Continuing nearer the Austral Pole than we presently are, as you instructed the captains at the river of Santa Cruz, I do not think it feasible, due to the terrible and stormy weather, because if at this latitude sailing proves so hazardous and painful, what shall it be like when we find ourselves at sixty or seventy-five degrees or more, as your lordship said he must go in search of the Moluccas by way of the Eastern and East-Northeastern routes, rounding the Cape of Good Hope? By the time we should arrive there it would already be winter, as your lordship well knows, and also the crew is thin and lacking in strength; moreover, if there are now sufficient provisions, they are not many nor enough to regain energies and enable too much working without the crew’s health suffering it, and I also have noticed how it takes the ill ones long to recover.
On the positive side of the ledger, San Martín reminded Magellan that the three remaining ships of the fleet were still seaworthy, but, he warned, their reduced provisions would not be sufficient to last them all the way to the Moluccas. “Even though your lordship’s ships are good and well equipped (praise be God), some ropes are missing, especially in Victoria, and besides, the crew is thin and weak, and the provisions are not enough to reach the Moluccas by the aforesaid route, and then return to Spain.”
And he had a final word of advice for the Captain General:
I also believe that your lordship should not sail along these coasts at night, both because of the ships’ safety and the crew’s need to rest a little; since there are seventeen hours of daylight, let your lordship have the ships lie at anchor for the four or five nightly hours so that, as I said, the people can rest instead of having to bustle about the ships with the rigging; and, most importantly, in order to spare ourselves the blows that an untoward fate could inflict on us, may Heaven forbid it. For, if such blows befall us when things can be seen and observed, it should not be unfitting to fear them when nothing can be seen or known or well watched, so let your lordship have the ships anchor one hour before sunset rather than continue forward at night to cover two leagues. I have said as I feel and understand in order to serve both God and your lordship with what I believe is best for the Armada and your lordship; your lordship shall do as your lordship sees fit and as God shall guide your lordship. Please He that your lordship’s life and condition be successful, as it is my wish.
San Martín dared to express what nearly everyone on the voyage whispered: There was great danger ahead, and chances were they would not make it to the Spice Islands, wherever they were; their maps had long since proved to be useless. Give it until January, he advised, and if they had not reached their goal by then, return to Spain, and try again.
Magellan considered these carefully thought-out admonitions, but he was nevertheless inclined to proceed, no matter how long it took to reach the Spice Islands. They had at least three months’ provisions, by his reckoning. More important, he believed that God would assist them in achieving their goal; after all, He had permitted them to discover the strait, and He would guide them to their final goal.
The next day, Magellan gave the order to weigh anchor. The ships fired a salvo of cannon that reverberated among the splendid dark green mountains, gray ravines, and azure glaciers of the strait, and the armada set sail once again, heading west, always west.
At last, the churning, metallic waters of the Pacific came into view, and they realized they had reached the end of the strait. Magellan had done it; he had found the waterway, just as he had promised King Charles. Now that the armada had accomplished this feat, all the arguments for turning back by mid-January were never again discussed. “Everyone thought himself fortunate to be where none had been before,” Ginés de Mafra exulted.
Magellan was overwhelmed to have completed his navigation of the strait, at last. Pigafetta records that the Captain General “wept for joy.” When he recovered, he named the just-discovered Pacific cape “Cape Desire, for we had been desiring it for a long time.” As the armada approached the Pacific, the seas turned gray and rough. It was late in the day, and the dull skies were fading to darkness as the three ships put the western mouth of the strait to stern. “Wednesday, November 28, 1520, we debouched from that strait, engulfing ourselves in the Pacific sea,” noted Pigafetta with quiet satisfaction. Even with the mutiny of the San Antonio, and the time spent trying to recover the ship, not to mention the ubiquitous dead ends the strait presented and at least one fierce williwaw, Magellan needed only thirty-eight days and nights to travel from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific.
For Magellan and his crew, it had been a remarkable rite of passage. As they sailed beyond the strait into the open water, how could they doubt that their expedition was indeed blessed by the Almighty? Although Magellan and his crew appeared vulnerable to the elements, to starvation, to the local tribes they encountered, and most of all to each other, this was not how they saw themselves. They all believed that a supernatural power looked after them and conferred on them the unique status of global travelers.
