Perhaps you’re partial to the classic “ibex-as-ninja” footage, or the guy who writes great songs but then sings them so gratingly as to make it difficult for anyone to listen to them. Or maybe you like the one with the death-dealing golden eagle or the leopard. They all have their merits. But for true goat-video lovers, I think this is likely the single greatest goat video of all-time.

“When officers searched the theater, they found several sandals that were left behind by moviegoers who fled the scene.”
 — “Man paced theater, screamed ‘This is it’ during movie showing: Police.”

by Lizzie Skurnick

In 1956, the great science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov published “The Dead Past.” In the story, scientists and the government clash over the Chronoscope, a machine that can let a viewer see as deep as the ruins of Carthage, but is restricted for mysterious reasons. (Reader, halt. If you’ve yet to work your way through Asimov’s oeuvre and would like to absorb the climactic twist of this story on your own, skip down.)

Ah, but you are on tenterhooks! Here we go. A scientist pushes to access the Chronoscope. Access denied. He proceeds nonetheless. His act of defiance wins the day, but destroys society as we know it. Why? As a bureaucrat bitterly clues him in, a machine that can see into the very distant past can — idiot — also see into the very recent past: say, one millionth of a second ago. What our scientist has done is set free the ur-security camera, one that will allow us to track each other anywhere, at any time, for all time. “Happy goldfish bowl to you, to me, to everyone,” our hero of a bureaucrat hisses at the scientist-villains. “May each of you fry in hell forever.”

Well! As usual, Asimov got the dangers right, but the means and motivation wrong. He rightly predicted that our future would produce an unheard-of level of exposure, but did not predict we would be the means. We do not need an ur-security camera when it’s we ourselves who leave a littering of video, blog post, credit-card records and Google search strings for corporations and individuals alike to raid. Our very human desire for contact over isolation, convenience over difficulty, and declaration over circumspection would provide the means for our —

I’m sorry. I briefly forgot that I am not David Starkey. But gigantic digital footprints notwithstanding, we’re not yet absorbed into Asimov’s great Multivac as a bodiless synaptic web. We’re still here in corporeal form, and one can, if one wishes, approach us as human, question us as to our circumstances, then jeer in our face and depart.

So why do we hate-search? That is, why do we trawl the internet for information about people we dislike? I call this activity “smearching,” and it often overlaps with hate-reading, which is what happens when your hate search becomes part of your daily routine.

In an effort to answer these questions, I’ve tried to lay out the main types of smearching, as well as recall what we did before the Internet, though I am a poor fool and remember little of this dark time. I am also but a lone woman and not even on Tumblr so I will rely on you to provide additional means, methods, and motivations for smearching, which is by its very nature a solitary activity, cloaked in shame, called “stalking” at best, and thus not wholly to be understood by even the most inveterate smearcher.

1. IT IS BY ITS VERY NATURE A SOLITARY ACTIVITY, CLOAKED IN SHAME, CALLED STALKING AT BEST, NOT EVEN TO BE UNDERSTOOD BY THE MOST INVETERATE SMEARCHER

Humans are dumb, and one of the main ways in which we are dumb is we don’t like anyone to know that we care about them. In love, we generally get over this fear because a host of “no thanks” eventually renders our affections but a dry husk of a once-flowering bloom. But in hatred, we never get over the fear that someone will know they got to us — because to declare we are threatened means to declare someone our equal, exactly the opposite of what we wish them to be.

Here’s where smearching comes in. Those unable to bear the stink of superiority of that guy tinkling the ice of his bourbon in your face can content themselves with his Amazon ratings (10 1-stars! 10!) or his pudding-faced child. (Facebook.) That these are all, in fact, signs of success — having anyone rate a book on Amazon, having had sex, having the time to use Facebook — mean nothing if they can be quantifiably reduced. This is not jealousy but a kind of back-door pecking, reducing one’s enemy to a reasonable size so that you can tinkle your glass back with your sad idea of parity.

