Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (9 page)

Of the food that Magellan took on at Seville, nearly four-fifths consisted of just two items, wine and hardtack. Wine was considered the most important; it was tax free, and an official was required to come aboard and make certain it had not soured or become contaminated. The wine was stored in casks, which were carefully maintained, and in pipes sealed with a cork and with pitch. These were meticulously stowed on board the ships according to a plan designed to maximize the use of the limited space below deck.

Hardtack, the other staple of the sailor’s execrable diet, consisted of coarse wheat flour, including the husk, kneaded with hot water (never cold), and cooked twice. The result, a tough, brittle biscuit known as
biscocho,
was stored for up to a month before it was sold. Inevitably, the hardtack degraded in the humid conditions at sea, and when it became soft, and rotten, and inedible, it was called
mazamorra;
the sailors boiled the stuff until it turned into a mush known as
calandra,
said to be so vile that even starving sailors refused it.

The ships also held flour stored in wooden barrels, to be kneaded with seawater and then grilled as a kind of tortilla, as well as meat, usually pork, bacon, ham, and especially salted beef. And some meat came on the hoof. The fleet carried seven cows and three pigs; they were slaughtered just before or just after departure; otherwise, they would have eaten their way through a considerable amount of valuable food. Their presence turned the ship into a floating barn, with an odor to match. Barrels of cheese, almonds in the shell, mustard, and casks of figs were also loaded on board the ships. As unlikely as it sounds, Magellan’s fleet carried fish—sardines, cod, anchovies, and tuna—all of it dried and salted. In expectation of catching fresh fish along their route, the ships’ holds included a generous amount of fishing line and a plentiful supply of hooks. There was little in the way of fresh vegetables; instead, the sailors consumed chickpeas, beans, rice, garlic, almonds, lentils. All fruit was preserved. Raisins, a particular favorite of the sailors, came in two varieties, “sun raisins,” dried in the open air, and “lye raisins,” boiled in a mild lye solution. Magellan also carried with him jelly and jam preserves, including a cider jam known as “diacitron.” The officers brought with them a delicacy in the form of preserved quince,
carne de membrillo,
a jam made from the small, hard, applelike fruit. As the voyage wore on, quince jelly would play a crucial role in the lives of the sailors, and Magellan’s as well.

There were casks filled with vinegar, which was used as a disinfectant both for the ships and for contaminated water. On rare occasions, starving sailors would add vinegar to rotting hardtack. Sugar and salt also had a place in the list of provisions. Salt was plentiful, and was used for preserving meat and fish through the voyage, while sugar was scarce. It was administered to sailors who had fallen ill, but not used in food. Honey, far cheaper, served as the universal sweetener. These provisions made for an unhealthy diet, high in salt, low in protein, and lacking vitamins that sailors needed to protect themselves against the rigors of the sea. Given the inadequacy and volatility of his food supply, it was no surprise that Magellan’s first thought on arriving at ports of call was replenishing his stock, and, along with it, his sailors’ health and morale.

D
isputes over the crew’s composition and pay bedeviled Magellan until the moment of the fleet’s departure from Seville. Three of his Spanish pilots demanded to be paid as much as the more experienced Portuguese pilots Magellan had retained, but King Charles refused, reminding them that they had already been richly rewarded with a full year’s pay in advance, free lodgings in Seville, and the prospect of knighthood.

The composition of the crew engendered greater controversy. Magellan was suspected of packing the roster with his countrymen, but the reality was that experienced Spanish seamen willing to enlist on the voyage were scarce, and so he was forced to include many foreigners. The Casa de Contratación decreed that Magellan must limit his entire crew to 235 men, including cabin boys. If he did not obey this constraint, the Casa sternly warned, the resulting “scandal or damage” would be blamed on him, “as it would any person who chooses to disobey a royal command.” When the armada’s roster, bloated with well-connected Spaniards, exceeded this number, the Casa stopped short of halting preparations, but it placed Magellan on warning. And when he hired no less than seventeen apprentice sailors, or
grumetes,
he was forced to let them go. He was reminded that key positions such as bookkeepers and bursars must be filled by Spaniards. Magellan protested that he had retained the services of only two Portuguese bursars, and he pleaded in writing with the Casa to allow the men he had enlisted to board the ships, regardless of nationality. If he could not have the crew he wanted, he insisted that he would abandon the expedition.

