HistoryExtrahttps://www.historyextra.comHome of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast2026-08-24T14:48:43.000Zhourly12000-01-01T12:00+00:00How the Americas transformed Tudor Englandhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/how-the-americas-transformed-tudor-england-podcast/2026-08-24T14:48:43.000ZWhat did Tudor England really gain from its early encounters with the Americas? In this episode, Elinor Evans speaks to historian Dr Lauren Working about her new book A Golden World, exploring the overlooked exchange of ideas, materials and knowledge between Indigenous peoples and Renaissance England.
From brilliant red dyes made from insects, to tobacco, pearls and exotic animals, Working reveals how English society was profoundly shaped by American influences, challenging long-held assumptions about colonial history.
]]>Tudor explorers: everything you wanted to knowhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/tudor-explorers-podcast-jerry-brotton/2024-12-01T07:00:02.000ZBy the time the Tudors took to the waves, much of the world had already been mapped by Europeans. So what was left for Tudor explorers to uncover – and should we call them 'explorers' at all? Historian Jerry Brotton doesn't think so. In this episode, he tells Kev Lochun how the Reformation drove the Tudors to sea, how Ireland became their Vietnam, and why some of the era's most famous names were little more than pirates.
Jerry Brotton takes listeners on a whistle-stop tour around the world in AD 1500
]]>Tudor podcast episodeshttps://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/tudor-podcast-episodes/The Tudor travel bug: 6 artefacts that show the Tudors’ taste for travelhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/travel-tudors-where-exploration-trade-artefacts/2023-07-10T11:54:47.000Z
Fashion accessories from across the globe
The portrait above of a finely dressed woman from 1569 is thought to depict Helena Snakenborg, one of several courtiers who accompanied Princess Cecilia of Sweden to London in 1565. The 1560s saw the Swedish king, Erik XIV, attempting to win Elizabeth I’s hand in marriage. Erik failed to win over the English queen but the two nations enjoyed good relations for much of Elizabeth’s reign, as evidenced by the diplomatic visit of 1565.
Snakenborg remained in England following the visit, probably because she was being courted by William Parr, Marquess of Northampton. She eventually became maid of honour to Elizabeth – reflected, perhaps, in the vibrant rose embroideries on her clothing (the combination of red and white roses was a key Tudor emblem).
- On the podcast | Jane Malcolm-Davies unpicks the historical sources to uncover what people wore in Tudor England
The intricate decorations in Snakenborg’s outfit show off her considerable wealth. They include two gold chains, feathers, hat buttons, a pearl-encrusted golden oak leaf pendant, an enamelled gold pendant in the shape of a woman holding a large gemstone, and golden rings in the shape of roses. These pearls, jewels and gold were brought from overseas through mercantile and colonial networks. The weighty pendant around her neck may be an emerald sourced in the mines of distant Colombia.
Terrestrial globes to capture epic feats of exploration
The Tudor era was one in which the world grew smaller – in more ways than one. As travellers embarked on voyages to distant destinations, they stoked a burgeoning obsession with global commodities. And that turned the world itself into an object that could be held or possessed. Pictured above is a terrestrial globe made by Emery Molyneux in 1592.
Molyneux’s spheres are the first of their kind known to have been produced in England, and were made from flour paste to protect them from humidity at sea. Molyneux’s work reflects England’s evolution into a major player in the field of exploration: his globe features the circumnavigations of English adventurers Francis Drake and Thomas Cavendish, depicted in red. Globes such as Molyneux’s captured vast networks of mobility in miniature: a world covered by the criss-crossing lines of global travellers, yet small enough to fit in a ship or a library.
Word lists and translations of other languages
When the Tudor explorer Stephen Burrough embarked on a journey to Russia in 1557 he returned with a list of words from the Ter Sámi language, the earliest known documentation of a Sámi tongue. Burrough’s list aimed to help future travellers strike lucrative deals with people in Russia’s Arctic north – and included translations of words and phrases such as “what call you this?”, “whither goe you?”, “wollen” and “linnen cloth”.
Yet a basic knowledge of Ter Sámi not only had the potential to boost the earning power of English explorers. In a destination as perilous as the Arctic it also promised to save their lives. Those perils were illustrated by the fate of Sir Hugh Willoughby who, in 1553, had led one of Tudor England’s first trade ventures to Russia, only to disappear. When his ship, the Bona Esperanza, was found the following year, its crew were dead, frozen like statues.
Indigenous artefacts brought to England by explorers
In 1597, travelling through the Amazon rainforest, William Davies noted that “the king of every river… wears upon his head a crown of parrots’ feathers, of several colours”.
The 16th century saw a wave of English adventurers such as Davies chronicling their encounters in the Americas. It wasn’t long before they realised that, in the societies they encountered there, feathers conveyed sovereignty, divinity and exquisite craftsmanship. These were qualities that seized the imaginations of their compatriots back in England, who collected and wrote about artefacts similar to the exquisite cotton, feathered and knotted vegetable fibre fan from Peru, shown below.
Along with artefacts such as canoes, featherwork became a recognised marker of Indigenous cultures in Elizabeth England, and soon began appearing in cabinets of curiosity – none more famous than Walter Cope’s collection of global marvels in London’s Holland Park.
The Tudor fascination with genuine objects crafted in the Americas also triggered a surge of appropriations and imitations. In 1613, 50 gentlemen dressed up as “Virginia priests and princes” for a court masque. As the performers processed through London to the royal palace, onlookers marvelled at the way their feathered ruffs glittered in the night.
Tobacco: England’s curious medicine that blighted Indigenous people’s lives
Tobacco was the first foreign intoxicant of mass consumption in early modern England. Brittle clay pipe fragments like those shown below can still be found in gardens and riverbanks across Britain, indicating how widespread the smoking of tobacco had become among all social classes by the 1630s. “In the ale-houses, tobacco [is] obtainable,” wrote a Swiss traveller to London in 1599. The traveller added that the English “regard it as a curious medicine and as a pleasure. The habit is so common with them, that they… light up on all occasions.”
- Read more | When was tobacco first thought to be dangerous?
Originally sourced in the Americas, and cultivated by enslaved peoples in the Caribbean and eventually England’s budding North American plantations, tobacco tangibly connected Elizabethans to Indigenous groups that had gathered knowledge about its properties and value for thousands of years.
While the spread of plantations dispossessed Native peoples of their homelands, late Elizabethan poetry celebrated tobacco as a commodity that ushered in the golden age. It was, so the poet John Beaumont observed, when “great tobacco pleas’d to show her powers” that the inspiration behind “this blest age of ours” could begin.
Ceramics from China that risked merchants’ lives
They were fragile, luminescent, incredibly rare – and few English artisans had unlocked the secrets to manufacturing them. Is it any wonder, then, that ceramics such as the porcelain bowl below – fashioned by Chinese potters in Jingdezhen in c1585 – were highly prized by Tudor traders?
So great was the demand for these delicate artefacts that English merchants established networks with traders and interpreters across Europe and Asia. Yet the quest for ceramics was fraught with danger: on land, travellers faced mountains and deserts; at sea, voyages took them across the Pacific and Indian oceans where they were menaced by storms, ship wrecks and piracy.
A milestone in the Tudors’ relationship with ceramics arrived in 1592, when the English capture of the Portuguese ship Madre de Dios flooded the realm with spices, textiles, Ottoman carpets and many “porcelain vessels of China”. These treasures made their way into Elizabethan shops and display cabinets, including the queen’s private collection. London silver and goldsmiths – often French, Dutch and German artisans – then transformed bowls into cups, adding elaborately decorated mounts and handles.
This article was first published in the July 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]>David Ingram: the Tudor sailor who hiked across pre-colonial Americahttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/david-ingram-tudor-who-hiked-america/2023-04-12T09:05:13.000ZOn an autumn day in 1569, the French trading ship Gargarine was anchored off the coast of north-east Canada when men aboard spotted a Native American canoe. To their surprise, the smaller vessel was carrying three Englishmen, who asked to be taken back to Europe. The tale they recounted – of traversing North America on foot, from the Gulf of Mexico via the east coast to the Bay of Fundy – was extraordinary. And the later account of one of them was to have a profound impact on the future of the continent.
By the 1580s, the idea of establishing North American colonies was gaining traction in England. Adventurers and merchants including Walter Ralegh attempted to persuade Elizabeth I to lend her support to such ventures. So it was that in the summer of 1582, the queen directed her principal secretary and spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, to interrogate the one living Englishman known to have explored tracts of North America in person.
