Antonio Pigafetta Relates His Voyage Around the World with Ferdinand Magellan and Juan Sebastián Elcano
On September 6th, 1522, just over 500 years ago, a ship called the Victoria, with 18 sailors aboard, captained by the Basque sailor Juan Sebastián Elcano (1476-1526), entered Sanlúcar de Barrameda, at the mouth of the Guadalquivir river in Spain; two days later, the Victoria reached the town of Sevilla. This ship had left Sevilla with four others, with well over 200 men manning the five ships, under the leadership of the Portuguese Ferdinand Magellan (1480-1521), on August 10th, 1518, and then Sanlúcar a few weeks later, on September 20th, 1518. The Victoria had travelled around the world, covering an estimated distance of 14'470 leagues [60'774 km]. This was the first circumnavigation of the world by European explorers, and proved demonstrably to the European public that the Earth is round.
This voyage was immortalized by a Venetian writer, Antonio Pigafetta (c.1480-c.1534), who had participated in the voyage. Despite his attempts, including with Pope Clement VII (1478-1534), to find funds, Pigafetta was unable to publish his book. Although the original manuscript is lost, as are his daily logs, which were deposited with the Spanish court in Valladolid, near Madrid, there are today five extant versions of the book from that time period: an Italian-language text now in the Ambrosiana library in Milan, and four French-language translations, one of which being only a summary.
The most important critical edition of Pigafetta’s text, based on those five versions, was undertaken by the Italian philologist Andrea Canova, and first published in 1999.
To honour the 500th anniversary of the return of the Victoria to Sevilla, a bilingual Italian-Spanish version of Pigafetta’s book was published in 2023 by the University of Navarra Press in Pamplona1. I picked up a copy at The Bogotá International Book Fair 2024, where I met a representative of the university.
The Italian part is a revised version of Canova’s critical edition, which took advantage of the completion of the two historical dictionaries of the numerous Italian languages and dialects: the Glossario degli antichi volgari italiani2 [Glossary of the old Italian vernaculars] and the Grande dizionario della lingua italiana3 [Great dictionary of the Italian language]. The Spanish version is a translation of the Italian part. There are numerous introductory notes.
Pigafetta’s Italian is not easy to read. It is not standard Italian, which broadly corresponds to the Tuscan dialect. Pigafetta wrote in Venetian dialect, and included a number of Iberisms, i.e., loan-words from Castillan [Spanish] and Portuguese. Hence Canova’s critical apparatus has to provide a permanent running glossary for unusual words in Pigafetta’s text.
For those who cannot read Italian or Spanish, there is an English translation of the first version of Canova’s critical edition, published by the University of Toronto Press4. I will use this text for the quotations below.
Pigafetta has been referred to by many writers. When the Colombian writer Gabriel García Marquez received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 for his novel Cien Años de Soledad [One Hundred Years of Solitude], he began his acceptance speech as follows5 [as translated by Deepl]:
Antonio Pigafetta, a Florentine [sic] navigator who accompanied Magellan on the first voyage around the world, wrote a rigorous chronicle of his passage through our southern America that nevertheless seems an adventure of the imagination. He told how he had seen pigs with their navels on their backs, and legless birds whose females hatched on the male’s back, and others like gannets without tongues whose beaks resembled a spoon. He told how he had seen a beastly beast with the head and ears of a mule, the body of a camel, the legs of a deer and the neighing of a horse. He said that the first native they met in Patagonia had a mirror held up in front of him, and that the giant lost the use of his reason because he was terrified of his own image.
