In 1521, after Magellan was killed, his last two ships went on alone to find the Spice Islands. This is what life aboard them was really like, told slowly for sleep. After Magellan: a calm, sourced bedtime history of what his last two ships did next. In 1521 the Trinidad and the Victoria wandered through the Philippines and Borneo to the clove islands of Maluku, and then the Victoria sailed on alone to Timor. We follow the ships the way Antonio Pigafetta wrote it down, day by day. A ship is burned off Bohol. Rice is cooked in leaves on a river in Mindanao, and Palawan proves a land of plenty. At Brunei, elephants in silk wait at a city built over the water. The crews spend forty-two days repairing the ships on the coast of Borneo, and Pigafetta keeps a leaf that walks. Then come the four peaks of Maluku, the sultan of Tidore under his silk umbrella, cloves weighed against red cloth, and a mist that settles on the clove mountain. The Trinidad springs a leak that no diver can find. Then the Victoria sails alone, south to the sandalwood coast of Timor. Gentle narration, quotations from Pigafetta's account, disputed numbers flagged, and no verdicts. CHAPTERS 00:00 Cold open: Two things you may not know 01:10 Chapter 1: The Ship at Bohol 06:02 Chapter 2: Rice Cooked in Leaves 12:55 Chapter 3: Elephants in Silk 22:32 Chapter 4: Forty-Two Days 30:55 Chapter 5: The Islands of the Cloves 42:05 Chapter 6: The Leak 49:37 Chapter 7: South to Timor 57:29 Fade: Evening at Tidore SOURCES Primary text (public domain) 1. Antonio Pigafetta, account of Magellan's voyage, in The First Voyage Round the World by Magellan, translated by Lord Stanley of Alderley, Hakluyt Society, London, 1874: https://archive.org/details/firstvoyageround00piga All direct quotations in this episode come from this translation. 2. J. A. Robertson (tr.), Magellan's Voyage Around the World, in Blair & Robertson, The Philippine Islands, vols. 33–34, 1906 (Project Gutenberg #42884, #47927), consulted. Modern references (consulted, not quoted) - 1522 Seville record of the Victoria's cargo (381 sacks, 524 quintals of cloves), via Ingenieros Navales de Galicia. - Library of Congress, Pigafetta manuscript (World Digital Library): https://www.loc.gov/item/2021667606/ - Kota Batu Archaeological Park and Kampong Ayer, Brunei. - Treaty of Zaragoza (1529). Numbers that sources disagree on are given as "around" or "about": the men who left Spain, the crews leaving Tidore and Timor, the men held at Cape Verde, and the size of a bahar. Where exactly the Victoria anchored on Timor is not known. Who should be remembered for the first voyage around the world is argued over; this episode leaves that argument alone. IMAGES Pigafetta's own island maps (Library of Congress). Ortelius, Maris Pacifici, 1589 (Wikimedia Commons). Maps and prints of the Moluccas, Borneo and the Banda Islands, A. J. Bik's drawings of Tidore and a clove tree, and the nutmeg plate (Rijksmuseum). Köhler's clove plate (Wikimedia Commons). All public domain. Route maps were drawn for this episode from Natural Earth data. The painted illustrations and the short opening scenes were made for this episode and are labelled on screen as illustrations. They show no real historical faces. The script was researched and written from the sources listed. Images are public-domain museum works, route maps and painted illustrations. New sea stories every week. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6UMpMNbpTo True voyages to India, the Spice Islands and Australia: calm history for sleep, told from the travellers' own journals.
