Cfive sailboats and 237 crew members left Seville on September 20, 1519. When they returned to Spain three years later, there were only eighteen sailors left, in one ship, and had lost their captain, the Portuguese Fernand de Magellan. Their precious cargo – 26 tons of cloves – could barely cover the costs of this disastrous journey. A spectacular failure on paper, Magellan’s expedition was nonetheless a maritime achievement: the first circumnavigation of the world by sea…
Unfortunately, history does not like antiheroes. Now if we assume that Magellan died before he reached the Maluku islands as he had promised the King of Spain, and that he, like his living companions, did not circumnavigate the globe, then it is one, and of a sublime kind. The Portuguese considered him a traitor. The Spanish were such a failure. “He only has one statue in Portugal, there is not one in Spain, because Magellan does not represent the national narrative,” regrets Michel Chandeigne, writer, under the pseudonym Xavier de Castro, for the reference work on this trip.
One ocean
Michel Chandeigne is the scientific advisor for the series Magellan’s Incredible Journeyillustrated by designer Ugo Bienvenu. The series has now been turned into an exhibition by the National Maritime Museum, which projects Bienvenu’s drawings – including many unused rush drawings – in a highly effective immersive scenography. It all started with a map, a world split in two that belonged to the two great maritime powers of the time: the land found to the east of this arbitrary line belonged to Portugal, to the west to Spain. But the route, to the antipodes, is unclear.
From then on, Magellan made a crazy bet to find a way across the American continent to reach Asia, with the aim of proving that the Maluku islands and their coveted spices belonged to the Spanish empire. Guided by the story of the Italian Antonio Pigafetta, who started out as a chronicler of the expedition, visitors to the exhibition embark on an extraordinary journey with the fleet. The supply of food and goods loaded on ships departing from Seville alone is dizzying: 7,000 liters of oil, 1,850 hectoliters of wine, 10,000 fish hooks…
Everything was carefully planned, but nothing went according to plan. For after its relentless descent in the Atlantic, the fleet entered territory never before sailed by Europeans, a world without maps, in which there was no guarantee that it offered a passage west. From then on, storms, shipwrecks and human uprisings followed each other until the much-anticipated crossing of the straits in the fall of 1520: only three sailboats remained to enter the sea that Magellan called “the Pacific”, sailing 105 days without stopping and finally arriving, in the spring of 1521, in the Philippines. And it was there, during a clash with the native population, that Magellan died on April 27.
To find
Kangaroo today
Answer
“His body was never found, and his death remains an enigmaexplained Michel Chandeigne. He deviated from the royal prohibition against fighting, perhaps because he later understood his mistake: the Moluccans were indeed Portuguese. Better to perish with weapons in hand than to suffer the humiliation that awaited him in Spain. » However, it is to him, an extraordinary antihero, and to the eighteen survivors of the expedition, that we owe the greatest discovery in maritime epic: in the world, there is only one ocean…
“Magellan, the voyage that changed the world”, at the National Maritime Museum, Paris, to 1uh Line up. 1. “ Magellan’s Voyages (1519-1522). Antonio Pigafetta relationship & other testimonies »by Xavier de Castro (Chandeigne & Lima, 1,088 pp., €59).