This short and fascinating book, in which we can already glimpse the germs of our novels of today, is by no means the most astonishing testimony of our reality in those times. The Chroniclers of the Indies bequeathed us countless others…
For my part, I will focus on three specific technical passages that attracted my attention. The first passage pertains to the discovery of the passage now known as the Straight of Magellan:
Upon reaching fifty-two degrees toward the Antarctic Pole, we discovered most miraculously a strait on the day of the [Feast of the] Eleven Thousand Virgins, whose cape we named the Cape of the Eleven Thousand Virgins [192]. That strait is 110 leagues or 440 miles long, and it is one-half league broad, more or less, and it leads to another sea called the Pacific Sea, and is surrounded by very lofty mountains laden with snow [193]. There it was impossible to find bottom [for anchoring], and [it was necessary to fasten] the moorings on land twenty-five or thirty fathoms away, and if it had not been for the captain-general, we would not have found that strait, for we all thought and said that it was closed on all sides [194]. But the captain-general, who knew that he had to make his journey by means of a well-hidden strait, which he had seen depicted on a map in the treasury of the king of Portugal, which was made by that excellent man, Martin of Bohemia, sent two ships, the San Antonio and the Concepción (for thus they were called), to discover what was at the end of the bay [195]. [p.18, my emphasis]
Pigafetta is writing that Magellan had a map indicating the straight. Whether this map was actually created by Martin of Bohemia is unclear, but what would have been the source? Was it possible that someone like Niccolò de’ Conti (1395-1469) had acquired this knowledge during his voyages through Asia?
The second passage pertains to the stars visible around the South Pole, including the Southern Cross:
The Antarctic Pole is not so starry as the Arctic [254]. Many small stars clustered together are seen, which have the appearance of two clouds with little distance between them, and they are somewhat dim; in the midst of them are two large and not very luminous stars, which move only slightly: those two stars are the Antarctic Pole [255]. Our loadstone, although it moved here and there, always pointed toward its own Arctic Pole, although it did not have so much strength as on its own side, and on that account when we were in that open expanse, the captain-general asked all the pilots: ‘Are you still sailing forward in the course that we laid down on the maps [256]?’ All replied: ‘By your course exactly as laid down [257].’ He answered them that they were pointing wrongly, which was a fact, and that it would be fitting to adjust the compass, for it was not receiving so much force from its side [258]. When we were in the midst of that open expanse, we saw a cross with five extremely bright stars straight toward the west, those stars being exactly placed in relation to one another [259]. [p.25, my emphasis]
Pigafetta’s description of the Southern sky is perfectly correct.
The third passage pertains to them losing a day by travelling around the world:
Finally, constrained by our great distress, we went to the islands of Cape Verde [1338]. Wednesday, 9 July, we reached one of those islands called Santiago, and immediately sent the boat ashore for food, with the story for the Portuguese that we had lost our foremast under the equinoctial line (although we had lost it upon the Cape of Good Hope), and when we were re-stepping it, our captain-general had gone to Spain with the other two ships [1339]. With those good words, and with our merchandise, we got two boatloads of rice [1340]. We charged our men when they went ashore in the boat to ask what day it was [1341]. They told us that it was Thursday for the Portuguese: we were greatly surprised for it was Wednesday for us, and we could not see how we had made a mistake [1342]. For since I had always been healthy, I had written down every day without any interruption [1343]. However, as was told us later, it was no error, but as the voyage had been made continually toward the west and we had returned to the same place as does the sun, we had made that gain of twenty-four hours, as is clearly seen [1344]. [p.125, my emphasis]
Today, of course, this problem is resolved with the use of the International Date Line, which roughly corresponds to 180º longitude east or west.
With the great voyages conducted by European explorers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, all of a sudden Europe gained access to much knowledge acquired over previous centuries in other civilizations, including in India and China. This would turn out to be crucial for the development of European mathematics.
Antonio Pigafetta. Relazione del primo viaggio attorno al mondo. Relación del primer viaje alrededor del mundo. Edición bilingüe. Introducción, edición crítica y comentario de Andrea Canova. Traducción y edición de Soledad Aguilar Domingo y María Enriqueta Pérez Vázquez. Prefacio de Luciano Formisano. Pamplona: Ediciones Universad de Navarra, 2023.
Glossario degli antichi volgari italiani. A cura di Giorgio Colussi. Helsinki: Helsingin Yliopiston Monistuspalvelu, 1983-2006.
Grande dizionario della lingua italiana. Fondato da Salvatore Battaglia. Torino: Utet, 1961-2009.
Antonio Pigafetta. The First Voyage around the World (1519-1522). An Account of Magellan’s Expedition. Edited and Introduced by Theodore J. Catchey Jr. University of Toronto Press, 2007.
Gabriel García Márquez. La soledad de América Latina. 22 de diciembre de 2012. https://librosjuanqueduerme.blogspot.com/2012/12/gabriel-garcia-marquez-la-soledad-de.html