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October 8 - October 20, 2023
Spices have played an essential economic role in civilizations since antiquity. Like oil today, the European quest for spices drove the world’s economy and influenced global politics, and like oil today, spices became inextricably intertwined with exploration, conquest, imperialism.
The global spice trade underwent an upheaval in 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Turks, and the time-honored overland spice routes between Asia and Europe were severed.
In the face of all these dangers, Prince Henry offered a bold reply, “You cannot find a peril so great that the hope of reward will not be greater.”
They designed a new type of ship, the small, maneuverable caravel, distinguished by her triangular lateen sail (the name lateen came from the word “Latin”), borrowed from Arab vessels. Until this time, European vessels such as galleys relied on oarsmen or fixed sails for power.
anti-Semitism in Portugal led to a massacre of Jews in Lisbon in 1506. Manuel punished those responsible, but the legacy of bitterness lingered, and many Jews left the country for the Netherlands.
Juan de Cartagena—orders that became the most controversial aspect of the entire expedition—to serve as the inspector general of the fleet under the command of the two Portuguese commanders.
Fonseca had managed to stifle Magellan’s authority, and, potentially, his share of the proceeds of the expedition, by appointing his natural son and his close allies to virtually all the important positions in the armada.
Hardtack, the other staple of the sailor’s execrable diet, consisted of coarse wheat flour, including the husk, kneaded with hot water (never cold), and cooked twice. The result, a tough, brittle biscuit known as biscocho, was stored for up to a month before it was sold.
In the pages of his diary, Pigafetta confided another and far more troubling reason for Magellan’s unusual secrecy: “The masters and captains of the other ships of his company loved him not. I do not know the reason, unless it be that he, the Captain General, was Portuguese, and they were Spaniards and Castilians, which peoples have long borne ill-will and malevolence toward one another.”
The existence of an illusory island, Terra Australis, the South Land, was accepted as fact before and long after Magellan’s voyage. This landmass was said to lurk in the Southern Hemisphere, where its vast size supposedly counterbalanced the continents in the Northern Hemisphere.
Prester John (“Prester” is an archaic word for presbyter, or priest), on the European imagination during the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. He was part Christian ruler and part Kublai Khan.
During the Middle Ages, India was believed to include a good portion of northeastern Africa. It was an elastic term, and medieval geographers obeyed the convention that there were several Indias, some near, and some far.
Prester John’s letter was actually written by imaginative monks toiling in anonymity, and the result begged to be read as a symbolic document, an allegory, or an expression of faith. Yet it was taken as a factual account and diplomatic initiative.
Marco Polo had spent two decades in the East, traveling throughout the Mongol empire and China, and made it as far east as Burma. His father and uncle spent years in exile at the summer court of the Grand Khan, known as Shang-tu, whose kingdom served as the inspiration for Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Xanadu, and eventually they returned to Europe as the khan’s emissaries.
This was a revolutionary concept in the Age of Discovery, to go see for one’s self, to study the world as it was, not as myths and sacred texts suggested that it should be.
Maintaining the ampolletas was simple enough—the pages turned them over every half hour, night and day—but the task was critical. Aboard a swaying ship, the ampolletas were the only reliable timepiece, and the captain depended on them for dead reckoning and changing the watches.
Operating the ampolletas aboard the armada had religious overtones, and the pages, in their presumed innocence, doubled as the ships’ acolytes. When they turned over the sand clocks, they recited psalms or prayers invoking divine guidance for a safe voyage. Usually, the prayers required a chorus, and they had to chant loudly enough to demonstrate that they were on the job and fulfilling their duties promptly.
Magellan gave the Indians a name—Pathagoni, a neologism suggesting the Spanish word patacones, or dogs with great paws, by which he meant to call attention to their big feet, made even larger by the rough-hewn boots they wore. So these were the Bigfeet Indians, according to Magellan, who later gave the name to the whole region, known ever since as Patagonia.
The surface of snow and ice reflects all light, without preference for any particular color of the spectrum, but the interior handles light differently. Snow acts as a light filter, and treats the spectrum preferentially, scattering red light more strongly than blue.
A williwaw occurs when air, chilled by the glaciers surrounding the strait, becomes unstable and suddenly races down the mountains with ever-increasing velocity.
The scale of the Pacific Ocean was past imagining to Magellan. It encompasses one-third of the earth’s surface, covers twice the area of the Atlantic Ocean, and contains more than twice as much water volume.
Solar heating is greatest at the equator, where heated air rises high into the atmosphere and then divides into two streams, one flowing to the north and the other to the south.
the streams encounter what is known as the Coriolis force; the earth’s easterly rotation causes the wind to veer in a westerly direction; in the Southern Hemisphere, the location of the Armada de Molucca, the winds come from the southeast.
vitamin C, or ascorbic acid, helps to manufacture the enzyme prolyl hydroxylase, which in turn synthesizes a protein collagen used for connective tissues such as skin, ligaments, tendons, and bones, all of which give our bodies tensile strength.
Collagen acts as a glue binding connective tissues together, and when it disintegrates, the tissues separate and capillaries hemorrhage, creating black-and-blue patches on the skin.
Finally, in 1932, three medical researchers, W. A. Waugh, C. G. King, and Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, managed to isolate and synthesize ascorbic acid; they offered a scientific explanation of vitamin C’s effect on the body, and showed how a vitamin C deficiency leads to scurvy.
About thirty miles long, covering 209 square miles, Guam is the largest of an archipelago of volcanic islands known as the Marianas, which lie about three thousand miles west of the Hawaiian Islands.
(In the Pinyin transliteration of Chinese, he is now known as Zheng He, but he is still usually called Cheng Ho.)
Today, in the Philippines, the tragic encounter between Magellan and Lapu Lapu is seen from a radically different perspective.
By far the most impressive sight in Mactan harbor today is a giant statue of Lapu Lapu, his bamboo spear at the ready, as he gazes protectively over the Pacific.
Over time, the Holy Roman Empire became so fragmented that by the eighteenth century Voltaire remarked that it was “neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” Nevertheless, it survived.
To complete his quest to become emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Charles required the blessing of Leo X, the Medici family pope whose excesses helped to inspire the Reformation.
King Charles paid scant attention to the controversy surrounding a rogue ship tied up in Seville. He remained abroad until July 1522, and in his absence Spain struggled to redefine itself as a nation and as part of the Holy Roman Empire.
Although the Cape of Good Hope was first rounded in 1488 by Bartolomeu Dias and nine years later by Vasco da Gama—both major accomplishments in Portuguese exploration history—it was still considered extremely hazardous and barely navigable even by the most seaworthy of ships and the most experienced of captains.
At that, the boy lifted his shirt, turned to reveal his bare bottom, and with his small finger traced the line between his buttocks. “Draw your line right through this place!” he declared.
Hernándo Cortés, the conqueror of Mexico, dispatched his own expedition to the Moluccas from his outpost in Aguatanejo, Mexico. Although this expedition promised to be shorter, and did not have to pass through the strait, it, too, met with disaster.
