Who makes it
One person makes the series, on one Mac, working with an AI assistant, Anthropic's Claude. The person chose the subject and set the rules on this page. He reads each storyboard and approves it or sends it back. The assistant reads the records, drafts each day's story with its citations, lays out the storyboard, and wrote the programs that draw the films and build this site.
None of the technique is new. The programs are short Python scripts, and the tools are free or cheap and in common use. Most of the work is reading the records and checking what was written against them.
Calendar
The voyage lasted 1,086 days, from 20 September 1519 at Sanlúcar de Barrameda to 9 September 1522, when the Victoria's men gave thanks in Seville. The series keeps the same count, one voyage day for each real day. Day 1 was released on 3 October 2026, and Day 1,086 falls on 22 September 2029. Each day gets a short film. On Saturdays a longer film takes one question from the week and follows it through the records. Two introductions and the occasional special stand outside the calendar.
Records
Nearly everything known about the voyage comes from a few men who were there and the papers they left. Four of their accounts are on the Sources page in full, in Lord Stanley's English translation for the Hakluyt Society (1874): Antonio Pigafetta's book, the pilot Francisco Albo's log of latitudes and courses, the account of an unnamed Genoese pilot, and the letter of Maximilianus Transylvanus, who questioned the survivors. Beside them the series uses Robertson's 1906 translation of Pigafetta from the Italian manuscript, and the Spanish documents printed by Navarrete (1837), Medina (1920) and Pastells (1920): the 1519 muster roll, the pay lists, the fleet's accounts, and the survivors' answers under questioning in 1522.
Words shown or spoken as quotations come only from the public-domain English translations, word for word and attributed. Spanish, Portuguese, Latin and Italian texts, and every modern history, supply facts, not quotes. The series invents no dialogue, no quotations and no feelings.
Dates, and the day that went missing
Every date any record names goes into one index, with the source and the page: the dated records. The Voyage page shows them. Each day's card lists what the records say for that date, marked as written on the day, implied by a dated entry, or background. Dates are given as the men wrote them, in the Julian calendar. When witnesses disagree about a date, both readings stay in the index and the film says so.
When the Victoria reached the Cape Verde Islands in July 1522, her daily count was a day behind the calendar ashore: Wednesday aboard, Thursday on land. Sailing west, the ship went the same way as the sun, so each day aboard ran a little longer than a day ashore, about a minute and a half on average. Once round the world, the minutes made a whole day.
How a day's story is chosen
The record for the date comes first: every passage that names the day or plainly covers it. Then the other dated sources, and what historians have since established for that day. When nothing was written down, the fleet still existed that day, so the film says where it probably was and what the work was, then spends the day on one of four subjects: a person on board (the default; over three years every named man on the roster should get his day), the church calendar the crew lived by, how things worked (taking the sun, the watches, rations, the ships, the goods in the hold), or what was happening elsewhere in the world that the men could not know.
The story is written to complete one sentence: "After watching this, the viewer will understand ___." It is printed at the top of the storyboard, and the film is judged against it. Each day must teach something distinct.
Citations
Every statement in a story that rests on a source carries a number. The Sources list under the story gives the edition and page, and "Read it in the source" opens that page of the 1874 volume on this site. Where the words are printed in another edition, the link goes to that edition online. Facts from outside the records are marked "Background" and cite a readable public page.
Review before anything is made
Each film is first written as prose with its sources, then laid out as a storyboard: every picture, every caption with its line breaks, the places on the map, and the sentence the film must earn. Nothing is narrated or rendered until the board is approved; the approval is recorded, and the film is made from the approved board. A weekly film is built only after the days it draws on are settled.
From the approved board to a film
The film is described in a plain text file: a list of passages, each with the sentence to be spoken, the caption to be shown, and the picture, map or globe to show with it. The storyboard and the film are both drawn from that one file, so the film shows the pictures and captions the board showed.
- Draw the board. A Python script draws one panel for each passage on a single sheet, with the caption as it will appear and the narration under it. This step uses no narration and costs nothing, so a board can be redrawn as often as it needs.
- Record the narration. After approval, each passage is sent to ElevenLabs, a text-to-speech service, and the recording comes back as an audio file. Each recording is kept and matched to the exact words of its line. A film rendered again after a caption is corrected reuses the recordings, and only a line whose words changed is spoken again.
- Draw the map. A second Python script draws the film one frame at a time, 24 frames for each second, at 1,280 by 720 pixels. A three-minute film is 4,320 drawings. The plotting library matplotlib does the drawing. The library cartopy supplies the map projection, and the coastlines come from Natural Earth, a public-domain map dataset. The old-chart look is a paper texture, a fixed set of colors, and a small ship that moves along the track.
