The changeable winds blew the ships sideways into the troughs between waves. As the ships were tossed about, their yardarms dipped into the seething water, a prelude to a possible shipwreck. To keep from being dragged under, the captains on several occasions came close to ordering their men to chop down the masts, a desperate measure that would have disabled the fleet once the weather began to clear. Instead, they cleared nearly all their sail, offering bare masts to the relentless wind. “Thus we sailed for sixty days of rain to the equinoctial line,” Pigafetta wrote. “Which was a thing very strange and uncommon, in the opinion of the old people and of those who had sailed there several times before.” They were buffeted “by squalls and by wind and currents that came head on to us so that we could not advance. And in order that our ships should not perish or broach to us (as often happens when squalls come together), we struck the sails. In this manner we did wander hither and yon on the sea.”
Throughout the ordeal, sharks constantly circled the ships, terrifying the crew. “They have terrible teeth,” Pigafetta wrote, plainly aghast at the sight, “and eat men when they find them alive or dead in the sea. And the said fish are caught with a hook of iron, with which some were taken by our people. But they are not good to eat when large. And even the small ones are not much good.”
After weeks of constant, life-threatening storms, several hissing, incandescent globes mysteriously appeared on the yardarms of Magellan’s ship, Trinidad. Saint Elmo’s fire!
Here was a natural phenomenon to rival any fanciful, supernatural apparition cataloged by Pliny or Sir John Mandeville. Saint Elmo’s fire is a dramatic electrical discharge that looks like a stream of fire as it trails from the mast of a ship; it can even play about someone’s head, causing an eerie tingling sensation. The superstitious sailors, always alert to omens, associated the phenomenon with Saint Peter Gonzalez, a Dominican priest who was considered the patron saint of mariners and who had acquired the name Saint Elmo; the “fire” was regarded as a sign of his protection.
This is how Saint Elmo’s fire first appeared to the terrified, storm-tossed crew: It assumed “the form of a lighted torch at the height of the maintop, and remained there more than two hours and a half, to the comfort of us all. For we were in tears, expecting only the hour of death. And when this holy light was about to leave us, it was so bright to the eyes of all that we were for more than a quarter of an hour as blind as men calling for mercy. For without any doubt, no man thought he would escape from that storm.” Once the apparition subsided, some crew members believed that supernatural powers had singled out the Captain General for a special destiny. But their deliverance from the perils of the sea proved brief, and their faith in Magellan’s ability to save them would soon be tested again. For the moment, Magellan’s official chronicler, Antonio Pigafetta, enjoyed a rare moment of repose and pondered the mysteries of the sea. No monsters with flaming faces menaced the ships; instead, flying fish leaped from the water, and not just a few, but “so great a quantity together that it seemed an island in the sea.” The wonderful sight, half real, half illusion, mesmerized Pigafetta. In the sea below, as in the heavens above, there were marvels and perils beyond comprehension. This was not the world as described by the speculative historians of antiquity and the Middle Ages; it was stranger and richer, and even more dangerous.
C H A P T E R I V
"The Church of the Lawless"
There passed a weary time. Each throat
Was parched, and glazed each eye.
A weary time! a weary time!
How glazed each weary eye,
When looking westward,
I beheld A something in the sky.
Sixty days of furious storms left the ships of the Armada de Molucca in need of repair and ruined a good part of the precious food supply. Magellan found it necessary to reduce rations. Each man received only four pints of drinking water a day, and half that amount of wine. Hardtack, a staple of the sailors’ diet, was also reduced to a pound and a half a day. As with his other decisions, Magellan did not explain why he was reducing the amount of food and drink, and no other decision he could take was as likely to create resentment among the captains and the crew.
Once the gales abated, the battered black ships drifted into equatorial calms. As the sails luffed lamely amid rising temperatures, the ships rode helplessly in the water. The rebellious Spanish captains, with time on their hands, resumed plotting against the Captain General. They avoided overt violence on this occasion; rather, they displayed a pointed lack of regard for the status of a man they considered their social inferior.
