Magellan's Unlikely Explorers

Magellan's Unlikely Explorers tells the first circumnavigation through stories of the far-fetched individuals who joined the expedition. This was a three-year voyage that circled the globe and crossed a wide swatch of history along the way. Among its crew were Antonio Pigafetta, the Italian scholar who passing through Spain just happened to hear about a fleet being prepared, and went on to write its history; Duarte Barbosa, who spent fifteen years in India, became fluent in the Malayalam language of Kerala, and wrote a detailed Asian travelogue; Joozito Lopes Carvalho, a young boy who became the first native of Brazil to cross the Pacific; and Enrique of Malacca, the first person to circumnavigate the globe linguistically, and possibly altogether.

Magellan's enterprise was anything but normal. Magellan sought to travel to the East by sailing west with plans to navigate waters that Cristopher Columbus and others had failed to cross. Along the way he fought intrigue, sabotage, and mutiny including from the Spanish officials who were supposedly backing him. In the end, Magellan crossed the Pacific and reached the Visayan Islands (modern-day Philippines), there already proving the world was round and could be circumnavigated. Incredibly, after Magellan's death at Mactan, a handful of his unlikely crew did just that: they completed a full circuit of the globe.

The stories of the individuals who completed the journey and those lost along the way show how implausible the expedition was. Cast of characters:

Antonio Pigafetta
Charles V and Family
Christopher Columbus
Francisco Albo
Juan de Cartagena
Juan Rodrguez Serrano
Paulo and the Patagonian Giants
Joozito Lopes Carvalho
Duarte Barbosa
Ferdinand Magellan
Gonzalo Gmez de Espinosa
Juan Sebastin de Elcano
Phileas Fogg and Sir John Mandeville
Enrique of Malacca

As for Enrique of Malacca, his circumnavigation was a ten-year journey from Portugal's colonial entrance into Southeast Asia in 1511 ... to Spain's colonial debut in the Philippines a decade later. Enrique took the long way.