Mexico City, Dec 31 (AP) Disease, mutinies and uncharted waters nearly sabotaged the global circumnavigation of the expedition led by Portuguese mariner Ferdinand Magellan. Five centuries later, the pandemic looms as a Spanish navy tall ship sails to commemorate the feat.

The Juan Sebastian de Elcano, named for a Basque captain who completed the 1519-1522 circumnavigation with 17 of the roughly 240 crewmembers who began it, docked around Latin America after leaving Europe in August. Visitors were not allowed on board and the crew disembarked in just a few places, including the Chilean island of Dawson in the Strait of Magellan and San Lorenzo island in Peru.

“This was possible after confirming that the environments were completely free” of COVID-19, Lt Luis Martínez García, the ship's public information officer, emailed from the vessel.

The ship departs across the Pacific from Mexico on Friday.

Magellan's expedition for Spanish trade and imperialism opened a westward route from Europe to the Spice Islands, the Maluku archipelago in today's Indonesia. The epic story invites appreciation for conflicting, overlapping perspectives on history as well as the rewards and perils of a connected world.

It was "the first action humans took on a literally planetary scale", said Joyce Chaplin, a professor of early American history at Harvard University and author of "Round About the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit".

"Only by the 19th century was it a safer kind of journey, and this was when it became a popular pastime, as in Jules Verne's 'Around the World in Eighty Days'," Chaplin said. “Now, we worry, like those early circumnavigators, that maybe taking on the entire planet is a deadly business, given how our collective impact on the globe is destroying species and ecosystems.”

Magellan crossed the strait between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans that has his name in modern Chile, where President Sebastian Pinera recently said the voyage was about “knocking down walls and building bridges where today ideas, people, knowledge and culture flow freely?.

Magellan, a daring navigator with Portuguese military experience in Africa and Asia, was later spurned by Portugal, Spain's rival, and distrusted by Spanish sailors in his fleet. While Magellan's expedition exploited Indigenous people, Christopher Columbus is a far more divisive figure today for his role in the violent colonisation of the Americas.

Magellan's interpreter, an enslaved ethnic Malay called Enrique by the Spanish, has been commemorated in parts of Southeast Asia. Malay writer Harun Aminurrashid wrote “Panglima Awang,” a 1958 novel about him that contributed to regional identity as Malaysia broke with British rule.

The interpreter should “move out of the shadows of Magellan,” said Ahmad Murad Merican, a professor at the International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilisation of the International Islamic University Malaysia.

Portrayed in European accounts as subordinate, the interpreter has since been discussed as a “diplomat and a linguist” who sparked interest in “Malay navigation skills, boat building and the expanse of Malay travels across the oceans,” Merican said.

Some speculate that the interpreter may have been the first person to travel around the world, in separate stages. That might have been possible if he continued west to his Malay homeland after Magellan died in an April 27, 1521, fight with warriors in what is today the Philippines. Some accounts from the time say the interpreter betrayed Magellan's expedition after his death, though that narrative has been questioned.

In 2018, President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines designated April 27 as a national holiday to honor Lapu-Lapu, the chief whose men killed Magellan. Lapu-Lapu is admired for resisting foreign intervention and is the namesake of a widely eaten fish.

Magellan is credited with introducing Christianity in the Philippines, now the largest Roman Catholic nation in Asia. Yet he is lampooned in late comedian Yoyoy Villame's song “Magellan", whose lyrics imagine his last words: ''Mother, mother, I am sick/Call the doctor very quick/Doctor, doctor, shall I die?" “We don't aim to rewrite our history, far from it,” Celia Anna M Feria, the Filipina ambassador in Portugal, said a year ago at a Lisbon conference on Magellan and the Philippines.

But, she said, “We are taking the elements of our history apart' and studying them.

Feria described “magnanimity and humanity” during Magellan's time in what is now the Philippines, saying he was received on woven bamboo and palm mats by dignitaries (not including Lapu-Lapu).

History is about perspective, said Ambeth Ocampo, a Filipino professor who attended the Lisbon meeting. In a column in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, he said few details were recorded about Lapu-Lapu and so “history recedes into wishful or aspirational images of the hero" on monuments, in films, comics and even an advertisement for disposable baby diapers.

Jesus Baigorri Jalon, an academic at the University of Salamanca in Spain who was a United Nations interpreter, said Muslim, Jewish and Christian coexistence in what became Spain showed that cultural mixing was common long before Magellan's expedition.

“The idea of ??classifying 'multicultural' societies as a novelty of our times reflects ignorance or obliviousness of our history, that of the colonial powers and that of those that were colonised,? Baigorri Jalon said. (AP)

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)