John Mandeville Medieval Travelogue Predicts Enrique of Malacca’s Circumnavigation
the town dock at Jaffa
A handful of medieval travelogues were the closest thing Ferdinand Magellan had to a travel guide when he sought a westward route to Asia — accounts credited to Marco Polo, John Mandeville, and others, and those all echoed the same monsters and myths repeated since the time of Pliny the Elder, the Roman author whose Naturalis Historiae helped inspire the encyclopedia.
It gets little mention today, but The Travels of Sir John Mandeville was a world atlas of sorts in medieval Europe, essential reading for navigators and explorers. The accounts became circulated widely in Europe in the fourteenth century. They detail travels in North Africa and the Middle East, and in India, China, and even the Malay Peninsula — which would have been of particular interest to Ferdinand Magellan, and also Enrique of Malacca, Magellan’s interpreter-slave.
It was clear early on that much of the Mandeville travelogue was borrowed, yet it’s a collection of knowledge and tales and, importantly, a record of the medieval European mind-set.
The author introduces himself as Sir John Mandeville, an English knight, though no historical corroboration exists. The work was possibly written by a Flemish monk named Jan de Langhe in the early 1300s, a prolific writer and collector of travelogues. The earliest surviving text is in French.
It’s possible also that the author did not in fact travel: Much of the manuscript is commandeered from other sources. His accounts of East Asia including the Malay Peninsula mirror those from Odoric of Pordenone (1286–1331), an Italian missionary explorer.
Odoric, a Franciscan friar, was sent to Asia as a missionary around 1316, where he remained until 1329. His travels took him beyond the normal reach of medieval Europeans, to the north coast of Sumatra and the southern coast of China. He may also have reached Lhasa, in Tibet, on his return.
The Mandeville travelogue borrows directly from Odoric, but often sensationalizes Odoric’s accounts.
One gem among Mandeville’s wild tales turned out to predict what would take place two centuries later:
And therefore hath it befallen many times of one thing that I have heard counted when I was young, how a worthy man departed some-time from our countries for to go search the world. And so he passed India and the isles beyond India, where be more than 5000 isles.
And so long he went by sea and land, and so environed the world by many seasons, that he found an isle where he heard speak his own language, calling on oxen in the plough, such words as men speak to beasts in his own country whereof he had great marvel, for he knew not how it might be.
But I say, that he had gone so long by land and by sea, that he had environed all the earth …
Two hundred years after Mandeville wrote this, it happened. Ferdinand Magellan in his early years traveled eastward to Asia, around the Cape of Good Hope. He was with the Portuguese fleet that sacked Malacca, a regional trade hub for merchants from China, Persia, Arabia, and India.
While in Malacca, Magellan acquired a “captured” slave who was christened Enrique, and in 1512–13, the two sailed to westward to Portugal, beginning what would become the first circling of the globe.
Enrique traveled with Magellan first back to Lisbon and later Seville, where with backing from the Spain’s King Charles, Magellan prepared the expedition he became known. His fleet departed from Sanlúcar de Barrameda in September 1519 and spent the following year enduring harsh weather, hardship, and mutiny.
On October 21, 1521, Magellan’s expedition found the entrance to the strait and on November 28 became the first Europeans to sail into the Pacific Ocean. By that time, one ship had been wrecked in a storm and another had deserted, sailing directly back to Spain.
Tragically, Magellan underestimated the earth’s size, and believing Asia lay just days away, he set out without stopping for provisions. The fleet spent more than three months crossing the Pacific. More than twenty men died from starvation and scurvy and many more lay gravely ill.
On March 28, the fleet reached Limasawa Island (modern-day Philippines), where they were greeted by eight men in a canoe, and probably very much to everyone’s delight, Enrique was able to converse with them.
Enrique was Magellan’s slave, but he was listed on the fleet’s roster as an interpreter — with a high salary — and by reports had become fluent in Portuguese and Spanish. At Limasawa, for the first time Enrique’s job title proved accurate.
Enrique had gone in the opposite direction of Mandeville’s traveler, but he had traveled in one direction so far that he circled the earth and came to “an isle where he heard speak his own language.” Enrique of Malacca had completed at minimum a linguistic circumnavigation.
Extra: Interesting blog post on Flemish inspiration in The Travels of Sir Mandeville.
Images:
Top: (left) Sir John Mandeville, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; (right) British Library, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Middle: Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Bottom: Route of Enrique of Malacca’s circumnavigation, Malacca to Cebu, 1512–1522. Map by John Sailors, using Diogo Ribeiro’s 1528 Vatican Planisphere. (Source.)
© 2023 by John Sailors. All rights reserved.