But how much of this accomplishment of navigating the strait derived from Magellan’s skill, and how much could be attributed to plain good luck? Magellan was fortunate that the weather was relatively mild; after the intense williwaw that had menaced his ships, no other squalls surprised them, no glaciers collapsed on them, and the temperature, fluctuating as it does at that time of year between 35 degrees and 50 degrees Fahrenheit, remained within normal bounds, so the men were spared the intense cold they had suffered at Port Saint Julian. Their scouting excursions, as well as the addition of fresh vegetables to their diet, boosted both their spirits and their health. The passage through the strait, while strenuous, was far healthier than being at sea for long stretches, within the unsanitary confines of the ships, subsisting on a diet of salty, spoiled food and wine.
Although the armada enjoyed reasonably good fortune, Magellan’s extraordinary skill as a strategist proved to be the decisive factor in negotiating the entire length of the Dragon’s Tail. He ordered lookouts scrambling to the highest perch on the ships, where they could see the waterways and obstacles that lay ahead. In addition, he regularly sent small scouting parties in the longboats. “They would go on and come back with news of the findings, and then the rest of the armada would follow. This is the way the armada operated for the whole passage of the strait,” Ginés de Mafra recalled. The information they brought back helped Magellan plot his next move; they warned him against rocky shoals, bays that deceptively resembled a continuation of the strait, and other dead ends that would have delayed his passage. Magellan even relied on the taste of seawater to guide the fleet. As the water became fresher, he knew he was traveling inland, and once it turned salty, he realized he was approaching the Pacific on the western side of the strait.
This array of tactics saved tedious days of wandering up and down dead-end channels and harbors. If one approach failed, he always had others on which to fall back. Not even the loss of his best pilot, Estêvão Gomes, and his biggest ship, San Antonio, defeated him; the more the fleet shrank, the more nimble it became. His sophisticated approach to navigating uncharted waters went far beyond technical ability in boat handling and direction finding; it revealed an ability to deploy novel tactics to overcome one of the great challenges of the Age of Discovery: namely, how to guide a fleet of ships through hundreds of miles of unmapped archipelagos in rough weather.
Magellan’s skill in negotiating the entire length of the strait is acknowledged as the single greatest feat in the history of maritime exploration. It was, perhaps, an even greater accomplishment than Columbus’s discovery of the New World, because the Genoan, thinking he had arrived in China, remained befuddled to the end of his days about where he was, and what he had accomplished, and as a result he misled others. Magellan, in contrast, realized exactly what he had done; he had, at long last, begun to correct Columbus’s great navigational error.
When the fog receded and the sun broke through the low clouds, the Western Sea, as the Pacific was then calle
d, turned from lifeless gray to seductive cobalt, its surface mottled with frothy whitecaps that melted into the frigid air. The water boiled menacingly and surged over the rocks and cliffs emerging from its inscrutable depths. Fearing shoals, Magellan adjusted his navigational technique; instead of gliding through deep fjords, he steered a course in rough water between two rocks later named, with a bitter irony best appreciated by wary sailors, The Evangelists and Good Hope. A cold miasma descended, blinding the pilots. “The western exit of the strait is very narrow and foggy, and there is no sign of it,” de Mafra wrote. “Having exited it and sailed three leagues into the sea, its mouth cannot be descried.”
Magellan set a northerly course along the coast of Chile. The strait they had just left seemed an enchanted refuge by comparison to the ocean they now faced. Darwin, on his journey, found the vista so horrifying that he was moved to comment: “One sight of such a coast is enough to make a landsman dream for a week of shipwreck, peril, and death.”
The men of the Armada de Molucca looked on the scene with the same foreboding. They knew the voyage was far from over; in a sense, it had only just begun. No matter how great the feat of navigating the strait from one ocean to another, it would have little value unless the armada reached the Spice Islands, wherever they were. No one aboard the fleet’s three remaining ships suspected they were about to traverse the largest body of water in the world to get there.
C H A P T E R V I I I
A Race Against Death
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.
