Anthropocene - Geographical Visualization 1/3 - Captain Magellan and the first navigation around the planet by boat

Until March 1, 2026, an exhibition at the #MuséeNationaldelaMarine in Paris presents the adventurous expedition by boat in 1519 of Captain Magellan and 237 sailors, which signified the first undeniable physical visualization of the finite nature of the planet, its irrefutable reality as a globe, and its size.

What astronomers, mathematicians, and philosophers from various civilizations had previously demonstrated theoretically through long and sometimes life-threatening work, but always as pioneers, was confirmed by Magellan's extraordinary maritime epic.

Christopher Columbus's return to Spain in March 1493 sparked ambitious plans to bypass Portuguese trading posts along the African coast and find an independent route to Indonesia and its Spice Islands. On his return, Captain Christopher Columbus was named Admiral of the Ocean, Governor and Viceroy of the Indies, although in reality he had only set foot in what is today the Dominican Republic.

Far from being a scientific expedition, Magellan's convoy of five ships, which left Seville on September 20, 1519, commissioned by King Charles 1 of Spain, and returned on September 6, 1522, with only one ship and 18 survivors, was motivated solely by the aim to break the Portuguese monopoly on spices, a commodity more valuable than gold in 15th and 16th-century Europe. An expedition in which Magellan himself met his death while fighting against tribes in what are now the Philippine Islands, who refused to hand over the spices!

Following maritime discoveries along the coasts of Africa and in the Americas, the rivalry between Portugal and Spain explains the astonishing (for our time) Treaty of Tordesillas of June 7, 1494, which simply divided the world into a zone reserved for Spain and a zone reserved for Portugal, along a meridian that placed present-day Brazil in Portugal, all of Africa, and everything east of this meridian was assigned to Spain. A century later, the daring Dutch navigators, and then the English Royal Fleet, would shatter this division between Portugal and Spain through incessant acts of piracy and naval warfares.

Applying iron discipline to his convoy of five ships, and quelling a rebellion of Spanish captains, the Portuguese Captain Magellan discovered, on November 28, 1520, a strait connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in the far south of present-day Argentina.

It was the Italian chronicler who sailed alongside Magellan, Antonio Pigafetta, who related this expedition, which set out in search of a westward route to reach the Moluccas Islands, and which came back with, instead of spices, the "hot information" of the first visualization of the Earth: this small planet that human activities are damaging to the point of preparing an uncertain future.