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

by Laurence Bergreen

  Asuccession of placid, soporific days ensued. For hours on end, the waves slapped rhythmically against the hulls, the sails sighed and swelled contentedly in their fittings, and seamen spent their idle hours playing card games or sleeping. Pigafetta, short on patience, diverted himself by attempting to converse with their captive, cooperative Patagonian giant. In the process, he became the first European to learn and to transcribe the Tehuelche language of Patagonia. He was undoubtedly influenced by earlier explorers, such as Columbus, who had attempted to record South American languages with simple phonetic notations, but Pigafetta faced a complex language that defied reduction. Linguists have identified about one thousand languages in South America, and Tehuelche, or some variant of it, was the principal tongue of Patagonia. Exactly what dialect the Patagonian giant spoke is unknown. Despite their limitations, Pigafetta’s vocabulary lists rank among the expedition’s most significant discoveries. They lacked the commercial value of spices or gold, or the prestige of conquered territories, but they marked the beginning of the modern study of linguistics, and to later generations of scholars they offered clues to the migrations of various tribes across the South American continent.

  Pigafetta described the modus operandi that evolved between the two of them: “When he, asking me for capac, this is to say, bread (for so they call the root which they use for bread) and oli, that is to say, water, saw me write down these names, and afterward, when I asked him for others, pen in hand, he understood me.” Their collaboration resulted in a phrase book called “Words of the Patagonian Giants.” “All these words are pronounced in the throat,” he advised, for they pronounce them thus.” Pigafetta began with the Tehuelche word for “head,” which he transcribed as her. “Eyes” sounded to him like other. Nose: or. Ears: sane. Mouth: xiam. And so on through subjects of interest to him.

  Armpits: salischen. Breast: ochii. Thumb: ochon. Body: gechel. Penis: scachet. Testicles: sacaneos. Vagina: isse. Intercourse with women: iohói. The thighs: chiaue.

  Hour after hour, the tall, bronzed, clean-shaven, nearly naked Patagonian huddled in earnest conversation with the much shorter and paler European in his breeches and loose-fitting shirt, scratching eagerly with his pen, gesticulating, querying with his hands and fingers, the two of them engaged in a game of mutual comprehension, surrounded by an ocean of incomprehensible dimensions.

  Pigafetta was plainly delighted by the captive’s range of vocabulary and his willingness to follow directions; at the same time, he was pleased with his own ability to capture the Tehuelche language on paper. Displaying the transcriptions to the giant, Pigafetta introduced the Patagonian to writing, and the power of the written word to speak silently across widely separated cultures, and, ultimately, across time. Imagine the captive’s sense of wonder at the use of magic symbols to capture and transmit his language and thoughts. The use of linguistic symbols became the best way—in fact, the only way—for these two men to understand one another. Of all the weapons the Europeans brought to the Pacific, guns included, none was more powerful and more capable of effecting lasting change than written language.

  As their intellectual labors continued, Pigafetta’s queries moved from the concrete to the conceptual. What was the Patagonian word for the sun? he asked. Calex cheni. The stars? Settere. The sea: aro. Wind: oni. Storm: ohone. How does one say “Come here”? Haisi, replied the giant. To look? Conne. And to fight? Oamaghce.

  Pigafetta also introduced his cooperative prisoner to Catholicism. “I made the sign of the cross,” Pigafetta recalled, “and kissed the cross, showing it to him. But at once he cried out Setebos, and he made signs to me that, if I made the sign of the cross again, it would enter my stomach and cause me to burst.” Setebos, Pigafetta learned,

  meant “the great devil,” the opposite of everything the cross represented in Christendom. The giant intuited that the cross represented a spiritual power, and eventually Pigafetta persuaded him that it symbolized a source of strength rather than danger. At about that time, the Patagonian began to weaken and fall ill. No one could say what afflicted him; perhaps it was the change of diet, or a virus he caught from the Europeans. The sicker he became, the more he relied on the cross. Pigafetta gave him a real cross to hold, and, as instructed, the giant brought it to his lips, seeking its strength and healing power. But the illness worsened— Pigafetta does not supply any symptoms—and it became apparent that the giant was dying. Their conversations turned to religion, and Pigafetta persuaded the prisoner to convert to Christianity. He was baptized, and the giant, whose original name Pigafetta never mentioned, became known as Paul. He died shortly thereafter, a Patagonian Christian who met a unique and tragic fate. Pigafetta did not record what kind of funeral rites Father Valderrama accorded Paul, but presumably he was given a proper burial at sea.