That man was David Ingram, one of the sailors picked up by the Gargarine, who claimed to have undertaken his transcontinental trek more than a decade before Walsingham spoke to him. He had, though, also visited the African coast and the Caribbean, and (adding to the confusion) he was illiterate. As a consequence, written accounts adapted from Ingram’s interviews – particularly those published in Richard Hakluyt’s 1589 work The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation – were lurid and, to modern eyes, clearly fantastical.
Descriptions of creatures such as elephants, giant eagles and “a beast far exceeding an ox in bigness” were attributed to Ingram, and informed illustrations including drawings of giant human figures with faces in their chests. Most of these flourishes were the results of flawed interpretations of Ingram’s testimony. Yet his odyssey may well have happened much as he said – a truly extraordinary journey revealing rich details of the people, landscapes and wildlife of North America before the advent of large-scale European colonisation.
Little is known of Ingram’s early life, though he said he was born in Barking, Essex, and had worked as a sailor for a number of years before his epic overland adventure. In 1567, he sailed on the third slaving expedition of navigator and privateer John Hawkins. Some 400 men departed England aboard six ships, sailing for west Africa. There they undertook the horrible business of enslaving its people and transporting them to the Caribbean, where they were sold like cattle to Spanish colonists.
- Read more | Tudors at sea: 8 ways to survive a voyage
It was a profitable journey up to that point, but then the expedition’s luck failed. A hurricane drove the ships into the unfriendly Spanish harbour of San Juan de Ulúa (now Veracruz, on the Mexican coast). After fighting broke out on 24 September 1568, Hawkins’ cousin – the young Francis Drake – escaped with one of the smaller ships. All but one of the remaining English vessels were sunk, with half of the mariners killed or captured.
The rest – including Ingram – escaped with Hawkins aboard the Minion. Sailing a damaged ship and carrying little food, Hawkins had no hope of getting so many men home. So, in early October, many of them elected to take their chances ashore, landing near the side of modern-day Tampico, about 240 miles north of Veracruz. “These hundred men we set on land with all diligence in this little place,” recalled Hawkins. Most soon gave themselves up to the Spanish colonists, but Ingram and about two dozen others decided to escape northward.
Most were never seen again, but Ingram, Richard Browne and Richard Twide survived to tell the tale – or a version of it.
Witness to wonders
Ingram had at least been on the continent before, having called at a French colony in north-eastern Florida during a previous expedition with Hawkins. So he and his two companions set out for that settlement, hoping to find help there, and perhaps even a way home. The three Englishmen carried bundles of cloth, given to them by Hawkins, which they aimed to trade en route. They also picked up mesquite berries, shells and other light items they could exchange for food and shelter.
Ingram and the others picked up a few local words, but encountered too many different languages to achieve any meaningful level of communication. Instead, they did what the indigenous people did when they encountered language barriers: they learned to use the native sign language of the region. The hairy, light-skinned Englishmen were welcomed in the settlements they encountered along the network of well-worn, ancient trails. They learned which items would increase in value as they worked north and east toward the French outpost in Florida.
And they saw many wonders that Ingram described in his later interrogation, including a tornado, alligators and enormous manatees, describing that species as so fat that “it had neither head nor neck. His eyes and mouth were in his breast. This beast is very ugly to behold, and cowardly by nature. It bears a very fine skin like a rat, full of silver hairs.” This accurately depicts the manatee’s silver vibrissae, which contain nerves enabling it to detect currents and to navigate.
After two months of walking, Ingram and his companions arrived in northern Florida – only to discover that the French outpost had been destroyed by the Spanish. There would be no help for them there; their only good option was to move toward the next likely place where they might encounter a friendly ship. This, they decided, could only be Cape Breton, in what is now Nova Scotia. Thus Ingram, Browne and Twide turned north-east, along trails following the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains – the same route taken by a Spanish expedition of Hernando de Soto two decades earlier.
Where de Soto had turned west into the mountains in search of gold, though, the Englishmen continued north. By spring 1569 they were approaching Chesapeake Bay, on the part of the east coast where, encouraged by Ingram’s testimony, the English later attempted to settle in the mid-1580s. The first English colony, backed by Walter Ralegh, was founded on Roanoke Island in 1585; settlers included artist John White and scientist Thomas Harriot.
Their findings confirmed what Ingram had observed years earlier regarding the people and their clothing, customs and houses, and the promising nature of the land. Harriot wrote that “we found the soil to be fatter, the trees greater and… finer grass and as good as ever we saw any in England.” Like Ingram, he described the native crops: maize, beans, squash and several other plants.
- Read more | What happened to the colony of Roanoke Island?
Further north, the men came to a Northern Iroquoian settlement of huge bark longhouses, where they stayed for a week. Ingram later provided the first recorded mention of these “People of the Longhouse”, including the earliest clear evidence of their masked “False Face” curing societies, which were partly a reaction to a series of epidemics that swept North America in the 17th century.
The masked physician shocked the three sailors, who did not understand his beneficial intentions. “Twide said very vehemently: ‘I defy thee and all thy works’,” recalled Ingram, “and presently the Collochio [devil] shrank away in a stealing manner forth of the doors and was seen no more.”
Northern exposure
The men pressed on into the region later named New England, passing through smaller settlements located too far north to rely on domesticated crops. Finally, they reached the end of the indigenous trail system at what is now Old Town, Maine. From there, they had little choice but to continue by river in birch-bark canoes. These carried them to the northernmost settlement on their trek, a spot on the St John river in western New Brunswick.
There, people drew pictures in the dirt, indicating that a European ship was trading at the river’s mouth on the Bay of Fundy. A rapid final leg by canoe took the excited sailors to the Gargarine. Over the course of about 11 months, the three men had trekked some 3,600 miles, and become the first Englishmen to explore the interior of North America. Back in England, they were greeted and rewarded by their astonished former captain, John Hawkins.
However, their public fame was brief, and before long the three men had to return to work. Ingram went back to sea, sailing with Francis Drake in the 1570s, most notably aboard the Elizabeth during the first part of Drake’s circumnavigation of the world. Six years after his interrogation, in 1588, Ingram was probably one of the thousands of sailors who confronted the Spanish Armada.
- Read more | The Tudor guide to colonising the world
His end is unknown. Perhaps it’s not surprising Ingram’s words were so badly mistranscribed and mangled. The men asking the questions in 1582 would have had no concept of the wonders Ingram had witnessed in Africa and North America, and no frame of reference with which to tie them together. Ingram could not write his own account, so Hakluyt did it for him. The thread of the story had been muddled in the interrogation records, so Hakluyt reorganised paragraphs by topic, incorrectly advising readers that everything in the resulting document related to the North American journey.
No wonder Ingram seemed to say that elephants, leopards, iron tools, grey parrots, giant eagles and many other things he’d seen in Africa and the Caribbean were found in North America. The published version of Ingram’s story has been ridiculed by historians ever since. Few have looked at the original records, depending instead on Hakluyt’s flawed but more legible published version.
Only recently have the archived records revealed what really happened, and Ingram’s 1582 narrative has at last been unscrambled. It reveals important new facts about African and American cultures before the profound changes wrought by colonisation. For example, it demonstrates that the native trail system of North America was ancient, elaborate and heavily used. Dugout canoes were often large and numerous in the portions of the Eastern Woodlands south of northern New England. Itinerant traders could make a good living in North America. And Native Americans recovered and repurposed gold and silver found in Spanish shipwrecks.
A story that long seemed too fantastic to believe may, in fact, improve our understanding of pre-colonial North American cultures.
Dean Snow is an ethnohistorian, archaeologist and emeritus professor at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of The Extraordinary Journey of David Ingram (Oxford University Press, 2023)
This article was first published in the March 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine
]]>Magellan: daring explorer or doomed failure?https://www.historyextra.com/membership/magellan-daring-explorer-doomed-failure-podcast-felipe-fernandez-armesto/2022-05-09T15:03:50.000ZIn September 1519, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan set off on a fateful voyage to find a route to the Spice Islands. In the centuries since, Magellan has gone down in history as a chivalric adventurer, his name forever linked to the first circumnavigation of the globe. But, as Professor Felipe Fernández-Armesto tells Ellie Cawthorne, Magellan’s career was in fact shaped more by failure than success.
Felipe Fernández-Armesto is the author of Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan (Bloomsbury, 2022)
]]>Winds of change: how the discovery of trade winds powered Europe's empireshttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/trade-winds-history-discovery-gulf-stream-age-exploration-empire/2021-11-03T11:00:09.000ZThroughout the Middle Ages, Europe was something of a backwater. Essentially no more than a peninsula stuck on the very end of the great continent of Asia, Europe languished on the extremity of the sprawling trade networks stretching right across Asia – the overland trade routes of the Silk Roads as well as maritime links along the southern margin of the continent and across the Indian Ocean.
