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

by Laurence Bergreen

  In August of the following year, Pigafetta, by this time settled in Venice, requested that the doge and city council allow him to print his sensational account; he supplied two reasons, the overwhelming importance of the events recorded, and Pigafetta’s singular authority in relating them:

  Most Serene Prince and your Excellencies:

  Petition of me, Antonio Pigafetta, Venetian knight of Jerusalem, who, desiring to see the world, have sailed, in past years, with the caravels of his Caesarean Majesty [Charles V], which went to discover the islands of the new Indies where the spices grow.

  On that voyage, I circumnavigated the whole world, and since it is a feat that no man had accomplished, I have composed a short narration of the entire voyage, which I desire to have printed. For that purpose, I petition that no one may print it for twenty years, except myself, under penalty to him who should print it, or who should bring it here if printed elsewhere, of a fine of three lire per copy, besides the loss of the books. [I petition] also that the execution [of the penalty] may be imposed by any magistrate of this city who shall be informed of it; and that the fine be divided as follows: one-third to the arsenal of your Highness, one-third to the accuser, and one-third to those who shall impose it.

  I humbly commend myself to your kindness.

  Pigafetta’s request met with a favorable response, and he was granted the privilege that “no other except himself be allowed to have it printed for twenty years.”

  The first copies of Pigafetta’s “relation,” the ones he brought with him to the courts of Europe, were lavish handwritten manuscripts illustrated with maps of his own devising, items literally fit for a king. It is believed that Pigafetta wrote his “relation” in the Venetian dialect, mixed with Italian and Spanish, but the original has been lost. Instead, four early versions produced by expert scribes have come down over the centuries, one in Italian and three in French. By general agreement, the most handsome, complete, and extravagantly illustrated version resides today in the collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. To read this memoir, and to turn its ancient vellum pages, is to be transported instantly five hundred years into the past. Although Pigafetta tells his story more or less in chronological order, he has not constructed a linear narrative; rather, it is a compilation of events, illustrations, translations of foreign tongues, prayers, descriptions, epiphanies, and bawdy asides, all of them heavily cross-referenced and colorcoded in brilliant inks of black, blue, and red. Yet it is also a personal document, unusual for that time, when the idea of an individual consciousness was just beginning to take root. The reader of Pigafetta’s chronicle hears his voice, alternately bold, astonished, devastated, fascinated, and, in the end, amazed to be alive in the cruelly beautiful world of his time.

  Although a few influential voices celebrated Magellan’s extraordinary accomplishments and appreciated the extent of his ordeal, he was despised or discounted by most authorities and observers from Seville to Lisbon; in both countries he was considered a traitor, and court historians everywhere prepared to blacken pages with their indictments of his nefarious deeds and treachery. Ironically, Magellan’s most fervent admirers were in England, where political commentators urged their island nation to emulate his daring example. Closer to home, King João III of Portugal (the son of the monarch who had spurned Magellan) seethed at the news that one of the ships of the Armada de Molucca had returned to Seville with a full load of cloves. He hotly protested to King Charles, insisting that the Spice Islands actually belonged to Portugal. Charles, for his part, patiently but insistently pressed for the release of the men taken prisoner by the Portuguese in the Cape Verde Islands, and they trickled in to Spain in small groups throughout the following year. The additional survivors of Victoria included Roland de Argot, a gunner; Martín Méndez, the fleet’s accountant; Pedro de Tolosa, a steward; Simón de Burgos, suspected of betraying the other crew members in the Cape Verde Islands; and one Moluccan, who went by the name of Manuel.

  Victoria’s two groups of survivors, for all the hardships they had endured since leaving the Spice Islands, enjoyed far better fortune than the sixty men who had chosen to sail home aboard Trinidad. Only four of that number ever returned to Spain or Portugal. A deaf seaman named Juan Rodríguez, at forty-eight the oldest survivor, stowed away on a Portuguese ship bound for Lisbon. He spent a short time in jail, won his release, made his way back to Seville, and, despite his age, his infirmity, and the hardships he had endured during his years at sea, applied to the Casa de Contratación to sail to the Indies once again.

