Who discovered who?

Juan Sebastian Elcano, a Basque navigator, is recognized as the first to circumnavigate the globe. Ferdinand Magellan did not in a single voyage, as is still sometimes popularly believed. His opportunity to do so ended abruptly and terminally on Mactan Island. The Magellan expedition we remember well for how it ended, but not necessarily how it began.

Magellan though did put the Philippines on the global map. It was Friar Andres de Urdaneta though who connected the Philippines to the rest of the world when he discovered and mapped out the tornaviaje, or the return route. That route would be the basis for the galleon trade for 250 years. In their ways, Magellan, Urdaneta and Elcano can be considered the founders of global trade. At the center of East to West ocean-going trade was the Philippines.

Elcano is the first recognized circumnavigator. Urdaneta was the second; although his journey around the globe took nine years. This included an untimely stay (shipwreck) in the Moluccas where he fathered a child. Voyages in those years were epic journeys, worthy of tall tales. Of the five ships and 240 men that set out with Magellan, only one ship and 18 men returned with Elcano on the good ship Victoria. There is a reason why centuries later the Age of Exploration resonates in the imagination. As Herman Melville wrote in Moby Dick: “Like a savage tigress that tossing in the jungle overlays her own cubs, so the seas dashes even the mightiest whales against the rocks, and leaves them there side by side with the split wrecks of ships…”

Within the context of popular historical imagination during the Age of Exploration few loom as large as the figure of Enrique of Malacca. Historian Carlos Quirino was convinced he was Cebuano. Stefan Zweig in his biography of Magellan wrote: “The islanders surrounded Enrique, chattering and shouting, and the Malay slave was dumbfounded, for he understood much of what they were saying. It was a good many years since he had been snatched from his home, a good many years since he had last heard his native speech. What an amazing moment, one of the most remarkable in history of mankind! For the first time since our planet had begun to spin upon its axis and circle in its orbit, a living man, himself circling that planet, had got back to his homeland.”

Magellan visited Malacca through a route around the tip of Africa where the Atlantic and Indian Ocean meet. There Magellan purchased the slave-who-would-be-circumnavigator and named him Enrique, after Henry the Navigator. The basis for the contention that Enrique was from the Philippine islands was that greeting he received and his linguistic compatibility. However, there are a number of historical arguments concerning his Pinoyhood. Romantically the idea lingers.

So, some believe, and some do not, that Enrique the Filipino was the first to circumnavigate the world. Enrique the Filipino may very well be a romantically mythic construct. Enrique the man though remains. Consider: Columbus is widely considered in history to have discovered the New World, Magellan the Philippines: primarily, because they were the first to lead an expedition to a “new” land. Whether Filipino or Malay or Sumatran, Enrique was one of the first from the Pacific Islands to set foot in the West. Enforced or not his journey is epic-worthy. From our perspective, you could even say he discovered the Old World.

And that is well worth remembering: history books become as much about the perspective of the writers (and what they were trying to achieve), as the facts they’re based on.