That status began to change in the early 15th century. The Age of Exploration started on the Iberian peninsula, when sailors from Portugal began venturing out into the Atlantic Ocean to seek new lands and riches, followed by mariners from Spain. The ensuing process of establishing long-range maritime trade routes, founding remote colonies and outposts, and forging vast overseas empires relied on the patterns of prevailing winds around the planet. This very first stage of globalisation and the building of the modern world was directed by the fundamental circulation systems in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Portugal began its programme of exploration down the west African coastline in the early 15th century. The initial aim of those navigators was to locate the source of the gold that was then being brought across the Sahara by camel caravans; later, their efforts were directed at circumventing the Islamic world and establishing a maritime route to India and the lucrative trade in spices. The Atlantic islands – such as the Canaries, Madeira and the Azores – served as stepping stones through the tempestuous ocean waters. Sailing to and from those islands gave these early European navigators the first inklings of the grand-scale patterns of circulation in the planet’s atmosphere and oceans, which they soon came to understand more deeply and began to exploit.
The Portuguese spent the best part of a century working their way down the coast of Africa before they finally found its southern tip and the gateway into the Indian Ocean. The captain who first made the voyage from the cape across the Indian Ocean was Vasco da Gama, in 1497–98. He realised that, in order to cross the south Atlantic and round the tip of Africa, his best option would be to navigate a huge loop through the deep ocean in order to keep with the favourable winds and currents. This route took over three months and covered around 6,000 miles at sea – by far the longest voyage through open ocean undertaken by that time.
Even before da Gama’s pioneering voyage, Christopher Columbus had secured sponsorship from Spain for a westward voyage, and in 1492 sailed across the Atlantic to find a sea route to the riches of the Orient. Setting off from the Canary Islands, his fleet sailed with the easterly trade winds and unexpectedly ran into a whole new continental land mass – though, famously, he didn’t grasp that fact at the time. After mapping Caribbean islands for a few months, Columbus turned for home, first sailing north to pick up the band of westerly winds that blows through the Azores and which carried him back to Europe.
Within a generation of that first voyage around the tip of South Africa, and of Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of the Americas, European sailors ventured across all the world’s oceans and completed the first circumnavigation of the Earth. This was a revolution that heralded the birth of today’s global economy.
This leap forward in long-distance exploration was possible because mariners came to understand the patterns of reliable winds and ocean currents around the globe, which now determined the trade routes that brought great riches to Europe. It was realised, for example, that the band of prevailing winds blowing to the west in the North Atlantic has a mirror-image counterpart in the southern hemisphere, and that the band of winds that enabled the return voyage back to Europe across the Atlantic Ocean are also present in the Pacific. There is a global pattern to the winds, caused by the fundamental circulation systems of the planet’s atmosphere.
Essentially, prevailing winds blow from the north-east in the zone between the equator and 30°N, and from the south-east between 30°S and the equator. Above 30°N and below 30°S, prevailing winds blow from the west. So If you want to sail to the Americas from Europe, simply head south a little bit first to position yourself in the zone of the trade winds and ride them all the way across the Atlantic. To get home again, you need a band of prevailing winds blowing in the opposite direction.
These alternating bands of prevailing winds – the trade winds and the westerlies – also blow the sea surface into great circling currents known as the ocean gyres. Because water is so much more dense than air, these ocean currents can have a significant impact on a ship’s course. An example is the Gulf Stream, which is part of the North Atlantic gyre flowing from the Caribbean to Scandinavia.
When was the Gulf Stream first discovered?
The Gulf Stream was discovered by European sailors in 1513, and the implications for shipping were immediately realised. Heavily laden galleons needed only slip into this wide, fast-flowing river-within-an-ocean to be readily carried north to where they could pick up the westerly winds to sail back to Europe.
Navigators also learned to be wary of regions around the world where the surface winds are light and variable, such as the zone along the equator within the rising arm of the Hadley cells – a potentially treacherous zone known to sailors as the doldrums.
As navigators decoded these global patterns of alternating bands of prevailing winds and wheeling ocean currents, they realised that they could use them as a great interlinked system of conveyor belts to carry them where they wanted to go. European sailors reached across the great expanses of the world’s oceans, established long-range maritime trade routes, and controlled and protected all of these overseas interests with their powerful gunpowder weapons.
By doing so, Portugal and Spain created a new kind of empire – one made powerful and wealthy not through possession of large areas of land territory but by the strategic control of sprawling oceanic trade networks on the other side of the world: empires of water. And where the Spanish and Portuguese led the way, the Dutch, British and French followed. The rivalry between these marine trading powers triggered colonial wars around the world as they attempted to eject each other from strategic ports and forts, to control chokepoints and dominate the critical sea passages. Europe was no longer a backwards extremity of Eurasia, but had extended itself to dictate affairs around the world – for better or for worse.
How winds work
Warm air around the Earth’s equator rises before rolling over through high altitude and descending back to the ground at around 30° latitude in both the northern and southern hemispheres. These air masses then return to the equator along the surface as winds to complete this huge vertical loop. These great rolling currents in the atmosphere, called the Hadley cells (named for English meteorologist George Hadley), are convection currents that turn in opposite directions, like paired rollers straddling the equator. As these surface winds return towards the equator they are deflected to the west by the Coriolis effect – a consequence of the fact that the Earth is rotating – and this creates a band of prevailing winds blowing towards the west: the easterly trade winds. Beyond the Hadley cells are two more great rolling circulation currents: the Ferrel cells, named for a 19th-century US meteorologist. These circulate in the opposite direction, so the surface winds they produce blow in the opposite direction to the trade winds – these are the westerlies. Discovery of these bands of winds and associated ocean currents allowed European explorers, traders and colonisers to expand their ambitions. Portuguese passage to India: Using the south Atlantic gyre, from the late 15th century Portuguese navigators – beginning with Vasco da Gama in 1497 – pioneered the route around the southern cape of Africa and east to India and the Spice Islands (now Maluku, Indonesia). In the process, they also stumbled on the coast of what’s now Brazil. Spanish Manila galleons: Having discovered the passage around the tip of South America to the Pacific in the early 16th century, Spanish navigators recognised gyres corresponding with the familiar circular currents in the Atlantic. This powered trade between Spanish bases in the Philippines and Mexico, with Chinese goods such as silk, porcelain and spices heading east in exchange for silver from the Americas. Transatlantic Triangle: Using the clockwise circuit of winds in the northern Atlantic, from the early 16th century Portuguese then English, French and Dutch traders transported manufactured goods such as textiles and weapons from European factories to the west African coast, where the ships’ holds were filled with slaves. Sailing with the transatlantic trade winds to the Americas, these enslaved people were set to work on plantations producing cotton, sugar, coffee and tobacco, which was then carried back across to Europe. Dutch Brouwer Route: The journey time from the Cape of Good Hope to the Dutch East Indies was halved from 1611 when Captain Hendrik Brouwer pioneered a shortcut, using the ‘Roaring Forties’ trade winds to cross the Indian Ocean in the south rather than taking the circuitous route north along the coastline of east Africa and then east via India or Sri Lanka.
After the course from Europe to India around the southern tip of Africa had been pioneered by Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese began sending annual expeditions along this long maritime route. Indeed, the very first fleet that followed da Gama’s route to India took such a wide loop through the south Atlantic that they stumbled on the Brazilian coastline.
By 1520, the Portuguese had asserted their dominance across the Indian Ocean and the so-called Spice Islands (now Maluku, an archipelago within Indonesia) with their large, cannon-wielding ships and fortress-building techniques – experience gained from centuries of incessant warfare in Europe – and grew hugely wealthy by monopolising this trade. Portugal also established trading centres in Macau and Nagasaki to conduct business directly with the Chinese and Japanese. The Strait of Malacca, between the Malay peninsula and the long island of Sumatra (also now part of Indonesia), became a crucial maritime chokepoint, serving as the gateway into the archipelagos of south-east Asia; the Portuguese colony of Malacca (now Melaka) thus became the primary port controlling maritime traffic through the Strait.
The impact of their discovery was longer-lasting than the wealth it generated. Even after the trade dominance of the Portuguese empire waned and Brazil declared independence in 1822, their colonies endured for well over a century longer. The enclaves of Goa, Daman and Diu became part of India in 1961; Portuguese Timor was relinquished in 1975, the same year that Angola and Mozambique became independent; and Macau was finally handed over to China in 1999. Even today, Portuguese remains the primary official language of Brazil, Angola, Mozambique and other former colonies including Cape Verde, and the language (or a form of Portuguese Creole) is spoken in East Timor, Goa, Daman and Diu.