Magellan inadvertently set the stage for their mutiny when he reminded his officers that the instructions he had received from King Charles gave him full authority over the fleet. The captain of each ship was to approach Trinidad at dusk to pay his respects to Magellan and to receive orders. Cartagena chose to defy Magellan in a studied manner. When San Antonio approached the flagship, the quartermaster rather than Cartagena spoke up and, worse, he refused to address Magellan by the correct title. Cartagena should have said, “Dios vos salve, señor capitán-general, y maestro y buena campaña.” (“God keep you, sir Captain General, and master and good company.”) Instead, the lowly quartermaster called Magellan “Captain” rather than “Captain General.”
Magellan sharply reminded Cartagena of the proper form of address, but the Castilian captain took the opportunity to insult Magellan again. If he did not approve of San Antonio’s quartermaster offering the ceremonial salute, Cartagena would select a lowly page next time. For several days after that exchange, Cartagena neglected all forms of salute. Magellan had to devise an effective way to handle Cartagena’s defiant attitude or risk losing control over the entire fleet.
At this tense moment, a new crisis erupted aboard Victoria. Magellan learned that Victoria’s master, a Sicilian named Antonio Salamón, had been discovered sodomizing a cabin boy, Antonio Ginovés. There was no question as to whether the incident had taken place, because the two had been caught in flagrante delicto; the question was what to do about it.
Under Spanish law, homosexuality was punishable by death. Spanish authorities and the Catholic Church condemned homosexuality in the harshest language possible, despite its prevalence. As Captain General of the fleet, Magellan had little choice but to take disciplinary action, but he found himself in an impossible predicament, caught between the cruelty of Spanish law and the reality of homosexuality at sea. In practice, homosexuality among sailors confined to ships over long periods of time was inevitable. There are few accounts of captains attempting to punish sailors for this behavior; instead, they simply looked the other way. Magellan took a harsher course of action. He held a court-martial of Salamón, serving as both judge and jury. The outcome of the proceeding was swift, and Salamón was condemned to death by strangulation. The deed was to be carried out several weeks hence, on December 20.
After the hearing, Magellan held a tense meeting with the other captains of the fleet in his cabin; there was Cartagena from San Antonio, Quesada from Concepción, Mendoza from Victoria, and Serrano from Santiago. As Magellan realized, all the captains, except Serrano, were determined to lead a mutiny. Cartagena immediately began attacking Magellan about the eccentric and dangerous course they had been following along the coast of Africa. First Magellan had led them into storms, Cartagena complained, and now he had gotten them trapped in equatorial calms. Cartagena insisted that the only explanation for this bizarre behavior was that Magellan intended to subvert the fleet, because no matter how loyal to King Charles he claimed to be, Magellan’s true loyalty belonged with the king of Portugal.
In his fervor to usurp Magellan, Cartagena had been misled by appearances. In fact, the Captain General had chosen the risky, unorthodox course to avoid the Portuguese caravels pursuing him and was actually doing his best to frustrate Spain’s enemies.
Another resentment fueled Cartagena’s passion for mutiny. He believed that King Charles had appointed th
e two of them as coadmirals of the fleet. Although Cartagena carried the title inspector general, and had been appointed persona conjunta, King Charles had intended no such power-sharing arrangement. Cartagena had little if any experience as a navigator, certainly had nothing to recommend him as an admiral of the most ambitious ocean expedition Spain ever mounted; rather, he was to serve as a symbol of the fleet’s Spanish identity. His chief qualification, besides his relationship to Archbishop Fonseca, was that he was a Castilian. On that basis, the privileged Cartagena believed he was entitled to share power equally with Magellan. Had Cartagena known the truth, that Magellan was fleeing the Portuguese to save the fleet rather than destroy it, the revelation might have defeated the Castilian’s paranoid logic, but it would not have restrained his unbridled chauvinism and his sense of entitlement.
As a Castilian loyal to his sovereign, Cartagena declared he would no longer take orders from Magellan.
Fully prepared to counter Cartegena’s challenge, the Captain General gave a sign, and Trinidad ’s alguacil. or master-at-arms, Gonzalo Gómez de Espinosa, stormed the cabin. Right behind him came two loyalists, Duarte Barbosa and Magellan’s illegitimate son, Cristóvão Rebêlo, all with swords drawn. Magellan leaped at Cartagena, catching the Castilian by the ruff of his shirt, and shoved him into a chair. “Rebel!” Magellan shouted, “this is mutiny! You are my prisoner, in the King’s name.”