The scale of the Pacific Ocean was past imagining to Magellan. It encompasses one-third of the earth’s surface, covers twice the area of the Atlantic Ocean, and contains more than twice as much water volume. It extends over a greater area than all the dry land on the planet, more than sixty-three million square miles. Lost in this immensity are twenty-five thousand islands, and concealed beneath its waters lurks the lowest point on earth, the Mariana Trench, buried in inky blackness thirty-six thousand feet beneath the shimmering surface. The Pacific had had the same appearance and character for tens of millions of years before Magellan and his men sailed across its surface, yet they knew nothing of these geological wonders. The men of the Armada de Molucca might as well have been sailing across the dark side of the moon.
Even today, the Pacific remains mysterious and alluring to scientists and oceanographers. Until recently, more was known about the surfaces of Mars or Venus than about the depths of the Pacific. Nor does the scientific community agree about the origin of the oceans. One hypothesis maintains that in the first billion or so years after the earth was formed, comets—space ice—continually crashed to the surface, and they melted to form our oceans. Another suggests that the most ancient building blocks of earth—asteroidal material in the solar nebula and space dust—began to accrete and to heat. The heavier material sank to the center of the planet, and the lighter material remained nearer the surface. When the earth’s crust was formed, water may have been released and formed oceans. As Magellan’s men journeyed across the Pacific, they slowly and painfully came to realize what everyone knows now: Oceans cover 70 percent of the earth’s surface. Our planet has been misnamed; it is the ocean planet.
Magellan anticipated a short cruise to the Spice Islands, followed by a longer but untroubled voyage home through familiar waters. He believed that his men had learned from their ordeals. The mutinies had weeded out the faint of heart and the uncooperative. The crew, once numbering 260 men and boys in five ships, was now less than 200 in three vessels: Trinidad, still the flagship of the fleet; Concepción, where Juan Serrano ruled; and Victoria, under Duarte Barbosa’s command. Still, he had no idea of the real challenge that lay ahead, not one of shoals or climate but of distance.
The fleet’s progress was rapid, but just how rapid is open to question. In his log, Albo noted, “On the morning of December 1, [1520,] we saw bits of land like hillocks.” The usually scrupulous pilot gives his latitude as 48 degrees south, but his calculations may have been off by as much as one degree south; thus the fleet might have traveled even farther and faster than he supposed. In a cryptic entry, Pigafetta noted in his diary: “Daily we made runs of 50, 60, or 70 leagues a la catena ho apopa”—a phrase generally taken to mean “at the stern.” Pigafetta might have been referring to Magellan’s method of dead reckoning—the time it took for a log or other object to pass from one end of the ship to the other—but he did not furnish enough details to explain the fleet’s exact speed or distance. For the crew, the days at sea went by in a trance throughout December and most of January 1521.
To while away the idle hours, Pigafetta turned his attention to birds that occasionally flew overhead. He was of the opinion that they were undiscovered species. Swooping and diving into the waters of the Pacific, the birds hunted for flying fish, which occasionally lifted themselves out of the sea and landed on the deck of the ships with a distinctive thud. Pigafetta called the flying fish colondrini, by which he probably meant the flying gurnard, also known as the Oriental helmet gurnard, whose fins can expand into an impressive display of fanlike wings tipped with bluish spines. An exotic, forbidding-looking creature, the gurnard served as a reliable supply of food for the crew.
“In the Ocean Sea one sees a very amusing fish hunt,” Pigafetta wrote. “The fish are of three sorts, and are a cubit or more in length, and are called dorado, albacore, and bonito. They follow and hunt another kind of fish that flies and is called colondrini, a foot or more in length and very good to eat. When the above three find any of those flying fish, the latter immediately leap from the water and fly as long as their wings are wet—more than a crossbow’s flight,” Pigafetta marveled. “While they are flying, the others run along back of them under the water following the shadow of the flying fish. The latter have no sooner fallen into the water than the others immediately seize and eat them. It is a very fine and amusing thing to watch.”