The Casa would not let matters rest there. On the day before the fleet’s departure from Seville, August 9, 1519, Magellan was summoned from his frantic last-minute preparations to testify that he had made every effort to hire Spanish officers and crew members rather than foreigners. He had, in fact, gone to great lengths to comply, and he swelled with pride as he delivered his sworn statement. “I proclaimed [through a town crier] in this city [Seville], in squares and markets and busy places and along the river that anyone— sailors, cabin boys, caulkers, carpenters, and other officers—who wished to join the Armada should contact me, the captain, or talk to the masters of the ship, and I also mentioned the salaries stipulated by the king. Sailors will receive 1,200
maravedís,
cabin boys 800
maravedís,
and pages 500
maravedís
every month, and carpenters and caulkers five ducats every month. None of the villagers born here wanted to join the Armada.” And that was the truth. Qualified sailors were rare in Seville, and qualified sailors willing to risk their lives on a voyage to the Spice Islands rarer still.

Desperate to recruit qualified crew members for the expedition, Magellan cast his net even further. He sent his master-at-arms to MÁlaga with a letter from the Casa de Contratación indicating the salaries and benefits those joining the Armada de Molucca would receive. Other officers fanned out to popular seaports such as Cádiz in search of willing hands, but those willing to risk their lives on a voyage into the unknown proved scarce. “I couldn’t find enough people,” Magellan explained, “so I accepted all the foreigners we needed, foreigners such as Greeks, and people from Venice, Genoa, Sicily, and France.” Although he did not say so, few Spanish seamen wanted to sail under a Portuguese captain.

As matters stood at the time of departure, Magellan had official permission to hire only a dozen Portuguese; in reality, he was taking nearly forty with him. At the last minute, he sacrificed three relatives whom he had quietly enlisted, one of whom was a pilot approved by the Casa, but he kept berths for at least two others: Álvaro de Mesquita, a relative on his mother’s side, and Cristóvão Rebêlo, his illegitimate son.

Magellan’s last-minute compromises on the composition of the crew placated the Casa, and the Captain General received final permission to proceed with his expedition. To guarantee this voyage, he had sacrificed his allegiance to his homeland, his partnership with Ruy Faleiro, and a considerable amount of his authority as Captain General, but he had kept his essential mission intact. After twelve months of painstaking preparation, the Armada de Molucca was at last ready to conquer the ocean.

J
ust before departure, the officers and crew of the five ships comprising the fleet attended a mass at Santa María de la
Victoria,
located in Triana, the sailors’ district.

During the ceremony, King Charles’s representative, Sancho Martínez de Leiva, presented Magellan with the royal flag as the Captain General knelt before a representation of the Virgin. This marked the first occasion that Charles had bestowed the royal colors on a non-Castilian. Magellan could only have felt that he was now invested with the king’s full trust.

Still kneeling, his head bent, Magellan swore that he was the king’s faithful servant, that he would fulfill all his obligations to guarantee the success of the expedition, and when he was finished, the captains repeated the oath and swore to obey Magellan and to follow him on his route, wherever it might lead.

Among those in attendance at Santa María de la
Victoria
that day was a Venetian scholar named Antonio Pigafetta who had spent long years in the service of Andrea Chiericati, an emissary of Pope Leo X. When the pope appointed Chiericati ambassador to King Charles, Pigafetta, who was about thirty years old at the time, followed the diplomat to Spain. By his own description, Pigafetta was a man of learning (he boasted of having “read many books”) and religious conviction, but he also had a thirst for adventure, or, as he put it, “a craving for experience and glory.”

Learning of Magellan’s expedition to the Spice Islands, he felt destiny calling, and excused himself from the diplomatic circles to seek out the renowned navigator, arriving in Seville in May 1519, in the midst of feverish preparations for the expedition. During the next several months, he helped to gather navigational instruments and ingratiated himself into Magellan’s trust. Pigafetta quickly came to idolize the Captain General, despite their differing nationalities, and was awestricken by the ambitiousness and danger of the mission. Nevertheless, Pigafetta decided he had to go along. Although he lacked experience at sea, he did have funds and impeccable papal credentials to recommend him. Accepting a salary of just 1,000
maravedís,
he joined the roster as a
sobrasaliente,
a supernumerary, receiving four months of his modest pay in advance.

