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The Most Famous Explorer you Never Heard of




Do you have an Elcano GPS device? Perhaps you have looked up at the night sky (in the southern hemisphere) and seen the Elcanonic clouds? There are lots of things named after Ferdinand Magellan. Not many things are named after Juan Sebastian de Elcano. Elcano completed the first circumnavigation of the Earth. What? You heard that was Magellan? No. Magellan did not. He died in the Philippines. He never made it all the way around. Elcano took command of the expedition after Magellan died and he and the survivors made it home. Well, it wasn’t quite that simple . . .  


Magellan gets credit for the expedition because he started it. He convinced the king of Spain that he could get to the Indies by sailing west (something Columbus had tried and failed to do). He thought that the land mass south of the Caribbean (South America) was really a projection of Asia. Just sail around that and boom, you are in the spice islands! All they had to do was go around the corner from where Columbus went. At this point Spain had no access to the Spice Islands. The eastern route was controlled by Portugal. One can imagine the king drooling. He gave Magellan five ships, provisions, and more than 200 men. How could they go wrong? This was going to be a piece of cake. 


Magellan, like Columbus, vastly underestimated the size of the Earth. There were lots of calculations floating around arguing about how big the Earth was. They varied widely. Magellan only chose to listen to the ones that said what he wanted to hear. To say the Magellan expedition encountered problems would be like saying The Chernobyl Nuclear power plant had a slight glitch. They reached the coast of South America without incident and followed the coastline south. They stopped in Patagonia for a while so Magellan could claim the new land for Spain. But “a while” turned into five months. This was not popular with the crew. Indeed, a mutiny was planned, But Magellan got wind of it and put it down before it got started. One ship was sent off to look for a passage west. It wrecked. Most of the crew and cargo were saved, but now they were down to four ships. Two of his ships finally found the passage, but as the expedition forged west, one of the ships slipped away and high-tailed it for Spain. Now they were down to three ships. In November 1520, the little fleet emerged from the straight into the Pacific Ocean (or South Sea). They had to be close to Asia now right? By now Magellan realized that there was an ocean between the American land mass and Asia, but they could not conceive how vast it was. They headed northwest as provisions ran out and they made do with what they could (you don't want to know). Men started dying of scurvy. They finally made it to Guam where they could reprovision and then to the Philippines. Magellan chose to stay in the Philippines for a while, apparently to lay claim on it for Spain. Again, this was not popular with his crew who wanted to get loaded up with spices and get home. Magellan decided to “conquer” a neighboring island. He and his men went up against a vastly superior force of natives, and he was killed by his own hubris (although, it is not entirely certain whether he was killed by the natives or by his own men). After Magellan’s death the crew selected two commanders, Barbosa and Serrao. These two both died a few days later in another skirmish. After all this, they no longer had enough men to run three ships. They transferred men and supplies and burned the Concepcion. Now they were down to two ships. Joao Carvalho was now named the leader. 


So where in all this was Elcano? Elcano had participated in the failed mutiny back in Patagonia. Magellan had executed some of the mutineers, but Elcano was one of the ones he spared. Over the ensuing months Elcano had gradually worked his way back into the good graces of the expedition. The piracy and other tactics of Carvalho did not sit well with the crew and he was removed from leadership. Gonzalo de Espinosa was given command of the Trinidad. Command of the Victoria went to Elcano. The ships travelled on through a few more adventures and finally more than two years since they left Spain, they reached their destination: the Moluccas, the Spice Islands. As they began trading for spice, they learned that the king of Portugal had put a price on their heads. Magellan, a Portuguese, had betrayed his nation by leading a spanish expedition to steal their spice! Realizing that they were more than halfway around the world, they decided to sail for Spain to the west hoping to bypass the Portuguese fleet. When the expedition began, there was no intention of circumnavigating the Earth, but now they were set on that path. But then the Trinidad sprung a leak. No one could fix it. The Trinidad had to stay behind in the Moluccas along with her men including Espinosa and Carvalho and hope to make repairs. Now there was one ship left: the Victoria. The Victoria had troubles of her own. They had to stop several places for repairs and had to beg, borrow and steal food. Finally, on September 6th, 1522, they limped back to Spain, almost exactly three years after departing.


 All in all, it was a disastrous expedition. Of the five ships that sailed from Spain, only one made it back. Of the 270 men who set sail from Spain, only 18 made it back. Yet Elcano and 17 other men were the first people to circumnavigate the Earth. For the next hundred years, globes, maps and artwork frequently displayed the names and/or faces of famous explorers, Magellan among them, but almost never Elcano. He should get credit as a survivor if for nothing else. 


(My novel Star Liner, is now available in paperback or as an e-book through Amazon, or the other usual online sources)

Star Liner

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