  About ninety years later, Pigafetta’s affecting account of the curtailed education and conversion of the Patagonian giant drew the attention of William Shakespeare, who read an English translation by Richard Eden of Pigafetta’s diary. Distinctive fingerprints in Shakespeare’s resulting play, The Tempest, first performed in 1611, could only have come from Pigafetta’s account.

  In Shakespeare’s imagination, the humble details of Pigafetta’s encounter with the Patagonian giant are woven into an immense cosmological tapestry. The playwright sets the scene on an enchanted magical island ruled by Prospero, the duke of Milan, who, with his daughter Miranda, had been set adrift by his brother Antonio, a usurper. Shipwrecked, Prospero learns magic and manages to remain on good terms with spirits inhabiting the island, especially Ariel, a sprite whom Prospero had freed from an evil sorceress known as Sycorax. But Sycorax also has a son, Caliban, one of the most compelling yet enigmatic characters in the Shakespearean canon, and a character inspired in part by the Patagonian giant.

  The clash between Prospero and Caliban offers a vivid image of the impact of European discovery and conquest on indigenous peoples throughout the world, and Shakespeare dramatizes the encounter with wit and a frisson of horror.

  You taught me language; and my profit on’t

  Is, I know how to curse: the red plague rid you,

  For learning me your language!

  Later, Caliban quotes Pigafetta’s account of the Patagonian giant:

  I must obey: his art is of such power,

  It would control my dam’s god, Setebos,

  And make a vassal of him.

  Although Shakespeare keeps the setting vague, this mystical play demonstrates, if nothing else, that the New World, with its splendor and barbarism, had taken up residence in the European consciousness.

  Although the weather remained perfect, the winds strong and constant, the armada failed to encounter islands with the food and water needed to sustain life. The ships had passed east of the Juan Fernández Islands, then north of the Marshall Islands: Bikar, Bikini, and Eniwetok. Had their course varied by only a few degrees south, they would been able to explore Easter Island or, farther west, the Society Islands and Tahiti. Had their course varied by only a few degrees north, they might have eventually encountered the Marquesas or Christmas Island. At the same time, the ship also narrowly avoided marine hazards such as razor-sharp reefs that could have sliced their hulls. A roaring surf concealed subsurface coral towers. Magellan’s ships passed within a hundred miles of such hazards, and emerged unscathed.

  To look at Magellan’s course through the Pacific, it may seem as though he deliberately avoided the islands, and the chance to seek supplies, but he had no such plan in mind. None of these islands appeared on maps in his day, and if Magellan or anyone else spied telltale signs of landmass—a faint soaring plume, or the water turning light green—no one left any record of it. The two most reliable accounts, Pigafetta’s diary and Albo’s log, are silent on the subject of avoiding islands. Even if Magellan had known of their existence, he would not have felt any special urgency to land on their shores, for he expected to reach the Spice Islands or some other point in Asia within days.
Headed toward an illusory destination, the fleet remained isolated in the Pacific, three little ships suspended in an infinite cerulean sea.

  Thirst and hunger tormented the crew. The seals they had butchered and salted in Patagonia turned putrid and became infested with maggots, which devoured the sails, rigging, and even the sailors’ clothing, rendering them all useless. Pigafetta chronicled the appalling deterioration in their food supply. “We were three months and twenty days without getting any kind of fresh food. We ate biscuit which was no longer biscuit, but powder of biscuits swarming with worms, for they had eaten the good. It stank strongly of the urine of rats. We drank yellow water that had been putrid for many days. We also ate some ox hides that covered the top of the mainyard to prevent the yard from chafing the shrouds, and which had become exceedingly hard because of the sun, rain, and wind. We left them in the sea for four or five days, and then placed them for a few moments on top of the embers, and so ate them; and often we ate sawdust from boards. Rats were sold for one-half ducado apiece, and even then we could not get them.”

