This Day in Exploration History (Birth of Sir Richard Francis Burton, Roguish Arabist, Author and Adventurer)

 Mar. 19, 1821— Sir Richard Francis Burton, who opened up previously unknown realms in geography, religion and anthropology—even as he shocked proper Victorians with his roguish exploits and prolific writings—was born in Devon, England.

Much of what the British empire knew—or thought it knew—about the Arab world came through the efforts of Burton and a later soldier-linguist: T.E. Lawrence. Both men inspired biopics: Lawrence of Arabia and the far less well-known Mountains of the Moon.

But David Lean was able to encompass most of the career of Lawrence in his Oscar-winning Best Picture, whereas Burton was so varied in his pursuits that director Bob Rafelson was only able to depict the adventurer’s relationship with John Hanning Speke, the deputy on his expedition to discover the source of the Nile.

Two decades before Rafelson’s big-screen cult film, I became interested in Burton through the small screen, via a 1971 BBC miniseries that ended up broadcast in the U.S.: The Search for the Nile, a documentary narrated by James Mason, with key scenes from the explorer’s life dramatized. Later, I was intrigued when I learned that Fawn Brodie, who made waves with a 1974 psychobiography of Thomas Jefferson, used the same approach seven years before with her life of Burton, The Devil Drives.

Brilliant enough to master 40 different languages and dialects, Burton could have been content to spend much of the rest of his life in libraries. He would have had the perfect opportunity at Oxford, where his army officer father had sent him with the inexplicable thought that the university could prepare his son for the clergy.

Even before Richard’s post-education career thoroughly disabused anyone of such a notion, he was already doing his best to ensure that he would not even make it to graduation. In short order, he was challenging to a duel another student who ridiculed his droopy moustache; running up massive debts with his tailor; frequenting wild parties and bordellos; and, in the stunt that brought about his expulsion, breaking a university rule by attending a steeplechase, then refusing to apologize.

His appearance added to the overwhelming impression he made on those he met. To that moustache he added a thick beard, which, together with his eyes (described by poet Algernon Charles Swinburne as conveying “unspeakable horror”), gave him an almost Mephistophelian look, as well as an only slightly less fearsome nickname: “Ruffian Dick.”

After Oxford, Burton became an intelligence agent for the British Army in India, where his facility with languages and physical prowess (boxing and fencing) proved useful. But after a decade, he became restless and requested permission to pull off the feat that landed him firmly in the public eye for the first time: undertaking the hajj, or Muslim pilgrimage, to Medina and Mecca.

Taking months to prepare (including his disguise as a Pathan, or Indian born of Afghan parents), he came to Mecca in September 1853. His surreptitious notes on what he saw, as a Westerner in this holy Arab city, formed the basis of a subsequent sensational account.

A secret expedition to yet another forbidden site—Harar in the Horn of Africa, the center of the slave trade—followed two years later, with the public enthralled once again by the identity he assumed for getting inside (a Turkish merchant) and his brush with death (nearly dying of thirst, until the sight of desert birds convinced him that water was nearby). 

Immediately afterward, on another trip to Africa, he survived being impaled by a javelin that entered one cheek and left the other. It left him with a scar for the rest of his life, as well as visible confirmation of his willingness to brave all perils.

In 1856, Burton embarked on his most significant, dangerous and controversial adventure: searching for the source of the Nile with Speke. The trip, up hills and through swamps in East Africa, was slow and arduous. Both men fell sick at various points. 

But Burton’s condition was serious enough that, after they had discovered and explored Lake Tanganyika, he decided to recuperate rather than accompany Speke to find another huge body of water they had been told about: what turned out to be Lake Victoria, the source of the great river.

Burton refused to believe Speke’s subsequent report that he had discovered the Nile’s source, and they had fallen out by the time they came back, separately, to Britain. 

Acclaimed for the discovery, Speke still felt the need to prove it. Just before he was to set off on another expedition to confirm the discovery—and on the very day he was supposed to debate Burton on his claim—Speke died on his uncle’s estate, in what was officially ruled an accident but which many (including Burton) believed was suicide.

