Balboa claims the Pacific, 1513
DURING THESE YEARS of high excitement in the Americas, Magellan was a Portuguese soldier on the other side of the world, where Lisbon’s trade was flourishing and men-at-arms like him were fighting to expand King Manuel’s colonial territories. Beginning in 1505 he served there seven years, variously stationed in Africa, India, Malacca, and Mozambique. This was when Portugal broke Muslim power in the Indian Ocean. By all accounts, Magellan repeatedly distinguished himself in combat and at sea.
In his idle hours, spent on the docks, he talked to Asian pilots and navigators from as far away as Okinawa, asking about tides, winds, magnetic compass readings—the kind of information which, if they had kept records, would have been in their rutters. Through this method he became as well informed about the Indonesian archipelago as any European seaman. But he was equally interested in reports from the New World, particularly accounts of Balboa’s discovery. Like all European mariners, he believed that the new sea west of Panama must be very small. The great question was how it could be reached by water — where one could find what the Portuguese called o braço do mar and Spaniards el paso—a strait through which ships could pass from the Atlantic to El Mar del Sur beyond.
Repeated testing of the hemispheric land barrier had proved discouraging. The narrowness of the Panamanian isthmus was unmatched elsewhere. From Labrador, at the sixtieth degree of north latitude, to at least lower Brazil, at the thirtieth degree of south latitude, the Americas presented a solid, intimidating front of earth and stone. In the north the thousands of islands and inlets above what is now the Canadian mainland raised hopes for a northwest passage, and in some breasts these hopes endured for four centuries, until the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen threaded the countless straits between 1906 and 1909, only to find that the freezing of sea lanes and other arctic conditions made the route impractical. Most navigators had written off the north four centuries earlier, however. It was generally agreed that the break in the landmass, if there was one, must be in the south. Yet searchers there had also been frustrated. Some early cartographers showed the southern continent extending all the way to Antarctica.
That was more or less the situation on October 20, 1517, when the approximately forty-year-old Magellan, having renounced his Portuguese nationality, arrived in Seville accompanied by several pilots and his Malayan slave Enrique. He had come to offer his services to the Spanish crown. What befell him there resembles one of those Victorian morality tales in which Ragged Dick or Faithful Fred reaches the teeming city, is bewildered by its chaos, foils scheming rogues bent upon exploiting him, meets kind allies, survives a series of disappointments, and finally wins through by pluck and daring.
Magellan encountered no rogues then—they would come later—but Seville was certainly chaotic, especially within the Casa de Contratación, the royal house of trade. It was there that merchants who were prepared to finance expeditions met captains eager to lead them, there that the two bargained under supervision of the king’s magistrates, and there that the Portuguese explorer headed. The hall was surrounded by taverns swarming with adventurers, pilots, and seasoned mariners, some of them men who had sailed with Columbus, Côrte-Real, or John and Sebastian Cabot, and all of them bearing maps and plans guaranteed to enrich their King Carlos, their sponsors, and, not incidentally, themselves. Magellan, in need of an ally, found one in Diego Barbosa, a fellow Portuguese expatriate well acquainted with the Magellan family. Diego had served the Spanish crown here for fourteen years. He took an instant liking to Magellan. So did his son Duarte, a mariner himself. Finally, Beatriz Barbosa, the daughter of the family, fell in love with Magellan, and, after a brief courtship, became his bride.
Backed by his new relatives, Magellan approached the Casa de Contratación and formally presented the proposition which he and Ruy Faleiro, a Portuguese astronomer, had drawn up in Lisbon. It envisaged a westward voyage halfway round the globe to the Moluccas, the expedition to be led by him and funded by the Spanish crown, whose possessions the islands would then become. A commission of three officials rejected the plan, but immediately after the hearing, one of the commissioners, Juan de Aranda, sent word that he wished to see the petitioner in private. Aranda—the Casa’s agente, or factor—wanted to question Magellan further. Being a man of business, he was intrigued by the possibility of wresting the Spice Islands from Portugal. After hearing further details he offered to sponsor Magellan’s application for royal support. In return he expected one-eighth of the enterprise’s profits. That winter he carried on delicate negotiations with the chancellor of Castile and enlisted the help of the monarch’s privy councillors. Meantime Magellan had written Faleiro, summoning him to Spain.
