A Brief History of Circumnavigators

by Derek Wilson

  On 8 September she came slowly to her berth in Seville. The first task of Elcano and his men was to give thanks to God for their deliverance and to pray for their dead companions. Barefoot, haggard, most of them clad in tatters, they marched up from the harbour, carrying lighted candles, to the church of Santa Maria de la Victoria. One observer said that each one looked ‘more emaciated than any old worn-out hack horse’. There were eighteen of them. Another seventeen later returned from prison in the Moluccas and the Cape Verde Islands. Three million years earlier, human beings had appeared on this planet. Now the planet had been symbolically claimed by their descendants.

  In Seville and in their home towns and villages the returning mariners were received as heroes. Like astronauts in our own generation, they were men who had endured the unspeakable and seen the unimaginable, men with strange tales to tell to their wide-eyed neighbours. Elcano himself was summoned to the royal court at Valladolid, to be honoured by the king – but only after he had satisfied an official enquiry that the appalling loss of ships and men was not the result of bad leadership. In fact, neither the politicians nor the businessmen who had backed the expedition had cause for complaint. Spain had staked her claim to colonisation and trade in the Orient and the cargo brought back by the little Victoria more than made up for the losses of the other vessels. The fifty tons of cloves, cinnamon, mace, nutmegs and sandalwood were worth, ounce for ounce, more than gold in a Europe where the rich paid handsomely to acquire flavourings for insipid or over-salted food.

  Risk of capital is always better rewarded than risk of life and limb. Elcano’s recompense was modest. He was granted a royal pension of five hundred ducats a year (which, in fact, was never paid during his lifetime) and the right to a coat of arms. Appropriately, the shield was surmounted by a crest, incorporated in which was a terrestrial globe and the legend Primus Circumdedisti Me.

  And Ferdinand Magellan? He was forgotten. Neither in Portugal nor Spain was there any interest in a man who had sailed half-way round the world.

  * Despite the oddly precise numbering, Pigafetta almost certainly exaggerates. He certainly could not have known the strength of the enemy with such precision. It is, moreover, extremely unlikely that Magellan would, knowingly, have faced odds of 21 to 1.

  * There is no direct evidence that he reached the Moluccas in his service of the Portuguese king.3

  * The first European sighting of New Guinea was that of the Portuguese Antonio d’Abreu in 1512.

  † Later (1535), Faleiro’s ideas were published in the Tractado del Espheray del arte del marear: con el regemieto de las alturas: coalguas reglas nueuemete ascritas muy necessartas.

  * Keats’s On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer. Keats seems to have mistakenly believed that Cortes was the first conquistador to cross the Isthmus of Panama, according to this poem.

  * In fact islands were sighted twice – Pukapuka on 24 January and, probably, the Carolines on 4 February – but wind and tide prevented Magellan finding anchorage and he was obliged to leave these havens astern.

  2

  A PELICAN IN HER PIETY

  In whose half of the world did the Spice Islands lie? That was the question which remained to be resolved after the Magellan-Elcano voyage. Portugal and Spain now both had treaties proclaiming their overlordship. Each nation claimed that the Moluccas were situated on its side of the boundary line established by the Treaty of Tordesillas. In March 1524 a commission of lawyers, mariners and geographers met to resolve the matter. Juan Sebastian d’Elcano was among those presenting the Spanish case. After several sessions the commission broke up in disagreement and the free-for-all continued.

  Within weeks the ministers at Valladolid had resolved on a new expedition to retrace Magellan’s outward voyage, re-establish contact with the friendly princes of the East Indies, and reaffirm the treaty claims already made. A fleet of seven ships was fitted out and manned with 450 officers and men. Elcano was appointed second-in-command. Was it a testament to national ambition, or human avarice and folly, to ignore the immense cost in life and material of the first circumnavigation? Whatever the motivation, the voyage was a disaster. It was almost an exact re-run of Magellan’s expedition. Savage storms off Patagonia and through the Straits reduced the convoy to four vessels before it embarked on the Pacific crossing. Within days these had scattered, leaving individual captains to make their own decisions whether to go on or back. The flagship maintained its course across the empty ocean with men dying daily of fever, scurvy and malnutrition. On 30 July 1526 Elcano assumed command on the demise of the captain general. Five days later he, too, was dead. Leadership was destined to change hands three more times before Fernando de la Torre (who began the voyage as a mere man-at-arms) brought eight survivors back to Spain in 1536.