  The rats commanded a premium because sailors believed that eating them might offer protection against the disease they all feared: scurvy.

  Scurvy posed the single greatest danger to the health of the men during the entire voyage. There was no known cure, and if unchecked, it could claim the lives of them all. Magellan’s only defense against scurvy was an assortment of folk remedies. Once scurvy struck the crew, the voyage became a race against death itself.

  One by one, the men began to suffer from the disease. In his diary, Pigafetta described its dreaded symptoms. “The gums of both the lower and upper teeth of some of our men swelled, so that they could not eat under any circumstances.” A sense of exhaustion gradually overtook the men, and their gums began to feel sore and spongy. When they pushed with their tongues, even gently, their teeth wobbled. As the disease progressed, their teeth began to fall out, and their gums bled uncontrollably and festered with exquisitely painful boils.

  Even though they suffered terribly from scurvy, sailors were still expected to work. If they failed to appear on deck, the boatswain whipped them with the end of a rope and then dragged them up on deck, where the sunlight pitilessly revealed their deteriorated condition. Their skin seemed to be falling from their bones, and old scars and sores, long healed, reopened. Their bodies were literally falling apart.

  As scurvy claimed one life after another, burials at sea became commonplace. Sailors, many of them suffering from the early stages of scurvy themselves and seeing their own deaths foretold, wrapped the body in a remnant of an old, tattered sail, secured it with rope, and tied cannonballs to the feet. A priest, and on occasion the captain, uttered a brief prayer; two sailors lifted the corpse onto a plank, tilted it, and committed their crewmate’s mortal remains to the hungry sea.

  Pigafetta put the grim tally of those who died from scurvy at twenty-nine, in addition to the sole remaining Indian passenger they had captured. Many others suffered grievously. “Besides those who died, twenty-five or thirty fell sick of divers maladies, whether of the arms or of the legs or other parts of the body, so there remained very few healthy men.”

  In Magellan’s day, scurvy was a disease new to Europe, a terrible by-product of the Age of Discovery. In 1498, Vasco da Gama’s crew, exploring the African coast for Portugal, suffered the first widely noted outbreak. Da Gama observed that his men developed the telltale swelling of hands, feet, and gums. He also wrote of Arab traders offering oranges to the afflicted sailors, and the men making a miraculous recovery thereafter; the clear implication is that the Arabs, more accustomed to long ocean voyages than their European counterparts, knew the affliction and its cure. During a three-month-long passage across the Indian Ocean, Vasco da Gama’s crew again fell victim to scurvy, and this time thirty men died. “In another two weeks there would have been no men at all to navigate the ships,” da Gama wrote. Deliverance came when they reached land and again feasted on life-giving oranges. Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, Vasco da Gama and other early European explorers believed that unhealthy air—not dietary deficiencies— caused scurvy.

  The intense suffering experienced by da Gama’s men, and later by Magellan’s, could have been prevented by a daily dose of one spoonful of lemon juice, for that is the amount of vitamin C necessary to prevent scurvy. In the body, vitamin C, or ascorbic acid, helps to manufacture the enzyme prolyl hydroxylase, which in turn synthesizes a protein collagen used for connective tissues such as skin, ligaments, tendons, and bones, all of which give our bodies tensile strength. A vitamin C deficiency leads to the melting of the collagen fibers and a breakdown in the connective tissues, especially in bones and in dentin, the building block of teeth. Collagen acts as a glue binding connective tissues together, and when it disintegrates, the tissues separate and capillaries hemorrhage, creating black-andblue patches on the skin. (Curiously, Magellan’s men’s desperate hope that eating rats would avert scurvy had a basis in fact; unlike humans, rats synthesize and store vitamin C.)

  Scurvy continued to afflict explorers for more than two hundred years. Often, the difficulty of obtaining oranges during voyages was to blame, but even the most dedicated investigators remained befuddled, while thousands died at sea. Finally, in 1746, James Lind, a Scottish naval surgeon, turned his attention to the problem of scurvy, then afflicting sailors in the Royal Navy. To determine the cause, he conducted the first modern clinical trials on record. He isolated a dozen sailors suffering from scurvy and fed them the same diet. Then he subjected each to different treatments, administered daily. Some received seawater, some nutmeg and other spices, some vinegar, and others two oranges and one lemon. “The consequence was that the most sudden and visible good effects were perceived from the use of the oranges and lemons,” Lind observed, “one of those who had taken them being at the end of six days fit for duty.”

