Prologue

My name is Mark West, and I am an English historian specializing in the era of European voyages to India, the New World, and the Pacific, commonly referred to as the Era of Discovery. I have a PhD in History from Kings College, Cambridge, an MA in Spanish from Salamanca University, with specialization in medieval Spanish literature, and post-doctoral experience of research in the Archivo General de Indias (Archives of the Indies) in Sevilla.

Two years ago, in the Archivo, I was researching the first circumnavigation of the world between 1519 and 1522, generally erroneously attributed to Fernando Magellan, but actually completed by Juan Sebastián Elcano after the death of Magellan in what is now the Philippines. The documents that relate to the life of this man are scarce although there are accounts of the voyage written by some of the survivors who arrived back in Sevilla in 1522. For example, the account of the voyage by the Italian Antonio Pigafetta fails to credit Elcano with command of the one ship that completed the voyage after the death of Magellan, probably because of his devotion to Magellan, and his inability to forgive Elcano for taking part in the mutiny against Magellan in the port of San Julián in Patagonia in 1519. However, in addition to having access to these accounts, I had the incredibly good fortune to stumble by chance on an account of the life of Elcano written by the scribe Andrés de Urdaneta, whose record of the death of Elcano and of his last will and testament can be found in the Archivo. For centuries, this document was previously unknown until I found it miscatalogued as an account of the life of Urdaneta.