Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe

by Laurence Bergreen

  The composition of the crew engendered greater controversy. Magellan was suspected of packing the roster with his countrymen, but the reality was that experienced Spanish seamen willing to enlist on the voyage were scarce, and so he was forced to include many foreigners. The Casa de Contratación decreed that Magellan must limit his entire crew to 235 men, including cabin boys. If he did not obey this constraint, the Casa sternly warned, the resulting “scandal or damage” would be blamed on him, “as it would any person who chooses to disobey a royal command.” When the armada’s roster, bloated with well-connected Spaniards, exceeded this number, the Casa stopped short of halting preparations, but it placed Magellan on warning. And when he hired no less than seventeen apprentice sailors, or grumetes, he was forced to let them go. He was reminded that key positions such as bookkeepers and bursars must be filled by Spaniards. Magellan protested that he had retained the services of only two Portuguese bursars, and he pleaded in writing with the Casa to allow the men he had enlisted to board the ships, regardless of nationality. If he could not have the crew he wanted, he insisted that he would abandon the expedition.

  The Casa would not let matters rest there. On the day before the fleet’s departure from Seville, August 9, 1519, Magellan was summoned from his frantic last-minute preparations to testify that he had made every effort to hire Spanish officers and crew members rather than foreigners. He had, in fact, gone to great lengths to comply, and he swelled with pride as he delivered his sworn statement. “I proclaimed [through a town crier] in this city [Seville], in squares and markets and busy places and along the river that anyone— sailors, cabin boys, caulkers, carpenters, and other officers—who wished to join the Armada should contact me, the captain, or talk to the masters of the ship, and I also mentioned the salaries stipulated by the king. Sailors will receive 1,200 maravedís, cabin boys 800 maravedís, and pages 500 maravedís every month, and carpenters and caulkers five ducats every month. None of the villagers born here wanted to join the Armada.” And that was the truth. Qualified sailors were rare in Seville, and qualified sailors willing to risk their lives on a voyage to the Spice Islands rarer still.

  Desperate to recruit qualified crew members for the expedition, Magellan cast his net even further. He sent his master-at-arms to MÁlaga with a letter from the Casa de Contratación indicating the salaries and benefits those joining the Armada de Molucca would receive. Other officers fanned out to popular seaports such as Cádiz in search of willing hands, but those willing to risk their lives on a voyage into the unknown proved scarce. “I couldn’t find enough people,” Magellan explained, “so I accepted all the foreigners we needed, foreigners such as Greeks, and people from Venice, Genoa, Sicily, and France.” Although he did not say so, few Spanish seamen wanted to sail under a Portuguese captain.

  As matters stood at the time of departure, Magellan had official permission to hire only a dozen Portuguese; in reality, he was taking nearly forty with him. At the last minute, he sacrificed three relatives whom he had quietly enlisted, one of whom was a pilot approved by the Casa, but he kept berths for at least two others: Álvaro de Mesquita, a relative on his mother’s side, and Cristóvão Rebêlo, his illegitimate son.

  Magellan’s last-minute compromises on the composition of the crew placated the Casa, and the Captain General received final permission to proceed with his expedition. To guarantee this voyage, he had sacrificed his allegiance to his homeland, his partnership with Ruy Faleiro, and a considerable amount of his authority as Captain General, but he had kept his essential mission intact. After twelve months of painstaking preparation, the Armada de Molucca was at last ready to conquer the ocean.

  Just before departure, the officers and crew of the five ships comprising the fleet attended a mass at Santa María de la Victoria, located in Triana, the sailors’ district.

  During the ceremony, King Charles’s representative, Sancho Martínez de Leiva, presented Magellan with the royal flag as the Captain General knelt before a representation of the Virgin. This marked the first occasion that Charles had bestowed the royal colors on a non-Castilian. Magellan could only have felt that he was now invested with the king’s full trust.

  Still kneeling, his head bent, Magellan swore that he was the king’s faithful servant, that he would fulfill all his obligations to guarantee the success of the expedition, and when he was finished, the captains repeated the oath and swore to obey Magellan and to follow him on his route, wherever it might lead.