Familiar patterns
In the early 16th century, Spanish navigators found a route around the tip of South America and across the Pacific with the trade winds to the Spice Islands – but they also had to find a way to get their newly traded goods home. They realised that the now-familiar circular pattern of winds in the Atlantic was replicated in the Pacific, and navigators learned to sail first north from the Philippines to Japan before picking up the westerlies to carry them all the way east to the Californian coast.
For 250 years, this Manila Galleon Route bridged the vast Pacific Ocean with regular round-trip shipping, running between the Spanish colonies in Acapulco (in present-day Mexico) and Manila in the Philippines. Silver mined from the Americas was traded with the Chinese for luxuries such as silk, porcelain and spices. California thus became hugely important to the Spanish simply because it was where the winds delivered them after their transpacific crossing from Asia, and cities such San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego were founded to resupply Spanish ships after they had completed this long voyage.
In 1610–11, the Dutch found a shortcut bypassing part of the original Portuguese route to the Spice Islands. Rather than tracing the coast all the way around the northern Indian Ocean, which forced ships to wait for the correct monsoon winds to reach their goal, Captain Hendrik Brouwer of the Dutch East India Company recognised that it was quicker to sail straight east from the tip of South Africa before heading north at the eastern edge of the Indian Ocean.
The westerly winds that flow around the southern hemisphere are largely unobstructed by continents or mountains, so they blow far more strongly than their northern counterparts. These ‘Roaring Forties’ create what’s effectively a fast-moving motorway in the ocean, with the result that the time taken to sail the Brouwer Route was half that of the traditional passage – around six months, rather than a full year. It also had another notable impact: the critical gateway into the East Indies, which had been the Strait of Malacca, became the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra, and the Dutch colony of Batavia (present-day Jakarta) replaced Portuguese Malacca as the key strategic port in the region.
In 1652, the Dutch founded a colony at Cape Town to resupply ships that were about to undertake the long voyage across the chill southern waters of the Indian Ocean – hence this use of the Roaring Forties wind belt is the reason why Afrikaans (which is derived from the Dutch spoken by 17th-century settlers) is spoken today in South Africa. The Dutch East Indies, headquartered in Batavia, became the dominant trade power in that part of south-east Asia as a result, expanding its control to encompass all of what’s now Indonesia until the Second World War.
Whereas the quest for spices had been the prime motivation during the early years of the Age of Exploration, by 1700 other commodities were beginning to dominate oceanic trade. Crops such as cotton, sugar, tobacco and coffee had been transported to and grown in plantations in the Americas, creating a high demand for labour to produce them in mass for European markets.
The Atlantic triangular trade that emerged from the late 16th century had arguably the greatest impact on the modern world. Though Portuguese traders began transporting slaves from the west African coast to Brazil around 1502, it was during the following century that the triangular trade became the primary pattern for English, French, Portuguese and Dutch.
Ships involved in this trade sailed south from Europe laden with goods such as textiles and weapons manufactured in these developed nations; these were sold on the west African coast. Those cargoes were replaced by enslaved people who had been captured in west and central Africa, and who were sold to the European traders. Transported west across the Atlantic, these people were sold to plantation owners in Brazil, the Caribbean and North America; the ships then carried the produce of slaves’ forced labour in the New World – sugar, cotton and tobacco, in particular – back to Europe (and, sometimes, New England, where sugar was used to distil rum) to complete the loop.
Each turn of this huge economic cog, conveniently powered by the wind patterns of the Atlantic, generated huge profits for its masters, and the supply of cheap overseas cotton helped drive mechanisation in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution in Britain in the latter 18th century.
It’s clear, then, that the pattern of winds and fundamental circulation systems within Earth’s atmosphere determined the routes of huge continent-linking trade networks – and, therefore, the pattern of colonisation and empire-building that emerged during the modern era, planting the foundations of globalisation and the modern world.
Lewis Dartnell is a professor at the University of Westminster, and the author of Origins: How the Earth Made Us (Bodley Head, 2019)
This article was taken from issue 17 of BBC World Histories magazine
]]>Two worlds collide: Spanish conquistadors and Aztecshttps://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/spanish-conquistador-aztecs-moctezuma-hernan-cortes/2021-08-05T15:50:20.000ZOn 8 November 1519, on a wide wooden causeway outside the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, the tlatoani (ruler) Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin – better known today as Moctezuma – and the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés came face to face for the first time. The meeting powerfully symbolises the confrontation between the great civilisations of Europe and the Americas: Cortés, standing as representative of the king of Spain and newly elected Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V; and Moctezuma, the ruler of an empire of millions. It was the start of a series of events that led to the downfall of the Aztec empire, and to the Spanish conquest and colonisation of Central and South America.
The epic myth of the Spanish conquest has become famous in history: the daring adventurer Cortés and a few hundred plucky conquistadors who defied overwhelming odds to vanquish the brutal Aztec empire. But this is no simple tale of inevitable European dominance. This was a moment when events were finely poised, before the balance of power shifted decisively towards the Europeans. And, for the players in this delicate game, it was not at all apparent who held the strongest cards.
The meeting on the causeway has been depicted as emblematic of the meeting between the Old World and the New. But various aspects hint at the complexities and nuances of the encounter. After Cortés rode his horse onto the causeway he seems to have been kept waiting while Aztec nobles conducted a ceremonial welcome: each saluted him in courtly Nahuatl language before bowing low to touch and kiss the ground. It must have been an incredible scene, with thousands of Aztecs watching from canoes and rooftops, hoping to catch a glimpse of the newcomers; the causeway, too, was packed with people.
In a striking distinction, Spanish accounts of the event emphasise the precious metals and stones sported by the Aztecs, whereas the Florentine Codex – compiled later from the recollections of indigenous informants – gives priority to the glorious flowers that adorned the causeway in gourd vases, wreaths and garlands: sunflowers, popcorn flowers, magnolias, cacao blooms.
With so many nobles involved, these initial ceremonies dragged on for perhaps an hour, and it seems that Cortés endured them a little impatiently. Fortunately, the proceedings were deciphered for him by an indigenous translator, Malintzin (known to the Spanish as Doña Marina or La Malinche), who had been given to him as one of a group of enslaved women. Her importance to the encounter cannot be overstated: it was actually her voice that both Moctezuma and Cortés heard during their ‘conversations’, with all the potential for misunderstanding and misinterpretation that entailed. Fascinatingly, though the Spanish sources largely ignore her involvement, indigenous accounts don’t contain the same omission. In those, Malintzin appears as a central character, both the voice of the Spaniards and an authority figure in her own right.
After the initial ceremonies, calculated to make a grand impression and emphasise Aztec dominance, Moctezuma himself came out to meet the conquistadors. The tlatoani was carried onto the causeway on a litter with a magnificent canopy of green feathers, decorated with gold and jewels. The shimmering feathers and the green jade dangling from the canopy border, were among the most precious objects in the Aztec world, enveloping Moctezuma in a lustrous display of his power and wealth. He was surrounded by the high lords of his empire, themselves fabulously dressed, but the tlatoani’s rank was marked out by his ornate sandals. All the other Aztecs, even the highest nobles, went barefoot to honour the man who stood so close to the gods, and only his closest advisors were permitted to look him in the face.
When Moctezuma stepped down from the litter, Cortés dismounted and the two engaged in a fascinating exchange that reveals their very different values. It is hard to know precisely what happened. However, it seems that Cortés proffered his hand to Moctezuma but was rebuffed by his attendants – one did not touch the tlatoani. Moctezuma instead extended his own hand – taking control of the interaction – before accepting from Cortés a necklace of worked-glass beads scented with musk, which the conquistador had been wearing. In return, Moctezuma offered the Spaniard flowers, then put over the conquistador’s head two necklaces made of beautiful and valuable red snail shells, from which dangled eight shrimps made of pure gold, each the size of a man’s hand. After this rather unequal swap, the tlatoani invited Cortés into the city. It was the beginning of a famous relationship that led ultimately to the death of Moctezuma, and to Cortés’s triumph over a city in ruins.
Things never dreamed of before
Thanks to the dominance of sources produced by conquistadors or their supporters, this story is typically told from the Spanish perspective: scores of readers have experienced the entry into Tenochtitlan through the wide-eyed wonder of the conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo in his popular account of “things never heard of, seen, or dreamed of before”.