What we did in the old days: The best illustration of pre-smearch pecking comes, I believe, from the end of Broadcast News, when Albert Brooks asks his child if he knows who William Hurt is. The child replies, “The big joke?” Yes. In the old days, we relied on our children to reliably pass, in the playground or elsewhere, information back-and-forth we were not willing to say to someone’s face! Take that, Attachment Parenting!

2. WE HAVE FORGOTTEN THERE IS ANOTHER WAY TO LEARN ABOUT PEOPLE

The other night, I attended a party of a bunch of twentysomethings and was immediately struck by the oddity that no one would tell me what they did when I asked them, “What do you do?” Remembering my youth, I naturally thought this was from shame. But further prodding revealed a well-known videographer, a clerk at the AG’s office, and several others more impressively employed than some people I could name.

I asked them if this was modesty. But their bristling refusal to acknowledge how they spent their days did not bespeak modesty. I asked if they hated me. They claimed no. Finally, a young man with his face half-hidden by a tie-dye baseball hat told me it was like asking someone what courses they were taking in college.

This made me feel my mortality more than I enjoy on a Saturday night (COLLEGE!!!) but it answered my question. It was neither secrecy nor modesty on their part, but the idea that this information — what they did — was so freely available on Facebook, Google and Tumblr to ask them about it was doing was akin to asking someone if their hair was usually brown. Intimate information — that they played Catan last night, that the Deerhoof show had been really good, that I needed to make that ex-girlfriend who’d come to the party go away, somehow, just go away — was for in-person. LAWYER. That was like asking what college courses they were taking.

I pondered this new intimacy. Then I took all the good champagne and drank it, because they are in their twenties and can’t tell the difference.

What we used to do: We used to ask people what they did. Sometimes, if we responded, “Poet,” they said we were brave, and what they meant is we were poor but it was nice someone had loaned us a dress so we could leave the house.

3. THERE IS NO OTHER WAY TO LEARN ABOUT PEOPLE

Try to find out what my brother does. Try to find out what my sister does. TRY TO FIND OUT IF I ACTUALLY HAVE A BROTHER AND SISTER.

YOU CAN’T, because they’re not on the internet. (This may or may not be in response to the information dump of their sister, but I can’t ask even them, because they’re not on the internet.)

I am on the internet, however, and my information dump — as well as yours — has rendered us the point persons for tasks that used to be filled by phone books, encyclopedias, newspaper films, phone operators, and other objects you could throw across the room with a hard thump.

These operators are gone. Now, any dunderkopf is granted a smorgasbord of information, and who in their right-click could not spiral? I have told a friend about an upcoming date and had an astrological chart of the gentleman in question sent to me ten minutes later. I have gone through the wedding photos of complete strangers and found I had enemies I didn’t even know, just from their centerpieces. I have judged hairstyles, children, countertops, motorcycles, blog names, avatars, jobs, even email names — simply because the person was not in the position to refute my judgments with their presence. One whois query led me to find an ex’s wife makes jewelry for Garnet Hill and I ALMOST BOUGHT SOME.

What we used to do: Once, King Henry VIII would send around his lords to tell everyone who the queen was that year, and you would have to sign that she was the true queen and there was no other. Sometimes, when questioned, if you forgot and said “Our Lady Catherine, God Bless Her and Keep Her” instead of “Anne,” you were hanged at the crossroads. But you could luck out with “Katherine” a lot of the time.

4. THE WEB CAN TELL THE TRUTH IN THE WAY A PERSON CANNOT

When I say the web can tell the truth, I don’t mean “the truth” in the sense of “I googled your mother’s boyfriend and need to tell you that he has three very rich ex-wives, all dead,” or even, “the subject’s pattern of credit-card use indicates the subject is involved in prostitution and money laundering.” (Though Spitzer was hate-searching par excellence.)