After marrying the daughter of an aristocratic Catholic family, Isabel Arundell, in 1861, Burton, feeling the need for more regular employment, started working for the British Foreign Office. He used the opportunity to travel still more, but his postings, when not in hellish environments (Fernando Po, an island in the Gulf of Guinea), were tedious. But in the 1880s, he broke out of his ennui in spectacular fashion.

Already considered colorful, if not eccentric, Burton became notorious for translating explicit texts, such as The Kama Sutra and, more surprisingly, The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night and Supplemental Nights. Bad enough that he delivered an unexpurgated version of the so-called Arabian Nights, but he also created a sensation with something even more unlikely: footnotes on Arab sexual practices.

“He paid heavily for his frankness,” noted Canadian novelist-critic Robertson Davies in his 1960 collection, A Voice from the Attic: Essays on the Art of Reading, “for it was at least as hard a century ago as it is now for people of conventional mind to recognize that a man can be interested in the vagaries of sexual behaviour without wishing to practise them himself.”

Others have taken a dimmer view of Burton’s observations, notably Edward Said in his influential 1978 study, Orientalism, who saw Burton as emblematic of British imperialism and ethnocentric. Still others, such as John Wallen in Burton and Orientalism, regard the explorer as a non-judgmental guide to non-Western moral practices.

Scholars have faced major challenges in assessing Burton following his death in 1890. It’s not just that new academic theories such as Said’s have created an alternative interpretation of his achievements. Researchers also must cope with questions related to Burton’s voluminous writings:

*Absorbing his output. Burton wrote 43 books on his expeditions and translated another 30. Reading and interpreting it all is staggering.

*Weighing his veracity. Clearly, Burton loved telling tales. But to what extent were they true? Biographers who take his accounts at face value run a grave risk.

*Looking beyond holes in the record. After his death, Isabel depicted her husband as the most faithful of husbands. Yet she also took steps to ensure that nobody would second-guess her, as she burned 1,000 pages of his final manuscript.

(For an interesting account of the tomb of Richard and Isabel, in the churchyard of St. Mary Magdalen Roman Catholic Church in London, see Jonathan Carr's 2019 post on the "Victorian Fencing Society" blog.)

This Day in Exploration History (Columbus Begins Fateful Contact Between Old and New Worlds)

Oct. 12, 1492—When he set foot in the Bahamas after two months across a largely unknown Atlantic Ocean, Christopher Columbus initiated the long-term contact with the natives that fundamentally altered both Europe and the “New World.”

Leave aside for a minute, if you can, and try to reframe that epochal meeting between Native Americans and the Genoese-born navigator in the service of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. This was not really a “discovery” of America: Not only had Scandinavian Leif Ericson come to the Western Hemisphere four centuries before (not to mention, if the Irish are to be believed, St. Brendan the Navigator even before that), but, as Washington Irving chuckled, the Indians never knew they were lost.

The word “exploration” comes closer to what happened, but it only takes into account one side involved in the event.

Instead, historians have come up with other phrases that fit: the “Columbian Encounter” or “Columbian Exchange”--the transatlantic movement and mingling of living organisms, with convulsive impacts on the people and landscapes of the New and Old Worlds.

When I was a schoolboy, Columbus was not seen as a harbinger of imperialism or a perpetrator of genocide. Instead, he was regarded, in his determination, willingness to risk all, and courage, as a forerunner of American patriotism. That link was made explicit in Joaquin Miller’s “Columbus,” written for the 400^th anniversary of the sighting of San Salvador:

Then pale and worn, he kept his deck,

 And peered through darkness. Ah, that night

Of all dark nights! And then a speck --

 A light! a light! at last a light!

It grew, a starlit flag unfurled!

 It grew to be Time's burst of dawn.

He gained a world; he gave that world

 Its grandest lesson: "On! sail on!"

Perceptions of Columbus have changed markedly since I was a schoolboy. Back then, controversy swirled, after discovery of the “Vineland Map” detailing Ericson’s voyage, on whether the “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” could really be called the discoverer of America. Now, it is the very moral character of Columbus that is at issue. In enslaving inhabitants of the West Indies and forcibly converting them to Christianity, he introduced practices that haunted the Western Hemisphere for the next four centuries and let loose the even longer-lived virus of slavery.

