Posted on 08/23/2024 7:15:48 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Five hundred years ago, no one suspected the 16th-century vessel the Nao Victoria would become the stuff of legend. In 1519, a Portuguese consul called the Spanish carrack “very old and patched up” and unfit to even “sail … to the Canaries.” Nevertheless, the Nao Victoria was chosen for a five-ship expedition, crewed by 270 men, that would come to be known as one of the most significant journeys in the history of human exploration.
The captain of this unprecedented adventure was Portuguese explorer Fernão de Magalhães, anglicized Ferdinand Magellan. On September 20, 1519, he set sail aboard the flagship Trinidad from Sanlúcar de Barrameda in southern Spain, with an intended destination of the present-day Maluku Islands. Three years and tens of thousands of miles later, the “very old and patched up” Nao Victoria was the journey’s sole surviving ship — and Magellan wasn’t on board.
Magellan had died in a skirmish in the Philippines in 1521. It was Juan Sebastián Elcano, another mariner on the expedition, who brought the Nao Victoria back to its home port, but Elcano wasn’t the first person to circumnavigate the globe either. Historians believe that honor belongs to an enslaved person named Enrique, whom Magellan seized during the Portuguese conquest of Malacca (in present-day Malaysia) in 1511.
Enrique served as an interpreter during the historic journey for eight years after his capture, but he abandoned the mission after Magellan’s death.
As luck would have it, Enrique was only a little over 1,500 miles from his native land of Malacca. If Enrique found his way home before September 6, 1522 (when the 18 men aboard the Nao Victoria made it home to Spain), he’d officially be the first person to ever circumnavigate the globe — but we’ll likely never know for sure.
That book’s been discussed plenty. :^) It’s a crock, imho. I enjoyed one of his books, he digs up references and really does a lot of digging. But his writing style (again, imho) is along the lines of the old saying, when your only tool is a hammer every problem looks like a nail.
Three related keywords, sorted, duplicates out, a little editing:
I’m gonna forget that I watched that video to the end and I’m not gonna ask how you found it.......LOL!
Thank you for another useful list of research links, will copy for file. Actually I thought the level of detail in both the many pieces of information, and the way the mariner author thought through is search was rather convincing.
Gavin Menzes wrote a follow-up book called 1434. Apparently after 11 years China settled down, and Chinese ships ended up in the Mediterranean, with a visit to Florence, Italy. There they presented interesting material to the Pope, which apparently stimulated a flood of new intellectual activities and science in Europe. It seems Columbus and Magellan probably knew about some of this or had access to useful maps. Keeping maps secret was very important to those countries like Spain, Portugal, etc. who were all interested in learning new places to trade before the other guy. Now I have to check if this was before or after Marco Polo, and whether they might have brought plague ridden rats to Europe. History can be so much fun
We know that the Vikings reached the North American mainland, though they didn’t stick. I don’t know if it’s definitively established that Europeans were fishing the Grand Banks off Newfoundland in the late medieval period, but I gather that this is suspected. There is apparently some record of a few Chinese men visiting Imperial Rome, though I don’t know more than that. It’s hard to believe that at least a few European merchants didn’t reach the Far East in antiquity a thousand years before Marco Polo, but as far as I know, they left no record of it. The Spice Road is ancient, and control of the Black Sea was important for more than access to grain from the steppes.
What I have no idea about is the exploration literature from the Arab world, especially the far eastern reaches of Persia, and from the Indian subcontinent. The merchants from those regions were the middlemen in the trade between the Far East and Europe. Most of this trade involved selling to various intermediaries rather than through trips, but at least a few of them surely must have made round trips. I don’t know if any records of this remain.
And then there’s the settlement of virtually all the habitable islands of the Pacific. Thor Heyerdahl wasn’t the first to guy to make the trip. Some speculators have invested in the theory that Polynesians may have reached the American mainland. I don’t know whether there is any evidence of this, but it is certainly possible.
The question in all of this is secret or lost knowledge.
My wife is from Cebu City, Philippines. Our 30th wedding anniversary is next January. This singer and his song are well known in the Philippines.
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