crew caused some problems for Magellan.
In March of fifteen, twenty six months after the voyage began,

(05:05):
three of his captains incited a mutiny and tried to
kill him. Instead, Magellan killed them, and to send a
message to the rest of the crew, he had the
bodies drawn, quartered and impaled on spikes on the shore
of Argentina. After that cheery interlude, the five ships continued
their voyage across the Pacific Ocean, dealing with scurvy and

(05:28):
starvation along the way, and stopping off briefly in Guam
to massacre indigenous people. One month later, the crew reached
the Philippines, where they were shocked to learn that Enrique
could understand and speak the local language. Historians suggest that
Enrique may have been raised there in the central Philippines

(05:49):
before being sold into slavery in Sumatra and eventually taken
to Malacca, where he was bought by Magellan. This raises
a very interesting possibility, but we'll get back to that
in just a minute. With Enrique acting as interpreter, Magellan
decided to claim the Philippines on behalf of Spain. He
demanded the native people to convert to Christianity and wound

(06:12):
up starting an unnecessary war between those who were willing
to do so and those who weren't. On April fifty one,
this rash act of colonization backfired when Magellan was killed
by a poison arrow while attacking a chieftain who opposed
his rule. He never made it to the Spice Islands,

(06:33):
and it was his own fault. After Magellan's death, his
crew continued on and eventually made it to the Maluku
Islands in November. Off in September of the next year,
the expedition finally returned to Spain with three hundred and
eighty one sacks of clothes to show for their trouble.

(06:54):
In total, they had traveled more than sixty thousand miles
round trip, losing four out of five ships and of
the crew in the process. Still, the survivors had proven
that it was possible to circumnavigate the globe, and the
new routes they had charted would soon pave the way
for European colonization of the New World, for better or worse. Okay, so,

(07:18):
who was the first person to sail around the entire world?
There are actually a few options. The most obvious would
be the surviving crew members who actually completed the voyage
and made it back to Spain. In fact, the captain
of the one remaining ship, a man named Juan Sebastian
Delcano was given credit for the first circumnavigation by the

(07:40):
Spanish crown. The other possibility involves the expeditions interpreter Enrique.
If historians are correct and he was raised in the
Central Philippines before his enslavement, that would make him the
first person to circumnavigate the globe, beating the rest of
the crew by well over a year. Either way, the

(08:02):
one thing we know for sure is it definitely wasn't Magellan.
I'm Gabe Louzier and hopefully you now know a little
more about history today than you did yesterday. Also, we've
made a slight adjustment to our social media handles in
order to get them up and running again, So from
now on you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and

(08:24):
Instagram at t d I HC Show, and if you
have any Enrique fan fiction you'd like to share, you
can send it my way at this Day at I
heeart media dot com. Thanks to Chandler May's for producing
the show, and thank you for listening. I'll see you
back here again tomorrow for another Day in History Class.

(08:56):
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