At that, Cartagena barked at the other traitorous captains, Quesada and Mendoza, to stab Magellan with their daggers. From the way he spoke, it was apparent that the three of them had plotted to overthrow the Captain General, but now, at the crucial moment, lost their resolve to act.
Seizing the initiative, Espinosa, in his role as alguacil. picked up Cartagena and shoved him out of the captain’s cabin to the main deck, where he was secured to stocks intended for common seamen who had committed minor offenses. The indignity of seeing a Castilian officer subjected to this ignominy was more than Quesada and Mendoza could bear. They pleaded with Magellan to free Cartagena or, failing that, to release him into their custody. They reminded their Captain General that they had demonstrated their loyalty by ignoring Cartagena. They persuaded Magellan that he had nothing to fear from them, and he agreed to free Cartagena on condition that Mendoza confine him aboard Victoria. Cartagena was immediately relieved of command.
Had he chosen, Magellan could have convened a court-martial and sentenced Cartagena to death. As Captain General, he would have been within his rights because Cartagena had plotted to kill Magellan: Nothing could be more serious. But Magellan was acutely aware of Cartagena’s privileged position and concerned that executing or severely punishing him would be inflammatory, so for once he erred on the side of caution. The lack of disciplinary action made it a certainty that the irascible Castilian would continue to challenge Magellan until only one of them remained.
With the brief mutiny at an end, Magellan ordered the trumpets aboard the flagship to sound, alerting the other ships, and he announced that henceforth, San Antonio would be commanded by Antonio de Coca.
Stripped of his command, and having learned nothing from the experience of his failed mutiny, Cartagena grew intensely resentful of his inexperienced replacement. From that moment, he burned with desire for revenge against Magellan, no matter what the cost to the expedition, and as Fonseca’s son, Cartagena had power to make great trouble. Of all the perils that Magellan faced on the journey’s first leg, the greatest was Cartagena’s treachery.
With Cartagena removed from power, at least temporarily, Magellan turned his attention to his long-delayed crossing of the Atlantic. For three weeks in late October and November, the fleet headed south, vainly awaiting favorable winds. At last the sails began to fill, and Magellan ordered the ships to set a southwesterly course toward Rio de Janeiro. Learning that Concepción’s pilot, João Lopes
Carvalho, had visited Rio several years before on an earlier expedition, Magellan brought him over to Trinidad to serve as pilot. To supplement Carvalho’s expertise, the Captain General carried with him a reliable, though not flawless, map of the Brazilian coast known as the Livro da Marinharia—the Book of the Sea. At about the same time, Francisco Albo began keeping a navigational log intended for use by those following in the wake of the Armada de Molucca.
Neither of these expert pilots knew of the South Equatorial Current, which carried the fleet west of its intended heading. Rather than Rio de Janeiro, the fleet raised Cape Saint Augustine on November 29. Here, Pigafetta relates, the fleet paused to take on fresh food and water, and quickly resumed following the Brazilian coast in search of Rio de Janeiro, as the best navigational minds aboard the ships puzzled over why they had veered off course. Albo recorded, “We arose in the morning to the right of St. Thomas, on a great mountain, and south slopes along the coast in the S.W. direction; and on this coast, at four leagues to sea, we found bottom at twenty-five fathoms, free from shoals; and the mountains are separated from one another, and have many reefs around them.” Finally, two weeks later, on December 13, 1519, the fleet entered the lush and gorgeous Bay of Saint Lucy and approached the mouth of the River of January—Rio de Janeiro.
Trinidad went first, slipping past Sugar Loaf and coming quietly to anchor in the harbor. Magellan had arrived in the New World.
In the final days of 1499, Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, a Spanish mariner, first saw the coast of what would later be called Brazil. Pinzón explored the easternmost shores of Brazil and ventured into the mouth of the Amazon River, but Spain failed to maintain a settlement in the newly discovered wilderness. Months later, a Portuguese explorer named Pedro Álvares Cabral claimed the entire region—whose contours were poorly mapped and poorly understood—for his king and country. For tiny Portugal, hemmed in by the Atlantic and by Spain, the newly discovered land contained great commercial and psychological promise, but it lacked quantities of gold and spices. Unsure about how to exploit their find, the Portuguese became lackadaisical in the administration of the distant realm.