What I mean is the web you present contains, like the nervous sweat you sport when you swear you’re fine, a truth greater than you intend. Like all presentation, what we do on the web involves a degree of (increasingly crippling) self-consciousness, and it is only through pre-self-deprecation that we can get past the points we missed, the jokes we lost, our flat-footed delivery, our — TOPIC. What I mean is, though it is true you can, in truth, not tell anything about someone’s life from her Amazon reviews (One 2!!!) you can tell a great deal from her unconscious clues. Is she maniacally liking and commenting on everything on your page? Has she set the photos of her baby shower private? Does he delete Tweets that are not favorited in good time? Does NO PICTURE OF HIM EXIST ON THE WEB?

We see this unconscious truth sniffed out by no greater force than the commentariat, who, though they know the writer not, correctly pinpoint his or her weakness, hypocrisy, pretension, error, and split infinitives, like holy fools in a court of cowards.

I don’t mean you guys are holy fools. Or that I am King. That is just a metaphor.

What we used to do: Those of us known as “empaths” would know there was something wrong and say so on the way home from the party. Our companion would tell us we were wrong and always overthinking everything. If he or she were a therapist, they would possibly say we were “catastrophizing” or “projecting.” Later, we would say, “I told you so.”

5. TO SEE IF THEY ARE FAT OR THIN

I don’t know. I can’t explain it. I do this all the time.

What we used to do: Other people used to volunteer this information, first thing.

6. WE LIKE TO TOUCH A HOT STOVE

In the not-too-distant past, I related to my therapist that a nighttime spiral had led me to the following informations: One ex had inherited an apartment in Paris; a friend had married a Hollywood director; another ex was selling felted items on Etsy. She paused — I am not sure she has, as we once called it, “the internet” — and spoke. “You know, Lizzie, it sounds like torture,” she said.

Yes. Yes, it does. And it’s divine.

When one’s general experience on the internet involves paging through emails for your boss to prove you did in fact say the meeting was 1 p.m. on Thursday, not 2, though she will have moved on to some new gross negligence by the time you find it anyway, or spending three hours finding the drivers for your LAN that iTunes latest update broke (call me) so you can get back on the internet in the first place, the idea of submitting to an unholy alliance with the subconscious can seem a welcome palate-cleanser. Felted Etsy-ware is pain, yes, but is pain not life? How else to dim the experience of the Excel file than with the terrible news that, three years later, that boss was hit by a bus? (True story.)

And yes, though it is “torture,” cannot we then argue smearching is a sign we truly have no desire to have, in fact, this horrible person in our lives, and a healthy reminder of the pain they caused is but a self-administered preventative, the wee bit of virus that immunizes? Would we not, were we truly unhealthy, call these people and hang up; drive by their houses; actually send them emails? I would tell my therapist this but she will just ask me why I am being so analytical, like that is not MY JOB TOO.

How we used to do this: We used to drive by their houses. Call them and hang up. Drop in on them in the library. Leave secret mixed tapes.

7. R U THERE?

A friend recently explained my propensity for using Apple TV to play podcasts because my TV is next to the radio with the theory that technology is often ahead of what people actually want. “They thought we wanted phones with video screens,” he said. “But then it turned out people actually wanted to tap out tiny messages in Morse-like code.”

Dick Cheney and Dharun Ravi notwithstanding, our smearching is much the same. We do not stalk the symbols of our discontent in their actual habitats, but prefer to piece together a portrait using the web’s fragmentary shards, mixing a running roster from 1998 with an abandoned Facebook profile with a Pinterest page of the new love interest as if this were the same as sitting across from them as they ate their eggs.

On the one hand, yes. We acknowledge this means we have lost. There is no them, and no eggs. But on the other hand, we have won. This person is lost to us forever, and our proof is that we are alone, late at night, learning all we can about them, and they cannot see us either.

