Since I enjoyed Laurence Bergreen’s book about Magellan’s voyage so much, I figured that I ought to read the original. It is a curious experience. Pigafetta strikes one as cultured, well-educated, and endlessly curious. He includes details of weather, navigation, flora, fauna, and most especially, foreign customs. This is evidenced by the vocabularies he compiled from a captured Patagonian and during his stay in the Philippines. It is obvious that he exerted quite an effort to understand these alien societies (with a special interest in sexual practice, which I doubt was purely scientific).
Despite his ability to write with objective clarity, this account has many notable omissions. For one, he barely stops to describe the attempted mutiny that occurred while they wintered in South America. He adored Magellan and dwelling on the munity obviously would not redound to the commander’s leadership skills. Also, he summarized the return from the Moluccas rather quickly, though that step of the voyage was certainly full of drama and danger. Juan Sebastian Elcano—the captain who finally completed the voyage after Magellan’s death—is not even mentioned.
Though Pigafetta writes with the politeness of a noble, one gets a very clear idea of the hardships of the voyage. There was danger everywhere: starvation, scurvy, storms, mutinies, and virtually anyone they encountered, especially the Portuguese. Pigafetta describes the horrible food they were forced to eat while making the passage across the pacific: bread chewed through by maggots and soaked in rat urine, and water so rancid it could hardly be stomached. Soldiers even paid for the privilege of eating a rat. (Pigafetta was spared the effects of scurvy because he had preserved quince, though he did not draw any conclusions from this.) Indeed, Pigafetta was remarkably lucky to have survived: of the 270 who began, only 18 completed the journey around the world.
It is difficult to see why Pigafetta revered Magellan to such an extent. His navigation skills were certainly impressive, but he inspired little loyalty in his crew. Worse still, he seems to have gone completely off the rails when he arrived in the Philippines. Though the purpose of his voyage was strictly commercial (find out the location of the spice islands and bring back some spices), he rashly got involved in local politics. Worse still, he decided to become a kind of evangelist, leading mass conversions and even staking his reputation on a miracle cure (amazingly, it worked, at least according to Pigafetta). As he has nothing material to gain from this meddling, one can only conclude that he had acquired a savior complex. Maybe so much time at sea just got to him. In any case, this series of missteps resulted in his death during a totally unnecessary battle. His body was hacked to pieces and was not returned to the Europeans.
While it is, perhaps, tempting to view Pigafetta as just a bystander or even an early precursor to anthropologists, his account shows that he was an active participant in many of the ugliest episodes of the expedition: burning villages, capturing slaves, and outright murder. His interest in other languages and cultures did not, it seems, make him able to see them as fully human. One sympathizes, then, with Enrique of Malacca, Magellan’s slave. Though Magellan promised to free Enrique upon his death, the subsequent captain refused to honor this bequest. At the next banquet with the local Filipino king, all of the attending Europeans were slain, but Enrique was not. As the only one who spoke the local language, it seems quite plausible that he told the king a story which prompted the massacre. After that, he may have even been able to return to his home in Malacca, which would make him the actual first person to circle the globe. Go Enrique.