Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (24 page)

Enraged, the other crew members retaliated with all their might. “Our men had crossbows and muskets, but they could never hit any of those people because they never stood in one place, but leapt hither and thither.” The weapons’ deafening roar scattered the giants, and when quiet returned to Port Saint Julian, the detachment sorrowfully buried their fallen colleague.

Magellan still held two Indians hostage, one aboard
Trinidad,
the other assigned to
San Antonio,
and despite his prohibition against passengers, slaves, or stowaways, he intended to present these two giants to King Charles.

T
he encounter between the European visitors and the Tehuelche Indians deteriorated drastically from its spirited and happy beginning. Conditioned by the fate of Solis and his crew, Magellan expected the Indians to bare their fangs eventually, no matter how sociable and benign their behavior seemed at first.

Yet his response to the Indians wavered. Had he considered them nothing more than cannibals, he would not have troubled to convert John to Christianity, nor would he have offered the new convert sacred texts, gifts far more valuable than any number of shiny mirrors, tinkling bells, and other trinkets. The paternoster was not given as a trick or as bribery, but as an attempt to forge a bond between the Indians and Europeans. The conversion strongly implied a measure of trust and respect between the two parties, as well as the expectation that John would abide by Christian standards of morality. Then, inexplicably, Magellan turned away from John and the other Indians. Perhaps it was the cache of weapons gnawing at Magellan’s sense of security. Perhaps he had difficulty accepting that his faith could embrace both Europeans and Indians. That startling possibility had existed ever since Columbus, who saw no contradiction between converting Indians and enslaving them; both methods caused them to submit to the will of Spain. Although he was a devout Catholic, Magellan had no policy concerning conversions, and nothing in his royal orders offered explicit guidance in this crucial matter. He was an admiral, not a missionary. His conversion of John seemed motivated more by personal conviction than by a preconceived plan.

O
n August 11, 1520, Magellan carried out the sentence he had proclaimed for his nemesis, Juan de Cartagena, and the priest, Pero Sánchez de la Reina, who had conspired with the Castilian captain. At Magellan’s order, both were marooned on a small island in sight of the ships. They had no longboat, no firewood, and scant clothing. Their supplies consisted mainly of bread and wine, enough to last them the summer, perhaps, but they would have to face the next winter in Port Saint Julian alone.

Magellan finally gave the command to weigh anchor on August 24. After the harrowing five-month layover in Port Saint Julian, the Armada de Molucca put to sea. During that interval, Magellan had endured violent storms, single-handedly defeated a seemingly insurmountable mutiny, lost
Santiago,
befriended and then antagonized the local population of Indians, and at the cost of several lives strengthened his command of the fleet. He had demonstrated that he could be as much of a trickster as Odysseus. Most important of all, he had survived, kept most of his fleet intact, and his men under his command.

Just before leaving, Magellan sent everyone ashore to attend a final religious observance. They confessed their sins, received the sacrament, and returned to the ships, humbled before their Maker, to whom they prayed to preserve their lives during the next phase of the journey. As they sailed away from the ill-starred Port Saint Julian, the crew believed the worst of their difficulties were behind them. They had been hardened by adversity, and if nothing else, they were determined to survive to the end of the voyage. The strait still eluded them but, God willing, they would find it, and reach the Spice Islands, and eventually return to Spain, where they would be rich enough to spend the rest of their lives in retirement. It was a fantastic dream, and their only hope of deliverance.

A
s the four remaining ships of the armada sailed into the open waters of the Atlantic, the abandoned conspirators, Cartagena and the priest, watched the spectacle from their island prison. The two condemned men kneeled at the water’s edge, crying and pleading for mercy as the ships grew smaller and finally vanished over the horizon.

C H A P T E R   V I I
Dragon's Tail

The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound!

