The first world tour of Magellan, 500 years …

This Friday, a sailboat will leave the port of Seville, Spain, to reproduce the first world tour, a feat that began 500 years ago in the same port, the Portuguese navigator Fernando de Magallanes with five ships and 239 sailors, and culminated three years later. then the Spaniard Juan Sebastián Elcano, with a crew decimated: there were only 18 men left and the ship Victoria. The nautical raid of the boat "Pros", promoted by the Association of Friends of the Great Navigators and Spanish Explorers, which will cover three oceans for three years and a little over 81,000 km, will be one of the most a hundred scheduled events, including lectures, exhibitions and television series, among others, to commemorate the fifth centenary of the first round of the world.

The expedition led by Magellan, who was seeking to reach the spice islands (the gold of the moment), sailing west, without delimiting the entire west coast of Africa, sailed August 10, 1519 with five ships: Trinidad, San Antonio, Santiago, Concepción and Victoria, the only one to have returned to port 1123 days later.

The route to reach the Maluku Islands (Indonesian archipelago), rich in spices, included a typical program for the seafarers: hunger, thirst, diseases, deaths and riots. In the port of San Julián, Elcano and other men rebelled. But as they were short of crew, after shooting down and dismembering a couple for revolt revolts, Magellan forgave them.

The expedition continues and the Portuguese who sail in the name of the crown of Castile and Leon discover on November 1, 1520 the strait that will later bear his name. During this incursion into the south of the American continent, in Magellan, there was also time to give a name to the Patagonians, who until then did not know what they were calling. For this, they had to wait for the story of the great chronicler of the first round the world, Antonio Pigafetta, one of the 18 survivors, who explained that after the meeting with the locals, "our captain called this city, Patagones ".

After crossing the strait, after 38 days of sailing, four ships of the Spanish expedition headed for the ocean that christened Pacific to head for the Spice Islands. The ship from Santiago was crushed in the rocks at the mouth of the Santa Cruz River. Pigafetta recounted in cruel and desperate form: "The biscuit we ate was no longer bread, but a dust filled with worms that had devoured all its substance." Moreover, it had an unbearable foul odor because it was impregnated with urine. rats, the water we drank was putrid and stinking, because we were not starving, we were forced to eat the pieces of cowhide that covered the main mast … Very often we were reduced to us to feed sawdust, the rats had become a sought-after food, paid up half-duced for each of them … And that was not all.Our greatest misfortune came when we were attacked by a kind of sickness that swelled our jaws up to our teeth were hidden … "

On March 6, 1521, Magallanes and his men arrived exhausted on the island of Guam, which they named Thieves Islands and, ten days later, a new archipelago that they named San Lazaro , the current Philippines. He was the first European to walk on the archipelago and his last discovery.

His attempt to convert the natives to Christianity and to own the islands for the Spanish crown cost him his life. A group of natives attacked the crew when they stepped on the island of Mactan and the Portuguese explorer was fatally injured. It is Elcano who took over and who would complete the first round the world around the planet.

The group of navigators who leave the port of Seville will reproduce the trip that changed the history of navigation. For 37 months, on a 21-meter sailboat, with a crew of 120 volunteers who have completed several training and selection periods and rotated with a minimum stay of one month on the boat, they will repeat the journey when arriving in historic places. where the expeditioners are gone.

But as José María Morales, secretary of the Friends of the Great Navigators explained, during the presentation of the trip project last year, "the worst on board is bad milk, unlike the pioneers we have, we have there is wind, we carry little weight to reach a good speed and we know where we are going "

According to the website of the organization, the Pros will arrive at the following locations: Sanlucar de Barrameda (20 September); Rio de Janeiro (11 November); Buenos Aires (29 November); Punta Arenas (December 20); Guam (April 6, 2021); Mactan (April 26, 2021); Tidor, Maluku Islands (May 15 – June 15, 2021); Cape Verde (February 26, 2022) and Seville (September 8, 2022).

On its itinerary, the ship will take microplastic contamination samples, which will be used to provide information to a scientific study conducted by the Spanish Institute of Oceanography.