Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe
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Aranda obtained a meeting for Magellan with the king’s Flemish ministers to consider a proposal to assemble an expedition for the Spice Islands. And Magellan came well armed for what would be the most important meeting of his life. To begin, he offered tantalizing letters from his friend Francisco Serrão, a Portuguese explorer, describing the riches of the Spice Islands.
Serrão’s odyssey began in 1511, when he assumed command of one of three ships, dispatched by the Portuguese viceroy of India and bound for the Spice Islands, using an easterly route. Surviving shipwrecks and pirates, Serrão and several companions arrived at Ternate, in the Spice Islands, the following year. In all likelihood, they were the first Europeans to visit these fabled islands. Serrão carefully cultivated Ternate’s small ruling class, especially its king, and tried to promote trade between Ternate and Portugal, but the brisk transoceanic trade that he expected was slow to materialize. Rather than giving up, Serrão stayed on. Surrounded by the scent of drying cloves, soothed by the attentions of his newly acquired island wife, he wrote beguiling letters to Magellan describing the extravagant beauty and wealth of the Spice Islands and inviting his friend to visit and see for himself. “I have found here a new world richer and greater than that of Vasco da Gama,” he wrote. “I beg you to join me here, that you may sample for yourself the delights that surround me.”
Magellan had every intention of visiting Serrão in the island paradise: “God willing, I will soon be seeing you, whether by way of Portugal or Castile, for that is the way my affairs have been leaning: you must wait for me there, because we already know it will be some time before we can expect things to get better for us.” And when Magellan made a promise, he did everything in his power to keep it.
Significantly, Serrão’s letters placed the Spice Islands far to the east of their true position; he located them squarely within the Spanish hemisphere, as defined in the Treaty of Tordesillas. This error might have been intentional, to disguise the Spice Islands’ location from outsiders, but in any event his geographical legerdemain alleviated Spain’s principal anxiety: Magellan’s expedition to the Spice Islands must not violate the treaty.
To dramatize his mission, Magellan then displayed his slave of long standing, Enrique, who was believed to be a native of the Spice Islands. (This was not quite accurate, but in any event, Enrique could act as an interpreter.) According to one account, Magellan also brought another slave from the Indies, an attractive female from Sumatra who spoke many languages.
After presenting the slaves, Magellan spoke excitedly of his intention to sail along the eastern coast of what is now called South America until the land ended and he would be able to turn west toward the Spice Islands; he invoked the seven years he had spent in the service of Portugal, administering its empire and flourishing spice trade; and, to clinch his argument, he displayed a map or a globe (the wording in the original documents is ambiguous) depicting the route he planned to take. A crucial part of the map was obscured, however: the part that showed a waterway extending through South America toward the Spice Islands. Although Magellan, in his zeal to persuade the king’s ministers to back the expedition, all but gave the strait’s location away, he remained fearful that someone would steal his map and his strategy and launch a rival expedition before he could organize his own.
“Magellan had a well-painted globe in which the entire world was depicted,” wrote Bartolomé de las Casas, a historian and missionary who took part in the meeting. “And on it he indicated the route he proposed to take.” Reliable information about trade routes was so sensitive and precious that governments zealously guarded all maps and charts, which were essential to national security, and for Magellan to display a map likely purloined from Portugal was the equivalent of selling nuclear secrets at the height of the Cold War.
Magellan’s conception of the world he planned to explore was fatally inaccurate. Like most explorers of the Age of Discovery, his ideas about the size of the globe, and location of landmasses, were inspired by Ptolemy. Had Magellan comprehended the size of the Pacific, its currents, storms, and reefs, it is unlikely that he would have dared to mount an expedition. But without the Pacific Ocean to inform his calculations, the estimated length of his route came to only half the actual distance. Magellan confidently predicted that it would take him at most two years to reach the Spice Islands and return to Spain with ships bulging with precious cargo. All he would have to do was find a way to get around or through South America, and he would be at the doorstep of the Indies. This was nearly the same mistake that Columbus had made over and over, during his four voyages. And it was a mistake that would be corrected only at the cost of great suffering and of many lives during the voyage Magellan now proposed.
After making his presentation to the ministers, Magellan was invited to discuss the proposed expedition in greater detail with Fonseca and Las Casas.
“I asked him what way he planned to take,” the historian wrote, “and he answered that he intended to go by Cape Saint Mary, which we call the Río de la Plata, and from thence to follow the coast until he hit the strait.” Las Casas remained skeptical of Magellan’s belief in the strait. “But suppose you do not find any strait by which you can go into the other sea?” he asked. Magellan told him that if he could not locate the strait, he “would go the way the Portuguese took.” Although Magellan sounded ready to contravene the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas, the king and his advisers were too intrigued to turn him away. “This Ferdinand Magellan must have been a man of courage and valiant in his thoughts for undertaking great things,” Las Casas marveled, “although he was not of an imposing presence because he was small in stature and did not appear in himself to be much, so that people thought they could put it over him for want of prudence and courage.”
