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© 2002. The text that
follows is copyright. This article was originally published in
Mercator's World, November /and/ December 2002, Vol. 7, No 6
(under the title "Discovered but not revealed") and copyright is
held by the publisher of the journal. Apart from any fair dealing
for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, no
part may be reproduced without prior permission.
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Ferdinand Magellan
(c.
1480-1521).
The inscription on
the
portrait
translates:
"The
Illustrious
Ferdinand
Magellan,
Conqueror of
the Narrow
Antarctic
Strait." C. 1580
by an
unknown artist.
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the
Portuguese-born
Ferdinand
Magellan
(c.1480-1521).
richly deserves credit for a number of
exploration “firsts”: the first circumnavigation of the globe by one
ship of his expedition, the discovery of the strait
in South America that bears his name, and his pioneering traverse of
the Pacific
Ocean.
These accomplishments were celebrated in such
early chronicles as Antonio Galvano’s Discoveries of the World,
from their first original unto the year of Our Lord, 1555 ...
,
published in 1555, and have long been part of the historic record.
Magellan’s discovery of two
islands in Polynesia, by contrast has received relatively little
recognition. Galvano knew nothing about Polynesia, but his book
includes an enigmatic reference to islands named “Los Jardines”
(Plantations) sighted by Magellan in latitude 13 degrees south in a
“mightee sea called Pacificum."
§
Galvano’s “Los Jardines” no doubt refer to one or both of the
islands described in several contemporary accounts
as “Las Islas Infortunatas” (Unfortunate Islands) and portrayed on a
number of early Pacific and world maps. However, these sources
provide few clues other than to indicate that the islands are
located in Oceania.
Because geographical details are sparse in the known narratives and
latitude figures differ considerably between reports, scholarly
controversy over the identification of these two islands has waxed
hot over many years. Could it be that these "unfortunate islands"
were “discovered” by Magellan only to recede again into the great
Pacific Ocean.
§
After naturalizing himself as a Spanish subject, Magellan persuaded
King Charles I of Spain to dispatch an expedition to seize and
occupy the Moluccas or “Spice Islands,” in the East Indies. Given
the title captain-general in the style of the time and appointed
commander of the enterprise, Magellan decided to follow the
suggestion of the great Italian writer Peter Martyr d’Anghiera that
the East could be reached by sailing west. In his De Orbo Novo,
published in 1516, Martyr declared that the “Spice islands” lay in
the “Great South Sea,” discovered when Vasco Nuñes
de Balboa looked south at the Isthmus of Darien in 1513.
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Detail from a
world map
by Battista Agnese ca. 1544.
The Strait of Magellan
is
delineated
with place-names. |
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Courtesy Library
of Congress. |
Magellan’s fleet of five vessels, including the Victoria, set sail
from Sanlucan on 20 September 1519 and steered southwest. After searching for and
traversing a passage at the southern tip of South America,
Magellan sailed into the “Great South Sea.”
According to the account of expedition pilot
Francisco
Albo, the fleet, now
reduced to three vessels, steered northwest, north, and
north-northeast for two days and three nights. The expedition then
sailed up the coast of Chile to reach warmer climes in latitude 32
degrees or 34 degrees south before striking out westward across the
placid sea.
The fleet headed toward an area that includes the group of islands
now known as the Tuamotu Archipelago — sometimes called the “Low
Archipelago.” This chain of seventy-six atolls and countless reefs
and islets stretches over an area of hundreds of square miles in the
central Pacific and today is part of French
Polynesia.
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The
Victoria - the only ship
from the
fleet to complete
the
circumnavigation. |
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From an early
engraving. |
On 24 January 1521, after the ships had dropped slightly south
because of a two-day headwind, Magellan sighted his first island.
According to Albo’s record of the discovery, the uninhabited island
was fringed with trees. The men took soundings, but, finding no
bottom and unable to anchor, sailed on. Magellan named the island
“San Pablo,” since he discovered it on the day of Paul’s conversion.
Albo gives the latitude as approximately 16 degrees 20 minutes
south. Antonio Pigafetta, an Italian gentleman-traveller
who accompanied the explorers, says unequivocally in his narrative
that the latitude was 15 degrees south.
After leaving San Pablo, Magellan sailed northwest, west-northwest,
and west by north. On February 4 he found a second uninhabited
island, where, according to Albo, the men caught a large number of
sharks, which they called “Tiburoni.” They named the island “Isla de
los Tiburones” (Island of the Sharks). Albo claims it lay at
latitude 10 degrees 40 minutes south; Pigafetta says 9 degrees
south.
Pigafetta’s review of the discoveries provides little
extra information about these two uninhabited islands, which were
about two hundred leagues apart. He remarks that the men saw no
other land and were unable to anchor at either island. They called
them, he says, “Las Islas Infortunatas.”
§
Three islands in the northeastern sector of the Tuamotu Archipelago
have previously been nominated as Magellan’s “San Pablo”: Fakahina,
Fangetau, and Pukapuka. And the candidates for “Isla de los
Tiburones” have been three islands in the southern sector of the
Line Islands: Caroline Island, Vostok Island, and Flint Island. All
six islands lie within the Polynesia triangle.