More so than Robert E. Lee, Thomas Jefferson, and other figures who have sparked monumental (if you’ll pardon the pun) controversies, Columbus was the original Dead White European Male. As such, he’s been made to bear the weight of outrage over several centuries of atrocities, much of which cannot even be traced back to him with any elemental fairness.

There are three titles that illustrate our evolving understanding of Columbus:

*Admiral of the Ocean Sea, by Samuel Eliot Morison: Befitting the author’s penchant for retracing the voyages of his subjects, this 1942 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography is far more concerned with Columbus’ prowess as a mariner than his shortcomings as a human-rights violator. Perhaps this is unsurprising for someone who several years later, in his textbook co-written with Henry Steele Commager, The Growth of the American Republic, refers to a typical black slave as “Sambo.” Morison, then, could hardly be counted on as particularly sensitive toward nonwhites. But even he faulted Columbus as a colonial administrator out of his depth, and could not overlook "the monstrous expedient" that he perpetrated in enslaving the natives and bringing them to Spain as proof that he had indeed found something very different on his voyages.

*The Mysterious History of Columbus, by John Noble Wilford. This shorter bio, published nearly 50 years after Morison’s, took account of the revisionism that had occurred in the interim.  “The burden of the practices Columbus initiated or condoned weighs heavily on his reputation in history,'' Wilford stated bluntly. This is an especially acute examination of just how much responsibility (more than his admirers care to admit, less than his detractors charge) that the explorer bore for the Black Legend, Spain's ``burden of violence and destructive greed.''

* Seeds of Change, edited by Herman J. Viola and Carolyn Margolis. This beautifully illustrated companion to a Smithsonian exhibit 25 years ago examines the wider legacy of Columbus, with contributor essays focusing on five areas: sugar, maize, disease, the horse, and the potato. It also analyzes, in often painful detail, the destructive impact that Columbus’ ethnocentricism would have on whites’ relations with Native-Americans over the next few centuries. At the same time, Viola gives a succinct summary of why the explorer  cannot be forgotten by history:

``Columbus did more than force the cartographers of Europe to revise their maps of the Earth. His voyages of discovery were pivotal in world history. The Western Hemisphere was rapidly and profoundly transformed biologically and culturally by seeds of change--plants, animals and diseases--that were introduced, sometimes deliberately, sometimes accidentally, by Columbus and those who followed him.

``Eventually the processes of encounter and exchange that Columbus initiated affected the Old World as well, altering flora and fauna, reordering the ethnic composition of the countries, changing the diet and health of peoples everywhere. They continue to this day.``

This Day in Exploration History (Admiral Byrd, Polar Hero and Storyteller, Born)

October 25, 1888—Richard E. Byrd, born on this date in Winchester, Va., grew up with his mother’s constant urging to redeem the honor of a landed aristocracy that traced a glorious history back to the colonial era, but more recently had fallen on hard times due to their hometown's devastation in the Civil War and the alcoholism of their father, an otherwise brilliant attorney.

The young man lived up to his heritage in the military, where he rose to the rank of rear admiral and was awarded the Medal of Honor for his daring expeditions to the North and South Poles.

Nobody doubted Admiral Byrd’s ambition. What some questioned even in his own lifetime, however, and even more in our iconoclastic present, is if other elements in his patrimony—notably, instincts toward storytelling (a colonial plantation ancestor, William Byrd II, became renowned for his scandalous diary) and risk-taking that bordered on foolishness—might have played a role in his career and legend.

Alone was the title of his 1938 bestseller about surviving the rigors of remote Antarctica by himself, but it also represented his first significant life adventure: a solo trip halfway around the world at age 11 to visit a relative in the Philippines. 

His accounts of what he met along the way were sold to newspapers back home. That earned him some renown, and he resolved to gain the rest through a nascent branch of the U.S. Navy, where a badly injured ankle would not prevent him from action: aviation. (He didn’t even let his initial unease with flying get the better of him.)

After participating in several unsuccessful Navy attempts to fly to the North Pole, Byrd partnered with pilot Floyd Bennett on a privately funded mission. Their May 9, 1926 flight on the Josephine Ford was instantly accepted as successful by the U.S. Navy and a committee of the National Geographic Society, one of his sponsors, but whispers began about it from the start.

Completing the flight in less time than expected, and with a dangerous gas leak, just seemed too suspicious, some felt.