  Among those in attendance at Santa María de la Victoria that day was a Venetian scholar named Antonio Pigafetta who had spent long years in the service of Andrea Chiericati, an emissary of Pope Leo X. When the pope appointed Chiericati ambassador to King Charles, Pigafetta, who was about thirty years old at the time, followed the diplomat to Spain. By his own description, Pigafetta was a man of learning (he boasted of having “read many books”) and religious conviction, but he also had a thirst for adventure, or, as he put it, “a craving for experience and glory.”

  Learning of Magellan’s expedition to the Spice Islands, he felt destiny calling, and excused himself from the diplomatic circles to seek out the renowned navigator, arriving in Seville in May 1519, in the midst of feverish preparations for the expedition. During the next several months, he helped to gather navigational instruments and ingratiated himself into Magellan’s trust. Pigafetta quickly came to idolize the Captain General, despite their differing nationalities, and was awestricken by the ambitiousness and danger of the mission. Nevertheless, Pigafetta decided he had to go along. Although he lacked experience at sea, he did have funds and impeccable papal credentials to recommend him. Accepting a salary of just 1,000 maravedís, he joined the roster as a sobrasaliente, a supernumerary, receiving four months of his modest pay in advance.

  Magellan, who left nothing to accident, had an assignment for Pigafetta; the young Italian diplomat was to keep a record of the voyage, not the dry, factual pilot’s log, but a more personal, anecdotal, and free-flowing account in the tradition of other popular travel works of the day; these included books by Magellan’s brother-in-law, Duarte Barbosa; Ludovico di Varthema, another Italian visitor to the Indies; and Marco Polo, the most celebrated Italian traveler of them all. Making no secret of his ambition to take his place in letters beside them, Pigafetta readily accepted the assignment. His loyalties belonged to Magellan alone, not to Cartagena or to any of the other officers. For Pigafetta, the Armada de Molucca was the tangible result of Magellan’s daring, and if the expedition succeeded, it would be the result of Magellan’s skill and God’s will—of that Pigafetta was quite certain.

  From the moment the fleet left Seville, Pigafetta kept a diary of events that gradually evolved from a routine account of life at sea to a shockingly graphic and candid diary that serves as the best record of the voyage. He took his role as the expedition’s official chronicler seriously, and his account is bursting with botanical, linguistic, and anthropological detail. It is also a humane and compassionate record written in a distinctive voice, naïve yet cultivated, pious yet bawdy. Of the handful of genuine chronicles of foreign lands available at the time, only Pigafetta’s preserved moments of self-deprecation and humor; only his betrayed the realistic fears, joys, and ambivalence felt by the crew. His narrative anticipates a modern sensibility, in which self-doubt and revelation play roles. If Magellan was the expedition’s hero, its Don Quixote, a knight wandering the world in a foolish, vain, yet magnificent quest, Pigafetta can be considered its antihero, its Sancho Panza, steadfastly loyal to his master while casting a skeptical, mordant eye on the proceedings. His hunger for experience makes it possible to experience Magellan’s voyage as the sailors themselves experienced it, and to watch this extraordinary navigator straining against the limits of knowledge, his men’s loyalty, and his own stubborn nature.

  Pigafetta was not the only diarist on the voyage. Francisco Albo, Trinidad’s pilot, kept a logbook, and some of the surviving sailors gave extensive interviews and depos
itions on their return to Spain, or wrote their own accounts from memory. The plethora of firsthand impressions of the voyage, combined with the fantastically detailed Spanish records, make it possible to re-create and understand it from a variety of perspectives, ranging from the deeply personal and casually anecdotal to the official and legalistic; royalty and ordinary seamen alike have their voices in this epic of discovery.

