Today, when some documentaries seem like action movies, a production as rigorous as Magellan: The First Around the World, a four-part miniseries (on Movistar+) about the Portuguese navigator credited with creating globalization, comes as a surprise. The leader who survived a gruesome journey and the conspiracies against him, but came close to his fate by underestimating his native enemy.
The series is strict because here the story is based on the voices and it could almost be a podcast. Those of the narrator (José Coronado in the Spanish version) and those of the adventurous historians and seafarers. We follow the story through the diary written on board by the Italian chronicler Antonio Pigafetta, who described the bird species he observed as carefully as the menu of leather and rats on famine days. Some comics (barely animated) by Ugo Bienvenu and scenes of the overwhelming natural beauty of the places that the expedition crossed, from Rio to Tierra del Fuego, from the atolls of the vast Pacific to the Philippines, serve as images. It’s understandable that the story is swept up in epic: there’s plenty of that when talking about those who hit the oceans with no maps or even a vague idea of what they would find. Of course, since the production is Franco-Portuguese, we forgo the jingoism that usually pervades these heroic stories.
The message that Ferdinand Magellan’s mission was more daring and ambitious than Christopher Columbus’s is emphasized that this time the Genoese’s promise to reach India from the west was fulfilled. One wonders whether the carnation of the Moluccas deserved so much sacrifice: the journey took three years, with whole months without stops; About 150 people lost their lives. The documentary remembers the dead, one by one, until count is lost.
The focus is on Magellan, who is described as cursed: a traitor to the Portuguese, suspicious of the Spanish. His courageous leadership stands out without concealing that this included the brutality of dismembering the mutineers when he felt it necessary; Less is said of the violence he used against the natives. In any case, the praise for the adventurer prevails. The narrative almost ends with his death in a senseless, according to some experts, intentionally suicidal battle against local forces in what is now the Philippines. The fact that Juan Sebastián Elcano has completed the world tour and arrived in Seville is revealed very quickly in the last few minutes.
Little is said about the connection between exploration and colonialism, and that it all started in Tordesillas when the kings of Spain and Portugal split the entire world, even the most unknown, in half. After all this, it turned out that the Moluccas and their nail fell on the Portuguese side, contrary to what King Carlos I had been promised. Magellan, not planning to circumnavigate the world but to go back to where he came from, died believing (knowing?) that it failed.
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