An article in the January 2013 issue of the journal Polar Record, by Gerald Newsom, professor emeritus of astronomy at Ohio State, used recently discovered handwritten notes from Byrd's North Pole trip to conclude that Byrd missed his North Pole goal by as much as 80 miles (130 kilometers).

Byrd had not engaged in deliberate fraud, Newsom believed; rather, it was more likely that he made continuous calculations in a noisy, freezing cockpit, with instruments--a barograph and calibration graph--likely magnifying the effects of any errors.

Next, Byrd turned his attention to the South Pole, participating in five expeditions to Antarctica through the end of his life. On the first, in November 1928, he became the first to fly over the South Pole, establishing the U.S. presence there by establishing an outpost he named Little America.

A second, more astonishing expedition occurred from March to August 1934, which he spent, alone in a hut, some 120 miles from base, to record weather and observe aurora. 

The question arose among fellow polar explorers about why the American leader of Antarctic exploration didn’t assign staying at a weather station in the remote interior to a junior expedition member, and why a naval officer waited on by servants and navy stewards throughout his career, with no knowledge of cooking, would try to survive in one of the most harrowing places on earth by himself.

The only explanation some could see was that Byrd wanted to top his prior exploits.

The attempt nearly cost him his life. For starters, he ended up caught outside his hut during a blizzard, an experience he captured with extraordinary vividness in Alone:

“There is something extravagantly insensate about an Antarctic blizzard at night. Its vindictiveness cannot be measured on an anemometer sheet. It is more than just wind: it is a solid wall of snow moving at gale force, pounding like surf. [Because of this blinding, suffocating drift, in the Antarctic winds of only moderate velocity have the punishing force of full-fledged hurricanes elsewhere.] The whole malevolent rush is concentrated upon you as upon a personal enemy. In the senseless explosion of sound you are reduced to a crawling thing on the margin of a disintegrating world; you can't see, you can't hear, you can hardly move. The lungs gasp after the air sucked out of them, and the brain is shaken. Nothing in the world will so quickly isolate a man.”

His situation became truly dire when a leak from a faulty stove led to carbon-monoxide poisoning, compounded by malnourishment. Luckily, his incoherent radio messages sparked a rescue team from Little America that reached him just in time.

Though 47 years old at the time of this trip, Byrd was aged considerably by his privations. He assumed an increasingly reduced role on each of his succeeding three trips to the South Pole. 

He remained, however, an exceptional advocate for polar exploration, both because of his four accounts of his experiences (reportedly completed with the assistance of ghostwriters) and his brother Harry, an influential U.S. senator.

And yet, after the 1934 near-disaster, Byrd lived with a sense of anti-climax. Curt Gentry’s J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets tells the story of how, in his later years, the explorer would wander the halls of the Old Post Office Building in Washington, where he had been assigned space years before. By this time, the building had become the heart of the vast electronic surveillance operations of J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation. 

Now Byrd was a “live ghost,” wandering its hallways: “Locked doors, receptionists, guards, color-coded passes—nothing seemed to hinder him: monitors, poised over their consoles, would look up and see the admiral standing there.”

Eventually, it dawned on the monitors that Byrd wasn’t interested in eavesdropping on them: He was “just lonely and wanted someone to tell his stories to.” The storytelling instinct remained unabated, even after years of recapitulating his experiences in diaries, a bestselling account of his near-fatal mission, and before audiences enraptured by the thought that they were in the presence of one of the last great solitary explorers. 

The imperious Hoover wanted him ejected lest the admiral stumble on something, but an American hero is not just any ordinary building tenant, so Byrd was allowed to stay until he died.

After he was gone, the FBI monitors missed the tales of the aging Antarctic explorer.

Over half a century after his death, in 1957, Byrd’s exploits may yet reveal additional stories—as well as revisions of those he told. 

After decades in which legal wrangling among his heirs left his papers gathering dust or moldering in assorted attics, warehouses, bank vaults, and basements, approximately 500 boxes of them, rescued from the effects of time and unintentional neglect, are being catalogued, sifted through, and analyzed by researchers at Ohio State University's Institute of Polar Studies.

Byrd believed that Antarctica was a land that “God had set aside as man's future -- an inexhaustible reservoir of natural resources." One wonders what he would have made of the possibility of global warming melting a land mass he had done, as much as any man, to explore.