For ten years, the newly discovered land went by various names; not until 1511 did “Brazil” first appear on a map, and its origins are something of a mystery. The name might have derived from the Portuguese word brasa, meaning glowing coal, thought to resemble the color of the dark red wood that came to be prized by the Portuguese. Or it might have derived from “bresel wood,” which had been imported to Europe from India since the Middle Ages. The bright red wood was used for cabinets, violin bows, and dyeing. The newly discovered South American variety resembled the traditional Indian tree, but was easier and cheaper to obtain. No matter what its derivation, the name “Brazil” was slow to catch on. In his diary, Pigafetta called the land “Verzin,” derived from the Italian word for brazilwood.
The Portuguese bestowed a valuable brazilwood monopoly lasting ten years on an influential businessman, Fernão de Noronha, in exchange for large fees, and for a while commerce flourished under his management. The coast abounded in the trees; the Portuguese cut them down, sawed the trunks and branches into a manageable size, and stored the wood in a feitoria, or factory, until a ship came to collect and transport the valuable cargo back to Lisbon. (This activity had first brought Concepción’s pilot, João Lopes Carvalho, to Brazil in 1512, aboard a commercial Portuguese ship called Bertoa. The ship soon departed, but Carvalho remained to oversee the factory, a sojourn that lasted four years.)
The Portuguese dealings in brazilwood served as a model of how that country planned to exploit the natural resources of distant lands they claimed for their own. The most unpredictable part of the enterprise proved to be the transatlantic crossings, and even they became increasingly manageable as Portuguese navigators learned the winds and currents affecting their route. In practice, though, the brazilwood trade was too far-flung to administer with any coherence. The French were already helping themselves to brazilwood without interference. The unchallenged presence of the five ships comprising the Armada de Molucca in Brazil showed how porous and vu
lnerable the Portuguese “monopoly” actually was. Despite Brazil’s importance, the Portuguese did not maintain a permanent settlement there. A small abandoned customshouse served as the sole evidence of the Portuguese occupation. No Portuguese ships occupied the harbor when Magellan arrived, and he felt safe enough to drop anchor.
Although this was his first visit to Brazil, Magellan was familiar with the brilliantly evocative descriptions of the land written by Amerigo Vespucci after his visit in 1502. In his words Brazil and its natural wonders were the closest approximation to Paradise that Magellan was likely to encounter during his entire voyage around the world. “This land is very delightful, and covered with an infinite number of green trees and very big ones which never lose their foliage, and through the year yield the sweetest aromatic perfumes and produce an infinite variety of fruit, gratifying to the taste and healthful to the body,” Vespucci reported. “And the fields produce herbs and flowers and many sweet and good roots, which are so marvelous . . . that I fancied myself to be near the terrestrial paradise.” Vespucci’s descriptions, for all their charm, were not the elaborately embellished creations of Sir John Mandeville; they were generally reliable accounts looking forward to the Age of Discovery rather than backward to the Age of Faith.
Discussing the region’s indigenous tribes, Vespucci wrote out of his own experience: “I tried very hard to understand their life and customs because for twenty-seven days I ate and slept with them.” He assembled a disturbing if tantalizing picture of the Indians whom Magellan and his crew would encounter in Rio de Janeiro: “They have no laws or faith, and live according to nature. They do not recognize the immortality of the soul, they have among them no private property, because everything is common; they have no boundaries of kingdoms and provinces, and no king! They obey nobody, each is lord unto himself; no justice, no gratitude, which to them is unnecessary because it is not part of their code.” Vespucci thrilled readers with gruesome accounts of the Indians’ customs. “These men are accustomed to bore holes in their lips and cheeks, and in these holes they place bones and stones; and don’t believe that they are little. Most of them have at least three holes and some seven and some nine, in which they place stones of green and white alabaster, and which are as large as a Catalan plum, which seems unnatural; they say they do this to appear more ferocious, an infinitely brutal thing.” Even more repugnant—yet fascinating to Vespucci—were their marital and sexual customs. “Their marriages are not with one woman but with as many as they like, and without much ceremony, and we have known someone who had ten women; they are jealous of them, and if it happens that one of these women is unfaithful, he punishes her and beats her.”
Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe Page 10