September 20th in History: Magellan Sets Sail and Other Remarkable Firsts

On September twentieth, 1519, five ships and about two hundred and seventy men set sail from Spain to do something no one had ever done before: circle the entire globe. Yesterday, we talked about a monumental gamble on September nineteenth — George Washington stepping away from power, betting that the young United States could survive without him. Well, today we have a gamble of a different sort, one of wood, and wind, and sheer, breathtaking audacity. The man in charge was Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese navigator sailing for the Spanish crown. And his goal wasn't just exploration for its own sake. Oh no. This was about commerce.

This was about spice. Specifically, the Spice Islands — the Moluccas, in modern-day Indonesia. Cloves, nutmeg, and mace were, at the time, worth more than their weight in gold. Finding a westward route to them, one that didn't involve going around Africa and paying tolls to the Portuguese, would make Spain fantastically wealthy. So Magellan sells the idea to the young King Charles the First of Spain, and he gets his five ships: the Trinidad, the San Antonio, the Concepción, the Victoria, and the Santiago. And from the very beginning, it is an absolute disaster. It truly is. The crew is a mix of Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Greek...

you name it. The Spanish captains of the other ships don't trust Magellan because he's Portuguese. They face treacherous storms. They run low on supplies. By the time they make it to what is now Argentina to wait out the winter, a full-blown mutiny breaks out. Magellan has to ruthlessly put it down, executing one captain and leaving another marooned on the coast. One of his ships, the Santiago, is wrecked in a storm while scouting ahead. But they press on. And in October of 1520, they find it. A sea passage at the southern tip of South America that connects the Atlantic to the Pacific. We call it the Strait of Magellan. It is one of the most difficult, dangerous waterways on the planet.

It takes them thirty-eight agonizing days to navigate it. And during that time, the captain of the San Antonio — the biggest ship, carrying most of the supplies — loses his nerve, turns around, and sails all the way back to Spain, telling everyone that Magellan is dead and the mission is a failure. But Magellan isn't dead. He emerges from the strait with three remaining ships into a vast, calm ocean he names the "Mar Pacifico" — the Peaceful Sea. The name is a bit of a cruel joke. They expect the journey across it to take a few days. It takes ninety-eight. They run out of food. The men eat sawdust, leather rigging, and rats. Scurvy ravages the crew.

Men are dying daily. When they finally make land, in Guam and then the Philippines, they think their troubles are over. But Magellan, emboldened by his success, gets involved in a local political dispute. He wants to convert a local ruler to Christianity and make him a vassal of Spain. On April twenty-seventh, 1521, Magellan leads a small attack force against a rival chieftain named Lapulapu on the island of Mactan. He's overconfident, his tactics are poor, and he is killed on the beach, hacked to pieces. The great navigator who crossed the world's biggest ocean dies in a pointless skirmish thousands of miles from his goal. The survivors are forced to flee.

They have so few men left they can't even crew their three remaining ships, so they burn the Concepción. The final two, the Trinidad and the Victoria, finally reach the Spice Islands and load up with precious cloves. But the journey home is just as perilous. The Trinidad tries to go back across the Pacific and is captured by the Portuguese. Only one ship is left. The Victoria. Under the command of Juan Sebastián Elcano, it continues west, across the Indian Ocean and around Africa, desperately avoiding the Portuguese. And on September sixth, 1522, almost exactly three years after they left, the Victoria limps back into a Spanish harbor.

Of the two hundred and seventy men who set out, only eighteen return on that ship. But they did it. They had circled the world. And the cargo of cloves they carried was valuable enough to pay for the entire expedition and still turn a profit. It is one of history's most brutal, and most consequential, success stories. Now, from a journey of pure survival to a celebration of pure style. On September twentieth, 1946, a very different kind of landmark event kicked off on the French Riviera. The very first Cannes Film Festival. And what's so delightful about this story is that it was born out of defiance. In the late 1930s, the most prestigious film festival in the world was in Venice.

But by 1938, it had become a complete tool of fascist propaganda, with Mussolini and Hitler's governments basically deciding which films got the top prizes. The French were appalled. So a diplomat and historian named Philippe Erlanger decided to create a rival festival, one dedicated to artistic freedom and international cooperation. They planned the first one for September of 1939 in the resort town of Cannes. Everything was ready. Stars like Gary Cooper and Mae West were on their way. But on September first, the day the festival was supposed to open... Germany invaded Poland. The festival was cancelled. The dream was put on hold for the duration of the Second World War.

But they didn't forget. As soon as the war was over, the plans were revived. And so, on September twentieth, 1946, in a city still recovering from the war, the festival finally opened. It was a symbol of rebirth. A declaration that art, and beauty, and international glamour had survived the darkness. And it's a tradition that, of course, continues to this day, a little beacon of defiant elegance lit on this date. September twentieth also gives us some remarkable people. The Italian actress Sophia Loren was born on this day in 1934, a true icon of that same international glamour Cannes would come to celebrate. But I want to talk about someone born a little earlier, in 1878.

A man named Upton Sinclair. Now, if you were forced to read his book The Jungle in high school, you might remember it as a grim, relentless novel about the miserable lives of immigrant workers in the Chicago stockyards. And it is. But it was so much more than that. Sinclair was a socialist, and he wrote the book hoping to expose the evils of wage slavery. He wanted to hit America in the heart. But as he famously said later, "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach." The book's most graphic, most unforgettable passages weren't about the exploitation of the workers. They were about the food. The rats scurrying over piles of meat.

The poison bread set out for them that would get swept up and mixed in with the meat for sausage. Men falling into rendering vats and being turned into lard. It was disgusting. It was shocking. And it was largely true. The public outcry was INSTANTANEOUS. President Teddy Roosevelt, though he disliked Sinclair's politics, read the book and was horrified. He launched an investigation that confirmed the book's worst details. And within months, in 1906, Congress passed two landmark pieces of legislation: the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. These laws fundamentally changed the relationship between the public and the food industry.

They created the agency that would eventually become the Food and Drug Administration, the FDA. All because of one book. A book by a man born on this day, who set out to start a political revolution and instead started a public health one. It's such a perfect example of how an artist, a storyteller, can change the world in ways they never even intended. Okay, but sometimes changing the world requires a more direct confrontation. And on September twentieth, 1973, ninety million people tuned in to watch one. They called it "The Battle of the Sexes." The setup was pure spectacle. On one side, you had Bobby Riggs. He was fifty-five years old, a former Wimbledon champion long past his prime, but a magnificent self-promoter and hustler.

He was an avowed male chauvinist — or at least, he played one on TV — claiming that women's tennis was inferior and that even at his age, he could beat any top female player. And earlier that year, he'd proved part of his point by easily defeating Margaret Court, then the world number one. On the other side was Billie Jean King. She was twenty-nine, at the absolute peak of her powers, and the leading voice for equality in women's sports. She had initially refused to play Riggs, but after he beat Court, she realized she had to. There was too much at stake. This wasn't just a tennis match anymore. It was a referendum on the women's liberation movement.

The event, held at the Houston Astrodome, was pure circus. King entered the arena carried on a golden litter held aloft by shirtless men, like Cleopatra. Riggs rolled in on a rickshaw pulled by a group of young women in tight shirts. He presented her with a giant Sugar Daddy lollipop; she gave him a squealing piglet. It was absurd. It was over the top. It was perfect television. But then the match started. And the clowning stopped. Riggs was a master of a tricky, defensive game. King was an aggressive, all-court player. And she was ready. She didn't try to out-power him; she out-rallied him. She ran him ragged. She beat him in straight sets: six-four, six-three, six-three.

It wasn't even close. It was a decisive, public humiliation of the chauvinist argument. And its impact was IMMENSE. For women and girls all over the country, watching a woman so thoroughly and confidently defeat a man on such a huge stage was electrifying. The number of women playing tennis, and sports in general, exploded. It gave the movement for equal prize money, which King was leading with the founding of the Women's Tennis Association, unstoppable momentum. It wasn't just a tennis match. It was a cultural turning point, played out live for all the world to see. Sometimes, though, the biggest turning points are the ones that almost happen.

The moments of sheer chance that could have sent history careening in a totally different direction. On September twentieth, 1958, Doctor Martin Luther King Junior was at a department store in Harlem, signing copies of his new book, "Stride Toward Freedom." He was already a national figure, famous for leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott. As he sat at the desk, a forty-two-year-old woman named Izola Ware Curry approached him. She asked, "Are you Martin Luther King?" He said yes. And then she plunged a seven-inch steel letter opener into his chest. The attack was so sudden, so shocking. The handle of the letter opener broke off.

The blade was buried deep in his chest, its tip resting right up against his aorta, the main artery carrying blood from the heart. He was rushed to Harlem Hospital. The surgeons who operated on him knew how delicate the situation was. They had to open his chest and remove a rib just to get to the blade. And they said later... they said that if he had so much as sneezed, the blade would have pierced the aorta, and he would have drowned in his own blood almost instantly. Think about that. The entire course of the American Civil Rights Movement balanced on the edge of a letter opener, resting a millimeter away from oblivion. He survived.

He spent weeks recovering. And later, he reflected on that day. He spoke about a letter he received from a young high school student. She wrote, "I'm so happy that you didn't sneeze." And King used that line. He said, if he had sneezed, he wouldn't have been around to see the student sit-ins in 1960. He wouldn't have been there to see the Freedom Rides in '61. He wouldn't have been there for the March on Washington in '63 and the "I Have a Dream" speech. He wouldn't have seen the passage of the Civil Rights Act in '64, or the voting rights march in Selma. "I'm so happy," he said, "that I didn't sneeze." It is one of the most profound statements of grace and historical perspective I have ever heard.

To face your own random, senseless, near-death experience and see in it not a trauma, but a gift. The gift of more time to do the work you were put here to do. It's a moment that reveals everything about his character. And it all happened on this day, September twentieth. So we have Magellan, sailing into the abyss. We have Upton Sinclair, hitting the world in the stomach. We have Billie Jean King, returning a serve for equality, and Martin Luther King Junior, surviving an assassin's blade by a breath. September twentieth feels like a day of tests. Tests of the body, of the spirit, of a nation's conscience. History isn't just what happened.

It's the record of what we're willing to risk... and what we find on the other side.