THE TRUTH IS

Asimov was right. The bureaucrat of his story had nothing to worry about. We all need the danger of chaos, the satisfaction of knowing someone is fatter than us. But we don’t, as he feared, need it in real-time. To hate-search is to seek our cave painting, our fractured bit of tile, our ancient Carthaginian. In “The Dead Past,” the scientist wanted to use the Chronoscope to see if Carthaginians actually sacrificed their children by fire. We, too, want to know if anyone is immolating anyone, self or otherwise. We want to see the fire, but from a healthy distance. We don’t want to taste those ashes on the wind.

Lizzie Skurnick writes That Should Be a Word for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Shelf Discovery, a memoir of teen reading. She lives in Jersey City. You can follow her on Twitter. Photo by David Mican.

This #NoBollocks content was produced in partnership with Newcastle Brown Ale. If you enjoy this article, won’t you be a love and watch a TV commercial on the Internet? Go on, it’s right there on the right.

So yes, half of India is without electrical power this morning. Half of India is like two Americas, populationwise. Imagine if all of America had no electricity at the time? Once the batteries wore out on everyone’s wireless devices, no one could check sports scores or order Fresh Direct. Also, the Psychedelic Furs are one of my favorite new wave bands. I like pretty much everything they did in the ’80s. Even “Heartbreak Beat.” But my favorite song of theirs remains the opening track of their debut album. (That’s “India,” above.) Might I like them even more if they’d only recorded that one song? I mean, it’s kind of perfect.

What makes all these “cat food” companies believe I, Choupette Lagerfeld, would lower my standards for their commercial benefit?

— Choupette Lagerfeld (@ChoupettesDiary) July 31, 2012

Despite being one of the most recognisable faces in the world, Karl Lagerfeld believes that his beloved cat, Choupette, is now more famous than him. The German-born designer is renowned for his attachment to the pampered pet, who often travels around with him on his private jet. The Chanel creative director goes to great lengths to ensure that Choupette — which means “sweetie” in French — is sufficiently attended to at all times while he’s working: she has three maids, and pays a visit to the vet for a check-up every 10 days.

— Hey, does Choupette know that we are well into the second day of India’s power outage, with 670 million people without power? Also why does Choupette speak English.

How is @guyadams STILL suspended? The longer this goes on, the worse Twitter looks.

— felix salmon (@felixsalmon) July 31, 2012

TwitterGate 2012 has escalated in a remarkable and bad way, with today’s revelation that Twitter actually went to NBC to inform them that journalist Guy Adams had put forward NBC exec Gary Zenkel’s work email address, not the other way around. (Also, Gary Zenkel has a JD from Georgetown, so it makes it extra sad that he’s all up in this mess.)

Twitter is a company with enormous customer good will. They’ve gotten away with incorporating advertising into their product without harming themselves. They’ve grown and scaled really well — to watch them trash all that in 24 hours has been unreal, particularly as they’ve sat firm and silent on a misinterpretation of their own guidelines. This event has rolled back user enthusiasm massively. (And on the heels of them being heroes!) The hilarious part is, of course, that it’s not like angry Twitter users will boycott Twitter. They have to have somewhere to gripe.

Perfume Genius is playing in Prospect Park tonight! (iTunes)

The Slave Who Circumnavigated The World

by Josh Fruhlinger

Part of a month-long series on terrible trips, great journeys and getting lost.

Here are some geographic and economic realities, as any educated European of the late 1400s would have understood them: The European diet was monotonous and people were willing to pay good money for spices to liven up their meals. Those spices for the most part came from places to the east, lumped together in the European mind as “the Indies.” The easy and obvious routes there were blocked by Muslim states that were hostile to Christendom, and that made good money on the spice trade and weren’t interested in sharing the profits with Europeans. And since the world was round (yes, everyone knew even then that the world was round), it was theoretically possible to bypass the Muslim world and reach those places in the East by sailing west, although nobody knew exactly how far a voyage that would be.