  That was the last attempt at a voyage of circumnavigation for half a century. This was not so much because men were frightened by the prospect. The human species has a remarkable resilience and European sailors continued to brave wide oceans in ships scarcely equal to the task. Nor was it because rulers were less inspired by greed or national rivalry. Spain and Portugal continued to compete for the Orient trade. The reason that no captains left Lisbon or Seville bent on a circuit of the globe was that neither of the leading maritime nations needed to go to such lengths. Portugal’s eastward route to India and the Spice Islands was well established. As for Spain, once she had secured control of the central American isthmus, she had no need to hazard men and ships in the storms and icy waters far to the south.

  It was Spain who took the initiative of exploring the Pacific from her bases on the American seaboard. The principal objective was to find a way of getting from Mexico to the Moluccas and back again. Thanks to the work of the pioneers, it was now quite possible to reach the Spice Islands across the South Sea but, in both of Elcano’s expeditions, some captains had tried to sail home eastwards from the Orient – and failed. In tackling this problem some Spanish mariners became involuntary circumnavigators. For example, in 1542 Ruy López de Villalobos set out from Mexico and reached Mindanao. It was he who named this group of islands the Philippines, after the heir to the Spanish throne (the future Philip II). Twice Villalobos tried to sail home to Central America. Twice his ships were driven back by contrary winds, by which time they were unfit for further service. If he was to get his men safe home there was only one course of action left open to him: he surrendered to the Portuguese at Tidore. Villalobos and some of his colleagues died in captivity. The survivors were eventually sent home on a returning Portuguese ship.

  The puzzle was not solved until 1565 Miguel López de Legazpi, sent out as first governor of the Philippines, despatched an expedition back to Mexico with Andrés de Urdaneta as pilot. Urdaneta was then an Augustinian friar in his fifties but forty years before he had travelled as Elcano’s page on the ill-fated voyage which resulted in the death of the first circumnavigator. Ever since then he had been a student of ocean winds and currents. Now he put his knowledge to good use. Taking advantage of the SW monsoons and the Japan current, he guided his ship, the San Pablo, into the zone of the summer westerlies. In four months he crossed the ocean from Cebu to Acapulco and brought the East within reach of Spain’s waving commercial tentacles. His successors never succeeded in wresting control of the spice trade from the Portuguese but they did establish through the Philippines a mercantile system which was just as profitable. It involved the exchange of Peruvian silver, for which there was a great demand in China, for silk and porcelain; which commanded high prices in Spain and the colonies.

  By the last decades of the sixteenth century Spain was operating a truly phenomenal transoceanic commerce based on the export of bullion from the Pacific ports of Peru and Mexico (New Spain). Tens of millions of pesos left Callao and Acapulco annually; some bound for Manila; the rest sent home to Seville via the isthmus. Nor was the Spanish quest for new sources of precious metal abandoned. The Incas had a legend about gold coming from ‘islands in the west’. Seve
ral expeditions were sent out in search of this new Eldorado. In 1568 Alvaro de Mendafia claimed to have located it. He called his newly discovered islands the Solomons, after the legendary wealthy king. Twenty-seven years later he returned to found a colony. It was a lamentable failure. No mines of gold or silver were discovered and the local people, not without cause, became hostile. Then the Solomons were ‘lost’. For almost two centuries no mariner, with the exception of another Spaniard, de Quiros, was able to locate them. Steadily these elusive islands grew into a legend. Mariners’ tales told of a land abounding in precious metals hidden somewhere in the vast expanse of the Great South Sea.