This Day in Exploration History (Scott Loses Race to South Pole, Then His Life)

January 17, 1912—Captain Robert Falcon Scott, reached one of the last Holy Grails of the Age of Exploration, the South Pole, only to find it a hollow victory. Not only had Norwegian rival Roald Amundsen beaten him in the race to the Pole, but now the 43-old British explorer and his crew found themselves in the vast reaches of the desolate Antarctic facing bitter weather that was worsening—and dwindling supplies.

“Great God!” Scott wrote in his journal. “This is an awful place, and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.”

Two and a half months later, Scott and his men would perish. If he hadn’t achieved the goal to which he had committed the last dozen years of his life, though, he had won a place in the hearts of his countrymen, with his posthumously published journal acclaimed as an example of the kind of stiff-upper-lip resolve that had given truth to the line that “the sun never sets on the British Empire.”

In his last log entry, the explorer wrote: “Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman."

In 1948, the film world produced its own account of his last voyage, Scott of the Antarctic, with Scott‘s log and personal effects of his crew loaned by the British Museum to enhance the near-documentary feeling of the movie. Ralph Vaughan Williams’ intense score only added to the mood of impending tragedy.

Nearly four decades later, Masterpiece Theatre would offer a rather less romanticized take on the expedition in The Last Place on Earth. The PBS miniseries, based on a comparative account of the Amundsen and Scott expeditions by Roland Huntford, presented a much less idealized version of the British explorer. Amundsen’s meticulousness in planning every detail was contrasted with Scott’s style of winging it, and the Norwegian’s willingness to learn from native peoples of the polar regions on proper clothing and the best animal to use for the polar push (hardy sled dogs) with Scott, so caught up in national chauvinism to appreciate these same insights.

Even Scott’s onetime crew member (on the 1901-04 Discovery expedition) and later polar rival, Ernest Shackleton, is coming in for greater respect now. Which one is getting the TV hero treatment? (See Kenneth Branagh in Shackleton.) Which is having papers written about him at Wharton, and even becoming the subject of extended learning plans on leadership? Which is being voted the greater polar explorer in a BBC poll?

Scott, even despite the compliment paid to him in the following quote from another British explorer, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, would have bristled at the conclusion: “For a joint scientific and geographical piece of organization, give me Scott; for a Winter Journey, Wilson; for a dash to the Pole and nothing else, Amundsen: and if I am in the devil of a hole and want to get out of it, give me Shackleton every time.”

This Day in Exploration History (Hudson Marooned by Mutineers)

June 23, 1611—Having gotten his ship and crew intact through an icebound winter in desolate, then-unknown reaches of Canada, Henry Hudson was heading home when his men, embittered and hungry, mutinied. The 46-year-old English seaman, together with his 17-year-old son and seven supporters, was set adrift in a small, open boat. Neither Hudson nor the others in his small boat ever made it home to complete his fourth voyage in search of the Northwest Passage to Asia.


Early in the 20th century, in tones reminiscent of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses” (not surprising, as the British poet laureate was one of the three people that, he admitted, influenced him the most), Henry Van Dyke evoked the bravery of the embattled explorer in “Hudson’s Last Voyage”:




“For, mark me well, the honour of our life
Derives from this: to have a certain aim
Before us always, which our will must seek
Amid the peril of uncertain ways.
Then, though we miss the goal, our search is crowned
With courage, and we find along our path
A rich reward of unexpected things.
Press towards the aim: take fortune as it fares!”



Van Dyke’s attitude is no longer so widely shared. Like other explorers once lionized—Columbus, Magellan, James Cook, and Robert Scott—Hudson has come in for historical revisionism. Visionary, the Englishman might have been, the argument now goes, but the mutiny that blasted his hopes did not come out of nowhere. Hudson was at least partially responsible for his own misfortune.

On his prior voyage, Hudson--for the only time in his four voyages, in the service of Holland--broke his agreement with the Dutch East India Company return to Holland if his northeast voyage proved unsuccessful. Instead, he crossed the Atlantic, where, he had heard, a strait might take him through the American land mass to Asia. The voyage of the Half Moon is best known to us now because he explored the New York river now named for him. (Indeed, F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his rhapsodic ending to The Great Gatsby, alludes to “the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes-a fresh, green breast of the new world.”)

