Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (11 page)

I
t was a dream as old as the imagination: a voyage to the ends of the earth. Yet until the Age of Discovery, it remained only a dream. At the time, Europe was deeply ignorant of the world at large. Magellan undertook his ambitious voyage in a world ruled by superstition, populated with strange and demonic creatures, and reverberating with a longing for religious redemption. To the average person, the world beyond Europe resembled the fantastic realms depicted in
The Thousand and One Nights,
a collection of tales including “The Seven Voyages of Sindbad the Sailor.” Going to sea was the most adventurous thing one could do, the Renaissance equivalent of becoming an astronaut, but the likelihood of death and disaster was far greater. These days, there are no undiscovered places on earth; in the age of the Global Positioning System, no one need get lost. But in the Age of Discovery, more than half the world was unexplored, unmapped, and misunderstood by Europeans. Mariners feared they could literally sail over the edge of world. They believed that sea monsters lurked in the briny depths, waiting to devour them. And when they crossed the equator, the ocean would boil and scald them to death.

Some of the most tenacious ideas about the world at large derived from Pliny the Elder, who died in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in
A.D.
79. His multivolume, encyclopedic
Natural History,
rediscovered and widely consulted in the Renaissance, sought to bring together everything that was known about the natural world: mountains, continents, flora and fauna.

Pliny’s chapters on humankind contained a potent mixture of fact and fantasy. He wrote of a tribe known as the Arimaspi, “a people known for having one eye in the middle of the forehead.” He confidently cited other classical authorities, such as Herodotus, who related tales of a “continual battle between the Arimaspi and griffins in the vicinity of the latter’s mines. The griffin is a type of wild beast with wings, as is commonly reported, which digs gold out of tunnels. The griffins guard the gold and the Arimaspi try to seize it, each with remarkable greed.” Pliny meant this vivid description literally, and while it might have generated some skepticism among naturalists of Magellan’s time, it was generally accepted as fact, as was Pliny’s curious description of “forest-dwellers who have their feet turned back behind their leg; they run with extraordinary speed and wander far and wide with the wild animals.” India offered particularly fertile ground for extraordinary creatures. Pliny evoked “men with dog’s heads who are covered with wild beasts’ skins; they bark instead of speaking and live by hunting and fowling, for which they use their nails.” At one time, says Pliny, over 120,000 of these hominids flourished throughout India.

Pliny assured his readers that wonders never ceased in the natural world; the result of his labors was a Ripley’s Believe-It-or-Not catalog tinged with the classics. “That women have changed into men is not a myth,” he wrote. “We find in historical records that . . . a girl at Casinum became a boy before her parents’ very eyes.” To emphasize his point, Pliny claimed to have firsthand knowledge of the phenomenon: “In Africa, I myself saw someone who became a man on his wedding-day.” There was more; he claimed that people in Eastern Europe had two sets of eyes, backward-facing heads, or no heads at all. In Africa, Pliny wrote, lived people who combined both sexes in one body, yet managed to reproduce; people who survived without eating; people with ears large enough to blanket their entire bodies; and people with equine feet. In India, he said, there were people with six hands. These marvelous accounts were subsequently retold by various respected chroniclers and widely credited up through Magellan’s time.

In the open waters of the ocean, lurked even more bizarre creatures, whales and sharks, six-foot-long lobsters and three-hundredfoot-long eels. Sailors had no way of telling which of Pliny’s descriptions were reliable, and which were fantasies.