  But the majority of adventurous and avaricious seamen looked, not to the mythical Solomons for rich pickings, but to the loaded argosies plying the Atlantic and Pacific along Spain’s dangerously exposed and over-extended trade routes. Which brings us to the brave, rumbustious and not wholly admirable Francis Drake:

  He is low in stature, thick set and very robust. He has a fine countenance, is ruddy of complexion and has a fair beard . . . In one leg he has the ball of an arquebus that was shot at him in the Indies. He is a great mariner, the son and relative of seamen, and particularly of John Hawkins in whose company he was for a long time . . . Francis Drake read the psalms and preached . . . He also carried with him, from his country, a negro, named Diego, who spoke Spanish and English, and whom he had taken prisoner from a frigate in the North Sea [i.e. the Atlantic], near Nombre de Dios, about seven or eight years previously.1

  Thus was Francis Drake described by a Portuguese fellow mariner who sailed with him. He might also have added that Drake was fearless, ruthless and fierce in his hatred of Spain and Catholicism. In an age when religious apathy and toleration were virtually unheard of, this Devonshire seaman was aggressively Protestant. He was the son of a tenant farmer-turned-clergyman who had suffered at the hands of Catholic persecutors during the reign of ‘Bloody’ Mary. Young Francis was only seven when his family were harried from their home on the slopes of Dartmoor. During his teenage years and his early twenties he had opportunities to witness what can happen when religious fanaticism and political power go hand-in-hand. These were the years during which relations between Philip II’s Spain and Elizabeth I’s England were steadily deteriorating. Philip’s most sacred ambition was to restore the stubborn queen and her subjects to papal allegiance. Naturally, the leaders of the island race were determined to resist such pressures. But it was not only in matters religious that rivalry between the two nations manifested itself. England was experiencing a period of unprecedented maritime expansion. Her merchants and captains wanted access to overseas ports and markets and mounted a determined challenge to the Spanish and Portuguese monopolists.

  While England and Spain drifted into a state of undeclared war, the politicians on both sides, as politicians always do, protested their peaceful intentions. Diplomatic niceties were observed and there was a genuine reluctance, in London and Madrid, to become involved in the expense of open hostility. The seamen of both nations lacked both the sophistry and the stomach for such detachment. They were in the front line of the conflict, risking life and livelihood. Spanish colonists and shipowners suffered raids on their American settlements and piratical attacks on their homeward- bound convoys. English captains and supercargoes were afflicted with constant harassment by Spanish officials. Their vessels and goods were confiscated. A still worse fate awaited those who were arrested, for they might be handed over to the Holy Inquisition as heretics. In 1572, Morgan Gilbert, a former shipmate of Francis Drake, received two hundred lashes in an Inquisition dungeon and was sentenced to twenty years on the galleys. Others were tortured, imprisoned, even burned. Tennyson was not exaggerating when he described in The Revenge how Captain Richard Grenville delayed at the Azores to convey his sick men back aboard, despite the imminent arrival of a Spanish fleet. The poet goes on to express the feelings of the scurvy and fever-ridden crewmen:

  And they blessed him in their pain, that they were not left to Spain,

  To the thumbscrew and the stake for the glory of the Lord.

  Drake knew many men who had suffered at the hands of the Spaniards and, in 1568, he experienced at first hand the perfidy and brutality of Philip’s agents. He was sailing with his relative, John Hawkins, when the fleet, badly storm-battered, was forced to put in at the Caribbean island of San Juan de Ulua. While Hawkins’s men and ships were recuperating, a Spanish fleet arrived. The English admiral negotiated for permission to stay in port until his vessels were ready for sea and then to depart peacefully. The Spanish officials pretended friendship to lure the ‘heretics’ into a sense of false security, then massacred all the English sailors ashore and opened fire on their ships. Hawkins eventually escaped, to return home with two of the six ships and fifty of the four hundred men he had led out of port months before. That fearful day remained forever vivid in Francis Drake’s memory. Hatred of Spain and desire for revenge were, thenceforth, his overmastering passions.

