Beyond the huddled town lay the churning waters of the Atlantic. To Magellan and his crew, the body of water was known simply as the Ocean Sea, believed to girdle the globe. At the sight of these seething green waters, every sailor’s pulse quickened; their lives depended on conquering this element. Many ships had departed from the Sanlúcar de Barrameda, and some had been fortunate enough to return from distant ports and newly discovered lands, but none had circumnavigated the entire world.
Magellan took command of his fleet just before departure, and made sure that his sailors led a pious existence during what might be their last days on land. “A few days after, the Captain General went along the said river in his boat and the masters of other ships with him,” wrote Pigafetta, “and we remained for some days at the port to hear mass on land at a church named Our Lady of Barrameda near Sanlúcar, where the Captain General ordered all those of the fleet to confess themselves before going farther. In which he showed the way to others. Moreover he would not allow any woman, whoever she might be, to come onto the fleet and to the ships, for many good reasons.”
Magellan’s autocratic style extended beyond religious observance. To stifle dissent, Pigafetta writes, Magellan concealed the ultimate goal of the expedition from his rank-and-file sailors. “He did not wholly declare the voyage that he wished to make, lest the people from astonishment and fear refuse to accompany him on so long a voyage as he had in mind to undertake, in view of the great and violent storms of the Ocean Sea whither he would go.” The assertion needs clarification. As a Portuguese mariner, Magellan was accustomed to secrecy when it came to voyages of discovery; that was the Portuguese way. Yet everyone realized the fleet was bound for the Spice Islands; it was even called the Armada de Molucca. Perhaps Pigafetta meant that Magellan wished to keep his plan to find a strait—a waterway leading to the East—to himself until it was too late for disloyal crew members to desert. Inevitably, the plan meant trouble, because once the fleet encountered storms, then uncharted waters, and finally a search for an unknown strait, the men whom he had hoodwinked into coming along were likely to rise up in rebellion against him.
In the pages of his diary, Pigafetta confided another and far more troubling reason for Magellan’s unusual secrecy: “The masters and captains of the other ships of his company loved him not. I do not know the reason, unless it be that he, the Captain General, was Portuguese, and they were Spaniards and Castilians, which peoples have long borne ill-will and malevolence toward one another.”
To assert his authority over his resentful and contentious captains, Magellan gave strict sailing orders designed to reinforce his unquestioned authority. They were “good and honorable regulations,” in Pigafetta’s words, and consistent with procedures followed by other fleets of the era. “First, the said Captain General desired that his ship should go before the other ships and that the others should follow him; and to this end he carried by night on the poop of his ship a torch or burning fagot of wood, which they called a farol, that his ships should not lose him from sight. Sometimes he put a lantern, at other times a thick cord of lighted rushes, called a trenche, which was made of rushes soaked in water and beaten, then dried by the sun or by smoke.” If the flagship, Trinidad, signaled, the others were to reply; that way, Magellan could tell if his fleet was following him. “And when he wished to change course because the weather changed, or the wind was contrary, or he wanted to reduce speed, he had two lights shown. And if he wanted others to haul in a bonnet (which is a part of the sail attached to the mainsail), he showed three lights. Thus by three lights, even if the weather was good for sailing faster, he meant that the said bonnet be brought in, so that the mainsail could be sooner and more easily struck and furled when bad weather came on suddenly.” Four lights on Trinidad signaled that the other ships should strike sail. If the watchman suddenly discovered land, or even a reef, Magellan would display lights or fire a mortar.
Magellan set a traditional system of watches, an essential precaution. There were to be three: “the first at the beginning of the night, the second at midnight, and the third toward daybreak. . . . And every night the said watches were changed, that is to say, he who had made the first watch made on the morrow the second, and he who had made the second then made the third. And after this manner they changed every night. Then the Captain [General] ordered that his regulations, both for signals and watches, be strictly observed, that their voyage be made with greater safety.”
