You get a new sense of respect for cloves and nutmeg watching “Magellan’s Crossing,” part of the new season of the long-running PBS series “Secrets of the Dead.” The yearslong voyage depicted—along with the suffering, the violence and the loss of life and property—were all in pursuit of a shorter route to the so-called Spice Islands (now the Maluku Islands) and their much-coveted aromatics. One’s view of Christmas cookies and eggnog may never be the same.

Similarly, one’s perspective on the 16th century—the Age of Exploration,...

You get a new sense of respect for cloves and nutmeg watching “Magellan’s Crossing,” part of the new season of the long-running PBS series “Secrets of the Dead.” The yearslong voyage depicted—along with the suffering, the violence and the loss of life and property—were all in pursuit of a shorter route to the so-called Spice Islands (now the Maluku Islands) and their much-coveted aromatics. One’s view of Christmas cookies and eggnog may never be the same.

Secrets of the Dead: Magellan’s Crossing

Wednesday, 10 p.m., PBS

Similarly, one’s perspective on the 16th century—the Age of Exploration, the Age of Discovery and the Age, problematically, of Colonialism. It was an age of heroes, was it not? As the show insists, the journeys undertaken by the men whose names we learned in grade school and whose exploits straddled the 1400s and 1500s—including Drake, Ponce de Leon, Vasco da Gama and even Columbus—were about money, sometimes plunder, sometimes trade. But just as advances in medicine have often been propelled by war, knowledge about the world has been a byproduct of profit-seeking. Likewise, heroism.

Was Ferdinand Magellan a hero? It’s the unavoidable question of this hourlong special, which uses expert testimony, re-enactments and sundry illustrations to portray the man best known for being the first to circumnavigate the globe—even if he didn’t quite survive the trip. One can feel a certain tension in the program, which is caught between wanting to exalt its title character and confronting his very obvious failings. His crew hated him (because he wouldn’t tell them anything). His Portuguese countrymen hated him (because he was working for the despised Spanish). He grossly miscalculated the distance from Patagonia to Asia (he thought he was a few days away, rather than a hundred). We’re not so fond of him well before he’s killed in the Battle of Mactan (now the Philippines) two years after setting sail in September 1519. By the time the journey was finally completed, four of the original five ships had been lost, along with the lives of 200 sailors.

And yet, as pointed out by Andrew Lambert, professor of naval history at King’s College London, Magellan’s efforts actually proved the world was round, and that it was rotating through space. The voyage—which he planned, even if he didn’t complete it—eventually established not only the size of the planet but its place in the universe.

Sebastian Elcano (Martin Rother) in ‘Secrets of the Dead: Magellan’s Crossing’

Photo: ZDF/Pia Schadel

Being a historical program, “Secrets of the Dead” is often about the dead. The lurid question is what secrets they hold, and in the case of “Magellan’s Crossing” the “secret” as such is not about the title subject but his very capable navigator, Juan Sebastián Elcano, who has more or less vanished into a limpid hole in 16th-century history. It was Elcano who got Magellan’s ships to the Spice Islands. (The current sultans of two of them, Tidore and Tenate, are among those interviewed in the show.) It was Elcano who got the surviving ship, Victoria, back to a Spanish port—and did so carrying 25 tons of cloves and nutmeg. The problem, we are told, is that Elcano never wrote a book about his accomplishments. The one shipmate who did never mentioned Elcano. There’s a lesson in there somewhere. But not one we ever got in grade school.