EARLY IN THE FOLLOWING YEAR King Carlos, with the approval of his privy council, received the partners at Valladolid. Magellan and Faleiro convinced him that the Moluccas, the remote Indo-Pacific archipelago then known as the Spice Islands, lay on Spain’s side of the papal line of demarcation. They also said that the Portuguese route there—through the Indian Ocean and the Sunda Sea—was needlessly long. The islands, they explained, could be reached by a much shorter route from the west. To be sure, this meant penetrating the American barrier from the south, but that could be done by sailing through a South American paso whose location was known to them alone. Persuaded, Carlos pledged his support of the partners from Lisbon. He put it in writing; then, after knighting Magellan, he appointed him capitán-general of what he christened the Armada de Molucca.
Thus the enterprise was launched—or so the record reads. Common sense, however, insists that there must have been more to it than that. The new admiral had been only one of hundreds of supplicants in the Casa that day. He had succeeded where the others had been turned away, not because he had charmed the Barbosas, Aranda, the king’s privy council, and the king himself —his charm, by all accounts, was slight—but because he had struck them as an exceptionally qualified Portuguese captain and navigator who knew precisely what he was doing.
His knowledge of the south seas was profound. Although he had never reached the Spice Islands, he had learned a great deal about them from a friend, one Francisco Serrão, a Portuguese skipper who had been so smitten with the islands that he had decided to spend the rest of his life there, fathering children and basking in the paradisaical climate. Serrão had written long, lyrical, detailed letters describing the archipelago; Magellan had showed them to the Spaniards in Valladolid. It was true, he conceded, that he had yet to sail in the waters of the Western Hemisphere. Yet he was knowledgeable about them. As a Portuguese of noble blood with service in Africa, Asia, and the islands beyond, he had had access to Lisbon’s celebrated Tesouraria (Treasury). There, before defecting to Spain, he had pored over the rutters, logs, and sailing directions of fellow countrymen who had explored the Americas. Their accumulated knowledge was now his.
It was his certitude, however, which had impressed the Spanish court most. Other petitioners had speculated. Magellan said he knew, and his decisive manner confirmed him. He was absolutely positive that the Moluccas belonged to Spain, and Faleiro had brought a globe of his own design to back him up. Both men assured the court that they knew precisely where to find the paso, the legendary open sesame to Balboa’s ocean. When the king had asked why it wasn’t shown on the globe, Magellan had replied that the secret was too precious; they could not risk a leak.
His conviction was genuine, but it was built on quicksand. Faleiro’s globe was flawed. Due to compensating errors, his calculations of longitude were only four degrees off, but that was enough to discredit them. The islands were on Portugal’s side of the line, not Spain’s, and the more men learned about that part of the world the stronger Lisbon’s claim would become. And—far more important—the partners’ assurance that Magellan could find the strait linking the Atlantic and the Pacific was equally false. After five centuries their error is clear, though their sources seemed plausible at the time. The first was a map drawn by Martin Beh
aim, the Nuremberg geographer who had been royal cartographer to the Portuguese court; the second a globe produced by Johannes Schöner in 1515; and the third a report from the western Atlantic which reached Magellan either shortly before, or soon after, his move from Lisbon to Seville. The map and the globe showed a southern passage between the oceans. In the light of later evidence it is clear that Behaim and Schöner had put it in the wrong place, but they appeared to have been confirmed in 1516, when Juan Díaz de Solís, who had been sailing along the coast of South America under the illusion that he was near the Malayan Peninsula, came upon the gigantic funnel-shaped estuary leading to what is now Buenos Aires.
