But it took a lot to kill the capitán-general. A poisoned arrow struck his unarmored right foot; reaching down, he ripped it out and fought on. He and his embattled band were knee deep in surf now, showered by stones, sod, and spears—Pigafetta writes that the natives would retrieve the spears and hurl the same one five or six times. Twice Magellan’s helmet was knocked off; twice his men recovered and replaced it. Then he was speared in the face. Half blinded by his own blood, he slew his attacker with his lance, but the weight of the falling spearman wrenched the lance from his grip. Empty-handed, he started to draw his sword and found he couldn’t; an earlier wound had severed the muscles in his sword arm. Seeing him helpless, Lapulapu’s warriors closed in. All but four of Magellan’s men were dead. The survivors tried to cover him with their bucklers, but a native wielding a long terzado—a scimitar—slashed beneath the shields, laying Magellan’s game leg open. As he fell face downward in the water, Pigafetta, bleeding himself from an arrow, saw a dozen warriors “rush upon him with iron and bamboo spears and with their cutlasses, until they killed our mirror, our light and comfort, and our true guide.” Somehow Don Antonio, Enrique, and the two others fought free. “Beholding him dead,” Don Antonio writes, “we, being wounded, retreated as best we could to the boats, which were already pulling off.”
Nothing of Magellan’s person survived. That afternoon the grieving rajah-king, hoping to recover his remains, offered Mactan’s victorious chief a handsome ransom of copper and iron for them. Lapulapu was elated; he had not possessed so much wealth in his lifetime. However, he was unable to produce the body. He could not find it. He searched; accompanied by a delegation from
The death of Magellan
Cebu, he and his warriors carefully examined the shallow surf where Magellan had thrashed his last. The corpses of the other victims lay where they had fallen among the battlefield debris—arrows, discarded spears, fragments of armor—but that was all. None of the capitán-general’s parts turned up; no shred of flesh or tissue, no shard of bone. The only explanation, as inescapable as it is gruesome, is that Mactan’s defenders, in their murderous fever, literally tore him apart, and the sea, which had brought him so far, bore his blood away. Since his wife and child died in Seville before any member of the expedition could return to Spain, it seemed that every evidence of Ferdinand Magellan’s existence had vanished from the earth.
IT WAS ILLUSION. His life had ended, but his voyage had not. To be sure, its next few days were shaky. The magic nimbus which had clothed the Spaniards in glory was gone, as dead as their commander. The disgraceful behavior of the men who had fled to the boats, abandoning their leader, left an unpleasant aftertaste among Filipinos, but there was another reason for their disenchantment. After the chaplain’s memorial service for him, the armada’s prurient seamen, insensitive to their loss, continued to wear out their welcome by impregnating Filipino females. Long afterward one member of the armada’s crews, a Genoese, was asked why the Visayan people had turned against them. He replied: “Violation of the women was the main trouble.”
The revulsion was felt on all levels of native life. In a particularly striking act of backsliding, Cebu’s rajah reverted to paganism and deceit. On the Thursday following the tragic and pointless battle, Humabon, as he again called himself, sent a message to the fleet. Twenty-nine Spaniards—the best officers and most skillful pilots—were invited to dine ashore with him. According to Don Antonio, who declined to attend, two of the guests, growing suspicious, slipped away from the feast and returned to their ships. They had thereby saved their lives; the others, including Duarte Barbosa and Serrano, were cruelly slain. Terrified, the crews aboard Trinidad, Victoria, and Concepción fled with the tide, blindly groping their way through the archipelago. Off the Philippine island of Bohol, between Cebu and Mindanao, the three galleons became two. Concepción was leaking badly, and since there weren’t enough seamen to nurse her along—since its departure from Sanlúcar the flota had lost 150 men—she was set afire and sunk.