They were just as ignorant about major landmasses. Only three continents were known to Europeans of the era—Europe, Asia, and Africa—although it was suspected that more would be discovered. The existence of an illusory island, Terra Australis, the South Land, was accepted as fact before and long after Magellan’s voyage. This landmass was said to lurk in the Southern Hemisphere, where its vast size supposedly counterbalanced the continents in the Northern Hemisphere. Highly schematic medieval maps depicted the three known continents as separated by two rivers, the Nile and the Don, as well as the Mediterranean, all of them surrounded by the great Ocean Sea, into which other seas and rivers flowed. This diagram resembled a
T
inside of an
O,
so medieval maps of this

genre are referred as “T in O” maps. To remain consistent with religious traditions, T in O maps located Jerusalem at dead center, with Paradise floating vaguely at the top. To complicate matters, Asia occupied the Northern Hemisphere of this map, with Europe and Africa sharing the Southern. In some versions of the medieval map, the Ocean Sea flowed out into space. One could not navigate with such maps, or locate points of the compass on it, or plot realistic routes; they offered a conceptual model rather than an actual representation. As such, they were utterly useless to Magellan. In 1513, only six years before Magellan undertook his circumnavigation, Juan Ponce de León set out to find the Fountain of Youth. Peter Martyr, another trusted authority of the Renaissance, described the Fountain of Youth as “a spring of running water of such marvelous virtue that the water thereof being drunk, perhaps with some diet, makes old men young again.” According to tradition, the fountain was located on the island of Bimini, in the Bahamas. On the strength of his reputation as a soldier, nobleman, and participant in Columbus’s second voyage to the New World, Ponce de León received a commission from King Ferdinand to claim Bimini for Spain. In a fruitless search, Ponce de León explored the Bahamas and Puerto Rico, but his failure to find the Fountain of Youth did not put the myth to rest. As late as 1601, the respected Spanish historian Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas wrote confidently about the fountain’s great efficacy in restoring youth and potency to aging men.

Although his quest seems fanciful and absurd today, Ponce de León was a man of his times. Superstition governed popular impressions, and even scholarly accounts, of the world at large. A work published in 1560 contained descriptions of various sea monsters infesting the oceans. One, known as the Whirlpool, was said to have a human countenance. Another, supposedly sighted in 1531, had hideous scaly skin. There were others: the Satyr of the Sea; the Rosmarus, which rivaled an elephant in size; and the wondrous Socolopendra, with its face of flames. Voyagers across the seas, especially those attempting to circumnavigate the globe, could expect to encounter all these creatures, and more, in the course of their journey.

E
ven educated people placed credence in fantastic realms on earth, for instance, the persistent belief in the existence of the kingdom of Prester John. It is difficult to overestimate the influence of this fabulous personage, Prester John (“Prester” is an archaic word for presbyter, or priest), on the European imagination during the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. He was part Christian ruler and part Kublai Khan. Despite an enormous number of inconsistencies and improbabilities in the details surrounding Prester John and his realm, his existence was widely believed in for several hundred years. In an era of violent conflict between Christianity and Islam, and unsuccessful Crusades, it was vastly reassuring to the faithful to believe that a sprawling and wealthy Christian outpost existed beyond Europe.

The legend originated in 1165 when a lengthy letter began to circulate among various Christian leaders; as time passed, the letter became more elaborate as anonymous authors added beguiling, utterly fantastic details; so great was its appeal that it became one of the most widely circulated and discussed documents of the Middle Ages, translated into French, German, Russian, Hebrew, English, among other languages, and with the introduction of movable type, it was reprinted in countless editions.

Addressed to Manuel, the Constantinopolitan emperor, and to Frederick, the emperor of the Romans, the letter read, “If you should wish to come here to our kingdom, we will place you in the highest and most exalted position in our household, and you may freely partake of all that we possess. Should you desire to return, you will go laden with treasures. If indeed you wish to know wherein consists our great power, then believe without doubting that I, Prester John, who reign supreme, exceed in riches, virtue, and power all creatures who dwell under heaven. Seventy-two kings pay tribute to me. I am a devout Christian and everywhere protect the Christians of our empire, nourishing them with alms.” As it continued, the letter became overtly symbolic, yet it was taken to be factual: “Our magnificence dominates the Three Indias, and extends to Farther India, where the body of St. Thomas the Apostle rests. It reaches through the desert toward the palace of the rising sun, and continues through the valley of the deserted Babylon close by the Tower of Babel.” By “India,” Prester John, or whoever wrote this missive, meant more than just the Indian subcontinent. During the Middle Ages, India was believed to include a good portion of northeastern Africa. It was an elastic term, and medieval geographers obeyed the convention that there were several Indias, some near, and some far.