  By 1577 he had perfected in his own mind a scheme that would strike a terrible blow at Spain and pour rich booty into the coffers of his avaricious queen. He would do what no other privateer-captain had ever attempted: he would lead an expedition through the Straits of Magellan and fall upon the unguarded and unsuspecting Spanish settlements along the Pacific seaboard. Having loaded his ships with loot, he would either return the way he had come or sail on along the American coast until he discovered the ‘Straits of Anian’, the north-west passage which, geographers insisted, lay to the north of the continent. The plan was presented to the queen and backed heavily by Drake’s friends at court. Elizabeth hesitated. For months she would neither forbid the enterprise nor sanction an expedition which would be highly provocative to her brother monarch in the Escorial.

  It was late July before she gave her consent to a venture officially described as a commercial operation bound for Alexandria. But Drake could not start out even then. He had to waste precious weeks in London sorting out the business end of the enterprise, drawing up contracts with backers who included merchants, courtiers and the queen, herself. Then it was posthaste to Plymouth to oversee personally the provisioning of ships and mustering of crews. By the time he was ready to sail the period of equinoctial gales had arrived, and that meant further delays. It was 15 November before Drake weighed anchor in the Pelican and led his little fleet out into the Sound. A fortnight later they were all back again, battered into harbour by Channel storms. Not until 13 December was Drake’s convoy of tiny ships able to escape the land and begin its historic voyage.

  Tiny they certainly were. The Pelican (100 tons) was about a hundred feet overall and twenty in the beam. Her consort, the Elizabeth, was a mere eighty tons. There was a store ship or canter named the Swan and a fifteen ton bark, Christopher, which was the fleet’s messenger, used for contact between the vessels, scouting out anchorages, searching for missing members of the convoy, etc. Last and least was the tiny merchantman Marigold which would prove unequal to the task and was probably only included because she was provided by the queen’s favourite, Sir Christopher Hatton. With this puny flotilla and a hundred and sixty-four men, Francis Drake set out to do battle, not only with the might of Spain, but also with the world’s most awesome expanses of ocean.

  He followed the now-established track of vessels bound for the Americas. Coasting the western seaboard of Saharan Africa, he called at the Cape Verde Islands for revictualling. There he had the first of many strokes of good fortune. Or perhaps one should not call it fortune. Drake was one of those bold, aggressive commanders who grabbed the slenderest of opportunities and turned every half chance into a triumph. Off the harbour of Praia he fell in with two Brazil-bound carracks. He captured one of them and went aboard to examine his prize. He found the Portuguese vessel laden with a variety of supplies for the colonists: wine, woollen cloth, velvet, swords – all valuable commodities to mariners facing a long voyage. The Mary, herself, was a well-found ship of 100 ton
s and a welcome addition to Drake’s fleet. But, most important of all, she was carrying a highly-experienced pilot, Nun a da Silva, a man who had made many voyages to the Americas, was very familiar with Atlantic winds and currents and conversant with stellar navigation in the southern hemisphere. Drake had no hesitation in kidnapping the little Portuguese, though he released all his comrades. With a prize crew aboard the Mary, the convoy sailed south-westward and the admiral took every opportunity of spending time with da Silva, comparing charts and rutters. He treated his captive well. Da Silva ate at Drake’s table, enjoyed the best accommodation available and, in general, had everything he wanted – except his freedom.

  The convoy wallowed through the Doldrums. For hours on end the sweating and idle mariners had nothing to do but grumble, quarrel and wish they were ashore. It was that sultry atmosphere that nurtured those rivalries and discontents that were to burgeon into the worst crisis of the voyage. The problem was the gentlemen and, in particular, their ringleader, Thomas Doughty. In the sixteenth century it was the custom for adventurous young men of wealth and influence to acquire berths on long-distance voyages. It was an opportunity to see the world, to dabble in trade and to enhance their reputations. Unfortunately, the presence of such idle coxcombs rarely did anything to enhance the smooth-running of the vessels to which they were assigned. On this expedition, as on many others, the relationship of the gentlemen to the officers was ambiguous. Doughty and his friends had a financial stake in the venture and powerful contacts at court. They were soon giving themselves airs and Drake, to some extent, acquiesced in their affectation. He was a snob and had the self-made man’s exaggerated respect for wealth and privilege. The gentlemen added a tone of culture and refinement to the enterprise which Drake found almost irresistible.