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Hello and welcome to The Spectators Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.

And this week, my guest is the historian, Professor Felipe Fernandez Armesto,

whose new book in the, I think the words quintinery of Magellan's Great Voyage, is called

Straits, beyond the myth of Magellan. But he comes, perhaps he'll dispute this characterization,

but not so much to praise Magellan as to bury him.

The general received idea of Magellan is he was the heroic navigator, who was the first

person to circumnavigate the globe, that he was a great adventurer, a chevaric figure, a pioneer

of the age of exploration. And Philippe's contention in the book

is that, well, he very much wasn't, that he was neither brave, well, he was brave, but he was

not noble, that he didn't try and circumnavigate the world, let alone succeed in doing so,

and that he was a thug and a failure failure more or less. Is that a fair representation,

Philip? Well, thank you, Sam, for summarising the book so, well, I feel that perhaps

you might have written it yourself and done it, you've done a better job. My only quibble with

what you say is that I absolutely don't want to bury him. I mean, for Christ's sake, I want people to buy the books. I want to make him more interesting by telling the truth about it.

You know, the truth is so much more interesting than the myth, because it raises so many fascinating problems.

The problem of why did this man's proposal ever get adopted in the first place?

Because when he arrived at the Spanish court, he did so with a reputation as a traitor,

who knew nothing about navigation and whose sidekick who supposedly did know something about it

was literally certifiably insane. And if you look at it objectively, the whole plan just didn't make

...