In Magellan’s case, appearances were deceiving. His ideas were big enough, and promised to be lucrative enough, to convince King Charles and his powerful advisers to back them.
Immediately after the meetings at Valladolid, the potential coleaders of the expedition presented a list of demands to the crown; they were couched in respectful language, but they were demands nonetheless. They included an exclusive franchise on the Spice Islands for a full ten years, 5 percent of the rent and proceeds “of all such lands that we would discover,” and the privilege of trading for their own accounts, so long as they paid taxes to the king. They asked to keep any “islands” they discovered for themselves, if they discovered more than six, as well as permission to pass the newly discovered lands on to “our heirs and successors.”
Magellan’s insistence on a ten-year exclusive on voyages to the Spice Islands appeared preposterous in a fast-changing world, but he was concerned that Spain would send duplicate expeditions as soon as his was out of sight of land, expeditions guided by his theories and secrets, expeditions that might succeed if he failed. Magellan was right to insist on this point, although he was powerless to enforce it.
On March 22, 1518, King Charles, from his royal seat in Valladolid, offered Magellan and Faleiro a contract “regarding the discovery of the Spice Islands.” The document was a charter to discover a new world on behalf of Spain. “Inasmuch much as you, Bachelor Ruy Faleiro and Ferdinand Magellan, gentlemen born in the Kingdom of Portugal, wishing to render us a distinguished service, oblige yourselves to find in the domains that belong to us and are ours in the area in the Ocean Sea, within the limits of our demarcation, islands, mainlands, rich spices,” it began, “we order that the following contract with you be recorded.”
In the first clause, King Charles appeared to accede to Magellan’s insistence on a ten-year exclusive: “Since it would be unjust that others should cross your path, and since you take the labors of this undertaking upon yourselves, it is therefore my wish and will, and I promise that, during the next ten years, I will give no one permission to go on discoveries along the same regions as yourselves.” Nevertheless, he did not honor this promise. Just as Magellan feared, King Charles dispatched a follo
w-up expedition to the Spice Islands only six years after Magellan’s departure from Spain. The Spice Islands were too valuable to entrust to the luck and skill of a single explorer.
King Charles enjoined Magellan and Faleiro to respect Portugal’s territorial rights under the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas: “You must so conduct this voyage of discovery that you do not encroach upon the demarcation and boundaries of the Most Serene King of Portugal, my very dear Uncle and Brother, or otherwise prejudice his interests, except within the limits of our demarcation.” He reminded Magellan of the delicate diplomatic and family situation complicating the rivalry of Spain and Portugal for mastery of the seas and of world trade. Portugal’s sovereign, King Manuel, had married not just one but two of Charles’s aunts, first Isabel and then María. And now he was planning to marry Charles’s sister, Leonor, within a matter of weeks. The family ties, with their complex web of sentiment and formality, kept Spain and Portugal from all-out war with each other, but they did not extinguish the intense rivalry between the two nations; they drove it underground or into the diplomatic realm, where it was no less fierce.
Charles I had every intention of overtaking the elderly king of Portugal. No matter what the language of the contract seemed to say, the impatient young king wished to bend the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas to Spain’s advantage by insisting that the Spice Islands lay within the Spanish hemisphere. And if it was impossible to prove this point, then it was equally impossible to disprove it. To succeed, Magellan’s expedition need only give Spain a reasonable argument for claiming the Spice Islands.
From Magellan’s standpoint, this was a remarkable contract because it gave him nearly everything he had wanted. The grant of lands, for instance, proved more generous than Magellan had any right to expect. “It is our wish and our will that of all the lands and islands that you shall discover, to grant to you . . . the twentieth part, and shall besides receive the title of Lieutenant and Governors of the said lands and islands for yourselves and your sons and heirs in freehold for all times, provided that the supreme [authority] shall remain with Us and with the Kings who come after Us.” Magellan would find his name all over the newly redrawn maps of the world, maps depicting lands that he not only discovered, but possessed: Magellan islands, Magellan lands, entire realms belonging to Ferdinand Magellan and his legitimate male heirs. The world, or at least a significant part of it, could be his.
From Fonseca’s point of view, this was hardly an advantageous contract, for it gave Magellan too much power over the expedition. It would take Fonseca months, but eventually he would have his revenge on Magellan, and exert the control over the expedition that had been denied him in the royal contract.
King Charles also promised Magellan five ships: “two each of 130 tons, two each of 90 tons, and one of sixty tons, equipped with crew, food, and artillery, to wit that the said ships are to go supplied for two years, and the other people necessary.” The fleet would be called the Armada de Molucca, after the Indonesian name for the Spice Islands.
The ships were mostly black—pitch black. They derived their blackness, and their ominous aura, from the tar covering the hull, masts, and rigging, practically every exposed surface of the ship except for the sails. Their sterns rose high out of the water, towering as much as thirty feet over the waves, so high that a man standing on the stern deck seemed to rule the sea itself. Their height exaggerated movement; even in relatively calm water, they tossed the men about like toy figures.