Magellan’s strict procedures demanded discipline from an inexperienced crew lacking respect for the Captain General. The most innocuous aspect of his standing orders—the requirement that all ships report to Trinidad at dusk—rankled the most because it demonstrated that Magellan, and no one else, served as the leader of the Armada de Molucca.
Leaving the mouth of the Guadalquivir River on September 20, 1519, the five ships of the armada plunged into the Atlantic Ocean. Juan de Escalante de Mendoza, an experienced Spanish seaman, described the exhilaration and frenzy of sailing past Sanlúcar de Barrameda into the Atlantic. “When the hour had arrived in which they had to make sail,” he wrote, “the pilot ordered the men to raise all but one of the anchors and to attach the cable on the last anchor to the capstan . . . and with the yards and sails aloft, he ordered two apprentices to climb the foremast and stand ready to unfurl the sails when and as they were ordered and directed.” Amid the intricately choreographed flurry of activity aboard the ships, officers shouted orders, but their words at this crucial moment sounded more like prayers than commands. “And if the special pilot for the sandbar said that it was time to make sail, the ship’s pilot would call out the following to the two men aloft on the yard: ‘Ease the rope of the foresail, in the name of the Holy Trinity, Father, and Son, and Holy Spirit, three persons in one single true God, that they may be with us and give us good and safe voyage, and carry us and return us safely to our homes!’ ” With those words ringing in their ears, the sailors hauled the hemp ropes holding anchors, set the sails, and felt the breeze freshen against their faces. The ships picked up speed, and the coastline began to recede; there was no turning back now. It would sustain them all, or it would destroy them all. To reach his goal, Magellan would have to master both the great Ocean Sea and a sea of ignorance.
It was a dream as old as the imagination: a voyage to the ends of the earth. Yet until the Age of Discovery, it remained only a dream. At the time, Europe was deeply ignorant of the world at large. Magellan undertook his ambitious voyage in a world ruled by superstition, populated with strange and demonic creatures, and reverberating with a longing for religious redemption. To the average person, the world beyond Europe resembled the fantastic realms depicted in The Thousand and One Nights, a collection of tales including “The Seven Voyages of Sindbad the Sailor.” Going to sea was the most adventurous thing one could do, the Renaissance equivalent of becoming an astronaut, but the likelihood of death and disaster was far greater. These days, there are no undiscovered places on earth; in the age of the Global Positioning System, no one need get lost. But in the Age of Discovery, more than half the world was unexplored, unmapped, and misunderstood by Europeans. Mariners feared they could literally sail over the edge of world. They believed that sea monsters lurked in the briny depths, waiting to devour them. And when they crossed the equator, the ocean would boil and scald them to death.
Some of the most tenacious ideas about the world at large derived from Pliny the Elder, who died in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. His multivolume, encyclopedic Natural History, rediscovered and widely consulted in the Renaissance, sought to bring together everything that was known about the natural world: mountains, continents, flora and fauna.
Pliny’s chapters on humankind contained a potent mixture of fact and fantasy. He wrote of a tribe known as the Arimaspi, “a people known for having one eye in the middle of the forehead.” He confidently cited other classical authorities, such as Herodotus, who related tales of a “continual battle between the Ar
imaspi and griffins in the vicinity of the latter’s mines. The griffin is a type of wild beast with wings, as is commonly reported, which digs gold out of tunnels. The griffins guard the gold and the Arimaspi try to seize it, each with remarkable greed.” Pliny meant this vivid description literally, and while it might have generated some skepticism among naturalists of Magellan’s time, it was generally accepted as fact, as was Pliny’s curious description of “forest-dwellers who have their feet turned back behind their leg; they run with extraordinary speed and wander far and wide with the wild animals.” India offered particularly fertile ground for extraordinary creatures. Pliny evoked “men with dog’s heads who are covered with wild beasts’ skins; they bark instead of speaking and live by hunting and fowling, for which they use their nails.” At one time, says Pliny, over 120,000 of these hominids flourished throughout India.
