BOOK: DR JOYCE E.CHAPLIN > "ROUND ABOUT THE EARTH: CIRCUMNAVIGATION FROM MAGELLAN TO ORBIT."

In Joyce Chaplin's book, the claim is presented as a possibility, not as a settled fact.

Round About the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit is dedicated to two circumnavigators "who reluctantly made history": Enrique de Malacca, also known as "Henry the Black", who may have been the first human to circle the Earth, and Laika, the Soviet space dog.

What Chaplin and other historians are pointing to is this:

1. What is certain – the linguistic circumnavigation

On March 28, 1521, Enrique became the first person to complete a linguistic circumnavigation — he travelled so far in one direction that he reached a point where his language was spoken.

Magellan had bought Enrique as a teenager in Malacca after 1511, taken him to Portugal, then to Spain, and then on the Armada de Molucca westward across the Atlantic and Pacific. When they reached Cebu / Limasawa in the Philippines, Enrique could understand the local language, to the crew's surprise.

2. Why some argue he was the first to fully circle the globe

If Enrique was originally from the central Philippines, was captured and sold into slavery in Sumatra before being taken to Malacca—as some historians argue—then by reaching Cebu in 1521, he had already completed a full circuit: Philippines -> Malacca -> Lisbon -> Seville -> Philippines.

That version is phrased in the literature as: "They deem it more likely that Enrique had been raised in the Central Philippines... If so, Enrique was the first human to have completed a full circuit of the Earth."

This is also why in Malaysia he is celebrated as Panglima Awang — described as "indisputable that Panglima Awang or Enrique of Melaka was the first Malay to voyage around the world in the 16th Century".

3. Why it's still contested

There is no record that Enrique returned to Malacca after Magellan's death in Mactan in April 1521. The documents often cited in 2024 as "newly discovered proof"—Magellan's 1519 will and crew list—have been known since the 19th century and were available in Melaka since 2010, and neither mentions Enrique completing a circumnavigation, nor do they identify him as the first to do so.

In fact, the standard narrative is: "There are no specific records to prove that he succeeded in returning to Malacca; by arriving in the Philippines, he succeeded in reaching the Malay archipelago."

So historians like Chaplin distinguish between: 

• Linguistic circumnavigation: proven — March 28, 1521
• Geographic circumnavigation: plausible if his origin was in the Visayas, but not documented with a return to his starting point. The first documented complete survivor of the Magellan-Elcano expedition to return to Spain was Juan Sebastian Elcano and the 18 men of the Victoria in 1522.

If you're interested in the Malaysian historiography, the name Panglima Awang itself comes from Harun Aminurrashid's novelisation of Enrique's story, not from 16th-century Portuguese sources — which is why the debate continues between popular history and academic history.

Hj Zulheimy Maamor

30 September 2026: 11:45 p.m.