Using a simplistic idea

We consider a way to use something so simplified that it’s wrong.

Last week we presented the dilemma of our history-teaching tutor, who (it seems) must either present a version of history so simplified that it isn’t actually true, or risk damage to his students’ grades.  Maybe we can be more constructive.

Take the statement, “Magellan was the first person to circumnavigate the globe.”  We found this, most recently, in a highly-regarded news magazine.  It is not true.  The expedition headed by Magellan was the first known voyage to sail all the way around the world, but he was killed in one of what is now known as the Philippine Islands along the way, and did not make it.  Even in simplified History classes the statement would be modified to something like, “The surviving members of Magellan’s crew, led by Juan Sebastian Elcano, were the first to circumnavigate the word when they arrived back in Spain in 1522.”  (As the magazine article shows, however, it is the simplified form that people remember.)

But even this is possibly untrue.  One member of Magellan’s crew (in fact his own slave) was a Malay known as Malacca Henry, or Enrique.  When the expedition had reached the islands known as the Malaccas, Henry spoke to the inhabitants in their own language.  At some point around this time, he may have become the first person to have sailed entirely around the world, having reached his own homeland.  Unfortunately, we have no record of when, or if, he ever reached home.

Let us make use of this isolated possible fact: that the first circumnavigator may have been a Malay slave of a Portuguese sea-captain.  What does it tell us?

First, there is the explosive growth of the Portuguese trade in the East.  Vasco da Gama had only rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1499; barely a dozen years later the Europeans were well enough established on the far side of the Indian Ocean to have acquired slaves from the region.  Considering that a single round trip to the Spice Islands was likely to take one or two years, this is astonishing speed.

Next, slavery.  This is a highly sensitive topic, and should be.  That means it needs to be set in context, as fully as our historical records allow.  We won’t attempt that here; it requires whole books, not a blog post; we only point out this one data point.

Then there’s the defects in the historical record, and a matter of definitions.  We don’t know whether Malacca Henry ever got home.  We don’t know whether Magellan, who had voyaged to the Far East before he started his great expedition, managed to cross each one of Earth’s meridians of longitude before he died, and so became the first cicumnavigator after all.  But if you require someone with that title to have done it in a single voyage, then Elcano and his seventeen surviving companions are the first who qualify.

So an over-simplified fact can take you to interesting places, if you use it as a starting point and not a stopping point.