Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (10 page)

In the will, Magellan left thousands of
maravedís
to various churches and religious orders, all of them in Seville, which he designated as his permanent home in this life and the next: “I desire that if I die in this city of Seville my body may be buried in the monastery of Santa María de la
Victoria
in Triana—ward and precinct of the city of Seville—in the grave set apart for me; and if I die on this said voyage, I desire that my body may be buried in a church dedicated to Our Lady, in the nearest spot at which death seize me and I die.” He proposed very specific and pious plans for his funeral rites: “And I desire that on the said day of my burial thirty masses may be said over my body—two
cantadas
and twentyeight
rezadas,
and that they shall offer for me the offering of the bread and wine and candles that my executors desire; And I desire that in the said monastery of Santa María de la
Victoria
a thirty-day mass may be said for my soul, and that the accustomed alms may be given therefor; and I desire that on the said day of my burial three poor men may be clothed—such as I have indicated to my executors—and that to each may be given a cloak of gray stuff, a shirt, and a pair of shoes, that they may pray to God for my soul; and I also desire that upon the said day of my burial food may be given to the said three paupers, and to twelve others, that they may pray for my soul.”

Magellan made certain that all acknowledged family members and retainers would be well taken care of. He specified that Beatriz’s entire dowry of 600,000
maravedís
be returned to her; that his illegitimate son, Cristóvão Rebêlo, whom he called “my page,” receive a legacy of 30,000
maravedís;
and that his slave, Enrique, be freed. Since Enrique, like Cristóvão, would accompany Magellan on the voyage to the Spice Islands, the terms of his freedom were of particular interest: “I declare and ordain as free and quit of every obligation of captivity, subjection, and slavery, my captured slave Enrique, mulatto, native of the city of Malacca, of the age of twenty-six years more or less, that from the day of my death thenceforward forever the said Enrique may be free and manumitted, and quit, exempt, and relieved of every obligation of slavery and subjection, and that he may act as he desires and thinks fit.”

All that, plus 10,000
maravedís.

Magellan envisioned leaving behind a great empire. He left to Rodrigo, “my legitimate son,” along with any other legitimate male heirs that he might have with Beatriz Barbosa, all the rights and titles King Charles had granted to him for the voyage to the Spice Islands; in other words, these children might grow up to find themselves the rulers of distant lands, administered by Spain, and very wealthy rulers at that. All that Magellan asked was that they give a portion of their income to their mother, making her a wealthy widow. And even if she remarried after Magellan’s death, “I desire that there be given and paid to her the sum of two thousand Spanish doubloons.”

The will covered every eventuality that might befall a great explorer such as Magellan—except what would actually occur once he set forth from Seville.

T
he Portuguese reacted bitterly to the imminent departure of the Armada de Molucca. King Manuel ordered the harassment of Magellan’s relatives who remained in their homeland. To make his dishonor public, vandals were sent to the family estate in Sabrosa; they tore the Magellan escutcheon from the gates and smashed it to the ground. Even young relatives of Magellan found themselves the object of derision and were stoned. Fearing for their lives, they fled the country. Francisco de Silva Téllez, who claimed to be Magellan’s nephew, eventually sought refuge in the Portuguese colony of Brazil, where he dictated instructions that suggest the depth of shame stirred by Magellan’s betrayal: “I order all my relatives and heirs to put no other stone nor shield of arms in my house . . . in Sabrosa because I want them forever effaced, in the same condition that our lord and King prescribed, as punishment of Ferdinand Magellan’s crime of moving to Castile.” Should others take up Magellan’s mantle, his nephew warned that he would refuse to acknowledge them “should I learn that they had entertained feelings and designs so base and ruinous to their families as befell my father and me, who felt compelled to leave our house out of shame and fear that our neighbors would attack us, as they justly could not suffer him who went against Portugal, his motherland, to serve the Castilians, our natural enemies.”

Abandoned, the Sabrosa estate fell into disrepair, and another house rose on the site. The stone that once held the Magellan escutcheon met with a special fate: It was covered with excrement.

C H A P T E R   I I I
Neverlands

And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he
Was tyrannous and strong:
He struck with his o’ertaking wings,
And chased us south along.