By 1494, a few more facts had come to light. Christopher Columbus, an Italian employed by the Spanish government, had sailed west and found some islands that he was convinced were the easternmost fringe of the Indies. A few years before that, the Portuguese had had a breakthrough in the other direction: Bartolomeu Dias, a Portuguese nobleman and captain, had finally proven that Africa did not extend south indefinitely, but could be circumnavigated, with the Indies presumably accessible to the north and east of the Cape of Good Hope. To head off potential conflict, the Pope (himself a Spaniard) negotiated a treaty between the two Iberian countries. He cut the world in half, roughly down the middle of the Atlantic, and, ignoring not only the people who lived in these far-off lands but also everyone else in Europe, gave the everything east of the line to Portugal and everything west of the line to Spain.

A Malay, who we know as Enrique of Malacca but whose real name is unrecorded, would have his life defined by these European schemes. He is, it turns out, the closest thing there is to a hero in the story of Ferdinand Magellan’s horribly botched attempt to circumnavigate the world.

***

Everyone knows what the Spanish did after 1492: they conquered the islands of the Caribbean, then the mainland of Meso- and South America, killing thousands through war and slavery and millions with diseases, and slowly realizing that their new empire wasn’t in the Indies at all, but in a whole new continent nobody in the Old World had known existed. The Portuguese, staying on their eastern side of the dividing line, were more focused. Whereas even the strongest American states were no match technologically or organizationally for the Spanish, the Portuguese sailed into the Indian Ocean and found adversaries over whom they had just a bit of an edge. So they conquered where they could, intimidated when couldn’t, and sometimes even made friends, ending up with an odd little empire of isolated forts and cities protected by a powerful Indian Ocean-based navy. The goal was to seize control of the spice trade from the Muslim merchants who had monopolized it. In 1511, they captured Malacca, a city on the Malay peninsula that controlled ship traffic between modern-day Indonesia (home of all those delicious, expensive spices) and the West. “Cairo and Mecca would be entirely ruined,” gloated the Portuguese viceroy in advance of the raid, and so it was; Egypt’s spice monopoly collapsed and the country was conquered by the Turks just a few years later.

One Portuguese adventurer present at the capture of Malacca was Fernão de Magalhães, whose name is usually Anglicized to Ferdinand Magellan. Among the rather considerable spoils of war Magellan took in the battle was a human being. We have no evidence of what his name was at birth, but Magellan renamed him Enrique, probably because he was baptized as a Christian on St. Henry’s feast day, a few days after the siege of Malacca began. Here is what Magellan says about Enrique in his will:

And by this my present will and testament, I declare and ordain as free and quit of every obligation of captivity, subjection, and slavery, my captured slave Enrique, mulatto, native of the city of Malacca, of the age of twenty-six years more or less, that from the day of my death thenceforward for ever the said Enrique may be free and manumitted, and quit, exempt, and relieved of every obligation of slavery and subjection, that he may act as he desires and thinks fit; and I desire that of my estate there may be given to the said Enrique the sum of ten thousand maravedis in money for his support; and this manumission I grant because he is a Christian, and that he may pray to God for my soul.

Other sources call Enrique a native of Sumatra, the island just across the straits from Malacca, and (as we’ll see) he was fluent in the language of the islands, so he almost certainly wasn’t a “mulatto” in the sense we’d expect (i.e., of mixed African and European heritage), but rather a Malay, a rather exotic ethnicity to contemporary Europeans. We don’t know whether his conversion was genuine or compelled or an attempt to curry favor with his captors. We don’t know whether he ever had any intention of praying for the soul of the man who kidnapped him and took him thousands of miles away from the world he knew.

***

Magellan was something of a crank who fell out with his commanders. He returned to Europe, bringing Enrique home with him, fought in Portugal’s wars in Morocco, got a leg wound, was accused of illegally trading with the enemy, left the army under a cloud. He studied navigation charts and became more and more convinced that the islands in Indonesia that were the source of the most valuable spices could be reached by sailing west from Europe and around the Americas.

