The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  III

  Charles agreed to send five ships under Magellan’s command in search of the passage to Asia. When they set out from Seville in 1519 they carried a motley crew of 260 men that included forty Basque sailors, among them the future commander, Elcano, although there were also Portuguese, black Africans, Germans, Frenchmen, Flemings, Irishmen, Italians and Greeks, as well as a single Englishman, Andrew of Bristol, who was chief gunner, plus Magellan’s Sumatran servant, Enrique.14 The identity of the crew serves as a reminder that the voyages of discovery were not simply the work of Portuguese, Castilians and the occasional Italian. But aboard Magellan’s ships was one of those occasional Italians: a patrician from Vicenza, Antonio Pigafetta, signed up as a passenger, adding his name to the list of curious Italians who were prepared to risk their lives to see unknown parts of the world, a successor to Vespucci and Varthema. He wrote an account of the entire voyage, which remains the principal source of knowledge about what happened.15 He was a great admirer of Magellan, which skews his account in one direction; but he survived the entire voyage, carrying on westwards under the command of Elcano, whom he disliked so much that he never even mentioned him by name in his narrative.

  The challenge Magellan faced was not simply that of keeping a hostile crew (Pigafetta apart) under control; nor was it simply that of finding an unknown passage to India. He also needed to sail clear of his own compatriots, for Portuguese patrols were looking out for Spanish and other interlopers, and news of his plans had infuriated the Portuguese court, even if King Manuel had never believed in Magellan’s scheme. The journey across the Atlantic followed a peculiar route, staying close to the Guinea shore in worryingly calm waters before the ships were tossed about in November storms as they attempted to reach South America. Magellan’s unorthodox route down the African coast irritated his Spanish officers, who had expected to strike out for the New World from Spanish-controlled Tenerife. The lack of trust between them and Magellan was a constant problem, fed by the traditional dislike of Castilians for their Portuguese neighbours. There was some comfort in the safe arrival of the little fleet off Rio de Janeiro in December 1519, which was high summer in the southern hemisphere, but lack of faith in Magellan’s abilities revived when the estuary of the River Plate was decisively shown not to offer a route through South America to Asia. Travelling south from there in February 1520 the ships met late summer storms, and the slower they progressed the greater became the danger that food supplies would be exhausted. The crew were put on short rations. The officers demanded that Magellan should keep them properly informed about what route he planned to take. The frustration of blindly following orders without knowing the why and the wherefore of Magellan’s decisions undermined still further their belief in his abilities.

  All this led to mutiny, with Elcano among those condemned to death, though in due course he was pardoned and even promoted.16 Magellan was perfectly well aware that he could not execute forty of his own crew as mutineers. The main punishment was symbolic; the mutinous captain of the ship Victoria had already been killed in fighting between Magellan’s supporters and the mutineers. His body was hung upside down from the yardarm as a warning to all who dreamed of opposing the admiral. The rebellion gave Magellan the excuse to appoint Portuguese officers to the command of his ships – one of them, João Serrão, was the brother or cousin of his old friend Francisco Serrão, who had ended up as vizier of the sultan of Ternate, and whom Magellan was determined to meet when he reached the Spice Islands. Pigafetta, meanwhile, was fascinated by the Patagonian ‘giants’ whom the sailors met as they penetrated further and further south. Their ability to live almost naked in such a cold climate was only one of their remarkable features; tall and thin, the Patagonians had adapted well to the cold, since their body surface was actually smaller than that of the more compact but relatively tubby population further north. Their willingness to eat rats found on board ship, unskinned, surprised and rather disgusted the explorers.17