On November 6, 1521, after four months of wandering through the Indonesian islands, Victoria reached the Moluccas. There she was joined by Trinidad—Magellan’s flagship. But Trinidad would never again see European waters. She was on her last legs. It was not for lack of seamanship. Her captain now was Gómez de Espinosa, who had been Magellan’s point man in suppressing the San Julián mutiny nineteen months earlier. But Gómez was luckless now. After sailing northward to a point off Hokkaido—trying to reach Panama—the capitán-general’s old flagship was first driven south by high winds, then pursued by a Portuguese fleet. António de Brito, the fleet’s commander, had heard of Magellan’s expedition but not his death. He wanted to arrest him and clap him in irons. Finally cornering Trinidad in Ternate, in the Moluccas, he impounded her papers and stripped her of sails and gear. During a squall she “broke up,” Morison notes, “and became a total loss.” Brito’s report to Lisbon testifies to the cruelty of the age. He had beheaded one member of Trinidad’s crew—because the man was Portuguese, he declared, he was a deserter—and had considered putting all the ship’s complement to the sword. Instead, he wrote, “I detained them in Maluco because it is an unhealthy country, with the intention of having them die there.” Something like that happened; only four of Trinidad’s crewmen survived and eventually made it back to Europe.
Victoria, more fit, sailed homeward carrying twenty-six tons of spices in her hold. It was the expedition’s penultimate irony that her captain was Juan Sebastián del Cano, who, a year and a half earlier, had been among the leaders of the San Julián mutiny. He and his pilot, Francisco Albo, completed the expedition’s circling of the globe. They did it superbly. Unlike Magellan, they faced no unknown waters; the seas beyond their prow were familiar and charted. There was, however, a challenge of another sort. Because her sails bore the royal cross of Castile and Aragon, Victoria was a fair prize for the Portuguese, and Manuel’s empire had become so huge that Cano and Albo, sailing halfway round the world, had to avoid all ports of call in Malacca, the Indies, Africa, and Mozambique. The Cape Verde Islands—known as Ilhas do Cabo Verde since becoming part of the Portuguese royal domain in 1495—should also be avoided if at all possible. All hands, according to Pigafetta, took a vow to die rather than fall into the hands of the Portuguese (“Ma inanti determinamo tutti morir che andar in mano dei Portoghesi”).
For the pilot this meant plotting one long detour after another in a shaky, battered, worm-eaten ship reeking of decay; a listing wreck of groaning timbers taking in water from every seam, manned by sickly figures as they crept across the Indian Ocean, round the tip of Africa, and, in extremis, up Africa’s west coast—altogether, a voyage of 17,800 excruciating miles, the longest leg of the 39,300 miles covered by the expedition. * During their eight months of agony nineteen sailors perished. The crew was reduced to eighteen skeletal phantoms, all that remained of the 265 men who had left Spain three years earlier. After a hairbreadth escape from the Iberian enemy at Santiago, in the Cape Verde Islands—they pretended they were returning from America—lookouts sighted Cape St. Vincent on September 4, 1522. Victoria reached Sanlúcar four days later, and then ended the voyage in triumph, sailing up the Guadalquivir to Seville.
Long ago the Andalusians had given up the Armada de Molucca for lost. Now its survivors were hailed for achieving, in the words of one of their countrymen, “the most wonderful and greatest thing that has ever happened in the world since God created it.” Waterfront landsmen tried to fathom what the emaciated crewmen, calling down to them from Victoria’s decks, meant when they said that their cannons, now saluting the white bell tower of Seville’s La Giralda, had also been fired to celebrate the discoveries of Magellan’s Strait, the Pacific Ocean, and the Philippines. News of their return rapidly spread across the city, across Spain, across Europe. And now came the expedition’s final cruel irony. In Val-ladolid Charles V, having returned from the unpleasantness with Luther at Worms, was pleased to receive, and honor, the last command
er of the voyage’s last ship—a man who, had he had his way in Puerto San Julián on April 2, 1520, would have overthrown Magellan even before the fleet had reached the strait.