  An important limitation governed all the accounts, varied as they are. They provide only the European perspective on a voyage that affected nations and cultures around the world, often profoundly. There is no testimony from the individuals whom Magellan’s fleet would visit. Occasionally, we can glean disturbing hints of the reactions of those whom the armada would visit, and what they thought of the intruders in their black ships, the men who had come from a great distance, men bearing gifts but also guns.

  Magellan’s departure deeply affected the fortunes of those he left behind. His wife, Beatriz, pregnant with their second child, lived quietly in the city under the protection of her father. She received a monthly stipend, as specified in Magellan’s contract, but she was, in fact, a hostage to the Spanish authorities. If word should reach Seville that Magellan had done anything untoward during the expedition, or exhibited disloyalty to King Charles, she would be the first person the king’s agents would seek out.

  Although it seemed Magellan had placed his pregnant wife and young child at risk in the hostile environment of Seville, he did take elaborate precautions to ensure their future—and his own posthumous glory—in his will, dated August 24, 1519. Magellan knew from experience the risks of embarking on his voyage of discovery. He knew that each day of the voyage he would be at the mercy of forces he could scarcely contemplate, forces that only his fervent belief in God and unswerving loyalty to King Charles would be able to help him surmount. Although he coveted the renown and rewards of a successful voyage, he realized he might die far from home, in a part of the world that was still a blank on European maps. This knowledge imparted to his will a special weight and urgency.

  In the will, Magellan left thousands of maravedís to various churches and religious orders, all of them in Seville, which he designated as his permanent home in this life and the next: “I desire that if I die in this city of Seville my body may be buried in the monastery of Santa María de la Victoria in Triana—ward and precinct of the city of Seville—in the grave set apart for me; and if I die on this said voyage, I desire that my body may be buried in a church dedicated to Our Lady, in the nearest spot at which death seize me and I die.” He proposed very specific and pious plans for his funeral rites: “And I desire that on the said day of my burial thirty masses may be said over my body—two cantadas and twentyeight rezadas, and that they shall offer for me the offering of the bread and wine and candles that my executors desire; And I desire that in the said monastery of Santa María de la Victoria a thirty-day mass may be said for my soul, and that the accustomed alms may be given therefor; and I desire that on the said day of my burial three poor men may be clothed—such as I have indicated to my executors—and that to each may be given a cloak of gray stuff, a shirt, and a pair of shoes, that they may pray to God for my soul; and I also desire that upon the said day of my burial food may be given to the said three paupers, and to twelve others, that they may pray for my soul.”

  Magellan made certain that all acknowledged family members and retainers would be well taken care of. He specified that Beatriz’s entire dowry of 600,000 maravedís be returned to her; that his illegitimate son, Cristóvão Rebêlo, whom he called “my page,” receive a legacy of 30,000 maravedís; and that his slave, Enrique, be freed. Since Enrique, like Cristóvão, would accompany Magellan on the voyage to the Spice Islands, the terms of his freedom were of particular interest: “I declare and ordain as free and quit of every obligation of captivity, subjection, and slavery, my captured slave Enrique, mulatto, native of the city of Malacca, of the age of twenty-six years more or less, that from the day of my death thenceforward forever the said Enrique may be free and manumitted, and quit, exempt, and relieved of every obligation of slavery and subjection, and that he may act as he desires and thinks fit.”

  All that, plus 10,000 maravedís.

  Magellan envisioned leaving behind a great empire. He left to Rodrigo, “my legitimate son,” along with any other legitimate male heirs that he might have with Beatriz Barbosa, all the rights and titles King Charles had granted to him for the voyage to the Spice Islands; in other words, these children might grow up to find themselves the rulers of distant lands, administered by Spain, and very wealthy rulers at that. All that Magellan asked was that they give a portion of their income to their mother, making her a wealthy widow. And even if she remarried after Magellan’s death, “I desire that there be given and paid to her the sum of two thousand Spanish doubloons.”

  The will covered every eventuality that might befall a great explorer such as Magellan—except what would actually occur once he set forth from Seville.