Prester John described his kingdom as an enchanted realm, far more luxurious than European countries beaten down by war, plague, famine, and, among less memorialized miseries, the hardships inflicted by the Little Ice Age. In contrast, Prester John boasted of the wonders of his kingdom: “In our territories are found elephants, dromedaries, and camels, and almost every kind of beast that is under heaven. Honey flows in our land, and milk everywhere abounds. In one of our territories no poison can do harm and no noisy frog croaks, no scorpions are there, and no serpents creep through the grass. No venomous reptiles can exist there or use their deadly power. In one of the heathen provinces flows a river called the Physon, which, emerging from Paradise, winds and wanders through the entire province; and in it are found emeralds, sapphires, carbuncles, topazes, chrysolites, onyxes, beryls, sardonyxes, and many other precious stones.”

And there was much more; this mysterious religious leader claimed his dominion reached from Eastern Europe to India and contained satyrs, griffins, a phoenix, and other wonderful creatures. He lived, or so he said, in a palace without doors or windows, built of precious stones cemented with gold.

Prester John’s letter was actually written by imaginative monks toiling in anonymity, and the result begged to be read as a symbolic document, an allegory, or an expression of faith. Yet it was taken as a factual account and diplomatic initiative. Those who read the letter or heard about it wanted to know where Prester John actually lived. By 1177, the letter’s renown had grown to the point where Pope Alexander III issued a reply addressed to the “illustrious and magnificent king of the Indies and a beloved son of Christ,” and pilgrims went in search of the elusive Prester John.

Over time, the letter, like Pinocchio’s nose, grew and grew; copyists embellished the text, adding ingredients to Prester John’s domain. One important interpolation described spices in vivid detail: “In another of our provinces pepper is grown and gathered, to be exchanged for corn, grain, cloth, and leather”—which sounded plausible enough, but then the interpolation took an allegorical twist—“that district is thickly wooded and full of serpents, which are of great size and have two heads and horns like rams, and eyes which shine as brightly as lamps. When the pepper is ripe, all the people come from the surrounding countryside, bringing with them chaff, straw, and very dry wood with which they encircle the entire forest, and, when the wind blows strongly, they light fires inside and outside the forest, so that the serpents will be trapped. Thus the serpents perish in the fire, which burns very fiercely, except those which take shelter in their caves.” In the Age of Faith, the serpents were representative of the devil, which invades the Edenic garden of peppers, and which could be defeated only by the fire of faith.

G
enerous swaths of the Prester John letter found their way into the two most popular travel books of the Middle Ages:
The Travels of Marco Polo
and
The Travels of Sir John Mandeville,
lending credence to the travel accounts and to the Prester John legend.

Polo’s account, the earlier of the two, was written when he was a prisoner of war in Genoa in 1298 and 1299, with the help of a writer of romances known as Rustichello of Pisa. The son of a prominent Venetian merchant, Marco Polo had spent two decades in the East, traveling throughout the Mongol empire and China, and made it as far east as Burma. His father and uncle spent years in exile at the summer court of the Grand Khan, known as Shang-tu, whose kingdom served as the inspiration for Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Xanadu, and eventually they returned to Europe as the khan’s emissaries. Marco Polo had spent much of his youth in their company.

As might be expected of its co-authors,
The Travels of Marco Polo
is not strictly a travelog, and it is replete with inconsistencies. It has even been suggested that Marco Polo never made it to China, despite his apparently firsthand descriptions of that region. Why did he not mention the Great Wall, for instance, or tea? Although
Travels
included Polo’s experiences closer to home, enlivened with shrewd observations, the account was embellished with various wonders of the East, notably Prester John, which added to its readability and appeal, even as they compromised its claims to authenticity. To compound the problem, the manuscript was written in a FrenchItalian dialect that defied easy translation. Nor was there anything like a definitive text; over one hundred manuscripts, all of them different, were in circulation.