The ships were among the most complicated machines of their day, wonders of Renaissance technology, and the product of thousands of hours of labor by skilled artisans working at their specialized trades. They were relatively small, out of necessity. One of Seville’s limitations as a port was the shallowness of the Guadalquivir River; ships had to be sufficiently small and light to negotiate the narrow waterway to the Atlantic. Thus Magellan’s flagship, Trinidad, weighed 100 tons; San Antonio, which carried many of the provisions, weighed 120 tons; Concepción 90 tons, Victoria 85 tons; and Santiago, to be used for reconnaissance, weighed just 75 tons.
With the exception of Santiago, a caravel, the ships were all classified as naos, a term that simply meant ships. No illustrations of them have survived, so it is difficult to determine exactly how they were configured, but accounts from Magellan’s time mention their daunting stern castles, their multiple decks, and the profusion of obras muertas, or “dead wood,” to ornament the officers’ quarters. Each ship had three masts, one of which carried a lateen sail.
Although King Charles was supposed to pay for Magellan’s ships, according to the contract, he was deeply in debt. To cover the expedition’s cost, the Casa de Contratación turned to a familiar presence in financial circles, Cristóbal de Haro, who represented the House of Fugger, an influential banking dynasty based in Augsburg, Germany. Haro’s name derived from the city of Haro, in north central Spain. Haro (the city) flourished as a center of winemaking, and it also sheltered a community of Jewish goldsmiths and bankers until a civil war broke out in the fourteenth century and drove the Jews from their homes. Many of the persecuted Jews adapted by becoming conversos, adopting Christian-sounding names, Cristóbal de Haro’s ancestors among them.
For years, Haro served as the Fuggers’ man in Lisbon, trading in spices, lending money for secret Portuguese expeditions, and forging friendships with many of the great explorers of the era, including Bartolomeu Dias. His familiarity with secret Portuguese expeditions, or with tantalizing rumors about their findings, gave him privileged information concerning the existence of a strait leading through the American landmass to the Indies—the same possibility that animated Magellan’s furious desire to explore the East. Following a bitter dispute with King Manuel, Haro left Lisbon for Seville, where he renewed his acquaintanceship with Magellan, and combined their enthusiasm for a search for the strait.
For an explorer in need of financial backing, Cristóbal de Haro was the ideal friend; the House of Fugger, for which he worked, had enough money to finance ten expeditions, or more; indeed, it had more money than King Charles. By bringing in Haro, the king and his advisers would be giving up a significant amount of the profits. Given the hazards of the spice trade, and the uncertainty of long ocean voyages, financiers like Haro could be induced to risk their capital on such ventures for only one reason: the lure of extraordinary profits. If successful, or even partly successful, a fleet returning from the Indies could yield a profit of 400 percent; the more pragmatic Haro estimated that Magellan’s expedition could yield a profit of 250 percent. Meanwhile, he advanced money at an interest rate of 14 percent.
The official accounting of the expedition put the cost at 8,751,125 maravedís, including the five ships, provisions, salaries paid out in advance, and fittings for the ships. Magellan’s pay came to 50,000 maravedís, and an additional 8,000 maravedís each month. By royal order, his monthly salary went directly to his wife, Beatriz.
Of the overall cost of the expedition, the king’s share came to 6,454,209 maravedís, much of it provided at high interest by Haro. Although royal documents place Haro’s contribution to the great enterprise at a modest 1,616,781 maravedís, that number is deceptive. Because his backers, the House of Fugger, also financed expeditions for Portugal, they probably concealed the full extent of their contribution by loaning additional money to the king.
In a final piece of official business, King Charles conferred the title of captain on both Magellan and Faleiro. Given the hazards of exploration, it was not unusual for expeditions in the Age of Discovery to have co-captains, but in this case, the arrangement unintentionally sowed the seeds of bitter disputes at sea. The powers granted to the pair were sweeping and unequivocal. “We order the master and boatswains, pilots, seamen, ship boys and pages, and any other persons and officials there may be in the said fleet, whatever persons who are and reside in the said lands and islands to be discovered . . . that they shall regard, accept, and consider you as our Captains of the said fle
et. As such, they shall obey you and comply with your orders, under the penalty or penalties which, in our name, you shall impose.” As the language made clear, Magellan and Faleiro had absolute authority at sea. “We authorize you to execute sentence on their persons and goods. . . . If during the voyage of the said fleet there should arise any disputes and conflicts, at sea as well ashore, you shall deliver, determine and render justice with respect to them, summarily and without hesitation nor question of law.”
Magellan could only have marveled at the speed with which his plan to reach the Spice Islands had come together. King Charles risked Spain’s authority and reputation on the expedition, and the backers risked their capital, but Magellan would risk even more: his very life.
C H A P T E R I I
The Man Without a Country
The Sun came up upon the left,
Out of the sea came he!
And he shone bright, and on the right
Went down into the sea.