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Left: Mandeville; right: travelers approach the town dock at Jaffa |
A handful of medieval travelogues were the closest thing Ferdinand Magellan had to a travel guide when he sought a westward route to Asia—accounts credited to Marco Polo, John Mandeville, and others, and those all echoed the same monsters and myths repeated since the time of Pliny the Elder, the Roman author whose Naturalis Historiae helped inspire the encyclopedia.
It gets little mention today, but The Travels of Sir John Mandeville was a world atlas of sorts in medieval Europe, essential reading for navigators and explorers. The accounts became circulated widely in Europe in the fourteenth century. They detail travels in North Africa and the Middle East, and in India, China, and even the Malay Peninsula—which would have been of particular interest to Ferdinand Magellan, and also Enrique of Malacca, Magellan’s interpreter-slave.
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The departure of Odoric. |
The Mandeville travelogue borrows directly from Odoric, but often sensationalizes Odoric’s accounts.
One gem among Mandeville’s wild tales turned out to predict what would take place two centuries later:
And therefore hath it befallen many times of one thing that I have heard counted when I was young, how a worthy man departed some-time from our countries for to go search the world. And so he passed India and the isles beyond India, where be more than 5000 isles.
And so long he went by sea and land, and so environed the world by many seasons, that he found an isle where he heard speak his own language, calling on oxen in the plough, such words as men speak to beasts in his own country whereof he had great marvel, for he knew not how it might be.
But I say, that he had gone so long by land and by sea, that he had environed all the earth …
Two hundred years after Mandeville wrote this, it happened. Ferdinand Magellan in his early years traveled eastward to Asia, around the Cape of Good Hope. He was with the Portuguese fleet that sacked Malacca, a regional trade hub for merchants from China, Persia, Arabia, and India.
While there, Magellan “captured” a slave he christened Enrique, and in 1512-13, sailing with Magellan and the Portuguese, Enrique began what would become the first circling of the earth.
He traveled with Magellan first back to Portugal and then to Castile. From there, he joined Magellan on the Armada de Molucca, the fleet that found the strait and crossed the Pacific.
After three months at sea, with many crew dead of starvation and scurvy, the remaining three ships reached Limasawa Island (modern-day Philippines) on March 28, 1521.
Enrique had gone in the opposite direction of Mandeville’s traveler, but he had traveled in one direction so far that he circled the earth and came to "an isle where he heard speak his own language." Enrique of Malacca had completed at minimum a linguistic circumnavigation.
(C) 2021 by John Sailors. All rights reserved.
Ferdinand Magellan’s historic journey swept up several unlikely travelers along the way, among them a seven-year-old boy at Guanabara Bay (Rio de Janeiro). Half-Portuguese, half-Tupi Indian, he is remembered in history as Joãozito Lopes Carvalho. The young boy became the first native of Brazil and likely all of South America to cross the Pacific Ocean—on a year-and-a-half journey that for him ended at Brunei five hundred years ago this summer.
Antonio Pigafetta's account of the Magellan-Elcano voyage gives us both first-hand historical detail and color—the human aspects of the journey. The Italian scholar learned all he could about the cultures that Magellan's fleet encountered, even sitting down and recording samples of languages.
An excellent example of Pigafetta's curiosity and fascination is his description of the coconut and the palm tree, which he learned about soon after the fleet's arrival in the Philippines. Like the pineapple Magellan tried in Rio, the coconut was an unknown. "Cocoanuts are the fruit of the palmtree. Just as we have bread, wine, oil, and milk, so those people get everything from that tree. Read more.
A handful of medieval travelogues were the closest thing Ferdinand Magellan had to a travel guide when he sought a westward route to Asia—accounts credited to Marco Polo, John Mandeville, and others, and those all echoed the same monsters and myths repeated since the time of Pliny the Elder, the Roman author whose Naturalis Historiae helped inspire the encyclopedia.
It gets little mention today, but The Travels of Sir John Mandeville was a world atlas of sorts in medieval Europe, essential reading for navigators and explorers. The accounts became circulated widely in Europe in the fourteenth century. They detail travels in North Africa and the Middle East, and in India, China, and even the Malay Peninsula—which would have been of particular interest to Ferdinand Magellan, and also Enrique of Malacca, Magellan’s interpreter-slave. Read more.
Reni Roxas and Marc Singer brought the story of Enrique to life for children in First Around the Globe: The Story of Enrique. Twenty years on they released this anniversary edition in 2017 from Tahanan Books, Manila. Read more.
On March 16, 1521, Magellan and his crew reached the Philippines, where they would finally be able to recover after three months crossing the Pacific. They were unable to stop long at Guam—their encounter with the Chamorros they met there did not go well, as seen in their sendoff. As they were departing, more than a hundred of the Chamorros’ outrigger canoes followed for more than a league.
- EnriqueOfMalacca.com
- Enrique of Malacca on Twitter
- Enrique of Malacca on Facebook
- John Sailors / Enrique on Medium
- And, yes, Enrique might be 500 years old, but he was known as a kid, so of course he's now on Instagram too.