Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (14 page)

With the brief mutiny at an end, Magellan ordered the trumpets aboard the flagship to sound, alerting the other ships, and he announced that henceforth,
San Antonio
would be commanded by Antonio de Coca.

Stripped of his command, and having learned nothing from the experience of his failed mutiny, Cartagena grew intensely resentful of his inexperienced replacement. From that moment, he burned with desire for revenge against Magellan, no matter what the cost to the expedition, and as Fonseca’s son, Cartagena had power to make great trouble. Of all the perils that Magellan faced on the journey’s first leg, the greatest was Cartagena’s treachery.

W
ith Cartagena removed from power, at least temporarily, Magellan turned his attention to his long-delayed crossing of the Atlantic. For three weeks in late October and November, the fleet headed south, vainly awaiting favorable winds. At last the sails began to fill, and Magellan ordered the ships to set a southwesterly course toward Rio de Janeiro. Learning that
Concepción’s
pilot, João Lopes

Carvalho, had visited Rio several years before on an earlier expedition, Magellan brought him over to
Trinidad
to serve as pilot. To supplement Carvalho’s expertise, the Captain General carried with him a reliable, though not flawless, map of the Brazilian coast known as the Livro da Marinharia—the Book of the Sea. At about the same time, Francisco Albo began keeping a navigational log intended for use by those following in the wake of the Armada de Molucca.

Neither of these expert pilots knew of the South Equatorial Current, which carried the fleet west of its intended heading. Rather than Rio de Janeiro, the fleet raised Cape Saint Augustine on November 29. Here, Pigafetta relates, the fleet paused to take on fresh food and water, and quickly resumed following the Brazilian coast in search of Rio de Janeiro, as the best navigational minds aboard the ships puzzled over why they had veered off course. Albo recorded, “We arose in the morning to the right of St. Thomas, on a great mountain, and south slopes along the coast in the S.W. direction; and on this coast, at four leagues to sea, we found bottom at twenty-five fathoms, free from shoals; and the mountains are separated from one another, and have many reefs around them.” Finally, two weeks later, on December 13, 1519, the fleet entered the lush and gorgeous Bay of Saint Lucy and approached the mouth of the River of January—Rio de Janeiro.

Trinidad
went first, slipping past Sugar Loaf and coming quietly to anchor in the harbor. Magellan had arrived in the New World.

I
n the final days of 1499, Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, a Spanish mariner, first saw the coast of what would later be called Brazil. Pinzón explored the easternmost shores of Brazil and ventured into the mouth of the Amazon River, but Spain failed to maintain a settlement in the newly discovered wilderness. Months later, a Portuguese explorer named Pedro Álvares Cabral claimed the entire region—whose contours were poorly mapped and poorly understood—for his king and country. For tiny Portugal, hemmed in by the Atlantic and by Spain, the newly discovered land contained great commercial and psychological promise, but it lacked quantities of gold and spices. Unsure about how to exploit their find, the Portuguese became lackadaisical in the administration of the distant realm.

For ten years, the newly discovered land went by various names; not until 1511 did “Brazil” first appear on a map, and its origins are something of a mystery. The name might have derived from the Portuguese word
brasa,
meaning glowing coal, thought to resemble the color of the dark red wood that came to be prized by the Portuguese. Or it might have derived from “bresel wood,” which had been imported to Europe from India since the Middle Ages. The bright red wood was used for cabinets, violin bows, and dyeing. The newly discovered South American variety resembled the traditional Indian tree, but was easier and cheaper to obtain. No matter what its derivation, the name “Brazil” was slow to catch on. In his diary, Pigafetta called the land “Verzin,” derived from the Italian word for brazilwood.

The Portuguese bestowed a valuable brazilwood monopoly lasting ten years on an influential businessman, Fernão de Noronha, in exchange for large fees, and for a while commerce flourished under his management. The coast abounded in the trees; the Portuguese cut them down, sawed the trunks and branches into a manageable size, and stored the wood in a
feitoria,
or factory, until a ship came to collect and transport the valuable cargo back to Lisbon. (This activity had first brought
Concepción’s
pilot, João Lopes Carvalho, to Brazil in 1512, aboard a commercial Portuguese ship called
Bertoa.
The ship soon departed, but Carvalho remained to oversee the factory, a sojourn that lasted four years.)

