In 1519 Magellan sailed west from Spain with five ships expecting to arrive in either India are the Philippines and then back in Portugal sooner rather than later, certainly sooner than four years. Well. In 1521 one of the five ships hove into view off Spain, the Victoria, with 27 aboard. Magellan was not among them. He made it as far as the Philippines, where he undertook an ill-advised (though not atypical--these Europeans, will they never learn?) attempt to convert the heathens he found there to the Way of the Cross. The heathens made short work of Magellan and a number of his guys. That's all the stuff of 8th grade geography. Now for the back-story. It seems that a few years earlier, the ever-venturesome Magellan had sailed east from Portugal and got as far as the Maluccas, islands just west of the Philippines (remember that detail; it turns out to be important) in search of spices (in terms of economic value, spices were to the 16th century what cocaine has been to the 20th). He picked up a shipload of spices, along with a native slave (these Europeans!), whom he dubbed Enrique. He took the spices and Enrique back to Portugal with him. Hail, the conquering hero. A few years pass. Ferdinand proposes his trip to the west. Backers fall all over themselves, which results in five splendidly outfitted ships. And off they went, and of course Ferdinand had his bestboy, Enrique, in tow. It took fourteen months to get down the coast of South America and through the horrific storms and treacherous channels off the Tierra del Fuego ["Land of Fire"] (which Magellan named because they kept seeing Indian fires burning on the cliffs at night). At that point, as he entered the Pacific (which he also named--mis-named, as it turned out, of course--because they happened to enter the "new" ocean on a calm day), he thought the Maluccas were just a few days' sail away. These Europeans. Aren't they something. Three months later land had still not been sighted. The crew members who'd not died of scurvy or starved were reduced to eating leather bindings holding barrels together. March 6, 1521. Landfall at last, a speck of an island we now know as Guam. They got water, and sailed on. Ten days later, more land, lots of islands. And the only way Magellan knew where he was--which was actually the Maluccas--was because Enrique, to Enrique's great delight, could understand a lot of the language of the natives--the selfsame ones who would shortly dispatch F.M. Surely that moment, when they went ashore, the moment when the natives spoke and Enrique understood and answered, is one of the great moments of human history, certainly equal to Neil Armstrong's opening lunar line. After his death, what was left of the little fleet continued westward. The truth then is that Magellan did NOT (these Europeans!) make the first trip around the world. That honor belongs to the now forgotten non-European, Enrique. All of which brings us to the original question: Why Magellan's Log? Because it doesn't exist. Not only did our eponymous Captain fail to survive his epic voyage. So did his log. The key document describing the first complete human break with apparent reality ("The world is flat and consists of what I see between and above the horizons around me") was lost along with four of the five ships.* When you spend some time in these pixel-filled pages, you'll soon realize that that's what we're about: trying to see what lies behind well-funded, well-defended , well-defined present-day horizons. The view at the edge. The entrenched, the vested interests, the
powers that be in every era always say, "Warning! Warning! Don't go beyond our
profitable limits! You'll fall off the edge! You'll encounter monsters!" Magellan's
Log--does it really exist, this collection of charged particles on hard drives
somehere?--is the log of a mind looking at the edges, and beyond, beyond, beyond. Always
beyond. *The voyage's priest, one Antonio Pigafetta, did survive, and with him, the diary he kept. What's known today about the four year trip comes from that diary. Or, if you are attracted to less orthodox approaches to history: for an explanation of the title which, in terms of real reality, makes about as much sense, try Anchored in Time, a smudged, anonymous bit of work found beneath the urinal in the crew's head.
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Because it doesn't exist. And thereby
hangs this dog-wagging tale: