National Geographic History

Book recommendations are often in high demand during the summer months, so it is with great pleasure that I’m making my first one for History magazine: the Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant. Written in the waning months of his life, the book was a publishing sensation in 1885; the first printing quickly sold out—all 300,000 copies—and the work has never been out of print since then. Financial hardship thrust Grant’s writing career upon him when the “rascality of a business partner” swindled him out of his savings in 1884. Broke and needing money, Grant began writing short essays on major Civil War battles for The Century. He developed a taste for writing through these assignments and honed his writing style: direct, honest, earnest, and humble. I had the privilege to revisit Grant’s…

To deepen the shipping channel of Georgia’s Savannah River, contractors for the Army Corps of Engineers have been hauling up not only 24 million cubic yards of sand and clay but also something even more impressive: artifacts from the Revolutionary War. To date, as many as 19 cannons have been recovered. The weapons appear to have come from British Navy ships involved in the war. The redcoats captured the port of Savannah in 1778. A year later, the British Navy scuttled the H.M.S. Savannah and H.M.S. Venus to create a blockage and prevent French ships from aiding the colonists. Their tactic succeeded, and the British were able to hold Savannah until July 1782. The cannons were not the only recovered objects. Parts of a ship’s bell, ammunition (including cannonballs and bar shot), and…

WHENTHE FIRST cannons were dredged from the Savannah River in February 2021, archaeologists initially suspected they came from the H.M.S. Rose, a British warship that had been scuttled in the river in 1779. Before it sank, the Rose had been a scourge against the colonists, prompting the formation of the Continental Navy, the forerunner to the U.S. Navy. Further research, however, revealed that the Rose’s wreckage was located too far from where the cannon haul was found. Records indicate, too, that the Rose’s 20 guns were removed before it sank. The Rose’s fame lived on after its watery burial: Based on British Admiralty drawings, a replica of the Rose was built in 1970, and later converted to star as the H.M.S. Surprise in Master and Commander: The Far Side of…

Mooring at the southern Spanish port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda on September 6, 1522, the Victoria’s hull was so rotten that it could only stay afloat by continually operating the pumps. Three years before, the ship had set out from port as part of a proud, five-ship flotilla under the command of captain-general Ferdinand Magellan. Since then, of the four other ships, three were lost and one had deserted. Of the 250 men that had formed the flotilla’s original crew, only 18 returned that September day. The man who had captained these survivors on their long journey home, however, was not Magellan—killed in the Philippines more than a year before—but a Basque seaman named Juan Sebastián Elcano. By steering the frail Victoria across the Indian Ocean and around Africa’s Cape of…

1 April 27, 1521 Having crossed the Pacific, Ferdinand Magellan is killed by residents of Mactan. The expedition reaches the Moluccas in November. J.S. Elcano and the crew of the Victoria will begin the return to Spain in the last days of 1521. 2 Feb. 11, 1522 Elcano passes Timor. From here, he and his crew set out to become the first Europeans to cross the Indian Ocean at its widest extent. 3 March & April 1522 “The ship leaked [and] we suffered cold. We had nothing but rice and water to consume, all the meat having putrified.”—Antonio Pigafetta 4 May 1522 Rejecting calls from his crew to surrender to the Portuguese in Mozambique, Elcano captains his starving, sick crew through fierce storms around the Cape of Good Hope. 5 Sept. 6, 1522 After an aborted attempt to take…

In the late 1400s mapmaking in Europe was flourishing. Many maps were practical, produced for navigating expanding trade routes, but a few notable creations contained more than just geography. These reflected cultural, social, and political concerns of the time. One of the most notable maps was produced in the 1530s by the Austrian scholar and courtier Johannes Putsch, whose most famous work personified Europe as a crowned and gowned queen holding an orb and scepter. Putsch’s original map, a somewhat crude woodcut, became known by a variety of titles, including“Europa regina” (“Queen Europe”). The progression from the queen’s head to foot moves from west to east, Putsch labeling each region with a Latin name: Hispania, the Iberian Peninsula in the west, is the figure’s head, and eastern regions of Bulgaria and…