  Enduring months of hard labor and humiliation in the Moluccas, Espinosa was transported along with several of his crew members to Cochin, a Portuguese outpost on the west coast of India. Refusing a Portuguese invitation to fight the Arabs, he wrote to King Charles, complaining that the viceroy, Vasco da Gama, was busy “menacing me and telling me that my head would be cut off and dishonoring me with many evil words, saying that he would hang the others.”

  In 1526, after four miserable years in captivity, Gonzalo Gómez de Espinosa, the former captain, and Ginés de Mafra, the garrulous pilot, joined the crew’s gunner, Hans Vargue, aboard a ship bound for Lisbon. Freedom would elude them a while longer, though; on arrival, the heroic circumnavigators were thrown into jail. Vargue died there, leaving all his worldly possessions—his back pay and a package of cloves—to Espinosa.

  Toughened by years of adversity, de Mafra and Espinosa survived their time in a Lisbon prison as they had survived everything else, and upon their release they returned to Seville, only to be jailed again. Their case came to trial in 1527; at last they were acquitted and finally released.

  The harsh fate of these two men, who had been loyal to Magellan and King Charles, stood in marked contrast to the mutineers who had returned to Seville aboard San Antonio; all of them had been freed, except for the true loyalist among them, Álvaro de Mesquita, whom they had taken hostage during their mutiny. The injustice was particularly striking in Espinosa’s case, because whatever his failings as a captain, he had performed effectively as the alguacil in moments of crisis, and had played a crucial role in helping Magellan regain control of the fleet after the mutiny in Port Saint Julian. Magellan’s father-in-law, still living in Seville, took up the cause of these unjustly punished survivors, and risked all to write in their defense to King Charles. Rather than being punished for their acts of disloyalty, the mutineers had been “very well received and treated at the expense of Your Highness,” Barbosa remarked, “while the captain and others who were desirous of serving Your Highness were imprisoned and deprived of all justice. From this, so many bad examples arise—heartbreaking to those who try to do their duty.”

  Both men found their homecoming to be bitter, indeed. De Mafra, for one, learned that his wife, assuming that he was dead, had remarried; not only that, she had spent his entire fortune with her new husband. Disgusted with his lot, de Mafra returned to the life he knew best, that of a pilot in the Pacific; by 1542, he was back in the Philippines in the service of Spain.

  Espinosa faced a more ambiguous destiny. On August 24, 1527, King Charles granted him an enormous pension—112,500 maravedís—but Espinosa never received it. The Casa de Contratación, as mean-spirited as ever, withheld the salary he earned during his years in jail, arguing that he was not actually “in the service of Spain” at the time. Outraged by the treatment he had received at the hands of unfeeling bureaucrats, he sued for twice the amount, settled for half of the original pension, and, in the end, received only a fraction of the settlement, and even that modest amount was contingent on his participating in another expedition to the Moluccas. (The king did allow Espinosa to keep the 15,000 maravedís left to him by Hans Vargue.)

  Understandably, Espinosa refused to return to the lands that had claimed so many Spaniards’ lives, and where he had suffered in prison for four long years. In 1529, King Charles decided to bestow another pension on his loyal servant, this time in the amou
nt of 30,000 maravedís, and he received a comfortable job as an inspector, at an annual salary of 43,000 maravedís. He lived out his days in Seville.

  Spain and Portugal agreed to hold another conference to determine the locations of the line of demarcation and the Spice Islands. The Spanish delegates included experts such as Sebastián Elcano, Giovanni Vespucci (Amerigo’s sibling), and Sebastian Cabot. Despite the good intentions of the two nations, and the credentials of the delegates, the proceedings quickly degenerated into farce.

  To symbolize the strict impartiality of the deliberations, the summit was held on a bridge spanning the Guadiana River, along the Spanish-Portuguese border, but the location nearly undid the conference. As the distinguished members of the Portuguese delegation happened to be walking across the bridge, they were stopped by a small boy, who asked if they were carving up the world with King Charles. The former governor of India, Diogo Lopes de Sequeira, acknowledged that indeed they were. At that, the boy lifted his shirt, turned to reveal his bare bottom, and with his small finger traced the line between his buttocks.

