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.

The outstanding popular history of recent times in English is Laurence Bergreen’s 2003 sweeping, popular account Over the Edge of the World. It is in the vein of a book currently atop the best seller lists, David Grann’s The Wager, another extraordinary account of “shipwreck, mutiny and murder,” a difference being the world-altering historical significance of the Magellan expedition.

Among Bergreen’s many sources is an earlier English language book, Tim Joyner’s 1992 Magellan. Joyner, now deceased, was a fisheries biologist who, like me, became possessed by the Magellan story. He proceeded to devote a couple of decades to research and writing a much more scholarly work than Bergreen’s that is nonetheless an entertaining read. Some professional historians have denigrated Joyner by sneering at his non-professional status, but he nonetheless produced a meticulous work of deeply researched history, bolstered by the notes, appendices, crew biographies, ship’s manifests, diagrams, dates, navigational coordinates, and maps that Bergreen’s book lacks.

Most recently, last year – notably the 500^th anniversary of the completion of the voyage – Notre Dame historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto published Straits, subtitled “Beyond the Myth of Magellan.” In that subtitle he announces his purpose, which is at the heart of much controversy – the character of Ferdinand Magellan.

True devotees of Stephan Zweig know that he, too, produced a popular biography of Magellan, Conqueror of the Seas, in 1938. Joyner, however, calls it a “highly romanticized psycho-biography” that “makes interesting reading but is not suitable for historical study.”

On the other hand, reaching back to the nineteenth century, there are multiple Spanish and Portuguese language historical studies, some crucial works never translated into English. Among the outstanding Spanish histories is Chilean Jose Toribio Medina’s El Descubriomiento del Oceano Pacifico, much relied upon by others, including Bergreen and Joyner.

Prior to these, of course, are the primary sources beginning with eyewitness accounts, contemporaneous and later-recorded, by survivors and not, of the expedition and its almost countless travails and disasters. These include pilot’s logs and personal journals, as well as the interviews taken of the survivors by Maximilianus Transylvanus, commissioned by King Charles to make a report upon their return.

Primary among the eyewitness accounts, the most substantial and complete by far (but not complete – there is no account of the mutiny!) is the remarkable journal of Magellan acolyte Antonio Pigafetta, a young Venetian courtier, secretary to the ambassador to the Spanish king’s court, who lobbied hard to be accepted into the expedition as a supernumerary. Pigafetta revealed himself to be a fastidious journalist (except for the mutiny), a skilled amateur linguist, botanist, and zoologist and a proto anthropologist. And as the historiographic fates would have it, the “journalist” numbered among those ghostly 18 who completed the voyage.

Surrounding the expedition, before and after, exist, too, the astonishing records of the General Archive of the Indies, the Spanish Crown’s complete documentary history of its colonial administration of New World explorations, conquests, and commerce: 80 million pages in 43,000 volumes.

General Archive of the Indies in Seville, Spain (via Wikipedia)

But what of me?

Whatever my irrepressible, ultra-deep-water historical immersions, I am not a historian and the histories of this event have already been written. They’re history.

I am a fictionist, an imaginer of the unrecorded real.

AJA