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The Title
page of
Antonio
Galvão’s Treatise ...,1563. |
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Courtesy of the
Lilly Library.
Indiana University,
Bloomington,
Indiana. |
Pukapuka rides out far ahead of the main group of islands in the
Tuamotu Archipelago and is the most northeastern atoll in the group.
It is almost certainly the first island that caught Magellan’s eye
in 1521. Thor Heyerdahl reported that Pukapuka was the first land he
encountered during his famous voyage across the Pacific on the raft
Kon-Tiki in 1947. This wooded atoll, about 3.5 miles long in a
northwesterly and southeasterly direction, is slightly above sea
level and lies in latitude 14 degrees 48 minutes south, which is
only about eleven miles north of Pigafetta’s estimate. Moreover, its
lagoon is connected to the sea at high tide by non-navigable
openings in the reef.
The easternmost of the Line Islands, Caroline Island, which lies in
latitude 10 degrees south, closely fits a description of Magellan’s
“Isla de los Tiburones.” A narrow, slightly crescent-shaped atoll,
it comprises three main islets and twenty smaller ones standing on a
reef that encircles a shallow lagoon. No other nearby island that
might qualify contains a lagoon, and it is well known in the Pacific
that lagoons attract sharks. Remarks made by Frederick Bennett, who
visited the island in 1834 while on a whaling voyage, tie in with
Pigafetta’s observations. “Sharks were exceedingly numerous” and
there were “myriads of birds” wrote Bennett in his narrative.
Caroline Island has no anchorage. And Pukapuka and Caroline Island
are 780 miles apart.
The expedition proceeded across the centre of Polynesia and reached
Guam, at the eastern edge of the Philippine Sea, in early March.
Remarkably, out of the thousands of islands, islets, and reefs
scattered over the ocean between America and Asia, Magellan
encountered only two small islands during his traverse of the
Pacific. He may well have sailed close to a number of low-lying
atolls without seeing them, but his oversight merely emphasizes the
characteristic Polynesian geography and the vast extent of the
world’s largest ocean.
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The woodcut map - above was originally
published in
Sebastian Münster’s edition of Ptolemy's
Geographia,
Basle, 1540, as “Novae Insulae, XVII Nova Tabula”
and in Münster’s Cosmographia, in 1544.
Münster appliedthe name
“Islas Infortunatus” to the two islands andpositioned them, as can be
seen in the illustration, below a ship buffeted by heavy swells.
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Courtesy of James Ford Bell Library,
University of Minnesota. |
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Not long after the
Victoria, the sole
surviving ship in Magellan’s fleet, returned to Seville,
cartographers and map publishers began adding Magellan’s discoveries
to their maps. One of the earliest was by the noted Portuguese
cartographer Diogo Ribeiro, who had been in Seville at the time of
Magellan’s departure in 1519 and was authorized by royal decree in
1526 to be granted access with all material for a world chart
portraying recent and earlier discoverers. Ribeiro’s original world
chart has been lost, but two copies are known today; one is dated
1527 and the other, preserved in Rome, is signed and dated 1529.
Both show Magellan’s “y de los Tiburones” and what most likely is
“San Pablo.”
One of the earliest printed maps to include the islands is Oronce
Finé’s
cordiform world map of circa 1534, an updated and enlarged
version of his earlier world map of 1531.
.Forlandi's world map
of 1565 names Magellan's
two islands
individually.
Courtesy Library
of Congress Geography
and Map Division
A double-page world map from
Battista Agnese’s 1544 portolan atlas delineates the route of
Magellan’s circumnavigation, with the two Polynesia islands placed
just north of the expedition’s track.
On his decorative world map of 1560, Paolo Forlani named the two
islands individually
And Gerard Mercator included one of the best early
representations of the two islands, with an extensive legend, on his
famous and influential world map of 1569.
Le Maire and Schouten rediscovered Pukapuka on 10 April 1616 during
theircrossing of the Pacific from Le Maire Strait to the Dutch East
Indies. A landing party sighted three dogs but no people. In 1839 a
United States expedition visited the island and found birds “as tame
as barnyard fowls” in incredible numbers. Pukapuka today has a
population of approximately two hundred
people
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Pukapuka the northernmost island
in the Tuamotos.
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Courtesy
French Service
Hydrographique et
Oceanogr,
Brest
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Magellan sighted uninhabited
Pukapuka
the northernmost island in the
Tuamotos on 24 January 1521and in
He named the
island "San
Pablo" [St. Paul].
No landing was made,
This French
chart
derives from a survey carried out in 1937.
The
atoll is about 3½ miles long, wooded,
and only slightly
above sea level.
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Pedro Fernández de Quirós rediscovered Caroline Island on 21
February 1606. A landing party found it to be uninhabited, but
spotted an old canoe lying on its side. The visitors also noticed
the island’s rich marine and bird life. The island was given its
present name, after the eldest daughter of the first lord of the
British Admiralty, in 1795 by Captain W.R. Broughton of HMS
Providence. Broughton found the island thinly populated by
Polynesians. Caroline Island today is part of the Republic of
Kiribati. The islets are covered with coconut palms, pandanus, and
similar plants.
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