Although Díaz de Solís was killed by Indians, members of his expedition found their way home, and to Magellan their description of the Río de la Plata, as Sebastian Cabot later named it, must have seemed to be the final piece of the puzzle. Indeed, even today it is hard to believe that the estuary—actually the outlet of two enormous rivers—is not open sea. Its mouth is 140 miles wide, and its western shore is 170 miles inland. To Europeans accustomed to the Guadiana River of Spain and Portugal, the Tiber, or the Rhine, it must have resembled the great straits they knew—the Dardanelles or Gibraltar. They were wrong, and so was Magellan, misled by them. But persuasive errors have played key roles in history before. So it was here. Had the capitán-general known the truth, his confidence would have been eroded. Carlos and his privy council would have rejected the uncertain applicant. Even if they hadn’t, Magellan’s iron will, which was to become vital to the voyage, would have been weakened, probably fatally.
HOW MUCH Lisbon learned about the Valladolid audience is unknown. Probably very little. But it was enough: a seasoned Portuguese mariner, familiar with the Tesouraria’s holiest secrets, had been commissioned by the Castilian monarch to pry the Spice Islands loose from Portugal. His fleet was already forming up. It is a measure of Manuel’s alarm that he instructed his ambassador to Madrid, Álvaro da Costa, to sabotage the expedition. Fortunately for history, Costa was a fool. He attempted to coerce Magellan, and when that failed he tried to intimidate the Spanish king, first telling him that Portugal would regard continued support of the venture as an unfriendly act, then that Magellan and Faleiro wanted to return home but had been denied permission to leave Seville—a lie which, when exposed, resulted in the cold dismissal of the bumbling envoy. Nevertheless, attempts to sandbag the undertaking continued, and some of them were a nuisance. When Magellan began signing up crewmen, Sebastian Álvarez, Portugal’s consul on the spot, urged them to desert. He also spread vicious rumors; cornering the flota’s four Spanish captains, he whispered to them that their capitán-general was a double agent who planned to lower Spain’s colors, raise Portugal’s, and defect with the entire armada.
This ugly seed fell on fertile ground. Only one of the four was an experienced professional mariner; the other three were haughty young dons, Castilian courtiers held in high favor by their sovereign, resentful of their subordination to a foreigner. Thus the enterprise began to accumulate difficulties long before its five anchors were weighed. Because of Álvarez’s dirty tricks—he fed gossips tales that the mission was highly dangerous and the vessels unseaworthy—the recruitment of seamen bogged down. Those who finally signed on were the dregs of the waterfront: ragged, filthy, diseased drifters who babbled to one another in broken Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, English—even Arabic. Meddlesome officials of the port of Seville tried to reject the Portuguese among them, including several who were Magellan relatives; Duarte Barbosa, his brother-in-law; and Estevão Gomes, one of the ablest pilots in either Iberian country.
The capitán-general was thwarted again and again. He ordered equipment; it failed to arrive. Funds which had been promised by Carlos and his privy council miscarried. Magellan, his patience endless, successfully appealed to the king and royal agents. Finally he confronted the most intractable obstacle: his partner. Faleiro, who had never been to sea, insisted that they share a joint command. It was an impossible demand; had it been met, the ships would not have survived the first leg of their long journey. Precisely how the admiral deflected this challenge is unknown. Some accounts say that Faleiro was declared insane; others tell of an imperial edict appointing him commander of a second expedition, which never sailed. In any event, he turned his maps and astronomical tables over to Magellan, and the five bowsprits finally took the bone in their teeth on September 20, 1519, sailing westward before the wind, under taut sails bearing Spain’s royal cross of St. James.
The capitán-general watched the mainland recede in the wake of Trinidad—his flagship, or capitana. Then he opened an unsettling, last-minute dispatch from his father-in-law, relaying reports of a conspiracy between three of the Spanish noblemen. The leader was Juan de Cartagena, commander of San Antonio and an intimate of the bishop of Burgos, thought by some to be the bishop’s bastard. When the right moment arrived, Diego Barbosa had been told, Cartagena would give the signal for a mutiny.