Life at sea—so uncertain during the Port Saint Julian mutiny and the intricate maneuvering through the strait—became routine. From the first light of dawn, the crew kept time with an hourglass; when it was turned over, the pages sang their familiar incantations. Each day at noon the pilot, Albo, shot the sun and determined latitude, generally with considerable accuracy. Every evening, the other two captains went on deck, drew close to Trinidad, and saluted Magellan: ¡Dios vos salve, señor capitán-general, y señor maestro y buena compaña!
Magellan and his captains held morning and evening prayers each day. The nights brought respite from the heat, and the sailors remained on deck to escape their cramped, stinking, and suffocating sleeping quarters. At rest, they observed the diamond-bright stars etched on the canopy of the heavens. Pigafetta turned his ever curious mind to making astronomical observations: “The Antarctic Pole is not so starry as the Arctic. Many small stars clustered together are seen, which have the appearance of two clouds of mist.”
Without realizing it, Pigafetta had just recorded an observation of great consequence. These “clouds” are in fact two irregular dwarf galaxies orbiting our own galaxy and containing billions of stars enveloped in a gaseous blanket; they are known today as the Magellanic Clouds. The larger one, Nubecula Major, is about 150,000 light-years away, the smaller, Nubecula Minor, even farther, about 200,000 light-years. To the naked eye, they resemble pieces of the Milky Way torn off and flung across the heavens. Until 1994, they were considered the galaxies nearest to ours. The larger of the two covers an area in the night sky about two hundred times greater than that covered by the moon, while the smaller covers an area fifty times larger.
Pigafetta’s observations continued: “In the midst of them are two large and not very luminous stars, which move only slightly. Those two stars are the Antarctic Pole.” He may have been referring to the constellation Hydra, which is near the southern celestial pole. And as the flee
t moved away from land into the open expanses of the Pacific, he noted, “We saw a cross with five extremely bright stars being exactly placed with regard to one another.” This has usually been taken to be the Southern Cross, the most familiar constellation in the Southern Hemisphere, but that constellation would have been very low in the night sky, and Pigafetta might have confused it with Orion’s Belt or another constellation. Although the Southern Cross is small, the mere sight of it was so compelling to Magellan’s sailors that it became an important marker for both faith and navigation.
The absence of visible landforms meant the fleet’s pilots relied on celestial navigation, using the Southern Cross and other constellations as their guide. Magellan, ever vigilant, constantly doublechecked their course, lest they change direction under cover of night, as Pigafetta relates. “The Captain General asked all the pilots, always keeping our course, what sailing track we should prick [that is, mark] on the charts. They replied, ‘By his course exactly as laid down.’ And he replied that they pricked it wrong (and it was so) and that the needle of navigation should be adjusted.”
On December 18, 1520, Magellan finally changed course. At this
point, they were between the mainland and the Juan Fernández Islands, which lie roughly west of what is now Santiago, Chile. Their new course took them west, away from South America into the Pacific. Soon the mainland, hardly more than a smudge on the horizon, disappeared from view, increasing the crew’s sense of isolation and anxiety. If there was ever a time for a monster to appear on the horizon, for the ocean to boil, or for a magnetic island to pull the nails from the hulls of their ships, this was it.
Nothing quite that supernatural occurred. Instead, the armada encountered a different kind of miracle: the steady trade winds at its back. The wind still lacked a name, and the crew did not realize how extraordinary this current of air was until they had experienced it for some weeks. As they reached higher and higher latitudes, the Pacific, so forbidding when they first encountered it in the south, gradually metamorphosed into an undulating silken sheet. The mysterious change was brought about by solar heating— the effect of the sun warming the atmosphere. Solar heating is greatest at the equator, where heated air rises high into the atmosphere and then divides into two streams, one flowing to the north and the other to the south. As the streams move toward the poles, they cool down, and the air, now relatively heavy, descends at about 30 degrees of latitude north and south. Eventually, the streams encounter what is known as the Coriolis force; the earth’s easterly rotation causes the wind to veer in a westerly direction; in the Southern Hemisphere, the location of the Armada de Molucca, the winds come from the southeast. These are the trade winds, named for the crucial role they played in facilitating transoceanic trade routes. Even better, from Magellan’s perspective, the Coriolis force increases toward the equator. As the fleet worked its way north, it was getting the benefit of some of the steadiest winds on the planet.
Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe Page 21