The awe of the Spanish is not hard to imagine. Tenochtitlan was almost certainly the largest city that any of them had ever seen. Home to perhaps a quarter of a million people (more than double the population of contemporary London), this island city was a teeming metropolis, with palaces and temples towering over clean streets, fertile gardens, orderly canals and huge plazas. The market at Tlatelolco alone drew around 60,000 people each day – similar to the population of Seville, the largest city in Spain at that time. This was, incontrovertibly, a civilisation, much to the consternation of the conquistadors. The Aztecs are often stereotyped as an ‘ancient’ culture: superstitious, Stone Age, in thrall to bloodthirsty gods. It is easy to forget that Moctezuma, a contemporary of Henry VIII, was not just a powerful warrior but also a literate, effective administrator whose people were highly educated, well-organised and determined.
Our narrative of the conquest usually follows the path of the Spanish expedition, but the meeting on the causeway was actually the culmination of more than six months of careful manoeuvring from both sides.
From the time Cortés landed on the Mexican coast in March 1519, Moctezuma had been carefully monitoring his movements, despatching emissaries to meet the new arrivals and sending astonishing gifts of gold and silver; these were intended to persuade the invaders to depart his territory and move on to others less powerful or less willing to pay tribute. To the Spanish, though, these courteous exchanges were not a deterrent but an invitation: they saw them as confirmation of the existence of a wealthy kingdom in the interior that could be easily exploited.
In a precarious position after defying his local superior – Diego Velázquez, governor of Cuba – Cortés saw the incredible treasures sent by Moctezuma as an opportunity to buy the support of Charles V. He promptly dispatched these riches to the Spanish king, along with emissaries to plead his case and secure his authority in a land he had no real mandate to conquer.
This was just one prong of a complex strategy designed to legitimise Cortés’s actions and ensure his success. First, he ordered that his ships be disabled, forcing his followers to commit to the mission and realise – as Cortés himself said later – that “they would conquer and win the land, or die in the attempt”.
This do-or-die attitude was not merely a facade. Having departed from Cuba without the governor’s sanction, Cortés had been declared a rebel against the crown and, as a result, was fighting on two fronts for much of the expedition. Indeed, in May 1520 he found himself facing a force sent by Velázquez to arrest him, but in a characteristically bold (and lucky) move, Cortés convinced the Cuban soldiers to join his quest for gold and glory. It was not until 1523, two years after the fall of Tenochtitlan, that Cortés learned he’d been named governor of New Spain, and he spent most of his life fighting Velázquez’s accusations. It’s clear, then, that his position here was far from secure.
Cortés’s strategy on the ground was to exploit local divisions, winning allies (or at least reasonably compliant bystanders) through a combination of force, diplomacy and terror tactics. By the time he arrived at Tenochtitlan he was accompanied by some 10,000 indigenous warriors. These men were Tlaxcalans, close neighbours and enemies of the Aztecs of Tenochtitlan; after initial fierce resistance, they had been convinced to throw in their lot with the Spaniards against their old adversaries.
The entry into Tenochtitlan was an awe-inspiring moment for the conquistadors. Superficially, the balance of power favoured Moctezuma: he controlled the stage, and the Spaniards found themselves at the heart of a hostile city, in the centre of an empire of millions, surrounded by highly trained warriors who thought nothing of offering their opponents to a merciless god. “What men in all the world have shown such daring?” boasted Díaz. But the presence of a multitude of Tlaxcalans on the causeway must surely have affected the dynamic of the meeting. Bravery comes much more readily with 10,000 allies at your back.
When Cortés rode towards Tenochtitlan, he was at the head of a strikingly foreign force – unfamiliar clothes and weapons, white faces, beards, strange crosses and banners all feature in later depictions of the invading Spaniards by indigenous people – but he also led an army in which the conquistadors were outnumbered by Mexicans at least ten to one.
We don’t know what the Aztecs thought about the Tlaxcalans in their midst, but we know that their fellow Mexicans were luxuriously accommodated in the city with the Spaniards, and that many Tlaxcalans died alongside their allies on the so-called ‘Night of Sorrows’. This was the night when, after simmering hostilities erupted into open warfare following the slaughter of unarmed Aztec warriors at a festival, the conquistadors fled the city, losing most of their party in the process. Moctezuma was also killed at some point during this clash, though it’s unclear whether he died at the hands of the Spanish or his own people.
Cortés and his allies then orchestrated an unlikely reversal, besieging the city with brigantines constructed in Tlaxcala and carried over the mountains. Ravaged by a smallpox epidemic to which they had no immunity, the Aztecs nonetheless fought to the death, refusing to surrender until their new ruler, Cuauhtemoc, was finally captured in a canoe on the lake. By that stage, the city the Spaniards had so admired was in ruins.
Moment of uncertainty
This story is not new. It has been told and retold: as the triumph of technology; as a tale of heroism and European derring-do; as a story of Spanish barbarity and vicious conquest; as the salvation of savage souls; as the last gasp of a great empire or the start of a new one. And yet we keep returning to it – to this moment of historical tension, this instant when the world stood at a tipping point. It is, for me, this very uncertainty that draws us back.
There is an inexorability to history. The story marches towards the present, towards the birth of brutal European empires and the annihilation and exploitation of indigenous communities. The violence of conquest, combined with the merciless epidemics that swept through the Americas in the following decades, left all but a small fraction of the original population dead, families and communities in ruins, and thousands of Mexicans enslaved and transported to Spain.
But for the participants in this historical tragedy, the outcome was not inevitable. When the Aztec empire fell, indigenous Mexicans did not passively submit to Spanish rule. For many, one faceless emperor was simply replaced by another, and they adapted accordingly. The Tlaxcalans fought for their rights as allies to the Spanish, successfully asserting their autonomy and gaining exemption from tribute. They sent emissaries to Spain, won coats of arms, and became prominent players in colonial politics.
Other cities also asserted themselves, swiftly adapting their knowledge of legal and literary conventions to a new alphabetic system of communication, proving their adaptability and resilience, and learning the delicate art of negotiation with the crown. Even the noble families of Tenochtitlan – the conquistadors’ fiercest opponents – successfully asserted their ‘traditional’ rights, intermarried with the Spanish elite, and gained posts and grants at court in Spain.
The meeting between Cortés and Moctezuma was remarkable for all that it symbolises. For the Spanish, it was a precarious juncture. For the Aztecs, it was the arrival of a strange force to be dazzled and dominated. For the Tlaxcalans, it was an opportunity to exploit. It is a reminder that history is a mirror with many faces. The side we most often see reflects European dominance, but tilt the angle and we see other perspectives, other possibilities, other people. It is tempting to see this as the start of European global dominance, but the route by which we got here was not clearly signposted to its participants. In the 500 years since Moctezuma met Cortés, the world was remade. Yet a closer look at this moment reminds us that this history was not direct or inevitable, but a mosaic of endlessly complex possibilities.
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Caroline Dodds Pennock is lecturer in international history at the University of Sheffield and author of Bonds of Blood: Gender, Lifecycle and Sacrifice in Aztec Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, paperback 2011)
This content first appeared in issue 14 of BBC World Histories magazine
]]>Dire straits: the story of Ferdinand Magellan's fatal voyage of discoveryhttps://www.historyextra.com/period/tudor/ferdinand-magellan-fatal-voyage-discovery-first-circumnavigation-globe-story-facts-timeline/2021-04-27T11:00:15.000ZIf all had gone to plan during Ferdinand Magellan’s life-defining expedition, almost no one would know his name now. As it happened, everything went disastrously wrong for the Portuguese sea captain, yet he has gone down in history as the first explorer to circumnavigate the planet, even though he died in the middle of the journey.
Magellan did, however, become the first European to lead a voyage into the Pacific Ocean – although future sailors would regularly raise alarmed eyebrows at the name he bequeathed to it. The expedition he led (or at least one of the five ships that set out from Spain in 1519) performed the first known complete loop of the globe.
Although Magellan could never have predicted the extraordinary events that would follow, perhaps the thought of reputational immortality would have provided the 41-year-old with a crumb of comfort on 27 April 1521, as he floundered in the shallows of a beach on the island of Mactan in the Philippines, mortally injured and weighed down by his armour. He had been identified as the leader of the invading alien force by the enraged warriors of island chief Lapu-Lapu, and was about to suffer a pointless and wholly avoidable death after his ill-advised show of military might spectacularly backfired.
Magellan’s final moments were frenzied and violent. But if he hadn’t made the fateful decision to lead a small force against a defending army of 1,500 battle-ready men, then perhaps he wouldn’t have been remembered as one of the greatest explorers of his era.