T
he earth’s crust can be compared to a cracked eggshell consisting of tectonic plates that bump and grind against each other, forming our oceans and continents, creating earthquakes, moving mountains. Millions of years ago, two tectonic plates merged and created a unique landscape at the southernmost tip of South America, not far from the South Pole. Over time, the plate from the east smashed into the plate from the west, which slid underneath. As a result, the eastern sea is about fifteen hundred feet deep, but the western sea reaches depths of over fifteen thousand feet. The awkward juxtaposition of two plates formed distinctive features in the landscape; the western portion contains the southernmost extensions of the Andes Mountains, which attracts moisture, while the eastern part tends to be smoother and drier. This was the landscape awaiting the Armada de Molucca.

From the moment of their departure from Port Saint Julian, their journey southward was fraught with more difficulty. After two days at sea, as they approached the mouth of the Santa Cruz River, another storm engulfed them and threatened to drive them all ashore, where they would likely meet the same fate as unlucky
Santiago.
Magellan gave the order to enter the broad river, and there, sheltered from the worst of the winds, the fleet rode out the squall. After the storm passed, Magellan, with every fiber of his being, wanted to put to sea and resume the search for the strait. He gambled that if he could only survive the open water long enough to reach the strait, the channel would shelter the fleet from the storms that had plagued them for months. Yet the hazards of exploring the coast in August, as winter relented, remained overwhelming, even to Magellan, who was normally fearless. With the greatest reluctance, he decided to remain here until well into the subequatorial spring; then, and only then, would his ships have any chance of surviving at sea.

Magellan made the most of this enforced layover. For the next six weeks, the seamen busied themselves catching fish, drying and salting them, and stocking the ships. They ventured on land only to chop wood and haul it back to the ships. Occasionally, they made brief excursions to the southern shore of the Santa Cruz, where
Santiago.
had broken up, and salvaged whatever items the sea had thrown up on shore, mainly chests and barrels.

On October 11, a celestial event of singular importance occurred, as noted in all likelihood by San Martín, the fleet’s astronomer and astrologer: “An eclipse of the sun was awaited, which in this meridian should have occurred at eight minutes past ten in the morning. When the sun reached an altitude of 42½ degrees, it appeared to alter in brilliancy, and to change to a somber color, as if inflamed of a dull crimson, and this without any cloud intervening between ourselves and the solar body. . . .Its clearness appeared as it might in Castile in the months of July and August when they are burning the straw in the surrounding country.”

A
week later, on October 18, 1520, Magellan decided to risk the open sea again. He supposed, correctly, that the weather was as calm as it ever gets in this region. If the fleet faced more storms, his best hope was to seek shelter in a safe harbor, but he would pause no longer than necessary. He was months behind schedule—he had expected to approach the Spice Islands at about this time—and he yearned to make up for lost time. The fleet departed from the Santa Cruz River, tracing the undulating eastern coast of South America, with the Captain General in the grip of his obsession to find the strait.

Once again, foul weather bedeviled the ships, but it was not quite severe enough to drive them back. After two difficult days without any progress, the direction of the wind changed; now it came from the north, and the four ships plunged before the wind, leaving sharp, bubbling wakes and making rapid progress along a south-by-southwest course. Increasingly desperate to find the strait, Magellan scrutinized every inlet, hoping it might contain a hidden channel leading inland, but in each instance he was disappointed and continued his southerly course. Finally, he noticed a significant spit of land extending into open waters: a cape. As he approached, he made out a broad sandbank strewn with the skeletons of whales—a suggestion that he had come across a migration route, perhaps leading from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The gray water churned angrily where competing tides vied with one another, but the opening was wide, a league or more.

Vasquito Gallego, an apprentice Portuguese seaman aboard
Victoria
and the son of her pilot, recalled the gradual realization that the gaping break in the land might be more than a mere bay. “As the way became narrower, they thought it was a river,” he recalled, and then, with mounting excitement, recorded that the wide mouth turned into a narrows farther ahead. “Continuing that way, they found deep salt water and strong currents, appearing to be a strait and the mouth of a big gulf that might be discharging into it.” Magellan ordered his ships to sail into the gulf, and when they were well within its embrace, he saw it: the outlet leading west, just as he prayed it would.

Magellan had finally found his strait.

