Conqueror of the seas; the story of Magellan

Like Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Stout Cortez, and all the rest of them, Magellan is straightforward only when looked at from the perspective of the "age of discoveries" topic in school history lessons. Portuguese explorer, first person to sail around the world, discovered — by an amazing

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coincidence — the Magellan Strait. Tick, done that, who's next.

But of course he was actually working for the King of Spain (Emperor Charles V), having fallen out with his own king. What's more, the whole project was said to be based on a map that was a Portuguese state secret (Hugh Thomas and other later authors don't believe this map ever existed, but Zweig accepts it, with reservations), so King Manuel was not very happy with Magellan.

Magellan didn't sail round the world himself, of course. After guiding his fleet safely down the South American coast, surviving an attempted mutiny, and finding the elusive straits, he got them across the Pacific to the Philippines in a voyage where no-one knew how far they still had to go. But once there, he was killed in a typical conquistador stunt, whilst intervening unnecessarily in a local war between islands to demonstrate European military superiority. Only one of his five ships made it back to Seville, commanded by Juan Sebastian de Elcano and with a mere eighteen survivors on board out of the 256 men who set off. But that ship was carrying more than enough spices to pay off the debts of the whole expedition.

As Zweig makes clear, Magellan's legacy was more psychological than practical. His expedition made it clear to Europeans that the roundness of the world was not just a geometric abstraction, but had actual consequences and opportunities for trade. However, it soon became apparent that the passage through the straits was far too demanding and dangerous for regular use by sailing ships of the time — even fifty years later, Drake lost two of his three ships while passing through the straits, and there was no route for regular traffic round the southern tip of the Americas until Willem Schouten sailed round Cape Horn in 1616, nearly a century after Magellan.

Zweig got interested in Magellan through a book he found in the ship's library on his first trip to Buenos Aires and Rio for a PEN conference in 1936. He seems to have done some research in those cities and in Lisbon (Seville was not really an option in the late thirties...), but the book was mostly written in the British Museum library, at the same time as a novel and an essay collection (...and I get worried if I'm reading more than two books at the same time!). The German publication ban seems to have pushed Zweig's normal workaholic state into overdrive. It's a lively, very readable book, and Zweig is conscientious about separating facts from inferences, but in the end we don't really know much about Magellan the person. Very little of his own writing survives, and the only complete first-hand account of the trip is an edited and highly romantic version Magellan's Italian secretary Antonio Pigafetta produced for publication from his diaries. We're left with Magellan as a very competent man, supremely calm in a crisis, but not very good at winning hearts and minds, especially among his officers. Zweig does his best with what he could find.

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