- Render the globe. For a long crossing, the free 3D program Blender renders a globe with the track drawn on it, turning to follow the ship. A script runs Blender without opening its window, and a clip takes about a minute to render.
- Assemble the film. The free program ffmpeg joins the frames into a video file. It also joins the narration with its pauses, lays the sound bed under it, and fades the music in and out at the title and the closing quotation.
Daily run
A scheduled run starts at about seven each morning, if the computer is on. It renders the films whose storyboards have been approved, writes the story and draws the storyboard for the day two days ahead, builds the weekly film on Saturdays, and reports what it did. It approves nothing. A board waits until a person has read it.
Pictures
The map is drawn in the manner of an old chart. A solid line is where the records put the fleet; a dashed line is an estimate. Period pictures (portraits, maps, manuscript pages, ships) are public domain or under a Creative Commons licence, shown with a slow pan and credited by title and source. For the long ocean crossings a three-dimensional globe turns to follow the track.
Some pictures are made by AI image generation, for moments no period picture shows: a lantern at night, a storm, a landing. All of them are made in one fixed style, a hand-coloured woodcut in the manner of a sixteenth-century printed book of voyages, so that none could be mistaken for a photograph or a historical document, and each is labelled "Illustration, AI-generated" in the film and on this site. They are never used for a named person's face, and never as evidence of what a place or an object looked like. Every picture without that label is a period image with a credit.
Until 8 November 2026 these illustrations were made with OpenAI's image generation. Since then they are drawn on the same Mac by FLUX 3 Klein, an open image model that runs without a network connection and takes about a minute and a half for a picture. OpenAI's model is still used when the local model fails or gets a scene wrong. The label is the same whichever model drew the picture.
Sound
The narrator is an AI voice, designed for this series on ElevenLabs. The music follows one rule: both the composition and the recording must be in the public domain. The pieces are sacred and court music of the voyage's own generation, among them Jean Mouton's Nesciens Mater (the series theme), works by Josquin des Prez and Cristóbal de Morales, and songs from the Cancionero de Palacio, in concert recordings by the choir Ars Mvsica of Murcia, released by the choir under a public-domain mark. Under the narration runs a quiet sound bed made with ElevenLabs sound generation: a harbour at anchor, a ship under a steady breeze, a storm, cold wind in a narrow channel.
This site
One more script builds this site from the files the films are made from: the stories, the date index, the crew register, the home towns and the money ledger. The site is a single page and a set of data files, with no database behind it. The maps are drawn in the browser by the D3 library from the same Natural Earth outlines. A correction to a record is made in one place and reaches the film and the site from there.
Money
The series gives every sum twice: as days of an ordinary laborer's pay, and as that many days at a laborer's pay today. A Castilian laborer earned about 31.8 maravedís a day in 1518 to 1521; a construction laborer's eight-hour day in the United States was $188.90 in August 2026. Both figures are frozen for the whole series, so every number can be compared with every other. It is a comparison with working lives, not a price in today's goods. The Money page has the full method, every converted sum, and the sources.
Where each person came from
The People page maps each person to the home the lists give for him. Where the roll's spelling points to a known town, the card says "recorded". Where the reading is a scholar's best guess, it says "probable" or "uncertain" and gives the roll's own spelling. Where nobody has placed the name, the card says so and the map stays empty. Each town's short description of what it was around 1519 cites a public page a reader can open.
Checking what comes from outside
Research gathered outside the project, such as machine-read texts of the old editions and a modern reconstruction of the crew list, is treated as a finding aid, not as a source. Before a fact from it is narrated it is checked against the page image or against a second source, and an entry in the crew roster that rests on one source alone is marked to verify and waits.
Where it is rough
The local image model makes mistakes: night skies that come out pale, borders drawn round a picture, a lantern at the bow where the record puts it at the stern, the wrong number of ships. These are caught at the storyboard, and the picture is drawn again or replaced.
The Spanish editions are read from machine-made text of old print, which misreads letters and numbers. A date or a name taken from it is checked against the page image before it is used, and some have not yet been checked. In the crew register, an entry that rests on one source is marked to verify. Some home towns are uncertain or not identified, and their cards say so.
The drawing on each ship's page is a generic nao of the period scaled by tonnage, not a reconstruction of that ship. The narration service takes three requests at a time on the plan the series uses, so films are rendered three at a time. The daily run does not happen on a day the computer is off.