O
n the tenth of August,” Antonio Pigafetta recorded in his diary, “the fleet, having been furnished with all that was necessary for it and having in the five ships people of divers nations to the number of two hundred and thirty-seven in all, was ready to depart from . . . Seville, and firing all the artillery we set sail with the staysail only.” Pigafetta’s head count probably omitted about twenty crew members also on board the ships. Only Magellan remained behind, making last-minute provisioning arrangements; he would join the fleet shortly before its final departure from Spain.

To reach the Atlantic, the five ships, their colors set, negotiated the sinuous Guadalquivir River, whose hazards immediately tested the pilots’ abilities. Fed by rainwater in winter and melting snows in spring and summer, the Guadalquivir empties into the Gulf of Cádiz. The last forty miles, traversing a seemingly endless stretch of tidal marches known as Las Marismas, presented special perils. Hidden sandbanks, the hulls of shipwrecks, and shallow areas lurked beneath the river’s turbid waters, and occasionally these obstacles visited disaster on an expedition even before it reached the open sea. Pigafetta, new to the problems of navigation, suddenly became alert to the dangers of the Guadalquivir. “There was a bridge over the river by which one went to Seville, which bridge was in ruins, although two columns remained at the bottom of the water. Wherefore you must have practiced and expert men of the country to point out the proper channel for passing safely between these two columns, for fear of striking on them.”

Although defeated and driven from Spain, the Moors had left their indelible marks on the Spanish psyche, landscape, and bloodlines. “Going by this river we passed a place named Gioan de Farax, where there was a great settlement of Moors,” Pigafetta noted of one encampment. The Guadalquivir derived its very name from the Arabic original, Wadi al-Kabir, meaning “great river,” as the Arab rulers of the region designated it. And, as everyone aboard these ships knew, Moorish pirates still patrolled the Spanish coast, looking for ships laden with precious resources and, most of all, with weapons—ships like those of the Armada de Molucca.

A
week after leaving Seville, the fleet reached the snug coastal town of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, the final point of departure for the Ocean Sea. “You enter it on the west wind and depart from it on the east wind,” said Pigafetta, repeating the lore he recently learned. On arrival, the crew found a windswept seaport, seemingly poised on the edge of the world, and reverberating with a sense of adventure. Over the centuries, Sanlúcar de Barrameda had witnessed a succession of conquerors, from Roman to Arab to, most recently, King Alfonso X, who claimed it in 1264. In 1498, Christopher Columbus chose it as the departure point for his third voyage to the New World, and Magellan might have chosen the same port to announce that he planned to build on and outdo Columbus’s accomplishments.

Beyond the huddled town lay the churning waters of the Atlantic. To Magellan and his crew, the body of water was known simply as the Ocean Sea, believed to girdle the globe. At the sight of these seething green waters, every sailor’s pulse quickened; their lives depended on conquering this element. Many ships had departed from the Sanlúcar de Barrameda, and some had been fortunate enough to return from distant ports and newly discovered lands, but none had circumnavigated the entire world.

M
agellan took command of his fleet just before departure, and made sure that his sailors led a pious existence during what might be their last days on land. “A few days after, the Captain General went along the said river in his boat and the masters of other ships with him,” wrote Pigafetta, “and we remained for some days at the port to hear mass on land at a church named Our Lady of Barrameda near Sanlúcar, where the Captain General ordered all those of the fleet to confess themselves before going farther. In which he showed the way to others. Moreover he would not allow any woman, whoever she might be, to come onto the fleet and to the ships, for many good reasons.”

Magellan’s autocratic style extended beyond religious observance. To stifle dissent, Pigafetta writes, Magellan concealed the ultimate goal of the expedition from his rank-and-file sailors. “He did not wholly declare the voyage that he wished to make, lest the people from astonishment and fear refuse to accompany him on so long a voyage as he had in mind to undertake, in view of the great and violent storms of the Ocean Sea whither he would go.” The assertion needs clarification. As a Portuguese mariner, Magellan was accustomed to secrecy when it came to voyages of discovery; that was the Portuguese way. Yet everyone realized the fleet was bound for the Spice Islands; it was even called the Armada de Molucca. Perhaps Pigafetta meant that Magellan wished to keep his plan to find a strait—a waterway leading to the East—to himself until it was too late for disloyal crew members to desert. Inevitably, the plan meant trouble, because once the fleet encountered storms, then uncharted waters, and finally a search for an unknown strait, the men whom he had hoodwinked into coming along were likely to rise up in rebellion against him.