Pliny assured his readers that wonders never ceased in the natural world; the result of his labors was a Ripley’s Believe-It-or-Not catalog tinged with the classics. “That women have changed into men is not a myth,” he wrote. “We find in historical records that . . . a girl at Casinum became a boy before her parents’ very eyes.” To emphasize his point, Pliny claimed to have firsthand knowledge of the phenomenon: “In Africa, I myself saw someone who became a man on his wedding-day.” There was more; he claimed that people in Eastern Europe had two sets of eyes, backward-facing heads, or no heads at all. In Africa, Pliny wrote, lived people who combined both sexes in one body, yet managed to reproduce; people who survived without eating; people with ears large enough to blanket their entire bodies; and people with equine feet. In India, he said, there were people with six hands. These marvelous accounts were subsequently retold by various respected chroniclers and widely credited up through Magellan’s time.
In the open waters of the ocean, lurked even more bizarre creatures, whales and sharks, six-foot-long lobsters and three-hundredfoot-long eels. Sailors had no way of telling which of Pliny’s descriptions were reliable, and which were fantasies.
They were just as ignorant about major landmasses. Only three continents were known to Europeans of the era—Europe, Asia, and Africa—although it was suspected that more would be discovered. The existence of an illusory island, Terra Australis, the South Land, was accepted as fact before and long after Magellan’s voyage. This landmass was said to lurk in the Southern Hemisphere, where its vast size supposedly counterbalanced the continents in the Northern Hemisphere. Highly schematic medieval maps depicted the three known continents as separated by two rivers, the Nile and the Don, as well as the Mediterranean, all of them surrounded by the great Ocean Sea, into which other seas and rivers flowed. This diagram resembled a T inside of an O, so medieval maps of this
genre are referred as “T in O” maps. To remain consistent with religious traditions, T in O maps located Jerusalem at dead center, with Paradise floating vaguely at the top. To complicate matters, Asia occupied the Northern Hemisphere of this map, with Europe and Africa sharing the Southern. In some versions of the medieval map, the Ocean Sea flowed out into space. One could not navigate with such maps, or locate points of the compass on it, or plot realistic routes; they offered a conceptual model rather than an actual representation. As such, they were utterly useless to Magellan. In 1513, only six years before Magellan undertook his circumnavigation, Juan Ponce de León set out to find the Fountain of Youth. Peter Martyr, another trusted authority of the Renaissance, described the Fountain of Youth as “a spring of running water of such marvelous virtue that the water thereof being drunk, perhaps with some diet, makes old men young again.” According to tradition, the fountain was located on the island of Bimini, in the Bahamas. On the strength of his reputation as a soldier, nobleman, and participant in Columbus’s second voyage to the New World, Ponce de León received a commission from King Ferdinand to claim Bimini for Spain. In a fruitless search, Ponce de León explored the Bahamas and Puerto Rico, but his failure to find the Fountain of Youth did not put the myth to rest. As late as 1601, the respected Spanish historian Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas wrote confidently about the fountain’s great efficacy in restoring youth and potency to aging men.
Although his quest seems fanciful and absurd today, Ponce de León was a man of his times. Superstition governed popular impressions, and even scholarly accounts, of the world at large. A work published in 1560 contained descriptions of various sea monsters infesting the oceans. One, known as the Whirlpool, was said to have a human countenance. Another, supposedly sighted in 1531, had hideous scaly skin. There were others: the Satyr of the Sea; the Rosmarus, which rivaled an elephant in size; and the wondrous Socolopendra, with its face of flames. Voyagers across the seas, especially those attempting to circumnavigate the globe, could expect to encounter all these creatures, and more, in the course of their journey.
Even educated people placed credence in fantastic realms on earth, for instance, the persistent belief in the existence of the kingdom of Prester John. It is difficult to overestimate the influence of this fabulous personage, Prester John (“Prester” is an archaic word for presbyter, or priest), on the European imagination during the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. He was part Christian ruler and part Kublai Khan. Despite an enormous number of inconsistencies and improbabilities in the details surrounding Prester John and his realm, his existence was widely believed in for several hundred years. In an era of violent conflict between Christianity and Islam, and unsuccessful Crusades, it was vastly reassuring to the faithful to believe that a sprawling and wealthy Christian outpost existed beyond Europe.
