The Life and Legacy of Ferdinand Magellan

Ferdinand Magellan, known in his native Portugal as Fernão de Magalhães and in Spain, where he moved later in life, as Fernando de Magallanes, was unquestionably one of the more remarkable figures of the so-called Age of Discovery, a period in which Europeans spread their political and commercial influence around the globe. Accordingly, his name is often invoked alongside that of Columbus, but the nature of his achievements has sometimes been misunderstood. Magellan has sometimes been credited with "proving the world was round," since he and his crew were the first Europeans to reach Asia via a westward route. But such a claim is based on a popular misconception, referred to by historian Jeffrey Burton Russell as the "myth of the flat earth": the belief that medieval Europe had erroneously believed the earth was flat. In reality, essentially no educated Europeans of the late 15th and early 16th centuries doubted the spherical shape of the earth, which had been persuasively established by the scientists of ancient Greece - even down to Eratosthenes's relatively accurate measurement of its circumference in the third century B.C. It is also not quite true that Magellan himself circumnavigated the globe - in fact, he died in combat in the Philippines, leaving his surviving crew to complete the voyage. It is, on the other hand, certainly the case that Magellan was one of the most accomplished navigators of his time, and that he crucially charted territories previously unexplored by Europeans.

Perhaps the most important fact about Magellan, though, is that he succeeded precisely where Christopher Columbus before him had failed. While Columbus has gone down in history as the discoverer of America (for Europeans), finding a new continent was never his true goal: in fact, America came into Columbus's life as an unanticipated and troublesome obstacle on his planned journey to Asia. He had staked his career and his nautical reputation on the theory that the breadth of the body of water separating Europe from Asia was far less than most geographers had predicted. While most thought that a ship heading west toward Asia would run out of supplies long before arriving. As it turned out, Columbus was wrong and his detractors were right: the figure for the circumference of the earth first arrived at by Eratosthenes was more or less correct, and were there nothing in between Europe and Asia, sailors attempting to reach the East by the West would starve in mid-ocean. Yet as Columbus unwittingly demonstrated, there was something in between: namely, the adjoining continents of North and South America. When Columbus arrived in the Caribbean islands scattered between these two continents, he believed he was on the edge of Asia, and initially interpreted the northern coast of Cuba as a part of China. Only toward the end of his career, as he sailed along the coast of what is now Venezuela, did Columbus begin to acknowledge that he was in fact on the edge of a new continent, but in his bewildered state he associated it with the earthly paradise of Christian legend.