This was obviously of little interest to Portugal, which was enjoying a pretty good spice trade return on its strategic conquest investment at this point, but it piqued the interest of the Spanish. Spain’s new empire in the Caribbean wasn’t turning out to be as profitable as had been hoped; the conquest of Mexico was just getting underway and Peru wouldn’t be seized for another decade, so American gold and silver hadn’t started flowing back to Europe yet. Sailing to the Spice Islands in the Spanish direction (west) would avoid conflict with the Portuguese navy, and Magellan dangled the possibility that the islands were really on the Spanish side of the dividing line (an easy prospect to dangle, given how bad everyone was at determining latitude at this point). King Charles of Spain gave him five ships and a crew of 232, and the rights to a cut of the presumably lucrative spice trade he’d establish. The expedition left Spain on September 20, 1519. And Enrique went on this trip too — he would be invaluable as an interpreter in the region, obviously, but he also had gone everywhere else Magellan did since his capture, so there was no reason for him not to also go on this voyage.

The ships sighted South America on the 6th of December, after which virtually everything that happened to expedition was terrible. They had to stay one step ahead of the Portuguese, who were not keen on having Spain slip in on their spice trade via the back door — in an expedition led by a Portuguese to boot. In March, they established a little settlement in Patagonia; days later, two of the ship’s captains attempted a mutiny, which fizzled out when their crews refused to go along. At least one of the captains was executed, his impaled body left to rot in the abandoned town. The ships spent months inching their way down the coast; one was wrecked in a storm. In late October, the four remaining ships found what’s today named the Straight of Magellan; Magellan himself more modestly named it “All Saints’ Channel,” because he was sailing through it on November 1. One more of the ships simply turned around and sailed for home at this point, taking most of the expedition’s food with it. This left behind only three to enter the Pacific, so named by Magellan because of its eerie stillness. They put South America behind them on November 28, 1520.

The South Pacific between the Chilean coast and French Polynesia is one of the longest stretches of open ocean in the world, and Magellan, by sailing diagonally northwest, managed to spend a lot of time in it. By the time they finally got far enough west to a part of the sea where there were islands, they had gotten too far north to actually run into any of them. They spotted a couple of tiny islets — one in January, one in February — but didn’t land on them, and for the most part managed to swing far to the north of Polynesia (then unknown to Europeans) and the entire Spice Island chain that had been Magellan’s target in the first place.

On March 6, 1521, after what was (for the time) a ridiculous stint of three months at sea without taking on provisions, the ships finally blundered into the Marianas Islands; the half-starved crew encountered Chamorro locals whose different understanding of property prompted Magellan to name the archipelago the “Islands of Thieves.” The Spanish had big guns, though, so they still had the better of the encounter. Resupplied with food, and aware now that they had gone too far north, they turned southward and by March 17 had reached what are today the Philippines.

Here’s were Enrique re-enters our story. This was a part of the world where they spoke his language, or something close to it, and so he fulfilled his duties as ship’s interpreter. Antonio Pigafetta, an Italian crewman who wrote the most detailed description of the expedition, refers to him by name only once, as “Henrich,” but references to him as the interpreter dot his accounts of the next few weeks. And these weeks were among the expedition’s most hopeful. They arrived on the island of Cebu on April 7. Humabon, the local leader, agreed to be baptized as a Christian, then quickly requested that his new allies help him out with an ongoing dispute he was having with Lapu Lapu, the ruler of the nearby island of Mactan. Magellan agreed, sailed to the island, launched an ill-advised attack on Lapu Lapu’s army, and was killed on April 27. His body was never recovered. The expedition limped back to Cebu.

Humabon had watched this botched attack from a distance, and apparently decided that maybe his new friends weren’t as impressive as all that. Meanwhile, John Serrano, the new leader of the expedition, told Enrique that he would remain a slave, despite the promises in Magellan’s will, because the expedition still needed a translator. This was not news that he was particularly keen to hear. And so Enrique made the only decision on his own accord that we have recorded in our sources: he decided to get rid of his tormentors.