The Portuguese dealings in brazilwood served as a model of how that country planned to exploit the natural resources of distant lands they claimed for their own. The most unpredictable part of the enterprise proved to be the transatlantic crossings, and even they became increasingly manageable as Portuguese navigators learned the winds and currents affecting their route. In practice, though, the brazilwood trade was too far-flung to administer with any coherence. The French were already helping themselves to brazilwood without interference. The unchallenged presence of the five ships comprising the Armada de Molucca in Brazil showed how porous and vulnerable the Portuguese “monopoly” actually was. Despite Brazil’s importance, the Portuguese did not maintain a permanent settlement there. A small abandoned customshouse served as the sole evidence of the Portuguese occupation. No Portuguese ships occupied the harbor when Magellan arrived, and he felt safe enough to drop anchor.

A
lthough this was his first visit to Brazil, Magellan was familiar with the brilliantly evocative descriptions of the land written by Amerigo Vespucci after his visit in 1502. In his words Brazil and its natural wonders were the closest approximation to Paradise that Magellan was likely to encounter during his entire voyage around the world. “This land is very delightful, and covered with an infinite number of green trees and very big ones which never lose their foliage, and through the year yield the sweetest aromatic perfumes and produce an infinite variety of fruit, gratifying to the taste and healthful to the body,” Vespucci reported. “And the fields produce herbs and flowers and many sweet and good roots, which are so marvelous . . . that I fancied myself to be near the terrestrial paradise.” Vespucci’s descriptions, for all their charm, were not the elaborately embellished creations of Sir John Mandeville; they were generally reliable accounts looking forward to the Age of Discovery rather than backward to the Age of Faith.

Discussing the region’s indigenous tribes, Vespucci wrote out of his own experience: “I tried very hard to understand their life and customs because for twenty-seven days I ate and slept with them.” He assembled a disturbing if tantalizing picture of the Indians whom Magellan and his crew would encounter in Rio de Janeiro: “They have no laws or faith, and live according to nature. They do not recognize the immortality of the soul, they have among them no private property, because everything is common; they have no boundaries of kingdoms and provinces, and no king! They obey nobody, each is lord unto himself; no justice, no gratitude, which to them is unnecessary because it is not part of their code.” Vespucci thrilled readers with gruesome accounts of the Indians’ customs. “These men are accustomed to bore holes in their lips and cheeks, and in these holes they place bones and stones; and don’t believe that they are little. Most of them have at least three holes and some seven and some nine, in which they place stones of green and white alabaster, and which are as large as a Catalan plum, which seems unnatural; they say they do this to appear more ferocious, an infinitely brutal thing.” Even more repugnant—yet fascinating to Vespucci—were their marital and sexual customs. “Their marriages are not with one woman but with as many as they like, and without much ceremony, and we have known someone who had ten women; they are jealous of them, and if it happens that one of these women is unfaithful, he punishes her and beats her.”

More troubling, the Indians practiced cannibalism and human sacrifice in the course of their battles. “They are a warlike people, and among them is much cruelty,” he warned. “Nor do they follow any tactics in their wars, except that they take counsel of old men; and when they fight they do so very cruelly, and that side which is lord of the battlefield bury their own, but the enemy dead they cut up and eat. Those whom they capture they take home as slaves, and if [they are] women, they sleep with them; if [they are] men, they marry them to their girls, and at certain times when diabolic fury comes over them they sacrifice the mother with all the children she has had, and with certain ceremonies kill and eat them, and they did the same to the said slaves and the children who were born of them.” Vespucci concluded, “One of their men confessed to me that he had eaten of the flesh of more of than 200 bodies, and this I believe for certain.”