  Despite the overwhelming evidence, Lind’s findings were not widely accepted. He persisted. After leaving the navy, Lind was elected a Fellow of Edinburgh’s Royal College of Physicians and subsequently published an exhaustive study entitled A Treatise of the Scurvy Containing an Inquiry into the Nature, Causes and Cure of That Disease. In the four-hundred-page treatise, Lind offered his own bizarre theory of the origins of scurvy; he claimed that a cold and wet climate clogged the pores and set the stage for the disease. This was nothing more than an updating of theories prevalent in Magellan’s era.

  Not until 1795 did the British Royal Navy finally insist that sailors receive a daily ration of the juice of lemons or limes to combat scurvy, a practice leading to the term “limeys” to refer to British sailors. (At the time, a “lime” meant both lemons and limes.) This was an act of faith more than science because it was still not known why lemons, limes, oranges, and other fruits and vegetables prevented scurvy. Finally, in 1932, three medical researchers, W. A. Waugh, C. G. King, and Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, managed to isolate and synthesize ascorbic acid; they offered a scientific explanation of vitamin C’s effect on the body, and showed how a vitamin C deficiency leads to scurvy.

  While their men suffered and died around them, Magellan, Pigafetta, and several other officers remained mysteriously healthy. “By the grace of our Lord I had no illness,” Pigafetta marveled. Neither he nor anyone else knew why, but there was an outstanding reason why they had escaped scurvy. Throughout the ordeal, the officers regularly dipped into their supply of preserved quince, an applelike fruit, without realizing it was actually a potent antiscorbutic. Saved by this fluke, the good fortune seemingly conferred on Magellan by Saint Elmo appeared to hold, at least for the present.

  Nothing in Pigafetta’s diary suggests that the officers conspired to keep their supply of quince to themselves at the cost of their men’s lives. Magellan and the others remained oblivious to its lifesustaining properties, and they continued to believe that their men suffered from a variety of afflictions, most of them caused by “bad air.” Since Magellan was known for perso
nally ministering to his men when they became ill, he would likely have insisted they take daily rations of quince had he known of its benefits.

  During these three months and twenty days,” wrote Pigafetta, “we made a good four thousand leagues across the Pacific Sea, which was rightly so named. For during this time we had no storm, and we saw no land except two small uninhabited islands, where we found only birds and trees.” Their first landfall occurred on January 24, and very disappointing it proved to be: a simple atoll rising enigmatically from the ocean. Magellan named it San Pablo because the sighting occurred on the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul. (This tiny atoll was also the explorer Thor Heyerdahl’s first sighting of land during his transpacific crossing in 1947 aboard the balsa raft Kon Tiki.) The atoll proved useless to Magellan’s vessels; he saw neither evidence of human habitation nor a safe place to drop anchor. After sailing completely around the island, he signaled the fleet to proceed on its course. San Pablo could not come to their aid. Eleven days later, on February 4, 1521, Magellan spotted another islet—most likely Caroline Island, in Micronesia. The fleet approached, and once more tried to find an anchorage, but did not succeed. The water, complained Pigafetta, was so deep that “there is no place for anchoring because no bottom can be found.” De Mafra, writing long after the event, recalled an impenetrable reef that repelled the ships: “It seemed as if Nature had armed it against the sea.” And Albo’s log notes: “In this latitude we found an uninhabited island, where we caught many sharks, and therefore we gave it the name of Isla de los Tiburones”—Shark Island. Stunned from monotony and debilitated by illness, the crew watched the large, menacing creatures circle, apparitions in a scene of despair. Even Magellan, normally possessed of superhuman determination and indifference to hardship, became depressed and unstable as the transpacific crossing wore on. In a rage, he flung his useless maps overboard, crying, “With the pardon of the cartographers, the Moluccas are not to be found in their appointed place!”