Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (17 page)

W
hy did sailors put up with it all? Why did the ordinary seamen trained officers abandon hearth and home to live amid these grim circumstances for years on end? Why did they endure starvation rations, the indignity and agony of the lash and the stocks, torment by vermin, thirst, sunstroke, and the lack of women? They went to sea for a variety of reasons, for glory and greed, for escape, out of habit, out of desperation, and through pure chance. To Juan de Escalante de Mendoza, the veteran Spanish mariner, sailors came in two varieties. “The first sort includes all those who commence to sail as a livelihood, such as poor men. . . . Seafaring is the most suit- able occupation they can find to sustain themselves, especially for those born in ports and maritime areas. This sort is the most numerous among mariners,” he noted. “Although they might want to be schooled for some other occupation, they do not have the disposition or the means to be able to do it.” So they went to sea because it was their livelihood, and in all likelihood their fathers’before them; because they knew the sea better than they knew land; because they could throw off the concerns of ordinary life; because, if they stayed home, they knew the dreary routines life held in store for them, whereas at sea anything could happen; because, if they

survived the ordeal of an ocean voyage, they would have a fund of stories to draw on for the rest of their lives; and finally because if they successfully smuggled even a small amount of gold or spices, they would have a nest egg to sustain them and their families against the vicissitudes of life.

Many of the men went to sea simply to escape. Some were fleeing jail, hanging, or torture; others were abandoning their families and responsibilities. Others were avoiding debtors’ prison; once they obtained a berth on a ship, they would be immune from arrest, safe for as long as they were at sea. Many sailors planned to desert their ships once they reached the fabled Indies, with their gold and women and luxury. For them, the Indies served, in Cervantes’s words, as “the shelter and refuge of Spain’s desperadoes, the church of the lawless, the safe haven of murderers, the native land and cover for cardsharps, the general lure for loose women, and the common deception of the many and the remedy of the particular few.”

I
n the late hours of January 10, 1520, a severe storm descended on the Armada de Molucca, forcing Magellan to seek shelter. He ordered the fleet to reverse course and head north, toward the shelter offered by Paranaguá Bay. During the journey to safety, fierce but erratic winds blew the fleet off course, and Magellan found himself in dangerously shallow waters. Before him stretched the mouth of the Río de la Plata, a funnel-shaped river located on the coast of what is now Argentina.

We know, though Magellan did not, that the Río de la Plata is fed by two important rivers, the Río Uruguay and the Río Paraná, whose headwaters originate in the Andes. Sailing into these shallow, sediment-rich waters, Magellan thought he might have been entering the waterway leading to Asia, but the weather frustrated his efforts at reconnaissance. The region’s climate is typical of the temperate middle latitudes. Dry winds, called
zondas,
swoop down from the Andes; when they combine with cold offshore currents in the Atlantic, the result can be coastal storms called
sudestadas,
and it was probably a robust
sudestada
that caused Magellan to turn back and seek shelter.

Magellan faced difficult choices. If he lowered sail and tried to ride out the storm, the winds might blow his helpless fleet onto the shoals, or even ashore, where disaster awaited. But if he attempted to enter the harbor under short sail, he might run aground in the shallow water. He chose to proceed north with extreme caution; he made sure to sound the waters, and learned to his relief that they were deep enough for his ships to pass unharmed.

When the storm finally relented, Magellan turned south again and returned to the Río de la Plata. Although many on board the fleet argued that the river led to the strait, Magellan remained skeptical. Still, he would have to conduct a careful surveillance, just in case. And even if there was no strait, they had at least found abundant provisions. During the next two weeks, the men took on water and caught fish, or rather, learned how to catch fish.

Y
ears before Magellan arrived at the Río de la Plata, both Spanish and Portuguese ships had searched for the strait at this very point. Antonio Galvão, who served as the Portuguese governor of the Moluccas, wrote about a “most rare and excellent map of the world, which was a great helpe to Don Henry (the Navigator) in his dis- couries.” In 1428, Galvão said, the king of Portugal’s eldest son made a journey through England, France, Germany, and Italy “from whence he brought a map of the world which had all the parts of the world and earth described. The Streight of Magelan was called in it the Dragon’s taile.” A dragon’s tail was a fitting image for the strait, suggesting that it was dangerous, sinuous, and possibly mythological. Columbus believed in its existence, too. That mystical explorer supposedly received a vision prior to his fourth voyage in which he saw a map depicting the strait. He never found it, of course.