It would have been interesting to see what the Dutch East India Company would have done if Hudson made it back. But he and his crew were intercepted when they stopped in England, where, they were told, they could no longer enter the service of foreign powers. For his next voyage, then, Hudson would be back in the employ of the company that financed his first two trips.

As before, Hudson made great discoveries, including, between Greenland and Labrador, two bodies of water later named for him: Hudson Strait and Hudson Bay. But things came a cropper for him in the James Bay. He spent three months in the eastern part of the bay--an oddity, given that the object of his trip was to find a passage to the west. He continued there until well past the point when it was clear it offered no passage to the Pacific. Then, in November, his ship--the hopefully Discovery--became trapped in the winter ice.

Given that the boat lacked food and supplies, it was a miracle that all hands didn’t die over the next seven months they were trapped. But the crew suffered enough, and toward the end of that period, hunger combined with resentment got the better of the men.

Most of his men didn’t like what had been happening at all:

* In September, when they had a chance at an ample supply of food, Hudson disregarded his crew‘s pleas and pressed on.

* Hudson set anchor in the James instead of heading home when he could.

* Hudson gave one crew member, Henry Green, a gray gown, then took it back when Green displeased him.

* Many in the crew suspected their captain of hoarding food and doling it out to favorites.

* Hudson decided to demote captain’s mate Robert Juet and a boatswain. Why Hudson decided to act mid-voyage instead of at the end of his last one, when Juet had mutinied already on the trip to the northeast, is mysterious. But it left him with an enemy in his midst.

* Hudson promoted a carpenter who happened to be illiterate, leading the crew to believe “the Master and his ignorant Mate would carry the Ship whither the Master pleased.”

Once the mutiny unfolded, the captain was cast into the boat with a few supporters, a couple of crew members judged to be too old and infirm to last on the return voyage, and Hudson’s 17-year-old son John. (The famous image accompanying this post, by John Colliers, appears to lower the age of the teenager considerably. It heightens the pathos of the son—young Hudson even clings in fear to his father—but by taking some creative license with the facts.)

For awhile, Hudson’s tiny shallop attempted to keep pace with the larger ship, but once the Discovery hoisted another sail, the mother ship swiftly left its former captain and his small band to their own devices. They were never heard from again, and the only clue to their fate was discovered 20 years later, when another explorer came across the remains of a shelter, possibly erected by the castaways.

On the way home, Juet and Green were killed in an attack by Eskimos. This proved extremely convenient for the other mutineers, who could place most of the onus for the mutiny on their slain comrades.

Surprisingly, the Discovery survivors were prosecuted not for mutiny—of which they were manifestly guilty—but rather for murder, a far more difficult charge to prove. (After all, where were the bodies?) Naturally, they were acquitted of the latter charge. The unlikely prosecution strategy might have resulted from the need of the British East India Company and the Muscovy Company, the backers of the voyage, for seasoned hands who could continue to look for the Northwest Passage. By this reasoning, mutiny had to appear to be punished, but with no reasonable outlook for success.

It would take nearly three centuries and more tragedies (notably, the failure of Sir John Franklin’s 1845-47 expedition in the Arctic) before Scandinavian explorer Roald Amundsen made the full transit by sea and reached the long-unattainable goal of the Northwest Passage.
Ironically, global climate change has sparked speculation that melting icecaps in the North might make it easier for ships to traverse the routes that defeated Hudson, Franklin and many others.

Flashback, April 1521: Magellan Killed Rounding World

He had traveled to lands Columbus had only dreamed of, faced down challenges that would later undo other commanders, and braved all kinds of physical dangers on the first circumnavigation of the globe. 

But, after becoming the first European to journey from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans, Ferdinand Magellan interfered in local tribal politics on Mactan Island in the Philippines and was killed before the horrified eyes of crew members unable to save him. 

In his history of American naval operations in WWII, naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison noted that the month before he died, Magellan and his men reached an island in the Philippines known as Limasawa, where “westward-advancing Christianity first met eastward-advancing Islam.” 

That phrase has become more pregnant with irony and portent in the 60 years since Morison wrote them. It also inspires a different way of viewing Magellan’s odyssey. 