Vespucci’s Indians were most likely representatives of the vast network of Guaraní tribes. At the time of Magellan’s arrival, there may have been as many as 400,000 Guaraní Indians, grouped by dialects. They occupied huge regions of South America extending all the way to the Andes, and lived communally in huts sheltering about a dozen families each; polygamy was not unknown to them, but it was not common. They were short—rarely more than five feet tall—and, by European standards, stout. The men wore a simple G-string and occasionally a headpiece made of feathers; the women were fully clothed. They were adept at pottery, wood carving, and skillful in their weapons of choice: the bow and arrow and the blowgun. The origin of the name Guaraní, by which they were known to the outside world, is unclear; they called themselves Abá, their word for “men.”

T
he arrival of the Armada de Molucca in Rio de Janeiro coincided

with heavy rains that ended a two-month drought in the region. “The day we arrived the rain began,” Pigafetta noted, “so that the people of the place said that we came from heaven and had brought the rain with us.” The sight of strange ships arriving in the harbor inspired benign rather than warlike feelings in the hearts of the Indians, as Pigafetta later learned. “They thought that the small boats of the ships were the children of the ships, and that the said ships gave birth to them when the boats were lowered to send the men hither and yon.”

Yet the Guaraní Indians disturbed Pigafetta as much as they had Vespucci. Pigafetta had no doubt that the Indians practiced cannibalism, and even contributed a story about the origins of the practice, “an established custom begun by an old woman who had but one son who was killed by his enemies.” Pigafetta continued, “Some days later, that old woman’s friends captured one of the company who had killed her son, and brought him to the place of her abode. She, seeing him and remembering her son, ran upon him like an infuriated bitch and bit him on one shoulder. Shortly afterward, he escaped to his own people, whom he told they had tried to eat him, showing them the marks on his shoulder.” The incident led to a never-ending cycle of attacks, followed by cannibalistic practices, or so Pigafetta claimed. He provided a gruesome description of how it had become part of everyday life: “They do not eat the bodies all at once, but everyone cuts off a piece, and carries it to his house, where he smokes it. Then, every week, he cuts off a small bit, which he eats thus smoked with his other food to remind him of his enemies.”

A
s Magellan’s ships came to rest, a throng of women—all of them naked and eager for contact with the sojourners—swam out to greet them. Deprived of the company of women for months, the sailors believed they had found an earthly paradise. Any fear they might have had of Indian cannibals melted in the flame of carnal pleasure.

Discovering that the women of Verzin were for sale, the sailors gladly exchanged their cheap German knives for sexual favors. Night after night on the beach the sailors and the Indian women drank, danced, and exchanged partners in moonlit orgies. But there were limits: “The men gave us one or two of their young daughters as slaves for one hatchet or one large knife, but they would not give us their wives in exchange for anything at all. The women will not shame their husbands under any considerations whatever, and as was told us, refuse to consent to their husbands by day, but only by night.” Even so, the sailors found it easy to take advantage of the women, and one of the women, in turn, tried to take advantage of the fleet.

“One day, a beautiful woman came to the flagship, where I was,” Pigafetta wrote, “for no other purpose than to seek what chance might offer. While there and waiting, she cast her eyes upon the master’s room, and saw a nail longer than one finger. Picking it up very delightedly and neatly, she thrust it between the lips of her vagina and, bending down low, immediately departed, the Captain General and I having seen the action.” The reason for the astonishing behavior was the great value the Guaraní Indians placed on metal objects such as nails, hammers, hooks, and mirrors, all of which were considered to be more valuable than gold, more valuable, perhaps, than life itself.

That was not the only disturbing incident involving these women. Under the strain of temptation, one of Magellan’s most trusted allies, Duarte Barbosa, who had offered critical assistance when Cartagena mutinied, all but lost his head in Rio de Janeiro. Falling under the women’s spell and envisioning a life of ease as a trader on these distant shores, he decided to desert the fleet. Magellan learned of the plan and intervened at the last minute, sending sailors to arrest Barbosa onshore and drag him back to the ships. The poor man spent the rest of the layover in Rio de Janeiro confined in fetters aboard his ship, gazing on the women and the selfindulgent life that Magellan—and duty—denied him.