Juan Sebastián de Elcano

Spanish explorer

• Born: c. 1487
• Birthplace: Guetaria, Guipúzcoa, Castile (now in Spain)
• Died: August 4, 1526
• Place of death: At sea, Pacific Ocean

After the death of Ferdinand Magellan, Elcano took command of the Vittoria and completed the first circumnavigation of the globe. The voyage proved that Earth was round and brought forth the question of time changes in world travel.

Early Life

Juan Sebastián de Elcano (kwawn say-BAWS-tyahn day ehl-KAWN-oh) grew up in the Basque seafaring province of Guipúzcoa. Four of his brothers became mariners; one sister married a pilot. Elcano went to sea at an early age; by age twenty-three, he was captain and owner of a ship chartered to the king of Castile. While in a North African port, Elcano borrowed to pay his crew’s wages. When the Crown failed to send money promised for the voyage, he sold his ship to settle the debt, even though it was illegal to transfer an armed Spanish vessel to foreigners. Elcano then attended the school of navigation in Seville, completing a three-year course in piloting.

Life’s Work

Using his new credentials, Elcano applied for a position in Ferdinand Magellan’s exploring expedition. Magellan had convinced the king of Spain to sponsor a voyage to the East Indies by sailing westward. In the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), Spain and Portugal had divided the world, reserving everything east of a line drawn in the Atlantic Ocean to Portugal, while Spain claimed everything to the west. Magellan expected to find a passageway across South America and then sail west to the Moluccas, or Spice Islands (now in Indonesia). Proving they lay on the Spanish side of the line of demarcation would justify Spain’s participation in the lucrative spice trade dominated by Portugal.

Magellan appointed Elcano master of the Concepción. Master was the third-ranking ship’s officer, following captain and pilot. The fleet of five vessels, carrying a crew of 270, left Spain on September 20, 1519, and proceeded along the coast of South America without finding a passage. On March 31, 1520, the flotilla reached the Bay of San Julián in Argentina’s Patagonia region, where Magellan intended to spend the winter. Magellan’s arrogant behavior and unwillingness to discuss his decisions angered three of his aristocratic Spanish captains. They demanded that Magellan take the fleet back to Spain. When Magellan refused, the captains organized a mutiny.

Elcano joined the mutineers who, after capturing the San Antonio, placed him in charge of the vessel. Magellan successfully repressed the revolt and savagely punished the mutineers. Two of the mutinous captains were executed, their remains quartered and displayed on shore; the third was marooned when the flotilla left San Julián. Forty others, including Elcano, were convicted of treason and sentenced to death. Magellan could not spare the manpower and commuted the death sentences to hard labor, placing the mutineers in chains while they cleaned the fetid holds and worked the ships’ pumps.

The fleet departed San Julián on August 24, 1520, with Elcano returned to his post of master on the Concepción. On October 21, Magellan reached the passageway that would thereafter be named the Strait of Magellan . It took thirty-eight days of cautious navigation to transit the strait. One boat was shipwrecked; a second vessel was deserted and its crew returned to Spain. Three ships–Trinidad, Concepción, and Vittoria exited the strait on November 28. Magellan and his crew enjoyed the calmer waters of the new ocean and named it the Pacific.

No one in the early sixteenth century realized the extent of the Pacific Ocean. Even the latest maps showing the newly discovered American continents located Japan and the East Indies near America’s western shore. Magellan’s fleet took ninety-eight days to sail more than seven thousand miles before making landfall on Guam on March 6, 1521. Food ran low during the long voyage, and the crews suffered terribly from scurvy and starvation. After taking on supplies, Magellan’s expedition continued to the Philippines, becoming the first Europeans to visit those islands. Magellan befriended a local ruler and volunteered to fight his enemies, but his invasion of Mactan Island ran into fierce resistance. Magellan was killed on April 27, 1521.

Immediately after Magellan’s death, crew members selected new expedition leaders. Elcano had little respect for the men chosen, believing them deficient in navigational skills. He considered himself far better qualified, but the crewmen had not forgiven his role in the mutiny and preferred Magellan loyalists. On May 2 the Concepción (whose hull was being devoured by shipworms) was burned to prevent it from falling into unfriendly hands. Elcano then transferred to the Vittoria.

On September 21, 1521, Gonzalo Gómez de Espinosa became captain of the Trinidad, still flagship of the fleet, and Elcano received command of the Vittoria. Espinosa had no practical navigational experience, and Elcano effectively became leader of the expedition. The flotilla headed more directly toward the Moluccas, arriving at the harbor of the island of Tidore on November 8.