Pigafetta reports (with no indication of how he found this information out) that Enrique had secretly told Humabon that the Europeans planned to kidnap the ruler and take him prisoner, a European practice Enrique knew a bit about. On May 1, Humabon invited Serrano and other officers of the expedition to a banquet; Pigafetta, nursing an arrow wound in his face, stayed back on ship. A couple of crewmen returned and reported an odd vibe among the locals. Then:

Scarcely had they spoken those words when we heard loud cries and lamentations. We immediately weighed anchor and discharging many mortars into the houses, drew in nearer to the shore. When thus discharging [our pieces], we saw John Seranno in his shirt bound and wounded, crying to us not to fire any more, for the natives would kill him. We asked him whether all the others and the interpreter were dead. He said they were all dead except the interpreter. He begged us earnestly to redeem him with some of the merchandise; but Johan Carvaio, his boon companion, [and others] would not allow the boat to go ashore so that they might remain masters of the ship. But although Johan Serrano weeping asked us not to set sail so quickly, for they would kill him, and said that he prayed God to ask the soul of Johan Carvaio, his comrade, in the day of judgment, we immediately departed. I do not know whether he is dead or alive.

And that is how Enrique freed himself from slavery and got almost all the way back to where he had started, a decade after he left, traveling west all the way, and that is the last we ever hear about him. The Philippines are still several hundred miles short of Malaysia, but there was commerce all through that part of the world, and it seems sad to think that, having come so far, he didn’t eventually make it home, so I (and many others) assume that he did, thus becoming the first person to circumnavigate the earth. He’s now something of a celebrity in Malaysia: this photo of his statue — entirely fanciful, as no contemporary portrait of him exists — is in the Maritime Museum of Malacca.

***

After abandoning their commander to his death on the Cebu beach, the sailors of the Spanish expedition headed west. They had suffered so many casualties that they didn’t have enough crew left to man their three remaining ships, so they burned one of them. After wandering through the Indonesia for a while, they really did manage to find the Spice Islands, in November, and successfully traded for some cloves and cinnamon. But the Trinidad, the larger of the two ships, had sprung a leak, and needed to be overhauled. The other ship, the Victoria, sailed west for home on December 21; a few weeks later the Trinidad made an abortive attempt to turn around and go back via the Pacific, but was captured by the Portuguese, who were still angry that the Spanish were trying to get a piece of their newfound spice monopoly. The crew was imprisoned, and only five lived long enough to return to Europe, years later.

The Victoria rounded the southern tip of Africa on May 6. On July 9, it reached the Cape Verde islands in the Atlantic. By this time, 20 crewmen had starved to death, and now another 13 were left behind in Cape Verde. On September 6, 1522, just short of three years after it had left, the Victoria arrived in Spain with 19 crewmen and 26 tons of spices. The crew were not paid the full wages they had been promised, which helped the expedition make a modest profit.

Previously in series: Portraits From A Cross-Country Road Trip, Fly Fishing The Universe, A Chat With A Person Who Has Been To Disney Parks 40 Times, Hiking The Grand Canyon In A Day, The 2006 World Cup With No Game Plan and The Castaway’s Guide To Making A Home

Josh Fruhlinger never goes anywhere without printing out stuff from Google Maps first. Follow him on Tumblr or Twitter. Map courtesy of Wikipedia; photo of Enrique statue by abdullatif hamidin.

Is this the world’s largest falafel? Sure, why the hell not.

“The former Soviet Union used to get around this rule by faking an injury to one of the qualified athletes. Back in 1992 — when the top three per country advanced to the all-around final — pre-meet favorite Tatiana Gutsu fell off the beam and failed to make the top three on the powerful Unified Team. So the team simply claimed that Roza Galieva had a knee injury and subbed in Gutsu, who ended up winning the whole competition. It was only a few years later that Galieva herself revealed that she in fact had not been injured.”

— If you were peeved for U.S. Olympic gymnast Jordyn Wieber not making the cut yesterday, at least blame us for not being Russian enough.