The legend originated in 1165 when a lengthy letter began to circulate among various Christian leaders; as time passed, the letter became more elaborate as anonymous authors added beguiling, utterly fantastic details; so great was its appeal that it became one of the most widely circulated and discussed documents of the Middle Ages, translated into French, German, Russian, Hebrew, English, among other languages, and with the introduction of movable type, it was reprinted in countless editions.
Addressed to Manuel, the Constantinopolitan emperor, and to Frederick, the emperor of the Romans, the letter read, “If you should wish to come here to our kingdom, we will place you in the highest and most exalted position in our household, and you may freely partake of all that we possess. Should you desire to return, you will go laden with treasures. If indeed you wish to know wherein consists our great power, then believe without doubting that I, Prester John, who reign supreme, exceed in riches, virtue, and power all creatures who dwell under heaven. Seventy-two kings pay tribute to me. I am a devout Christian and everywhere protect the Christians of our empire, nourishing them with alms.” As it continued, the letter became overtly symbolic, yet it was taken to be factual: “Our magnificence dominates the Three Indias, and extends to Farther India, where the body of St. Thomas the Apostle rests. It reaches through the desert toward the palace of the rising sun, and continues through the valley of the deserted Babylon close by the Tower of Babel.” By “India,” Prester John, or whoever wrote this missive, meant more than just the Indian subcontinent. During the Middle Ages, India was believed to include a good portion of northeastern Africa. It was an elastic term, and medieval geographers obeyed the convention that there were several Indias, some near, and some far.
Prester John described his kingdom as an enchanted realm, far more luxurious than European countries beaten down by war, plague, famine, and, among less memorialized miseries, the hardships inflicted by the Little Ice Age. In contrast, Prester John boasted of the wonders of his kingdom: “In our territories are found elephants, dromedaries, and camels, and almost every kind of beast that is under heaven. Honey flows in our land, and milk everywhere abounds. In one of our territories no poison can do harm and no noisy frog croaks, no scorpions are there, and no serpents creep through the grass. No venomous reptiles can exist there or use their deadly power. In one of the heathen provinces flows a river called the Physon, which, emerging from Paradi
se, winds and wanders through the entire province; and in it are found emeralds, sapphires, carbuncles, topazes, chrysolites, onyxes, beryls, sardonyxes, and many other precious stones.”
And there was much more; this mysterious religious leader claimed his dominion reached from Eastern Europe to India and contained satyrs, griffins, a phoenix, and other wonderful creatures. He lived, or so he said, in a palace without doors or windows, built of precious stones cemented with gold.
Prester John’s letter was actually written by imaginative monks toiling in anonymity, and the result begged to be read as a symbolic document, an allegory, or an expression of faith. Yet it was taken as a factual account and diplomatic initiative. Those who read the letter or heard about it wanted to know where Prester John actually lived. By 1177, the letter’s renown had grown to the point where Pope Alexander III issued a reply addressed to the “illustrious and magnificent king of the Indies and a beloved son of Christ,” and pilgrims went in search of the elusive Prester John.
Over time, the letter, like Pinocchio’s nose, grew and grew; copyists embellished the text, adding ingredients to Prester John’s domain. One important interpolation described spices in vivid detail: “In another of our provinces pepper is grown and gathered, to be exchanged for corn, grain, cloth, and leather”—which sounded plausible enough, but then the interpolation took an allegorical twist—“that district is thickly wooded and full of serpents, which are of great size and have two heads and horns like rams, and eyes which shine as brightly as lamps. When the pepper is ripe, all the people come from the surrounding countryside, bringing with them chaff, straw, and very dry wood with which they encircle the entire forest, and, when the wind blows strongly, they light fires inside and outside the forest, so that the serpents will be trapped. Thus the serpents perish in the fire, which burns very fiercely, except those which take shelter in their caves.” In the Age of Faith, the serpents were representative of the devil, which invades the Edenic garden of peppers, and which could be defeated only by the fire of faith.
Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe Page 8