The Magellan Files

Background to a Most Mysterious Mystery.

The evening of Sunday 6th April 2008 saw a most unusual meeting in a secret location hidden away in Bodega, a meeting of some of the finest explorer’s adventurers, hunters and inventors all with one aim: to find the missing explorer, Magellan Linden!

Salazar Jack's photo Magellan Linden in Nova Albion dated 23-03-2006

Magellan is a legend in Second Life, a explorer & traveller who discovered Nova Albion city in Sansara in 2004 and whose spacecraft crashed in Columbia as he explored the new continent of Heterocera way back in February 2005. He continued his explorations, sending his typically gruff and bad-tempered reports back for all to read in his blog. His reports stopped abruptly in April that year and many feared him lost to the Moth God worshiping tribes he had encountered, but he did turn up a few more times with the last sighting being just over two years ago at the second anniversary celebrations for the city of Nova Albion.

However, since that last sighting, Magellan Linden, explorer extraordinaire and connoisseur of many a fine ale house (and many, many more not so fine) has not been seen nor heard of since.

Rumours are rife – some say he has fallen to the demon drink and currently lives in a state of befuddled bliss in some seedy opium den; others say he long ago went native and is blingged up to the max and running an illegal gambling skybox; still others say he is kept in Robin Linden’s basement or Osprey Therian’s cave as a sort of grumpy play-thing! Whatever the truth, one thing is clear – Linden Lab knows more about his whereabouts and fate than they are letting on and the brave souls who met in secret are determined to get to the truth.

To And From Bay City.

Despite the two year silence, Magellan resurfaced again in April 08 in a quietly dramatic way. From his name once more appearing in the search engine, word quickly spread of a deserted camp and crash site (a pattern of bad driving emerges!) in the newly discovered continent of Gaeta. Soon explorers and Magellan hunters from all over the grid were flocking to the camp hoping for a sight of the great drunk man. Natacha Chernov was the first and a lucky few also managed to catch a glimpse but many more did not such as myself and the ever brilliant Ayumi Cassini and it soon became apparent that the man of the moment had buggered off in a craft cobbled together from the wreckage of the airship he journeyed to Gaeta in from Bay City. We were all so close, and despite a trip to Bay City by the Explorers, it seemed Magellan had moved on again.

Beyond Gaeta. But Back a Bit.

Then in mid-October 08 he appeared again! This time discovering (as is his wont) another newly found continent, this one called Nautilus. It appears he has made friends with the Moles of the Linden Department of Public Works (LDPW) and convinced them to build him a ruddy great tank that bores underground and between sims and voided locations. At least he won’t drop out of the sky in this one, I guess. But I wouldn’t want to live anywhere near where he is boring to be honest.

On 20th October 08, a secret and baffling meeting took place between Peripase Linden and a mysterious alt named “Elcano Swashbuckler”  in which many things were sort of revealed by this grumpy, booze obsessed ‘stranger’. The most startling of which is the fact that Elcano claims the Nautilus continent was shielded from view/scan deliberately by technology unknown. If this is true, and Mag… Elcano may be many things but a liar he is not (a LIER yes, but a liar no), then it lends even more credence to Salazar’s records of a world before the Second Life grid erased in some terrible and yet to be understood incident nearly 40 years ago. Shielded from view? Who, how and why? All these questions  and more may or may not be answered here, so keep reading!

The Hunt Turns To Nautilus.

The Bodega Explorers visited the new land of Nautilus on Thursday 23rd October 08 and uncovered many strange and interesting things – from Magellan’s mole-tank (now broken says Jack Linden) to the strange crystal powered temple where highly localised time tremors sweep through at regular intervals. Read more here on my blog and here on Osprey’s. You can also read The Baker’s (they are legion) exploration on Nautilus here.

February 2009 – The Wide Open Ocean of Blake Sea.

In Feb 09 the forums briefly lit up again with a new possible sighting of the ill-famed suff – this time a bottle had been found bobbing in the recently gridded waters of the ocean sims east of Nautilus that made up Blake Sea. Spotted in Blake Sea – Indian, the bottle contained a garbled message seemingly from the pilot of a downed plane. Now whilst this carelessness with transportation did indeed sound like our man, the few words that could be made out in the message did not:

Please rescue ~~~ ~~ name ~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~~~ and I’m a pilot for the Blake Sea ~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~
~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~~~ crashed, and I’m stuck on a tro~~~~~ ~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~ in ~~~ ~~~~~ part of the Blake Sea.
The plane went down near ~~~ ~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~.  My EPIRB must be broken.  I’m tired of eating fish!

I went right out there as soon as I could (photo record here) but couldn’t decide if it was from Magellan or not – my gut says it isn’t… watch this space!

November & December 2009 – Nascera & The Elderglen Transport Device

On the 23rd November 2009 Marianne McCann reported that her self-made Magellan Detector ring had alerted her that Magallen was in-world. Despite several IM attepts from Marianne, myself and Prokofy Neva, the great man was set to busy and steadfastly ignored us all. We were all in the dark for a few days until it became clear that more land been found! Reports came in that the great man had crashed into an ancient transport device in Elderglen in the newly gridded land of Nascera.

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A Call to Arms. And Feet. And Knees.

You can join in the hunt – you can help find this grumpiest of explorers and return him doing what he does best: charting the uncharted, mapping the unmapped and drinking the undrunk! Simply head over to the SL Forums here to get up to speed and then drop me or other members of the Explorer’s Base group an in-world IM.

Show your support with these (crude, I know but I’m no artist or webmonkey I’m sorry) buttons below:

Hunt for Magellan Linden Button 1

Hunt for Magellan Linden Button 2

Hunt for Magellan Linden Button 3

Link Me, Momma!

• Follow the hunt on the SL Forums
• My posts about the whole sorry affair
• My Flickr Pics
• Salazar Jack’s page on the hunt
• Salazar Jack’s Magellan Mugshot
• Osprey’s Information Film
• Ilianexsi Sojourner’s Blog
• Magellan’s Defunct Blog
• SLURL to your very own “Find Magellan!” kit
• Linden Lab’s own Nautilus & Magellan page