A World Lit Only by Fire (44 page)

By the second decade of the new century—the 1510s—Europe’s developing image of the Americas resembled an enormous jigsaw
puzzle whose pieces were rapidly falling into place. Commissioned by the English crown, John Cabot had explored the St. Lawrence
River. Others were mapping the east coast of North America from the Savannah River north to what is now Charleston. On April
2, 1513, Juan Ponce de León, pursuing the medieval dream of eternal youth, landed four hundred miles to the south. Naming
his discovery Florida (from
Pascua Florida
, Easter), he declared it to be Spanish territory. Other Spaniards claimed Argentina and explored the Gulf of Mexico, planting
their flag in the Yucatán Peninsula. Toward the end of the decade, Montezuma II made the capital error of cordially welcoming
Hernando Cortés, thereby sealing his fate as Mexico’s last Aztec emperor.

Although patriotic ardor burned in all these adventurers, their overarching goal had not changed. They were still looking
for the mysterious East. The unexpected appearance of the New World had merely whetted appetites. Columbus had been thoroughly
discredited by now, but the riddle remained: If the Americas were where the Orient was supposed to be, where was the Orient?
And what, exactly, lay beyond the newly found landmass? Their logs reveal that early in the century several of them had stumbled
close to the answer. In 1501 Rodrigo de Bastidas had explored Panama’s Atlantic coast. Late in the following year Columbus
himself, making his final Atlantic voyage, had been blown ashore on Panama’s isthmus. It was the worst storm in his experience;
his men, he wrote in his journal, “were so worn out that they longed for death to end their dreadful suffering.” Unaware that
the Pacific Ocean lay only forty miles away, he and his exhausted crews celebrated Christmas and the New Year in a harbor
near the eastern end of what later became the Panama Canal. Seven years later Spanish conquistadores actually founded a colony
at Darién. But they, too, failed to cross the narrow strip of land.

Vasco Núñez de Balboa did it. On September 25, 1513, the thirty-eight-year-old Balboa, a member of a Spanish expedition led
by Rodrigo de Bastidas, climbed his celebrated peak and beheld the vast Pacific below. Clambering down, he reached the shore
of the ocean four days later, christened it the South Sea (
El Mar del Sur
), and claimed it “and all its shores” for his sovereign. This was both extravagant and, in a way, impious; it defied the
Vatican policy set forth by Alexander VI after Columbus’s first voyage. The Borgia pope was partial to Spain, being Spanish
himself, but Portugal could not be denied her new empire; the Portuguese role in the explorations had been too great.

The pontiff therefore awarded the Portuguese all non-Christian lands east, and Spain all those west, of an imaginary north-south
line drawn 100 leagues west of the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands. This had infuriated England’s Henry VII, who, refusing
to recognize papal jurisdiction, vowed to build his own empire and designated Cabot as its first builder. For various reasons
Lisbon and Valladolid
^*
had also been dissatisfied. War between them appeared imminent. Then they negotiated the Treaty of Tordesillas, redrawing the line 270 leagues farther west. The pope’s
decision was accepted as valid for discoveries until then, but in the future the Spaniards could claim whatever they could
reach by sailing westward and the Portuguese what
they
could find sailing to the east. But this, too, was unsatisfactory. The negotiators had overlooked the fact that the world
was round. Eventually explorers from the two countries would meet. Thus the Moluccas—the Spice Islands—fell in a gray
area. Portugal had occupied them and claimed them, but Spain sulked. And everyone wanted them. To Ferdinand Magellan, the
dilemma represented opportunity.

Balboa claims the Pacific, 1513

D
URING THESE YEARS
of high excitement in the Americas, Magellan was a Portuguese soldier on the other side of the world, where Lisbon’s trade
was flourishing and men-at-arms like him were fighting to expand King Manuel’s colonial territories. Beginning in 1505 he
served there seven years, variously stationed in Africa, India, Malacca, and Mozambique. This was when Portugal broke Muslim
power in the Indian Ocean. By all accounts, Magellan repeatedly distinguished himself in combat and at sea.

In his idle hours, spent on the docks, he talked to Asian pilots and navigators from as far away as Okinawa, asking about
tides, winds, magnetic compass readings—the kind of information which, if they had kept records, would have been in their
rutters. Through this method he became as well informed about the Indonesian archipelago as any European seaman. But he was
equally interested in reports from the New World, particularly accounts of Balboa’s discovery. Like all European mariners,
he believed that the new sea west of Panama must be very small. The great question was how it could be reached by water —
where one could find what the Portuguese called
o braço do mar
and Spaniards
el paso
—a strait through which ships could pass from the Atlantic to El Mar del Sur beyond.