  “Draw your line right through this place!” he declared. The parties adjourned to towns on either side of the river. The

  cosmologists and astronomers continued to argue over longitude, and could not even agree on the length of a degree, so the question of where to place the Moluccas remained unresolved. Magellan had traversed the Pacific, it was true, but no one yet knew how to measure the distance he had traveled, except by dead reckoning, of limited value over long distances.

  For all these reasons, the attempt to redefine the line of demarcation ended in failure. As might be expected, both sides claimed victory—and possession of the Spice Islands.

  Blithely ignoring the conference, King Charles splurged on lavish follow-up expeditions to the Moluccas, heedless of the cost and the risks involved in these tragic enterprises.

  In 1525, the Casa de Contratación commissioned a wellconnected officer, Francisco García Jofre de Loaysa, to lead the next Armada de Molucca. Sebastián Elcano, honored as the first circumnavigator, received an appointment as second-in-command. The voyage’s primary goal—to build a fully staffed Spanish trading post and fort in the Spice Islands—demonstrated how hollow King Charles’s conciliatory language actually was. Spain remained determined to break the Portuguese monopoly on the spice trade and to claim the islands, no matter what.

  The second Armada de Molucca left Seville with the hope that retracing Magellan’s route would make the voyage to the Spice Islands far safer and faster, but just the opposite occurred. Without Magellan’s navigational genius to guide the ships, the second armada met with an even harsher fate than the first. Elcano, despite his experience, made one navigational error after another during the journey, and he arrived at the strait discovered by Magellan only after dangerous delays. Storms in these low latitudes battered the ships of the armada, reducing their number from five to just two. In the Pacific, scurvy broke out among the officers and crew, just as it had during Magellan’s crossing, and this time, no one had quince preserves to protect them from its ravages, not even the Captain General.

  Loaysa died, leaving behind an envelope prepared by King Charles himself, naming a successor. When the seal was broken, the letter appointed Elcano as the next admiral. The Basque mariner had finally reached the summit of ambition, but the time remaining to him proved to be cruelly brief, because he was already suffering from scurvy. Retreating to his small cabin, he drew up his will; the document carefully inventoried all his worldly possessions down to the last article of clothing and ream of paper; it listed his many charitable bequests; it specified gifts to his two mistresses; and it requested that his funeral take place in his hometown, Guetaria. The will was witnessed by seven others, each one a Basque. Five days after assuming command, on August 4, 1526, Sebastián Elcano died at sea, another casualty of the Age of Discovery. His body was committed to the deep amid the rolling blue expanses of the Pacific.

  In an eerie recapitulation of Magellan’s voyage, just one of the five original ships of the second Armada de Molucca reached the Spice Islands. And of the 450 men who set sail from Spain aboard these ships, only 8 lived to see Spain again, an even greater loss of life than Magellan’s crew suffered.

  The extraordinary death rate, to say nothing of the expense involved, did nothing to deter King Charles from trying to reach the Spice Islands again—and again. He sent Sebastian Cabot, then the piloto mayor, or chief pilot, of Seville, in search of the Indies, but the hapless mariner only got as far as the Río de la Plata, the false strait on the east coast of South America. After a time, he led the third Armada de Molucca, back to Spain, where he was charged with failing to complete his mission because he was afraid to enter the real strait and face its dangers.

  Soon after that debacle, Hernándo Cortés, the conqueror of Mexico, dispatched his own expedition to the Moluccas from his outpost in Aguatanejo, Mexico. Although this expedition promised to be shorter, and did not have to pass through the strait, it, too, met with disaster. Only one ship reached the Spice Islands, and the Portuguese captured her crew and seized her cargo, abruptly aborting the mission.

  With each failure, the dream of establishing a Spanish outpost in the Spice Islands and bringing the wealth of the Indies into Spanish coffers faded, and the scope of Magellan’s superhuman accomplishment and fierce determination came to seem greater and greater.

