How to Survive History by Cody Cassidy

Author:Cody Cassidy [Cassidy, Cody]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

When the San Antonio fails to return, Magellan surmises what has occurred and realizes it will make for an awkward return to Spain. In order to avoid a mutineer’s execution upon their return, Gomes and the crew of the San Antonio will have to disparage Magellan and the rest of the armada in the harshest terms. Don’t expect songs and celebration when you arrive back in Seville.

But that’s a problem years in the making. For now, the ship’s mutiny poses a more pressing concern. The San Antonio was the armada’s largest ship. It held the lion’s share of your dwindling provisions, and its desertion turns an unstable food situation desperate. The crew begs Magellan to sail for Spain to resupply and return. Magellan sails onward.

On November 28, 1520, after thirty-seven days spent navigating the strait, and with only three ships of the original five remaining, you finally reach the Pacific Ocean.

According to Europe’s best maps and thus Magellan’s sincerest beliefs, the Pacific Ocean is but a narrow strait. He believes the crossing is, at most, a few hundred miles. Had he known its true girth, even Magellan would have surely turned back.

Magellan’s maps were off by almost 7,000 miles. Expecting the quick riches and salvation of the Spice Islands at any moment, the armada instead sails into the world’s largest body of water. As the days stretch into weeks, and the weeks into months, the meat rots and the hardtack goes soft. Even the water turns foul. You’ll eat and drink it anyway.

“We ate biscuit which was no longer biscuit, but powder of biscuits swarming with worms, for they had eaten the good. It stank strongly of the urine of rats. We drank yellow water that had been putrid for many days,” wrote Pigafetta. Oxhides and sawdust become a staple, rats a delicacy. But even as your stores of food almost completely deplete, it isn’t the lack of food that poses the danger. It’s the kind of food.

Beginning in the second month of your journey across the Pacific, you’ll watch as the sailors around you sicken and die from a disease new to Europeans known as scurvy. The symptoms begin in the gums, which first swell and squish, then become splotchy, blacken, and rot before finally losing their grip on the teeth, which begin to fall. Painful ulcers develop in the legs and arms that soon become gangrenous and blacken. After the excruciating final stages of scurvy, “death arrives as a merciful release,” the explorer Robert Falcon Scott wrote, usually in the form of a burst blood vessel in the brain or heart.

Because the theory of disease transmission in this era centered on “bad air” or “miasmas,” the doctors and captains aboard will probably tell you something inherent to sea air causes this terrible affliction. The dampness of the breeze, perhaps, or the stench of the hold. But while the latter is so foul the theory may seem plausible, scurvy instead results from a lack of vitamin C, which the body requires to synthesize collagen.

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