Repeated testing of the hemispheric land barrier had proved discouraging. The narrowness of the Panamanian isthmus was unmatched
elsewhere. From Labrador, at the sixtieth degree of north latitude, to at least lower Brazil, at the thirtieth degree of south
latitude, the Americas presented a solid, intimidating front of earth and stone. In the north the thousands of islands and
inlets above what is now the Canadian mainland raised hopes for a northwest passage, and in some breasts these hopes endured
for four centuries, until the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen threaded the countless straits between 1906 and 1909, only
to find that the freezing of sea lanes and other arctic conditions made the route impractical. Most navigators had written
off the north four centuries earlier, however. It was generally agreed that the break in the landmass, if there was one, must
be in the south. Yet searchers there had also been frustrated. Some early cartographers showed the southern continent extending
all the way to Antarctica.

That was more or less the situation on October 20, 1517, when the approximately forty-year-old Magellan, having renounced
his Portuguese nationality, arrived in Seville accompanied by several pilots and his Malayan slave Enrique. He had come to
offer his services to the Spanish crown. What befell him there resembles one of those Victorian morality tales in which Ragged
Dick or Faithful Fred reaches the teeming city, is bewildered by its chaos, foils scheming rogues bent upon exploiting him,
meets kind allies, survives a series of disappointments, and finally wins through by pluck and daring.

Magellan encountered no rogues then—they would come later—but Seville was certainly chaotic, especially within the Casa
de Contratación, the royal house of trade. It was there that merchants who were prepared to finance expeditions met captains
eager to lead them, there that the two bargained under supervision of the king’s magistrates, and there that the Portuguese
explorer headed. The hall was surrounded by taverns swarming with adventurers, pilots, and seasoned mariners, some of them
men who had sailed with Columbus, Côrte-Real, or John and Sebastian Cabot, and all of them bearing maps and plans guaranteed
to enrich their King Carlos, their sponsors, and, not incidentally, themselves. Magellan, in need of an ally, found one in
Diego Barbosa, a fellow Portuguese expatriate well acquainted with the Magellan family. Diego had served the Spanish crown
here for fourteen years. He took an instant liking to Magellan. So did his son Duarte, a mariner himself. Finally, Beatriz
Barbosa, the daughter of the family, fell in love with Magellan, and, after a brief courtship, became his bride.

Backed by his new relatives, Magellan approached the Casa de Contratación and formally presented the proposition which he
and Ruy Faleiro, a Portuguese astronomer, had drawn up in Lisbon. It envisaged a westward voyage halfway round the globe to
the Moluccas, the expedition to be led by him and funded by the Spanish crown, whose possessions the islands would then become.
A commission of three officials rejected the plan, but immediately after the hearing, one of the commissioners, Juan de Aranda,
sent word that he wished to see the petitioner in private. Aranda—the Casa’s
agente
, or factor—wanted to question Magellan further. Being a man of business, he was intrigued by the possibility of wresting
the Spice Islands from Portugal. After hearing further details he offered to sponsor Magellan’s application for royal support.
In return he expected one-eighth of the enterprise’s profits. That winter he carried on delicate negotiations with the chancellor
of Castile and enlisted the help of the monarch’s privy councillors. Meantime Magellan had written Faleiro, summoning him
to Spain.

E
ARLY IN THE FOLLOWING YEAR
King Carlos, with the approval of his privy council, received the partners at Valladolid. Magellan and Faleiro convinced
him that the Moluccas, the remote Indo-Pacific archipelago then known as the Spice Islands, lay on Spain’s side of the papal
line of demarcation. They also said that the Portuguese route there—through the Indian Ocean and the Sunda Sea—was needlessly
long. The islands, they explained, could be reached by a much shorter route from the west. To be sure, this meant penetrating
the American barrier from the south, but that could be done by sailing through a South American paso whose location was known
to them alone. Persuaded, Carlos pledged his support of the partners from Lisbon. He put it in writing; then, after knighting
Magellan, he appointed him capitán-general of what he christened the Armada de Molucca.

Thus the enterprise was launched—or so the record reads. Common sense, however, insists that there must have been more to
it than that. The new admiral had been only one of hundreds of supplicants in the Casa that day. He had succeeded where the
others had been turned away, not because he had charmed the Barbosas, Aranda, the king’s privy council, and the king himself
—his charm, by all accounts, was slight—but because he had struck them as an exceptionally qualified Portuguese captain
and navigator who knew precisely what he was doing.

His knowledge of the south seas was profound. Although he had never reached the Spice Islands, he had learned a great deal
about them from a friend, one Francisco Serrão, a Portuguese skipper who had been so smitten with the islands that he had
decided to spend the rest of his life there, fathering children and basking in the paradisaical climate. Serrão had written
long, lyrical, detailed letters describing the archipelago; Magellan had showed them to the Spaniards in Valladolid. It was
true, he conceded, that he had yet to sail in the waters of the Western Hemisphere. Yet he was knowledgeable about them. As
a Portuguese of noble blood with service in Africa, Asia, and the islands beyond, he had had access to Lisbon’s celebrated
Tesouraria (Treasury). There, before defecting to Spain, he had pored over the rutters, logs, and sailing directions of fellow
countrymen who had explored the Americas. Their accumulated knowledge was now his.