The two ships filled their holds with the precious spices they had acquired. When they prepared to depart, the Trinidad began to leak. The men decided that Vittoria would return to Spain around the Cape of Good Hope, while Trinidad would stay for repairs and head back across the Pacific to Spanish-controlled Mexico. Restoration of the Trinidad took three months. Espinosa then justified Elcano’s low opinion of his navigational abilities by spending five months trying unsuccessfully to find the way back to the Pacific before returning to Tidore in October, 1522, where the ship was captured by the Portuguese. Of the sixty men who chose to return on the Trinidad, only four made it back to Spain.

On December 21, 1521, Elcano left Tidore with forty-seven Europeans and thirteen Indonesians aboard the Vittoria. Battling contrary currents and monstrous storms, it took Elcano six months to round the Cape of Good Hope. On July 9 the Vittoria reached the Cape Verde Islands. Although this was Portuguese territory, Elcano, desperate for food, risked entering Santiago harbor. At first things went smoothly Elcano claimed to have been blown off course on the way to Spain from the Caribbean and the Vittoria was allowed to replenish its food supplies. On shore, the men learned it was Thursday, not Wednesday as their records showed; pious men were horrified, realizing they had mistakenly fasted on Saturdays and celebrated Easter on Monday. (When they returned to Spain, they learned they had gained a day by sailing westward around the globe.)

When Elcano sent another boat to seek more food, authorities became suspicious. They seized the longboat and its thirteen men and ordered Elcano to surrender the Vittoria. Instead, on July 15, he fled the harbor with a skeleton crew, arriving in Spain on September 6, 1522. Of the sixty men who had left Timor nearly nine months earlier, only eighteen Europeans and four Indonesians reached Seville.

King Charles I of Spain (later Holy Roman Emperor Charles V ) welcomed Elcano, rewarding him with a coat of arms and a pension. He pardoned Elcano for his role in the mutiny and for selling a Spanish armed ship on a previous voyage. The king honored the entire crew, including the thirteen men later rescued from the Cape Verde Islands. At a formal hearing on the expedition, Elcano who had never forgiven Magellan for his treatment during the mutiny testified that Magellan’s arrogant behavior had made the mutiny by proud Castilian gentlemen inevitable. By burning their village, Magellan had goaded the Mactan Islanders into taking revenge, thus bringing about his own death.

In the summer of 1525, Spain sent a second expedition to the Spice Islands, consisting of seven ships and 450 men, commanded by García Jofre de Loaisa, with Elcano as second-in-command and chief pilot. Elcano had trouble finding the Strait of Magellan; storms reduced the fleet to two vessels and scurvy decimated the crews on the long Pacific trek. On July 30, 1526, Loaisa died and Elcano succeeded him, only to succumb to disease himself and be buried at sea after his death on August 4, 1526.

Significance

The circumnavigation of the globe was the greatest voyage of the Age of Exploration. The arrival of Europeans in the Americas produced more profound consequences, but Christopher Columbus’s voyage could be called a pleasure cruise compared with the difficulties faced by Magellan and Elcano.

The Moluccan expedition added to European geographical knowledge considerably. It offered practical proof that the earth was globular. The voyage posed, for the first time, the problem of how to adjust for time gained when traveling westward across the Pacific a difficulty not solved until the establishment of the International Date Line in 1884. The huge expanse of the Pacific Ocean, revealed by the voyage, changed geographers’ conceptions of the globe’s size and suggested that Earth was misnamed, since the planet consisted mostly of water, not land.

Historians have tended to praise each explorer at the expense of the other. Denigrating either Magellan or Elcano is unwarranted. Without Magellan’s ruthless determination, the voyage would not have taken place, and without Elcano’s skillful seamanship, the circumnavigation could not have been completed.

Bibliography

Bergreen, Laurence. Over the Edge: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the World. New York: William Morrow, 2003. Sets the voyage, and Elcano’s role, into historical perspective.

Levinson, Nancy. Magellan and the First Voyage Around the World. New York: Clarion Books, 2001. Well-written account intended for younger readers.

Mitchell, Mairin. Elcano: The First Circumnavigator. London: Herder, 1958. The only biography of Elcano.

Morison, Samuel Eliot. The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages, A.D. 1492-1616. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974. Contains an excellent, carefully documented account of the first voyage around the world.