The canonization of Juan Sebastián del Cano arose from no misunderstanding. Over a year earlier San Antonio, conned by the treacherous Estevão Gomes and his partners in crime, had returned to Seville, where the authorities had convened a royal commission of inquiry. The renegades, assuming that the armada’s remaining vessels had sunk with the loss of all hands, had their tale ready. The gist of it was that they had sailed away from Magellan after discovering that he was planning to betray his command to the Portuguese. Believing it their duty to resist, they testified, they had saved San Antonio by overpowering its captain—Magellan’s cousin Álvaro de Mesquita—and returning home. Magellan’s discovery of the strait had been unmentioned. There was a vague reference to the expedition’s entering a bay (“entraron en una bahía”), but they had then sworn that his search for a paso had been futile (“inútil sin provecho”).
Unconvinced, the commissioners had withheld final judgment pending further news of the flota—meanwhile imprisoning, of all people, Captain Mesquita. Now that the truth was available to them, they released Mesquita and awarded him reparations. The doom of the traitors seemed certain. Logically, the next step should have been an investigation of the earlier mutiny, in which Cano had been their accomplice. It was never taken. He shielded them, and his word was enough, for tarnishing his new image was unthinkable. Castile’s powerful dons had faced a choice between lionizing the capitán-general and honoring the man who had brought the armada’s last ship home. They reached their decision swiftly. The leader of the expedition was now merely a dead Portuguese. Cano, on the other hand, was not only a Spaniard, and very much alive; he was also a member of a noble Basque family. Therefore it was his name, not Magellan’s, which was heard everywhere, exalted and aggrandized.
The emperor, displaying the same ineptness which had distinguished his imperial performance at Worms, directed the farce. Summoning Cano to his court, he knighted him, granted him an annual pension of five hundred gold ducats, and presented him with a meretricious coat of arms on which the inscription Primus circumdedisti me (Thou first circumnavigated me) encircled a globe—thereby giving him full credit for all the capitán-general’s achievements. What made all this particularly shameless was that Francisco Albo, whose logs contained the truth, and without whom Victoria could not have found safe harbor, had accompanied Cano to Valladolid. Afterward Antonio Pigafetta had also been received at the court; as a Venetian of noble birth, he could not be ignored. During the audience he had unwisely presented Charles with the holograph original of his shipboard diary. He never saw it again. Fortunately he had made a copy.
Magellan’s name, when it was mentioned at all, was spoken almost with disdain. Before sailing he had left a will, but none of its beneficiaries—the poor, prisoners, those in the care of monasteries and infirmaries—received a single Spanish maravedi. In Seville he was survived only by his father-in-law, Diego Barbosa, who, having lost two of his children and a grandson to Magellan, cursed the day he had met him. Cano’s advertisers seemed triumphant. It seems never to have occurred to them that history could not be so easily manipulated—that eventually Don Antonio, the other survivors, and the extant logs and records of the voyage would expose them, as in time they did. Nevertheless the most barefaced lies die hard when influence and prejudice have a vested interest in them. Even after true accounts of those three years had appeared and been verified, skepticism flourished. In Castile the feats of the world’s greatest explorer continued to be distorted. His accomplishments were belittled, attributed to others, or, as in the case of the evangelistic obsession which marked his last days, mocked. It was said of the Philippines that he had found them pagan, left them pagan, and by his blundering had assured that they would remain pagan. In Spain the memory of this cruel sally died long before the century ended. Priests in the islands, however, savor it as the culminating Magellan irony, for there the crude Madonna and child which he presented to Rajah Humabon’s first wife may still be found, reverently preserved, and there 60 million Filipinos—85 percent of the population—are Roman Catholics.
SOME TWENTY-FIVE degrees from the south celestial pole two luminous galaxies, easily visible to the naked eye, span the night sky. These companions of the Milky Way are the Magellanic Clouds, trails of glory which arouse awe, give the heavens grandeur, and testify to the immensity of the universe. So high are they that their distance can be grasped only by a mighty sweep of the imagination. A ray of starlight from there, traveling at its speed of over 186,291 miles per second—6 trillion miles a year—cannot become visible on earth for 80,000 years. Thus the illumination which was leaving the Clouds when Magellan emerged from his strait and crossed the Pacific will not reach this planet for another 795 centuries, a cosmic perspective which would have pleased him, as, say, the Magellan Project of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory would not. The capitán-general believed in divine mysteries. He would have had little patience with technologists who poach on territory sovereign to God.