Who was Ferdinand Magellan?
Born into an aristocratic Portuguese family in 1480, Ferdinand Magellan was orphaned as a young boy and at the age of 12 he entered the royal court in Lisbon as a page of Eleanor of Viseu, consort of King John II. Thirteen years later, he enlisted in the fleet of the Portuguese viceroy to the Indies and spent seven years learning the ropes of his future career during action-packed voyages in Asia and Africa.
Magellan was part of the invading force that saw Portugal secure control of the region’s most important trading routes when it conquered Malacca on the Malay Peninsula in 1511, and he may have ventured as far east as the Moluccas (Spice Islands) of modern-day Indonesia. During these adventures he bought a Malay-speaking man, Enrique de Malacca, to be his slave, interpreter and companion – and he remained so on all Magellan’s later voyages.
By 1512, Magellan was back in Lisbon with a promising-looking career ahead of him. He soon joined the huge expeditionary force of 500 ships and 15,000 soldiers that John II’s successor, King Manuel I, sent to punish the governor of Morocco for failing to pay his tribute to the Portuguese crown in 1513. It was during a skirmish that he sustained an injury that left him with a lifelong limp. But he was then accused of illegal trading with the Moors, which saw him fall from favour.
A dedicated student of maps and charts, consumed with an urge to explore, Magellan had hatched a plan to pioneer a westward route to the Spice Islands, avoiding the perilous route around the Cape of Good Hope. However, the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas and the expeditions and achievements of explorers such as Vasco da Gama had already granted Portugal full control of the eastwards route around southern Africa, and Manuel was disinterested in Magellan’s ideas.
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This snub left the ambitious and capable captain dangerously disaffected – a blessing for the Spanish, who were desperately seeking an alternative way of accessing the riches of India and the Far East. In 1517, Magellan decamped to Seville in Spain, where he quickly married the daughter of another Portuguese exile, had two children and began bending the ear of Charles I about a western route to the Spice Islands.
The 18-year-old Spanish king – grandson of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, who had commissioned the adventures of Columbus – was desperate to make his mark and smash the dominance his Iberian rivals had over the enormously lucrative spice trade. He seized the potential opportunity to bypass Africa, while avoiding breaking the terms of the treaty with the powerful Portuguese, and commissioned Magellan to undertake the expeditionary mission he had been itching to pursue.
Of course, Magellan wasn’t the first European explorer to sail west in search of a backdoor route to the treasures of the Orient. Columbus had ventured that way across the Atlantic looking for the East Indies in 1492, before bumping into the Bahamas instead, while John Cabot (aka Giovanni Caboto), a Venetian captain commissioned by Henry VII of England, had sailed from Bristol to Newfoundland in 1497.
Unlike Columbus – who made a further three journeys across the western ocean, but died in denial that he was actually exploring a totally new continent – the Spanish soon realised this was a different land mass (the Americas). While this revelation would ultimately return riches beyond their wildest dreams in terms of gold, Magellan’s focus was on how to get past this ‘New World’ in order to reach the Spice Islands beyond.
No European had sailed around Cape Horn – or indeed even laid eyes on it – but a Spanish adventurer named Vasco Núñez de Balboa had discovered the ocean beyond the New World in 1513, by traversing the Isthmus of Panama. Magellan, a visionary who was working with the most advanced cartographers and cosmographers of the era, was convinced there was a way of getting around the Americas.
Westward ho
In September 1519, Magellan led five vessels, manned by a multinational, 270-strong crew, into the Atlantic – his flagship the Trinidad, plus the Santiago, San Antonio, Concepción and Victoria. Word of his mission reached Manuel I, who jealously dispatched a Portuguese naval detachment to follow the expedition, but Magellan outran them.
But he couldn’t escape all his enemies so easily, especially as some were among his own men. Many of the Spanish sailors in the expeditionary party were suspicious of their Portuguese commander. Some of his crew were criminals released from prison in return for undertaking the dangerous voyage. Others joined just because they were avoiding creditors.
The fleet was hit by a storm, which caused a delay and resulted in food rationing. Here, Juan de Cartagena – who had been appointed captain of the largest ship, the San Antonio, because of his good connections, despite being green in the business of exploration and an inexperienced seaman – began openly criticising Magellan’s competence and refusing to salute his captain-general. Magellan had Cartagena arrested, relieved of his command and imprisoned in the brig of the Victoria until they reached South America. The incident was a precursor to the much more dramatic and bloody events to come.
In December, the expedition reached South America and made landfall in Rio de Janeiro. For two weeks they interacted with indigenous people, trading trinkets for food and sexual favours, before the fleet sailed south, scouring the coastline in search of an opening. They spent fruitless weeks exploring the estuary of Río de la Plata for this elusive passage, before freezing conditions forced the party to seek shelter for the winter in Port St Julian in Patagonia.
Timeline: Ferdinand Magellan's voyage
Ten landmark moments in Magellan’s voyage into the unknown, as plotted out on a 1544 copy of the Agnese Atlas, produced by the Italian mapmaker Battista Agnese
20 September 1519: The fleet sets sail Magellan’s fleet of five ships with a crew of 270 leave Sanlúcar de Barrameda in south-west Spain. Supported by the Habsburg emperor Charles V, the voyage is funded by German banking money. The crew is drawn from across Europe and even Africa, and equipped for a voyage of two years. 26 September 1519: A supply crisis The fleet reaches the Canary Islands, but is already dogged with problems. Magellan realises he has been swindled out of supplies before departure. He also has to outrun Portuguese ships trying to arrest him as a traitor in the pay of Spain. December 1519: Tensions rise The fleet successfully crosses the Atlantic and arrives in Rio de Janeiro Bay. Tensions are already running high between the Portuguese commander and the Spanish nobles on the voyage, who continue to question his authority. Sailing down the coast of Patagonia they meet ‘giants’, one of whom is taken onboard. October 1520: Mutineers strike After a gruelling journey south, putting down a mutiny and wrecking a ship, Magellan discovers ‘Magellan’s Strait’, a route through the southern tip of South America to the Pacific. Navigating his way takes over a month through unknown waters in terrible conditions with the loss of another ship. November 1520: Into the Pacific Magellan finally emerges into open sea. He names it ‘Mare Pacificum’, or ‘peaceful sea’. He is the first European to sail across the Pacific, though having underestimated its size by almost half, the next leg of the voyage is anything but peaceful. Many of the crew die from scurvy. March 1521: Land at last After more than three months sailing out of sight of land, the ravaged crew land in Guam, Micronesia. Attempting to trade with locals, Magellan and his crew accuse them of theft, naming the islands ‘Ladrones’: the ‘Islands of Thieves’. 27 April 1521: Magellan is slain Magellan becomes embroiled in conflicts between rival chieftains and attempts to assert his authority by attacking the ruler of Mactan in the Philippine archipelago. Magellan and many of the crew are killed on the beach. His body is never recovered. November 1521: A new commander The Spanish captain Juan Sebastián Elcano takes command and finally reaches Tidor in the Moluccas Islands. Exploiting local hostility towards the Portuguese, he loads the two remaining ships with a large consignment of spices whose profit recoups nearly twice the voyage’s initial investment. December 1521: Elcano heads home Elcano makes the decision to send one ship back via the Pacific, but it is caught by patrolling Portuguese vessels. The crew are arrested, and the ship lost at sea. Elcano’s remaining ship heads back to Spain via the Indian Ocean and Cape of Good Hope. 6 September 1522: The odyssey ends Elcano arrives back in Sanlúcar, nearly three years after the fleet’s departure. Only 18 of the original crew of 270 survive, including the Venetian chronicler Antonio Pigafetta, whose book remains the key eyewitness account of the voyage. News of the voyage spreads throughout Europe and causes a diplomatic conflict over the Moluccas between Spain and Portugal.
Morale was already plummeting when, in April 1520, Cartagena made his move. He escaped Victoria, reboarded the San Antonio, and begun fermenting trouble and securing support from the Spanish crew and officers, playing on bad blood about Magellan’s Portuguese nationality.
In the mutiny that followed, the San Antonio was declared independent of Magellan’s command. The captains of the Concepción and the Victoria (Gaspar de Quesada and Luiz Mendoza) joined them, as did the Victoria’s pilot Juan Sebastián Elcano, and many of the officers and crew. A letter was sent to Magellan on the Trinidad, demanding he acknowledge that the fleet was no longer under his command.
Magellan coolly sent his reply back in the hands of an assassin. After coming alongside the Victoria in a small boat, while pretending to hand over the letter to Mendoza, the man fatally stabbed the errant captain instead. Simultaneously, crew loyal to Magellan stormed aboard the ship and attacked the mutineers, who were overcome.
