A recent review of Magellan’s Navigator complained that it was “boring and hard to follow all the names.” ‘Boring’ I can’t address. That is a personal reaction, and the book may be boring to some.
The number of names comes from the nature of the story. It could be worse. Some forty crewmen of the armada had their moment of glory, or infamy, during the voyage. My initial draft of the book in 2006 had all forty. Even I, at that time a rookie novelist, realized that was too many. So, I worked hard at cutting down the number of characters while at the same time retaining the strict faithfulness to the truth.
The book was still too complicated after doing that, and so I set it aside for some years while working on my science fiction books. Returning to the book in 2015, I had the epiphany of telling the story from Albo’s perspective. This eliminated many characters, and made the story work. Finally, I took care to not introduce too many people at once, and to wait until a few characters had met their fate before introducing more characters.
There remained the issue of names. Indeed, my editor in 2016 pointed this out. The problem is that Spaniards and Portuguese typically have two or three names, with the spelling different in Spanish and Portuguese. For example, Ferdinand Magellan is Fernando de Magallanes in Spanish and Fernão de Magalhães in Portuguese. My solution was to give the full English name upon a character entering the story, while subsequently using just a single name an Anglo reader could comprehend. Hence Gonzalo Gomez de Espinosa becomes Espinosa. Another problem was similar names. There was a Pilot Major Esteban Gomez while also the master-at-arms Gonzalo Gomez de Espinosa. In the book these men are referred to as Gomez and Espinosa.
As a final assist to the reader, a convenient list of important characters is in the appendix.
So, that’s how I attempted to deal with the character names.
kennethdschultz 