He was not the wisest man of his time. Erasmus was. Neither was he the most gifted. That, surely, was Leonardo. But Magellan became what, as a child, he had yearned to be—the era’s greatest hero. The reason is intricate, but important to understand. Heroism is often confused with physical courage. In fact the two are very different. There was nothing heroic about Magellan’s death. He went into that last darkness a seasoned campaigner, accompanied by his own men, and he was completely fearless because as he drew his last breath he believed—indeed knew—that paradise was imminent. Similarly, the soldier who throws himself on a live grenade, surrendering his life to save his comrades, may be awarded the medal of honor. Nevertheless his deed, being impulsive, is actually unheroic. Such acts, no more reflective than the swift withdrawal of a blistered hand from a red-hot stove, are involuntary. Heroism is the exact opposite—always deliberate, never mindless.
Neither, if it is valor of the first water, may it be part of a group endeavor. All movements, including armies, provide their participants with such tremendous support that pursuit of common goals, despite great risk, is little more than ardent conformity. Indeed, the truly brave member is the man who repudiates the communal objective, challenging the rest of the group outright. Since no such discordant note was ever heard around the Round Table, young Magellan, in his enchantment with the tales of Arthur, Lancelot du Lac, and Gawain, was being gulled. It follows that generals, presidents—all leaders backed by blind masses—are seldom valiant, though interesting exceptions occasionally emerge. Politicians who defy their constituents over matters of principle, knowing they will be driven from office, qualify as heroic. So, to cite a rare military instance, did General MacArthur when, protesting endless casualty lists with no prospect of an armistice, he sacrificed his career and courted disgrace.
The hero acts alone, without encouragement, relying solely on conviction and his own inner resources. Shame does not discourage him; neither does obloquy. Indifferent to approval, reputation, wealth, or love, he cherishes only his personal sense of honor, which he permits no one else to judge. La Rochefoucauld, not always a cynic, wrote of him that he does “without witnesses what we would be capable of doing before everyone.” Guided by an inner gyroscope, he pursues his vision single-mindedly, undiscouraged by rejections, defeat, or even the prospect of imminent death. Few men can even comprehend such fortitude. Virtually all crave some external incentive: the appreciation of peers, the possibility of exculpation, the promise of retroactive affection, the hope of rewards, applause, decorations—of emotional reparations in some form. Because these longings are completely normal, only a man with towering strength of character can suppress them.
In the long lists of history it is difficult to find another figure whose heroism matches Magellan’s. For most sixteenth-century Europeans his Vorstellung—to circle the globe—was unima
ginable. To launch the pursuit of this vision, he had to turn his back on his own country, inviting charges of treason. His ships, when they were delivered to him, were unseaworthy. Before his departure Portuguese agents repeatedly tried, with some success, to sabotage his expedition. When he did sail, his hodgepodge crews couldn’t even communicate in the same tongue, and the background of the captains assigned to him almost guaranteed mutiny and treachery, which indeed followed. Unable even to confide in anyone else after his crushing disappointment at the Río de la Plata, he stubbornly continued his search for the strait he alone believed in, and when he had at last found it, deserters fled with his largest ship and the bulk of the fleet’s provisions. Of his other four vessels, three could not complete the voyage. During the armada’s crossing of the Pacific, an epic of fortitude, it was its commander’s inflexible will which fueled morale and stamina. His discovery of the Philippines dwarfed his original goal—the Moluccas—and he died trying to bring them into the modern age.
The shabby circumstances of his death are troubling, representing flagrant deviance from his code of conduct. They may be partly explained by his exhilaration after sailing around the world, and partly by the fact that, living in a God-ridden age, he was distorted by its imperatives. Yet the distortion in him was slight when measured against other chief figures of his time. The hands of contemporary popes, kings, and reformers were drenched with innocent blood. His were spotless. Granted that his misjudgments on Mactan were unworthy of him, the fact remains that few men have paid so high a price for their lapses. He lost not only his life, but, of even greater moment, the triumphant completion of his voyage and vindication in his time.
A world lit only by fire: the medieval mind and the Renaissance : portrait of an age Page 31