The rebels maintained control of the San Antonio and Concepción, with Cartagena having boarded the latter prior to the fighting breaking out. Magellan positioned the three ships he had at his disposal across the mouth of the bay, and prepared for combat.
During the night, heavy winds caused San Antonio to drag its anchor and drift towards the Trinidad. Magellan met the oncoming ship with a cannon broadside, causing the mutineers aboard the stricken carrack to surrender. Conceding defeat, Cartagena followed suit and gave up the Concepción without resistance the following morning.
Having quelled the revolt, Magellan immediately sentenced 30 men to death, but then (mindful of his threadbare resources) commuted their punishment to hard labour. The leaders of the mutiny weren’t so lucky. Quesada was beheaded for treason, and both his body and that of Mendoza’s were mutilated and put on sticks. Too fearful of Cartagena’s connections to order him executed, Magellan instead left him marooned with Padre Sánchez de la Reina, a priest who’d supported the mutineers. They were never heard of again.
The real deal
The scientific and cartographic legacy of Magellan’s expedition was huge. To plan his expedition, the explorer partnered with cosmographer Rui Faleiro, a pioneer in determining latitude and longitude, and Portuguese cartographers Jorge Reinel and Diogo Ribeiro, who developed maps for the journey. Yet no one could have prepared Magellan for the crushing magnitude of the previously unexplored Pacific Ocean, which the men thought they would cross in a few days. Instead it took them more than three months, meaning they were woefully undersupplied and suffered terribly with scurvy. Ribeiro used data from Magellan’s expedition to make improvements and updates to the first scientific world map, the Padrón Real.
Back on course
In July, Magellan dispatched the Santiago to scout ahead for the elusive passage. She discovered the Rio de Santa Cruz in what is now Argentina, but sank in a storm while trying to make the return journey. Remarkably, the crew survived, and two men trekked overland for 11 days to alert Magellan, who mounted a rescue mission.
In October, the entire fleet set off, and Magellan at last sighted the strait that now bears his name, a route between the tip of mainland South America and the Tierra del Fuego archipelago. However, conditions continued to be rough, and when the fleet split to explore either side of an island, the crew of the San Antonio forced their captain to desert and return to Spain (where they spread scurrilous rumours about Magellan’s brutality to avoid punishment).
While the main fleet waited in vain for the San Antonio, Gonzalo de Espinosa led an advance party along the strait, returning after six days with news that made Magellan weep with joy: they’d sighted open ocean. On 28 November, the expedition emerged into an ocean that seemed so relatively benign on the day, Magellan named it Mar Pacifico, or Peaceful Sea.
The true nature and enormity of the Pacific was soon revealed to the explorer, however. !e fleet left the coast of Chile to sail across the new-found ocean, a journey Magellan expected to last four days, but which took almost four months. The fleet was woefully underprepared and the sailors savaged by scurvy and thirst, many dying.
Magellan crossed the equator in February 1521 and reached the Pacific island of Guam in March, where the fleet replenished its exhausted supplies. Not long afterwards they finally arrived at the Philippine archipelago. This, though, was just the beginning of Magellan’s real troubles; his erstwhile planning and leadership came dramatically undone when he needlessly embroiled himself in a dispute between two local chiefs.
In the Philippines, Magellan communicated with local rajahs through his Malay slave, Enrique. At the evangelical explorer’s behest, a number of island chiefs – including Cebu’s Rajah Humabon – converted to Christianity.
In return for his soul, however, Humabon sought Magellan’s support in a disagreement with a neighbour, Lapu- Lapu, a chief on Mactan Island, who had already irked the explorer by declining to convert or bow to the Spanish crown.
On 27 April 1521, 60 heavily armed Europeans accompanied a fleet of Filipino boats to Mactan, where Lapu- Lapu again refused to recognise the authority of Humabon or the Spanish. Facing 1,500 warriors, Magellan – confident in the shock-and-awe capability of his superior weaponry, which included guns, crossbows, swords and axes – instructed Humabon to hang back, while he waded ashore with an attack party of 49 men.
They torched several houses in an attempt to scare the islanders, but this only served to whip Lapu-Lapu’s warriors into a battle rage. In the resulting beachfront mêlée, where the Europeans were weighed down by their armour, Magellan was identified and injured by a bamboo spear thrust. Felled, he was then surrounded and killed, along with several others. With their captain dead, the survivors retreated to the boats.
After the battle, when the Europeans refused to release Enrique (despite Magellan’s orders to do so in the event of his death), Humabon turned against the Spanish. Several were poisoned during a feast, including Duarte Barbosa and João Serrão, who had assumed leadership of the expedition following the demise of Magellan.
Rounding the circle
João Carvalho took command of the fleet and ordered an immediate departure. By this time, however, too few men remained to crew the three ships. The Concepción was burnt, and the two remaining vessels made for Brunei, indulging in a spot of piracy en route, and attacking a junk bound for China. Espinosa then replaced Carvalho as leader, as well as being captain of the Trinidad, while Elcano was made the captain of the Victoria.
In November, the expedition finally reached the Spice Islands and managed to trade with the Sultan of Tidore. Loaded with cloves, they attempted to return home by sailing west across the Indian Ocean – which had never been Magellan’s intention – until the Trinidad started leaking. The wounded ship stopped for repairs, and eventually tried to return via the Pacific, but was captured by the Portuguese and subsequently sank.
Meanwhile, under the captaincy of Elcano, the Victoria continued across the Indian Ocean, eventually limping around the Cape of Good Hope in May. Tragically, 20 men starved on the last leg along the Atlantic coast of Africa, and another 13 were abandoned on Cape Verde – Elcano had put into port to resupply, but the Portuguese there caught on that they were part of a Spanish expedition; fearing for his cargo, Elcano fled.
On 6 September 1522, after three years’ absence, Victoria arrived in Spain, becoming the first ship to have sailed around the planet. Only 18 of Magellan’s original 270-man crew arrived with her. Though ultimately successful in finding a western passage that opened up the Pacific and the west coast of the Americas, the Strait of Magellan proved too far south to be a viable trade route to the Orient, which intensified the search for the elusive Northwest Passage from the mid-16th century.
Although Magellan didn’t make it home, he did complete a full circumnavigation of the globe (Philippines to Philippines, albeit in two chunks separated by several years), a feat probably matched by his Malaysian slave Enrique. But the first European to definitively do so in a single voyage was the man who captained Victoria on her final leg – the mutineer Elcano.
Drake's fortune
The next European to complete a circumnavigation of the globe was the English sea captain and privateer Francis Drake. During his second expedition (1577–1580), Drake also sailed west, returning into Plymouth with the Golden Hind on 26 September 1580, laden with spices and Spanish bounty, winning himself a knighthood.
Pat Kinsella specialises in adventure journalism as a writer, photographer and editor
This article was first published in the September 2019 issue of BBC History Revealed
]]>A tale of Tudor travel: John Cabot's voyage to Americahttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/john-cabot-famous-explorer-bristol-why-who-facts-voyage-discovery/2021-03-26T22:37:53.000ZThe Italian explorer John Cabot made history when he crossed the Atlantic and planted the English flag upon North American shores. He had sailed to a distant place where tall trees burst from rich, loamy soil, its waters so full of fish that the sailors hunted them by the barrel. But when Henry VII heard of Cabot’s rich discoveries, the monarch felt a pang of disappointment: why were there no spices?
Henry had backed Cabot’s venture in the hopes of securing a fast new trade route to China and Japan – both Cabot and the famous explorer Christopher Columbus believed sailing west from Europe would quickly take them to Asia, as Europeans did not yet know about America. At the time, Asia was thought to be overflowing with all manner of treasures, including precious stones, gold and spices.
And, as England was still reeling from the ill-effects of the Wars of the Roses and outbreaks of plague, securing such a profitable route into the heart of Asia would see the country’s prospects skyrocket.
Who was John Cabot?
Conversely, Cabot was not driven solely by the desire to fill his pockets with gold, but by his fervent ambition to travel the world and discover new lands. Born in the Italian city of Genoa in around 1450, Cabot upped sticks to Venice and became an official Venetian citizen in 1476. But he was determined to travel much further afield, and eventually found a job with a mercantile firm, where he learned how to navigate the sea with ease, and travelled as far as the Ottoman city of Mecca, an impressive trading hub where the eastern and western worlds collided.