O
n October 21, Albo, the pilot, recorded the great event in his log: “We saw an opening like a bay, and it has at the entrance, on the right hand, a very long spit of sand, and the cape which we discovered before this spit is called the Cape of the [Eleven Thousand] Virgins, and the spit of sand is in 52 degrees latitude, 52½ longitude, and from the spit of sand to the other part there may be a matter of five leagues,” he observed. This is what he saw: a series of mounds, covered with tufts of grass, rising approximately 130 feet from the water. A later explorer described the cape as “three great mountains of sand that look like islands but are not.” There was no mistaking the strait for a bay or an inlet; a broad waterway cut deep into the impenetrable landmass along which the fleet had been sailing for months.

Pigafetta exulted at the sighting of the waterway. “After going and setting course to the fifty-second degree toward the said Antarctic Pole,” he wrote, “on the Festival of the Eleven Thousand Virgins, we found by miracle a strait which we called the Cape of the Eleven Thousand Virgins.” After all the ordeals suffered by the armada, the discovery of the strait did lay claim to being a miracle.

T
he Cape of the Eleven Thousand Virgins marks the entrance to the strait that Magellan had sought for more than two years. Precisely how he divined its existence has been the subject of debate ever since. He might have been aware of Lisboa’s expedition, which claimed to have found the strait, and he was certainly aware of maps depicting the mythical strait. According to Pigafetta, Magellan, while still in Portugal, had seen a map depicting or suggesting a strait cutting through South America, but what map had Magellan seen? “He knew where to sail to find a well-hidden strait,” Pigafetta declares, “which he saw depicted on a map in the treasury of Portugal, made by that excellent man, Martin de Boemia”—who was of course, Martin Behaim, who had created a state-of-the-art globe in 1492. (The earliest Pigafetta manuscripts employ the word
carta,
which could mean either a globe, a map, or a chart.)

It is often assumed that Behaim’s “well-painted globe,” which Magellan had displayed to King Charles and his advisers to persuade them to back his voyage, showed the strait; in fact, Behaim’s globe, or map, did no such thing. Instead, it showed a waterway cutting through eastern Asia and the island of “Seilan.” To add to the cartographic confusion, it positioned other Asian islands to the east of the strait. It is unlikely that Magellan would have employed this fanciful, wildly inaccurate representation to persuade King Charles of the existence of a strait cutting through the American continent; indeed, it is unlikely that Magellan ever saw the Behaim globe, despite the linkage of their names.

Pigafetta was inadvertently responsible for the case of mistaken identity; in all likelihood, he confused Behaim’s rendition with that of another Nuremberg mapmaker, Johannes Schöner, a professor of mathematics who produced two maps, one in 1515 and the other in 1520, close to the time Magellan was displaying a map to King Charles. To the nonspecialist, Schöner’s maps closely resembled Behaim’s, and Pigafetta could easily have mistaken one for the other, especially because Schöner did not sign his productions.

Schöner’s globe depicted a strait cutting through the American continent in the approximate location of the Isthmus of Panama— several thousand miles north of the actual strait. There is no conclusive evidence that Magellan saw this map, either, but it does demonstrate that cartographers were starting to include some sort of strait in South America, however poorly it was understood. If this was the map Magellan had in mind, it would have been nearly useless in trying to find the strait. Even the daring Schöner hesitated to depict the western coast of South America; it was, as he termed it,
terra ulterior incog.
—in other words, “the land that has been hitherto unknown.”

Everything to the west was also unknown. Schöner, like other cartographers of his era, shrank the immense Pacific into an enticingly small and apparently navigable gulf, a misunderstanding that resulted in Magellan’s conviction that he could reach the Spice Islands within weeks, if not days, after exiting the strait. And like other maps of the era, it placed China in close proximity to the American continent. Finally, Schöner’s globe placed the Spice Islands well within Spanish territory as defined by the line of demarcation, and this feature—again, wildly inaccurate—might have accounted for Magellan’s conviction that the Spice Islands legitimately belonged to Spain rather than Portugal.