In 1506, Ferdinand of Aragon and Philip I of Castile commissioned two explorers, Juan de Solis and Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, to undertake an expedition to determine the position of the line of demarcation and to find a strait to the Indies. Like Magellan, Solis was a skilled and ambitious Portuguese mariner who found a receptive patron in Spain, but quite unlike Magellan, he was a fugitive from justice who had fled to Spain after murdering his wife. The Solis-Pinzón expedition, which embarked in 1508, discovered nothing, and when the expedition’s two ships returned to Spain, an enraged and disappointed King Ferdinand clapped Solis in jail.

Two years later, in 1512, Solis, deftly manipulating the levers of influence, rehabilitated himself, and King Ferdinand made him pilot major; he then received an ambitious new commission to claim the Spice Islands for Spain. When King Manuel of Portugal protested, Ferdinand, shading the truth a bit, explained that Solis’s task was simply to find the line of demarcation, and nothing more. Soon after, Ferdinand canceled the expedition, but he sent word to his representatives in the Caribbean to look for any sign of a strait and to arrest any Portuguese ships that might be searching for the same thing. Sure enough, the authorities in that distant outpost of the Spanish empire found a Portuguese caravel that had wandered into the Caribbean. She turned out to be a ship filled with secrets.

In 1511, Cristóbal de Haro had backed a covert Portuguese expedition to Brazil. The fleet consisted of two caravels commanded by Estêvão Froes and João de Lisboa. The Spanish knew nothing of the expedition until Froes’s ship arrived in the Caribbean for repairs before heading northeast across the Atlantic to Portugal. The Spanish authorities seized the crew and threw them into jail. Meanwhile, the other ship returned to Spain, where Lisboa revealed his discoveries to an agent of his financiers, the Fuggers of Germany. After that, Lisboa’s secrets gradually became public knowledge.

In 1514, a published account of Lisboa’s exploits surfaced in Germany.
Newen Zeytung auss Presillg Landt,
or “News from the Land of Brazil,” as the broadsheet was called, indicated that Lisboa had ventured seven hundred miles farther south than any prior expedition. According to this account, the expedition came to a strait, entered it, and sailed west until violent storms forced the ships to turn back. Lisboa might even have navigated the strait all the way to the Pacific. Although incomplete, the description of Lisboa’s clandestine voyage was consistent with the strait that Magellan eventually explored. In Spain and Portugal, mariners and cosmographers alike seized on this remarkable document.

At the same time, a report circulated throughout Spain that Vasco Núñez de Balboa had glimpsed the vast ocean to the west: the Pacific. Within months of hearing the news, King Ferdinand once again sent Juan de Solis to find the strait, or, as
El Rey
put it, “to discover the back parts of Golden Castile.” The strait, according to the best information of the day, ran through what is now Panama. The expedition, consisting of three ships and seventy men, embarked on October 8, 1515. Solis reached South America, sailed along its coast, and spotted a tribe that seemed friendly, at least from a distance. In good spirits, he went ashore with a landing party of seven men to greet them. The best record of what befell the explorers comes from the pen of Peter Martyr, writing close to the time of the events. Martyr’s account, in Latin, was translated into English in 1555 by Richard Eden, a Cambridge-educated scholar, in his best-known work,
The Decades of the Newe Worlde or West India, Conteyning the Navigations and Conquestes of the Spanyards, with the Particular Description of the most Rych and Large Landes and Islandes lately Founde in the West Ocean.
In this popular work, he recorded the appalling turn of events in robust language:

Sodenly a great multitude of the inhabitants burst forth upon them, and slue them every man with clubbes, even in the sight of their fellows, not one escaping. Their furie not thus satisfied, they cut the slayne men in peeces, even upon the shore, where their fellows might behold this horrible spectacle from the sea. But they being stricken with feare through this example, durst not come forth of their shippes, or devise how to revenge the death of their Captayne and companions. They departed therefore from these unfortunate coastes, and . . . returned home agayne with losse, and heavie cheare.