Cabot’s determination to sail to far- flung regions had also been stoked by reading Marco Polo’s heady accounts of bustling Chinese cities. Cabot was desperate to see these places for himself, and he believed he could travel to them by charting a course west from Europe, across the Atlantic Ocean.
However, Cabot lacked the money to finance such an extravagant operation, and at first, he failed to share his dream with those who had the funds to back him. Trying his luck at the European royal courts, Cabot eventually took himself and his family to England, to try and prise open the purse strings of merchants in London and Bristol. Before leaving for England, the aspiring adventurer learned that fellow Italian Christopher Columbus had travelled across the Atlantic and found land – land that everyone was convinced was the ‘Spice Islands’, or Indies.
Cabot reached England without incident, and by the end of 1495 he and his family were settled in Bristol. Talk of Columbus’s far-flung travels as an ambassador for Spain caught the attention of the English, and Cabot capitalised on this to access the coffers of some of Bristol’s merchants. Yet a few months later, the Italian had the backing of a much greater patron.
In late 1495 or early 1496, Cabot visited London and met with Henry VII’s advisors to explain his grand plans for charting a swift trade route to the far east. After persuading them of his idea, he proceeded to petition the king himself. Cabot won over Henry, too, and on 5 March 1496 the king sent letters patent to Cabot and his sons – Lewis, Sebastian and Sancio – which gave them permission to cross the seas in search of new lands.
In this document, Henry VII granted to Cabot and his offspring “full and free authority, faculty and power to sail to all parts, regions and coasts of the eastern, western and northern sea, under our banners, flags and ensigns”. The Tudor king also granted the explorer the right “to find, discover and investigate whatsoever islands, countries, regions or provinces of heathens and infidels, in whatsoever part of the world placed, which before this time were unknown to all Christians”. In other words, Cabot was not allowed to encroach upon land that had already been claimed by the Spanish or Portuguese – both Christian countries – as these nations had already sent explorers out in search of fresh territory.
The missive continued, giving Cabot and his descendants permission to “conquer, occupy and possess whatsoever such towns, castles, cities and islands by them thus discovered that they may be able to conquer, occupy and possess... acquiring for us the dominion, title and jurisdiction of the same towns, castles, cities, islands and mainlands discovered”.
Through giving the Italian explorer this right, England would be able to acquire power over new settlements and perhaps start to seed its empire across the globe.
Where did John Cabot explore?
Ever the shrewd ruler, Henry made sure that as well as growing England’s power abroad, he would benefit personally from Cabot’s exploits too. The letter also stated: “As often as [Cabot and his sons] shall arrive at our port of Bristol... [they shall] pay to us, either in goods or money, the fifth part of the whole capital gained.”
So, although Henry himself had not put forward so much as a single gold crown to finance the venture, he would receive one-fifth of the treasures they brought back to England.
To sweeten the deal, the king stipulated that Cabot and his family would be “free and exempt from all payment of customs” on all the goods they brought home from their travels. Moreover, “all mainlands, islands, towns, cities, castles and other places whatsoever discovered by them, however numerous they may happen to be, may not be frequented or visited by any other subjects of ours whatsoever without the licence of the aforesaid John [Cabot] and his sons”.
And finally, the king commanded that all English subjects “shall render good assistance to the aforesaid John [Cabot] and his sons and deputies, and that they shall give them all their favour and help as well in fitting out the ships or vessels as in buying stores and provisions with their money and in providing the other things which they must take with them on the said voyage”.
Buoyed by Henry’s support, in 1496 Cabot chartered a ship that would take him and his crew from Bristol across the Atlantic to – or so they hoped – Asia’s shores. However, it was not to be, and the first crossing ended in disaster. The Bristol merchant John Day revealed why this initial attempt failed, recording in a later letter: “Here is what happened: [Cabot] went with one ship, his crew confused him, he was short of supplies and ran into bad weather, and he decided to turn back.”
Cabot was not dissuaded, though, and the following year he set out from Bristol once more in search of the far east and adventure. He recruited a crew of 18 men, most of whom were from Bristol – although a Burgundian man and a barber from Castiglione, near Genoa (who was hired to shave the crew’s chins so that they kept up with the fashions of the time), seem to have also been onboard.
In May 1497 the adventurers left Bristol on a vessel named the Matthew, travelling across the Irish Sea and circumnavigating Ireland’s southern coast, before sailing into the great unknown.
Happily, this second journey proved to be the opposite of the first. The ship was well-provisioned and the weather was largely kind. In June, some storms did set in, but once these squalls had passed Cabot heard the cries of birds in the air and saw bits of wood bobbing up and down with the waves. Land was drawing near.
On 24 June, the Matthew reached these unknown shores. Cabot’s spirits couldn’t have been higher: he thought he’d succeeded in discovering an island off the coast of Asia, believing that he had successfully plotted a fast trade route from England to the far east. But although he had reached land, it was not the coast he thought it to be – Cabot was actually standing on North American soil.
It’s not known for certain exactly where the Matthew landed – Newfoundland, Cape Breton Island, and even Maine have all been suggested – but wherever it was, Cabot claimed it for Henry VII and called it the “New Founde Land”. John Day wrote: “He [Cabot] landed at only one spot of the mainland, near the place where land was first sighted, and they disembarked there with a crucifix and raised banners with the arms of the Holy Father [Pope Alexander VI] and those of the King of England, my master [Henry VII].”
The land that Cabot had proclaimed belonged to Henry VII was lovely indeed. The Milanese envoy Raimondo de Soncino recorded that “the land is excellent and temperate, and they [the crew] believe that brazil-wood and silk are native there. [The crew] assert that the sea is swarming with fish, which can be taken not only with the net, but in baskets let down with a stone, so that it sinks in the water.” And Day wrote: “[The crew] found tall trees of the kind masts are made, and other smaller trees, and the country is very rich in grass.”
What did John Cabot discover?
But Cabot and his men didn’t only find evidence of plentiful plants and creatures. According to Day, Cabot and his men spotted a trail that led further inland and “saw a site where a fire had been made, they saw manure of animals which they thought to be farm animals, and they saw a stick half a yard long pierced at both ends, carved and painted with brazil”. Who, they wondered, had occupied this fair land already?
Taking snares that had been left out to catch animals as well as a needle for stitching nets – as evidence of the mysterious people that could be presented to the king on their return – Cabot and the others left the trail, topped up their water supplies and returned to the safety of the Matthew. Cabot mapped more of the coastline from the confines of the ship, naming a variety of landmarks, before turning the Matthew around and beginning the journey home.
The Matthew docked in Bristol on 6 August 1497, and Cabot hurried to meet the city’s merchants who had financed his ventures and tell them of his success before rushing off to London where Henry was eagerly awaiting confirmation that the mission had borne fruit.
On 10 August, Cabot was granted an audience with Henry VII. He triumphantly announced that he’d sailed to north-eastern Asia and found an island there, describing the temperate weather and abundant waters. Although he’d brought back no riches this time, Cabot acknowledged, he would certainly find them on his next trip – and bring one- fifth back to Henry, whose coffers would soon be stuffed with gold.
The king gave Cabot a £10 reward for his efforts and vowed to give him a yearly income. He’d likely have offered the explorer far more money if he had indeed returned laden with spices. But Cabot’s mind was already on his next voyage across the Atlantic.
What happened to John Cabot?
By the end of the month, Cabot was back in Bristol and plans for his third journey were well underway. This time, he reasoned, he would sail back to “New Founde Land” before continuing westwards, where he would, he was certain, reach Japan. There, he would establish a trading post and start sending precious items from the far east back home to England.
In 1498, Cabot headed for the Atlantic once more, this time the leader of five ships – one financed by the king himself, and the other four courtesy of Bristol’s merchants – and commanding between 200 and 300 men. But the journey was soon marred by tragedy. At some point during the early stages of the voyage, one of the ships was seemingly caught in a storm and left unfit to cross the Atlantic, so it had to sail back to Ireland.
The other four ships continued on their journey – but what actually happened to them, and to their leader Cabot, is a mystery. Some believe the fleet sank beneath the waves in a savage storm; others have argued that Cabot was shipwrecked near to Newfoundland. There are also those who claim a freezing and starving crew mutinied somewhere across the Atlantic.
Whatever Cabot’s fate, though, his exploits had huge ramifications – although not in the way he had hoped. Rather than making England the premier European trading partner with the far east, thanks to a high-speed ocean highway, Cabot had, in fact, proved that rapid Atlantic travel was possible – but to a different destination entirely. The British colonies that were subsequently set up in what is now the United States and Canada owed a great debt to Cabot, for forging the way across the seas.
This article first appeared in BBC History Revealed
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