In the pages of his diary, Pigafetta confided another and far more troubling reason for Magellan’s unusual secrecy: “The masters and captains of the other ships of his company loved him not. I do not know the reason, unless it be that he, the Captain General, was Portuguese, and they were Spaniards and Castilians, which peoples have long borne ill-will and malevolence toward one another.”

T
o assert his authority over his resentful and contentious captains, Magellan gave strict sailing orders designed to reinforce his unquestioned authority. They were “good and honorable regulations,” in Pigafetta’s words, and consistent with procedures followed by other fleets of the era. “First, the said Captain General desired that his ship should go before the other ships and that the others should follow him; and to this end he carried by night on the poop of his ship a torch or burning fagot of wood, which they called a
farol,
that his ships should not lose him from sight. Sometimes he put a lantern, at other times a thick cord of lighted rushes, called a
trenche,
which was made of rushes soaked in water and beaten, then dried by the sun or by smoke.” If the flagship,
Trinidad,
signaled, the others were to reply; that way, Magellan could tell if his fleet was following him. “And when he wished to change course because the weather changed, or the wind was contrary, or he wanted to reduce speed, he had two lights shown. And if he wanted others to haul in a bonnet (which is a part of the sail attached to the mainsail), he showed three lights. Thus by three lights, even if the weather was good for sailing faster, he meant that the said bonnet be brought in, so that the mainsail could be sooner and more easily struck and furled when bad weather came on suddenly.” Four lights on
Trinidad
signaled that the other ships should strike sail. If the watchman suddenly discovered land, or even a reef, Magellan would display lights or fire a mortar.

Magellan set a traditional system of watches, an essential precaution. There were to be three: “the first at the beginning of the night, the second at midnight, and the third toward daybreak. . . . And every night the said watches were changed, that is to say, he who had made the first watch made on the morrow the second, and he who had made the second then made the third. And after this manner they changed every night. Then the Captain [General] ordered that his regulations, both for signals and watches, be strictly observed, that their voyage be made with greater safety.”

Magellan’s strict procedures demanded discipline from an inexperienced crew lacking respect for the Captain General. The most innocuous aspect of his standing orders—the requirement that all ships report to
Trinidad
at dusk—rankled the most because it demonstrated that Magellan, and no one else, served as the leader of the Armada de Molucca.

L
eaving the mouth of the Guadalquivir River on September 20, 1519, the five ships of the armada plunged into the Atlantic Ocean. Juan de Escalante de Mendoza, an experienced Spanish seaman, described the exhilaration and frenzy of sailing past Sanlúcar de Barrameda into the Atlantic. “When the hour had arrived in which they had to make sail,” he wrote, “the pilot ordered the men to raise all but one of the anchors and to attach the cable on the last anchor to the capstan . . . and with the yards and sails aloft, he ordered two apprentices to climb the foremast and stand ready to unfurl the sails when and as they were ordered and directed.” Amid the intricately choreographed flurry of activity aboard the ships, officers shouted orders, but their words at this crucial moment sounded more like prayers than commands. “And if the special pilot for the sandbar said that it was time to make sail, the ship’s pilot would call out the following to the two men aloft on the yard: ‘Ease the rope of the foresail, in the name of the Holy Trinity, Father, and Son, and Holy Spirit, three persons in one single true God, that they may be with us and give us good and safe voyage, and carry us and return us safely to our homes!’ ” With those words ringing in their ears, the sailors hauled the hemp ropes holding anchors, set the sails, and felt the breeze freshen against their faces. The ships picked up speed, and the coastline began to recede; there was no turning back now. It would sustain them all, or it would destroy them all. To reach his goal, Magellan would have to master both the great Ocean Sea and a sea of ignorance.