Magellan, who left nothing to accident, had an assignment for Pigafetta; the young Italian diplomat was to keep a record of the voyage, not the dry, factual pilot’s log, but a more personal, anecdotal, and free-flowing account in the tradition of other popular travel works of the day; these included books by Magellan’s brother-in-law, Duarte Barbosa; Ludovico di Varthema, another Italian visitor to the Indies; and Marco Polo, the most celebrated Italian traveler of them all. Making no secret of his ambition to take his place in letters beside them, Pigafetta readily accepted the assignment. His loyalties belonged to Magellan alone, not to Cartagena or to any of the other officers. For Pigafetta, the Armada de Molucca was the tangible result of Magellan’s daring, and if the expedition succeeded, it would be the result of Magellan’s skill and God’s will—of that Pigafetta was quite certain.

From the moment the fleet left Seville, Pigafetta kept a diary of events that gradually evolved from a routine account of life at sea to a shockingly graphic and candid diary that serves as the best record of the voyage. He took his role as the expedition’s official chronicler seriously, and his account is bursting with botanical, linguistic, and anthropological detail. It is also a humane and compassionate record written in a distinctive voice, naïve yet cultivated, pious yet bawdy. Of the handful of genuine chronicles of foreign lands available at the time, only Pigafetta’s preserved moments of self-deprecation and humor; only his betrayed the realistic fears, joys, and ambivalence felt by the crew. His narrative anticipates a modern sensibility, in which self-doubt and revelation play roles. If Magellan was the expedition’s hero, its Don Quixote, a knight wandering the world in a foolish, vain, yet magnificent quest, Pigafetta can be considered its antihero, its Sancho Panza, steadfastly loyal to his master while casting a skeptical, mordant eye on the proceedings. His hunger for experience makes it possible to experience Magellan’s voyage as the sailors themselves experienced it, and to watch this extraordinary navigator straining against the limits of knowledge, his men’s loyalty, and his own stubborn nature.

Pigafetta was not the only diarist on the voyage. Francisco Albo,
Trinidad’s
pilot, kept a logbook, and some of the surviving sailors gave extensive interviews and depositions on their return to Spain, or wrote their own accounts from memory. The plethora of firsthand impressions of the voyage, combined with the fantastically detailed Spanish records, make it possible to re-create and understand it from a variety of perspectives, ranging from the deeply personal and casually anecdotal to the official and legalistic; royalty and ordinary seamen alike have their voices in this epic of discovery.

An important limitation governed all the accounts, varied as they are. They provide only the European perspective on a voyage that affected nations and cultures around the world, often profoundly. There is no testimony from the individuals whom Magellan’s fleet would visit. Occasionally, we can glean disturbing hints of the reactions of those whom the armada would visit, and what they thought of the intruders in their black ships, the men who had come from a great distance, men bearing gifts but also guns.

M
agellan’s departure deeply affected the fortunes of those he left behind. His wife, Beatriz, pregnant with their second child, lived quietly in the city under the protection of her father. She received a monthly stipend, as specified in Magellan’s contract, but she was, in fact, a hostage to the Spanish authorities. If word should reach Seville that Magellan had done anything untoward during the expedition, or exhibited disloyalty to King Charles, she would be the first person the king’s agents would seek out.

Although it seemed Magellan had placed his pregnant wife and young child at risk in the hostile environment of Seville, he did take elaborate precautions to ensure their future—and his own posthumous glory—in his will, dated August 24, 1519. Magellan knew from experience the risks of embarking on his voyage of discovery. He knew that each day of the voyage he would be at the mercy of forces he could scarcely contemplate, forces that only his fervent belief in God and unswerving loyalty to King Charles would be able to help him surmount. Although he coveted the renown and rewards of a successful voyage, he realized he might die far from home, in a part of the world that was still a blank on European maps. This knowledge imparted to his will a special weight and urgency.