The Magellanic Diaries 2

History is History

Anonymous 16th or 17th century portrait of Ferdinand Magellan (There are no known portraits from life.)

Once I stumbled upon the Magellan story (which I explain somewhere in the middle, here), I couldn’t stop looking more closely into it. There were always deeper layers, always further levels of the startling and revelatory, reconfigured perception and reoriented understanding, and the layers drew me to dig into them, to still more layers beneath – possessed, as I became both by the story and the process of unearthing it. There arose then the question, also, of what it was.

Moving beyond the discoverable online sources, many of them obscure and slight, excavated by persistent neuronal and digital shovel and spade work, digging, digging, dusting, dusting – ah, those were his parents’ names, they are recorded, that’s what became of him, he didn’t disappear from earthly annals – I moved on to secondary and primary sources.