Straits

Against contemporary stereotypes that associate the name Ferdinand Magellan with success in a variety of endeavors, Fernández-Armesto insists that the Magellan expedition was an utter failure, doomed from the start and entirely unprofitable. To make his case, he toggles between two forms of historical writing that might seem incompatible. On the one hand, he tells gripping stories and paints vivid pictures of, for instance, the Strait of Magellan and the daunting challenges it poses to sailing vessels (188–190). On the other hand, he brings his sources to the fore, assesses their strengths and limitations, and explains the choices that he has made in distilling the truth from texts often designed to occlude or distort it.Generally speaking, Fernández-Armesto tends to believe Magellan’s detractors, the fellow officers and seamen who were deposed at various moments after returning to Spain (some of them after abandoning the voyage before it had reached the Pacific). He treats the chronicle of Antonio de Pigafetta with the suspicion it deserves as a piece of pro-Magellan propaganda. The result of this successful fusion between good storytelling, vivid description, and transparency regarding the use of sources is a book that should appeal to both the general reader and the professional historian.Magellan enthusiasts will be fascinated by the author’s assessment of numerous persistent controversies, such as the degree to which the explorer’s plans were influenced by the opinions of his friend Francisco Serrão or the chain of events that led to the executions at Port St. Julian. Yet, to my mind, two quite convincing arguments distinguish this account of the Magellan expedition from others. Both have to do with the motivations of the man whose psyche Fernández-Armesto works so hard to plumb. According to him, Magellan’s true destination was never the Moluccas but the islands to their north (eventually christened the Philippines), which were rumored to be rich in gold. Although there is no smoking gun to confirm this assertion, it explains a variety of mysteries in the historical record and accounts for Magellan’s extra-official efforts to establish a colonial state in the islands rather than head directly to the Moluccas as instructed.Although the Philippines were Magellan’s true destination, Fernández-Armesto further argues, the ethos imbued from romances of chivalry was among the forces that animated him. Abandoning easy generalizations about the role of chivalric literature in shaping the imaginations of conquistadors, Fernández-Armesto identifies the book that was most likely Magellan’s favorite and uses it to explain the strange decisions that the explorer took in the battle that lead to his death (256–268).At the end of the book, Fernández-Armesto identifies chivalric romance as one of the textual depositories of the “exploring spirit” of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries (288–289). This seems to be an attempt to name the cultural forces that, as the author has argued elsewhere, counted among the drivers of European expansion in its early years. But, coming as it does in the context of a disgruntled assessment of contemporary statue-bashing as moral anachronism, the remark looks like a defense of exactly the sort of romantic notions that Fernández-Armesto has done so much to tear down, in this book and many others. The context in which the point is made seems to obscure what the author may be trying to say.Also regrettable is the glaring misidentification of Figure 5 as an image drawn from the work of Levinus Hulsius, when it is in fact a detail from the 1562 map of America by Diego Gutiérrez. Most importantly, however, the author’s uncompromising insistence on the failure of the Magellan expedition makes it difficult for us to understand how or why the Spanish crown could choose to dispatch a follow-up expedition piloted by one of the Magellan survivors that followed the route that Magellan pioneered. The argument refuses to give any credence to the claim advanced by Chaplin and others that the first circumnavigation of the Earth exercised a profound impact on the period’s “planetary consciousness.” The author’s reasons for doing so are quite personal, as he himself admits, but they might also represent a minority view (263–265). These shortcomings, however, should not deter readers from diving into this book, which is certain to stand the test of time as a successful account of a monumental failure

Ancient history · Art · Biology · Botany · Fern · Mythology · Classics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Geology · History