BARBOSA was no alarmist. The hostility of the dons was real. One of them had precipitated a violent public row with Magellan before the fleet had even left Seville, and it is not unlikely that the
Magellan’s Armada de Molucca sails from Spain
Castilians had decided to get rid of him after he had disclosed his planned route. He had no choice but to take the warning seriously, and it provided the voyage’s first test of his leadership. His response was revealing, if not altogether reassuring. If patience and thoroughness were among his traits, so were an extraordinary passion for secrecy, insistence upon ruthless discipline, and determination to dominate his subordinates at any cost. To plot mutiny, if the report was true, was criminal, but the dons’ feelings of resentment were not. Nor were they unreasonable. As holders of royal commissions the officers rightly expected that, once at sea, they would be taken into their admiral’s confidence, provided with maps, informed of the course they would follow, and, most important, told the location of the all-important paso.
He told them nothing, gave them nothing. Resolving to force any revolt into the open but not to lose, he kept the Castilians at a safe distance. During the first, ten-week leg of the voyage, from Spain to Brazil, the other vessels were ordered to follow in the flagship’s wake. Late each afternoon a lantern was hung from Trinidad’s fantail. Under standing orders, they were required to keep it in sight, and when the lamp flashed a signal at sunset each day the four subordinate galleons—San Antonio (Cartagena), Concepción (Gaspar de Quesada), Santiago (Juan Serrano), and Victoria (Luis de Mendoza)—approached the flagship’s stern to receive orders for the three night watches.
The dons fumed. Cartagena, as senior captain and skipper of the fleet’s largest vessel, attempted to serve as their spokesman. He merely provoked a snub. The Spanish captains were baffled by their commander’s sailing direction. They had assumed that he would take them directly to the New World. Instead, when they reached 27 degrees north latitude, he changed their course. Now they were paralleling the African coast. He had an excellent reason for this. Before leaving Spain a reliable informant had brought him ominous news: Manuel of Portugal had sent two flotillas to intercept him. They would be lying athwart the direct route to Brazil. Magellan had decided to evade them; he would skirt Africa and then cross the Atlantic Narrows. Had he told his skippers that, they would have understood at once. But he was taciturn by nature and distrusted them anyway. So when Cartagena called out from his deck, asking where he was taking them, Magellan replied: “¡Que le siguiessen Y no pidiessen más cuenta!” (“Follow me and don’t ask questions!”)
Furious, the offended don answered this insult with one of his own. For three successive days he absented himself from the sunset ritual, remaining below and sending his quartermaster topside with instructions to address the fleet commander, not as capitán-general, which custom required, but merely as capitán. Magellan ignored the slight, feigning indifference, then called a meeting of all armada officers aboard the flagship. Again
Cartagena tried to question him; again the admiral disregarded him. He was deliberately inciting insubordination, and when he succeeded—when the young nobleman lost his temper and shouted that he would refuse to obey future orders—Magellan put him under arrest. He seized him, snapped, “Sed preso” (“You are my prisoner”), and turned him over to a nearby alguacil, or master-at-arms. Another Spanish officer, Antonio de Coca, replaced Cartagena on San Antonio’s quarterdeck. The other three Castilian officers stood mute and the moment passed. For the present, at least, the admiral’s authority as capitán-general had survived defiance.
On Tuesday, November 29, 1519, Trinidad’s lookout raised the Brazilian coast, and two weeks later the five ships sailed into the bay of Rio de Janeiro, discovered by the Portuguese eighteen years earlier. Although Magellan never confided in anyone, in Rio he held the first of his many talks with a member of the expedition, a youth who, after the voyage, was to become his biographer. Antonio Pigafetta was a member of the Venetian nobility who had come aboard representing the signory of Venice. Don Antonio’s mission was to observe and report home on the spice trade, but soon his chief interest, and his idol, was the capitán-general. In his diary he began entering copious descriptions of the admiral’s every move, noting, for example, that in Rio Magellan tasted pineapple for the first time and converted all the natives on shore to Christianity.
A world lit only by fire: the medieval mind and the Renaissance : portrait of an age Page 27