Our tale begins on September 8 1522, when a ship named the Victoria, commanded by a Basque navigator who the Portuguese remember as Juan Sebastian den Cano but the Spanish as Juan de Elcano, was steered into the harbour at Sevilla, bearing a cargo of spices so valuable that it was sufficient to pay for what had been one of the most important sea-voyages in human history.
That voyage began, on September 20th three years earlier, when a fleet in the command of a man remembered by the Portuguese as Fernäo de Megalhäes set out from Sanlúcar de Barremada, under the patronage of the King of Spain.
By November the fleet had reached South America, where it spent several months exploring the Rio Plata, and then six more, resting and overhauling at Port San Julian.
It was there that mutiny cost the fleet a ship, but the mutiny was quelled, and the dangerous, quixotic purpose of the voyage could now be tackled, the commander taking the ships through the straits that have born his name in Spanish forever afterwards, entering what he christened the Pacific Ocean, attempting to return home on a westward route that inferred the circumnavigation of a globe that could not possibly be flat if this was achievable.
One ship deserted en route, leaving only three. In March 1521 they reached the Marianas; ten days later the Philippines; on April 7th the three ships moored on Cebu, where Megalhäes agreed – one wonders if Swift knew about these events – to help the island in its war with the neighbouring island of Mactan. On April 27th Megalhäes was killed, and one of the ships burned; the other two ships fled to the Moluccas, and one of them, the Victoria, continued the journey home, arriving at Sevilla on the 8th of September. Megalhäes in Spanish is of course Fernando de Magallanes; in English he is quite simply Magellan.
1620Ninety-eight years minus four days ago later (give or take a handful of alternate dates that you can find in various almanacs and encyclopedia, including today, and the day they actually set out, from outside the pub The Shippe in London's Rotherhithe, which was August 6), the Mayflower set sail from Plymouth, though actually their first port of call after the Thames was Southampton, carrying the Pilgrim Fathers to their New World. Maps of the period show a land that could be the mirror-image of the modern State of Israel; the same long, thin coastal strip – but east-facing, and enormously larger – dwarfed by a vast continent at its shoulder, hostile, alien and unchallengeable, inhabited for millennia by people of such different customs they may well have seemed to be a different version of the human race.
There is no sense at all of modern North America in these maps. Canada is a monumental inland waterway dissolving into snowy desert, bordered to the north by civilisation failing to expand its economic empire, to the south by the aboriginal. What we think of as the USA was then entirely Louisiana – French. And as to the Thirteen Colonies; in those days, the influence of the Dutch was everywhere, including the Protestantism of the English pilgrims. Yet, to understand modern America, it is this map that makes the most sense, from the Ku Klux Klan to the IV League (yes IV, originally, Latin 4, not Ivy, the vine), from the Big Apple to Martha's Vineyard, and of course from New Amsterdam to the lands opened, on the Pacific side, by way of the sea, by the Portuguese Fernäo de Megalhäes.
The map below is dated around 1650, in the possession of Loyola University Chicago.
Amber pages
Upton Beall Sinclair, novelist ("The Jungle"), born today in 1878
Stevie Smith, poetess, born today in 1902. The difference between Stevie Smith and Sylvia Plath is that one wrote poetry while peeling the onions, the other peeled onions while writing poetry. I leave you to determine for yourself which one is which one.
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