  Despite all the setbacks, King Charles refused to let the dream of dominating the world’s economy die. He backed plans for a fifth armada, led by Simón de Alcazaba, another Portuguese sailing for Spain, and this one promised to be the most ambitious—and aggressive—of all. The fleet consisted of eight ships capable of transporting a large garrison of Spanish soldiers to the Spice Islands. They were to drive out the Portuguese and claim the islands for the crown once and for all. But before these ships put to sea, King Charles found himself in desperate financial straits. Fighting off the French had drained his coffers, and his longtime financial backers, Cristóbal de Haro and the Fugger dynasty, refused to back another expedition in search of the elusive goal that had claimed the lives of so many brave men. For the next two decades, the House of Fugger tried to recover its huge investment in the failed armadas, but the Spanish crown, teetering on the brink of insolvency, failed to repay the debt.

  Desperately short of cash, Charles was unable to send any more expeditions to the Spice Islands. But he did not give up his goal; instead, he sought a diplomatic solution to thwart or slow Portugal’s imperial ambitions. He invited Portugal to join a commission to study the Spice Islands quandary, and he asked the Vatican to arbitrate in case of disagreement. In the end, João III had no choice but to agree to the plan, or risk seeming bellicose and heedless of papal authority. In this way, King Charles maintained his interest in the Spice Islands through diplomacy—but not for long.

  Unable to raise money from his usual backers, Charles was forced to turn to Portugal for aid. In 1529, he borrowed 350,000 ducats from João III, and as security for the loan he pledged the Moluccas and all the islands lying to the east. Both nations signed the Treaty of Saragossa, ending the epic struggle for control of the global economy. Just seven years after Magellan’s voyage and three unsuccessful follow-up expeditions to the Spice Islands, King Charles, facing bankruptcy, gave up and returned the islands to the Portuguese. In matters of empire, everything had its price.

  Not until 1580, fifty-eight years after Victoria returned to Seville, did another explorer, Sir Francis Drake, complete a circumnavigation. His voyage took him through the Strait of Magellan. To accomplish the feat, Drake relied on the knowledge so painfully and heroically acquired by the Captain General and his crew.

  Little Victoria, the first ship to complete a circumnavigation, had her own curious epilogue. No one thought to preserve the battered vessel as a testament to Magellan’s great achievement. Instead, she was repaired, sold to a merchant for 106,274 maravedís, and returned

 
; to service, a workhorse of the Spanish conquest of the Americas. As late as 1570, she was still plying the Atlantic. En route to Seville from the Antilles, she disappeared without a trace; all hands on board were lost. It is assumed that she encountered a mid-Atlantic storm that sent her to the bottom, her wordless epitaph written on the restless waves.

  In 1531, one of the first accurate maps of the Strait of Magellan appeared. Oronce Finé’s representation placed the strait in its proper position in South America, and although the map does not name the strait, it does call the Pacific “Magellanicum.” The name Magellanica, or Magellanic Land, would appear on many later maps of South America, usually indicating Patagonia or Chile. Gerardus Mercator, the Flemish cartographer, canonized the strait on his famous globe in 1536. In time, the name Magellan came to designate only the strait—no lands, in fact, none of the territories that he once dreamed of bequeathing to his heirs. At least, such was the case on earth. In the heavens, his name came to be associated with the two dwarf galaxies he had discovered, the Magellanic Clouds, visible in the Southern Hemisphere.

  Although no continent or country was named after him, Magellan’s expedition stands as the greatest sea voyage in the Age of Discovery. In its epic, world-straddling scope, his voyage harkened back to Greek and Roman antiquity, which had been rediscovered and embraced with such conviction during the Renaissance. “Worthier, indeed, are our sailors of eternal fame than the Argonauts who sailed with Jason,” wrote Peter Martyr, Magellan’s contemporary and the first historian of the New World. “And much more worthy was their ship of being placed along the stars than that old Argo; for they only sailed from Greece through Pontus, but ours through the whole west and southern hemisphere, penetrating into the east, and again returned to the west.”