In one of the last essays of his long, illustrious career, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. assailed the Bush administration for going “eyeless in Gaza” by venturing into Iraq with poor intelligence. Even then, though, Bush and his Cabinet had at least some information from journalists, historians, diplomats, refugees, and defectors. 

Now flash backward five centuries, as Magellan--like the Bush administration, failing to proceed with care in a faraway land--decided to aid a local chieftain who had converted to Christianity. 

Not happy that 800 of these tribesmen followed their king to Christianity all in one night, the pious explorer insisted that others in the area do likewise. Their refusal led him to burn their villages. 

Nearly two weeks later, instead of leaving while he could, he demanded that these tribes provide his crews with provisions. When they replied that they could only provide some, he decided to teach them a lesson by leading 50 to 60 men on three boats on a punitive mission. 

The result was something like a maritime version of Custer’s Last Stand. 

Suddenly, Magellan found himself facing three or four thousand natives, roused to fury first by being fired on (ineffectually) by musket and cannon from a distance, then by watching their huts burned by the Spaniards. 

Though he had previously benefited by some natives’ perceptions that he and his men were god-like figures, his sense of vulnerability evaporated now, especially when the natives noticed that a) his bare legs left him exposed and b) he could only pull out his sword halfway because he’d been wounded in the arm. 

Antonio Pigafetta, an Italian traveling with the crew, described what happened next: 

"When the natives saw that, they all hurled themselves upon him. One of them wounded him on the left leg with a large cutlass, which resembles a scimitar, only being larger. That caused the captain to fall face downward, when immediately they rushed upon him with iron and bamboo spears and with their cutlasses, until they killed our mirror, our light, our comfort, and our true guide. When they wounded him, he turned back many times to see whether we were all in the boats. Thereupon, beholding him dead, we, wounded, retreated, as best we could, to the boats, which were already pulling off." 

When your leader is traveling in lands where he not only doesn’t know the history but even the language or geography, the temptation is overwhelming to urge caution upon him. 

But caution was not what led Magellan to greatness. Caution did not lead him to sail beyond the limits of the known world. Caution was not the byword of the country under whose flag he sailed--Spain, well launched toward its destiny as the great 16th-century empire. 

 If you want to read a thrilling account of Magellan’s epic voyage and of the terrible fate that befell him on April 27, 1521, an excellent place to start is with William Manchester’s A World Lit Only by Fire. In fact, I’d advise you to read only those chapters in this work dealing with the explorer. 

As for the rest of this history of the transition between the middle and modern ages, skip it--Manchester, an excellent chronicler of 20th-century history, had compounded his mistake of ranging far beyond his usual writing domain by a) sticking overwhelmingly to secondary rather than primary sources, and b) rehashing the same old stereotypes about the Dark Ages that historians had long overturned. 

But as I said, the Magellan portion is something else entirely. It began as a foreword to a biography of Magellan by Manchester’s friend Tim Joyner, but Manchester’s fascination with the explorer grew so intense that it became the climax of his own book. 

Like John F. Kennedy, the subject of Manchester’s bestselling Death of a President, Magellan is a hero who lets nothing stand in the way of his will, leading this dashing leader to his appointment with destiny. 

Manchester could write so well about Magellan, I think, because he well understood that constitutional inability to stop while he still could. 

Nearly 20 years ago, an academic friend told me what had delayed the next volume in Manchester’s biography of Winston Churchill, The Last Lion: The author became so consumed by his research that he worked himself into a state of exhaustion--a pattern that had repeated itself since Death of a President.

Something like this led to A World Lit Only by Fire. 

Manchester had been advised by doctors to rest while he was still only two-thirds through his epic work on Churchill. He could comply with part of their advice--not interviewing people or visiting archives--but he had to be writing every single day on something, for heaven’s sake. And so, this particular project gripped him. 

Not surprisingly, you have to admit. Magellan might have felt himself invincible at the Battle of Mactan because he had already survived the following: 

* Even before reaching South America, Magellan had had to relieve from command a leader of a planned mutiny against him. 

* Cold weather while heading south led him to decide to winter in present-day Patagonia. 

* In Patagonia, Magellan had to put down a second mutiny attempt. 

* On a reconnaissance mission, one of Magellan’s ships, Santiago, wrecked. 

