Last week, a “tall ship” visited my Long Island village, a port of call that has seen the HMS Bounty and replicas of every kind from the Age of Sail.  This time it was the Nao Trinidad, one of Ferdinand Magellan’s Spanish galleons that first circumnavigated the globe in 1522.

Magellan was Portuguese who, like Columbus, couldn’t convince the king of Portugal to sponsor his quest but found a willing partner in the Spanish monarch.  The quest: Columbus had proved that sailing west to reach the East Indies wasn’t a crazy idea.  In 1503, Vespucci surmised that a New World was blocking the way, but no one knew if there was a way around it.  One Spanish captain had gone as far south as Argentina in 1516 but was killed by not-so-peaceful indigenous people.  Magellan wanted to pursue that southern course when his fleet of five ships left Spain in 1519.

Circumnavigating the globe was not to be just a commercial venture for Magellan but a scientific one.  To observe and record the feat he brought along Venetian scholar Antonio Pigafetta and some 26 Italian crewmembers.  Of the 240 men who set out from Spain on the 3-year voyage, only 18 completed the trip – Pigafetta was one of them; Magellan was killed in the Philippines by the locals and Pigafetta was wounded in the same ambush.  It was Pigafetta’s journal that documented the circumnavigation and saved Magellan’s reputation.  The other survivors and the Spanish ship captains who had deserted Magellan’s fleet before it reached the Pacific Ocean all denounced their deceased captain for being Portuguese and for personal reasons.  Only the Italian stayed loyal to the late navigator and glorified his deeds.

Magellan had found the way around South America, now named the Strait of Magellan, he also brought Christianity to the Philippines and gave Spain a Pacific empire.  He proved that the globe was linked by oceans and expanded the spice trade.  Pigafetta’s observations gave geographers a more accurate circumference of the Earth and the locations of new Pacific islands like Guam. 

One of his lesser-known revelations concerned Earth’s time zones.  From the first day they left Spain, Pigafetta noted each day of the week.  Near journey’s end, when his ship reached the Atlantic Ocean in 1522 and landed on the Portuguese island of Cape Verde off the coast of West Africa, Pigafetta assumed it was Wednesday.

“[But]… to the Portuguese it was Thursday…and we knew not how we had fallen into error. For every day I, being always in health, had written down each day without any intermission.”

Somewhere along the journey a whole day had apparently been lost.  Pigafetta tried to make sense of it:

“We had always made our voyage westward and had returned to the same place of departure as the sun, wherefore the long voyage had brought the gain of twenty-four hours, as is clearly seen.”

In short, the fleet had crossed 24 time zones and what we now call the International Date Line, something first conceived in 1876 – 354 years after Pigafetta.

Antonio Pigafetta is acknowledged on the replica Nao Trinidad in a mural displaying Magellan’s voyage.  There is even a statue of him in the Philippines and in his home city of Vicenza, Italy where he died and is buried.

In my last blog I noted that June 24th is fixed in history as the day in 1497 that Giovanni Caboto claimed North America for England.  To my surprise, the almanac for that day as published by the Associated Press and distributed to subscribing newspapers around the country, had this anemic entry:  “The first recorded sighting of North America by a European took place as explorer John Cabot spotted land…”  No mention of planting the English flag or that the event led to the British Empire and to an English-speaking continent.  No less than Benjamin Franklin memorialized Cabot’s June 24th landing in a 1775 essay defending the rights of the thirteen colonies.  Beware of the AP’s disinformation!

Whether it be a Caboto or Pigafetta, behind every historic event you may find an Italian. -JLM