  The Portuguese reacted bitterly to the imminent departure of the Armada de Molucca. King Manuel ordered the harassment of Magellan’s relatives who remained in their homeland. To make his dishonor public, vandals were sent to the family estate in Sabrosa; they tore the Magellan escutcheon from the gates and smashed it to the ground. Even young relatives of Magellan found themselves the object of derision and were stoned. Fearing for their lives, they fled the country. Francisco de Silva Téllez, who claimed to be Magellan’s nephew, eventually sought refuge in the Portuguese colony of Brazil, where he dictated instructions that suggest the depth of shame stirred by Magellan’s betrayal: “I order all my relatives and heirs to put no other stone nor shield of arms in my house . . . in Sabrosa because I want them forever effaced, in the same condition that our lord and King prescribed, as punishment of Ferdinand Magellan’s crime of moving to Castile.” Should others take up Magellan’s mantle, his nephew warned that he would refuse to acknowledge them “should I learn that they had entertained feelings and designs so base and ruinous to their families as befell my father and me, who felt compelled to leave our house out of shame and fear that our neighbors would attack us, as they justly could not suffer him who went against Portugal, his motherland, to serve the Castilians, our natural enemies.”

  Abandoned, the Sabrosa estate fell into disrepair, and another house rose on the site. The stone that once held the Magellan escutcheon met with a special fate: It was covered with excrement.

  C H A P T E R I I I

  Neverlands

  And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he

  Was tyrannous and strong:

  He struck with his o’ertaking wings,

  And chased us south along.

  On the tenth of August,” Antonio Pigafetta recorded in his diary, “the fleet, having been furnished with all that was necessary for it and having in the five ships people of divers nations to the number of two hundred and thirty-seven in all, was ready to depart from . . . Seville, and firing all the artillery we set sail with the staysail only.” Pigafetta’s head count probably omitted about twenty crew members also on board the ships. Only Magellan remained behind, making last-minute provisioning arrangements; he would join the fleet shortly before its final departure from Spain.

  To reach the Atlantic, the five ships, their colors set, negotiated the sinuous Guadalquivir River, whose hazards immediately tested the pilots’ abilities. Fed by rainwater in winter and melting snows in spring and summer, the Guadalquivir empties into the Gulf of Cádiz. The last forty miles, traversing a seemingly endless stretch of tidal marches known as Las Marismas, presented special perils. Hidden sandbanks, the hulls of shipwrecks, and shallow areas lurked beneath the river’s turbid waters, and occasionally these obstacles visited disaster on an expedition even before it reached the open sea. Pigafetta, new to the problems of navigation, suddenly became alert to the dangers of the Guadalquivir. “There was a bridge over the river by which one went to Seville, which bridge was in ru
ins, although two columns remained at the bottom of the water. Wherefore you must have practiced and expert men of the country to point out the proper channel for passing safely between these two columns, for fear of striking on them.”

  Although defeated and driven from Spain, the Moors had left their indelible marks on the Spanish psyche, landscape, and bloodlines. “Going by this river we passed a place named Gioan de Farax, where there was a great settlement of Moors,” Pigafetta noted of one encampment. The Guadalquivir derived its very name from the Arabic original, Wadi al-Kabir, meaning “great river,” as the Arab rulers of the region designated it. And, as everyone aboard these ships knew, Moorish pirates still patrolled the Spanish coast, looking for ships laden with precious resources and, most of all, with weapons—ships like those of the Armada de Molucca.

  A week after leaving Seville, the fleet reached the snug coastal town of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, the final point of departure for the Ocean Sea. “You enter it on the west wind and depart from it on the east wind,” said Pigafetta, repeating the lore he recently learned. On arrival, the crew found a windswept seaport, seemingly poised on the edge of the world, and reverberating with a sense of adventure. Over the centuries, Sanlúcar de Barrameda had witnessed a succession of conquerors, from Roman to Arab to, most recently, King Alfonso X, who claimed it in 1264. In 1498, Christopher Columbus chose it as the departure point for his third voyage to the New World, and Magellan might have chosen the same port to announce that he planned to build on and outdo Columbus’s accomplishments.