* While sailing through the strait now named for him in South America, Magellan was faced with the loss of another ship, whose captain turned tail and sailed home. 

* While crossing the Pacific, many members of Magellan’s crew were hit with scurvy and forced to subsist on sawdust, leather strips from sails, and rats. 

Even after Magellan’s death, the survivors of his fleet weren’t through with hardship. Portugal seized one of the ships, taking with them Magellan’s log (which became lost during the Lisbon earthquake of 1755). When the remnants of his fleet staggered into Spain in September 1522, only 18 of the original 225 who left the country three years before made it home alive.

This Day in Exploration History (Wilkes Claims Eastern Antarctica for U.S.)

January 19, 1840—Capt. Charles Wilkes, in the midst of one of the most significant scientific voyages in American history, sighted East Antarctica and claimed it for the U.S. Though not the first to discover Antarctica—that had occurred two decades before—he proved conclusively, by sailing and mapping 1,500 miles of its coastline, that it was a separate landmass.

Upon returning to American two years later, having circumnavigated the globe, Wilkes found both his achievements and his management style called into question by rival foreign mariners and domestic enemies who pressed a court-martial.

One particular charge—that Wilkes could not have possibly found this land mass—was, on the surface, buttressed when British explorer James Clark Ross claimed to have sailed across some of the land Wilkes had seen. In his attempt to establish national priority over France, whose explorer, Dumont D’Urville, cited the same January 19 date as the one when he had first sighted land, Wilkes then tried to backdate his discovery by three days.

It turned out that Wilkes’ mistake involving the land mass occurred because of the phenomenon known as polar refraction, which sometimes makes land below the horizon appear above it. (It also helped that the Australian who charged him with misrepresentation and mistakes, Sir Douglas Mawson, had made his own errors because of the same illusion.) It took 99 years, but eventually the Australian government put Wilkes’ name on the map of the land he explored. Moreover, two midshipmen backed Wilkes at his inquiry by claiming they had seen the same thing.

(Much of this international rivalry went for naught in the end, as the 1959 Antarctica Treaty made the continent an international zone--blessedly free of military operations, nuclear testing, and radioactive waste disposal.)

All but one of the other charges levied against Wilkes went nowhere, except for one. A court of inquiry found him guilty of exceeding the traditional maximum punishment of 12 lashes for individual miscreants. He had been conclusively—and, unfortunately, correctly—judged as a martinet.

An annoyed Wilkes took his lumps and went on special assignment in Washington to gather and summarize the results of his four-year circumnavigation of the globe. He had not been the first choice for this major expedition (believe it or not, he was the fifth), so this proud and flinty man was intent on making sure he achieved due recognition for his efforts. These achievements were extraordinary, including:

* 280 islands (largely in the Pacific) explored;

* 800 miles of Oregon mapped;

* More than 60,000 bird and plant specimens collected;

* Seeds of 648 species collected, later to be dispersed throughout the country;

* 254 live plants that would form the basis of the U.S. Botanic Gardens.

If only Wilkes had stayed on assignment in DC! But the outbreak of the Civil War found him acting in his usual peremptory fashion, nearly precipitating another conflict the Union did not need: with Great Britain.

Commanding the San Jacinto, Wilkes boarded the British mail ship Trent and arrested two Confederate emissaries, John Slidell and James Mason. The British were incensed, and though Northerners initially supported his actions, many had a change of heart after they reflected that a) Wilkes did not have permission from the government to seize the two diplomats, and b) the incident—with a neutral power having its ships stopped and men seized—was reminiscent of the impressment issue that served as a causus belli of the War of the 1812.

The Lincoln government released the two Confederates, largely defusing the tension that had developed between the Union and Great Britain. But Wilkes’ career was damaged irretrievably. Conflicts with the Navy Department later led him to publish rash letters in the newspapers.

For the second time, Wilkes had provided his enemies with a cudgel, as he found himself facing another court-martial, this time on grounds of disobedience of orders and insubordination. His sentence—a public reprimand and suspension from active service for three years—was reduced by President Lincoln to one year.

The hotheaded old sea dog returned to writing, dying in 1877. He is now interred in Arlington National Cemetery, though one doubts if his proud and angry spirit is at rest.