It became part of the lore of the expedition that the unfortunate Europeans had not merely been killed but devoured as their shipmates looked on helplessly.

M
agellan’s crew displayed considerable courage, even foolhardiness, when they confronted Indians in the region where Solis had met disaster. Magellan dispatched not one but three longboats. The men were armed, which gave them an advantage, but otherwise at the mercy of the indigenous people of the river basin. No sooner had the boats landed than the men jumped into the surf and chased the Indians observing them. Rather than standing and fighting, the Indians simply outran them. “They made such enormous strides that with all our running and jumping we could not overtake them,” Pigafetta noted.

That night, a large canoe left the shore and approached the
Trinidad.
Standing upright in the middle of the vessel was an Indian covered with animal skins, apparently a chief. As the canoe drew close, the men aboard the flagship noticed that he exhibited no sign of fear. He indicated that he wished to come aboard, and Magellan agreed.

When they were face to face, Magellan offered the Indian two gifts, a shirt and a jersey. The Captain General then displayed a piece of metal, hoping to learn if the Indian was familiar with it. Recognizing the object, the Indian indicated that his tribe possessed some form of metal. Assuming the Indian would leap at the chance to obtain more, Magellan expected to barter metal objects such as bells and scissors for food and scouting assistance, but after the Indian left
Trinidad,
he never returned. The fleeting encounter with the indifferent tribal leader baffled Magellan and his officers. If they were received well, the sailors were ready for orgies, and the priests for conversions; if they were attacked, they were ready for battle. But they were not prepared to be ignored.

D
uring the fleet’s layover, Magellan constantly sounded the of the Río de la Plata, hoping that the water would swallow the lead, indicating that he had found the strait, but the stream remained precariously shallow. A channel or a strait would be deeper, he reasoned, and its current would run faster.

Unwilling to commit the entire fleet to the river, he dispatched
Santiago,
the smallest ship, and the one with the shallowest draught, to explore its murky and seductive reaches.
Santiago.
spent two days sailing upstream, constantly sounding the river, trying to avoid running aground.

Magellan meanwhile temporarily abandoned the flagship,
Trinidad,
to explore the waterway for himself aboard
Santiago.
At no point was the river deeper than three fathoms, too shallow for the ships to pass safely, and too shallow to suggest that it was a strait running all the way to Asia and the Spice Islands. Despite the many indications that they had found nothing but a large river, the other captains held fast to the belief that the Río de la Plata would lead them to the Indies, and they urged Magellan not to abandon his reconnaissance. But he had made up his mind to turn back, and once Magellan decided on a course of action, nothing could deter him. By the end of January, Magellan gave up and reversed direction, now facing directly into winds that made his return to the coast slow and erratic.

O
n February 3, 1520, the fleet resumed its southward course in search of the real strait—if it existed—but
San Antonio
was found to be leaking badly. Within two days, the leak was repaired, and the Armada de Molucca rounded what is now known as Cape Corrientes.

Magellan adopted measures to ensure that he did not sail past the strait for which he was searching. He dropped anchor at night and resumed sailing in the morning as close to shore as he dared, always on the lookout for any formation suggesting a strait. As they ventured toward 40 degrees latitude, passing along the eastern coast of what is now Argentina, the weather steadily turned colder, a warning of the discomfort and hazards that awaited them. Their deliverance from the brisk days and frigid nights at sea would come only in the form of the strait, if such a strait existed, but it proved maddeningly elusive. Without realizing it, they were heading into latitudes notorious for sudden, frequent, and violent squalls, and on February 13, they ran into another storm, tossing the boats, damaging
Victoria’s
keel, and terrifying the sailors with thunder and lightning and torrential downpours. When the storm finally blew itself out, Saint Elmo’s fire once again appeared on the masts of the flagship, lighting the way, reassuring the sailors that they enjoyed divine protection.