  The greatest challenge of all, however, came when Magellan’s fleet reached the strait that he correctly identified as a passage through the southern tip of South America, later known as the Strait of Magellan. Pigafetta claimed that Magellan knew all about the strait already because he had seen a chart in the treasury of the king of Portugal made by ‘Martin of Bohemia’, who must be Martin Behaim, the creator of the globe made in around 1492 that still survives in Nuremberg and does not show any part of America. Behaim died in Lisbon in 1507, so Magellan may well have met him. However, a German globe of 1515 did speculatively include a channel between South America and a great southern continent. This globe was created by Johannes Schöner, who, like Behaim, hailed from Nuremberg; it also included a channel between North and South America and placed Japan only a few degrees west of America.18 It was not obvious to Magellan that the land on his southern quarter, which became known as Tierra del Fuego (owing to the fires he saw there, possibly lit by Patagonian inhabitants), was simply a medium-sized island that ended at a great cape, Cape Horn. To him it seemed to be another vast landmass. This idea persisted, so that the first world map of the famous cartographer Mercator, of 1538, marked the Magellan Strait as the channel between two continents, one of which, the Terra Australis, covered the entire southern tip of the world, like a great enlarged Antarctica.19

  Navigating these stormy waters, through channels that led in different directions, and that were constantly buffeted by the so-called williwaw winds, cold blasts that seemed to explode from nowhere, depended on a combination of intuition and luck, and one of his captains decided to turn back to Spain. The desertion of the San Antonio reduced his fleet to three ships, as one had already been wrecked while exploring the South American coast. By the end of November 1520 he had entered a new ocean. Pigafetta remarked: ‘during these three months and twenty days, we sailed in a gulf where we made a good four thousand leagues across the Pacific sea, which was rightly so named. For during this time we had no storm.’20 The experiences of later navigators would give the lie to the name ‘Pacific’, but at last the greatest of all oceans had a European name and – more importantly – it became obvious how gigantic this sea is: leaving Tierra del Fuego on 28 November 1520, Magellan only reached Guam on 6 March 1521. This was the first proper landfall, for, oddly, the three ships did not encounter the islands and peoples of Polynesia and Micronesia as they headed for what they hoped were the Moluccas. Nor, apparently, did they meet any Pacific islanders in their splendid outrigger boats until they arrived at Guam. This is testimony to the sheer vastness of the Pacific Ocean, but it also shows that the land-sighting skills of European navigators accustomed to the very different waters of the Atlantic Ocean were quite different to those of the Polynesians, who could find needles in the Pacific haystack without great difficulty.

  The real difficulty that Magellan’s crew faced as they crossed the Pacific was not the weather but the lack of supplies of fresh food that left the sailors trading in rat meat and chewing rehydrated oxhides for their dinner, so long as they could chew anything. The scourge of scurvy made these long voyages a deathtrap, not just because of the dramatic effects of this disease on skin, bones and blood vessels, which to all intents fall apart, but also because of its side effects: it was impossible to eat what food there was with massively swollen gums. Thirty-one men died of scurvy or other illnesses during the Pacific crossing, including a Patagonian giant and a Brazilian Indian. When the ships at last reached land, islanders swarmed aboard, robbed the ships and were fought off; the sick sailors asked for the entrails of the islanders who had been killed in this engagement, in the belief that by eating them ‘immediately they would be healed’. The true solution was there to be seen: when the crew started to eat fresh fruit and vegetables, the swelling shrank away. Moreover, the officers on board, with a more luxurious diet, by and large escaped from the disease, so that Pigafetta, for one, ‘being always in good health’, observed scurvy without suffering from it: ‘yet by the grace of our Lord I had no
illness’, which was still the case when he returned to Spain.21 The discovery that lemons or limes kept scurvy at bay was the result of trial and error between 1746 and 1795, when the Royal Navy began to include lemons or limes in the diet of British sailors, and only the identification of ascorbic acid (vitamin C) in the early twentieth century explained how and why limes worked so well.22

  IV

  When Magellan reached the islands of the western Pacific, he encountered lands very different in culture and social structure to those he had left behind in Patagonia. Admittedly, the first islands he reached, around Guam, revealed societies that made no use of metal and where people walked around almost naked; because the islanders had run amok on board the Spanish ships, seizing everything they could carry away, Magellan’s men called this place the ‘Island of Thieves’. Pigafetta thought that the islanders believed that they were the only people in the world, but he was relying, as he admitted, on sign language, and what they were no doubt expressing was their disbelief that the shaggy-looking sailors on their vast wooden ships were of the same genus as themselves. They were people of the sea, whose boats decorated with palm leaf sails and outriggers ‘are like dolphins jumping from wave to wave’.23

  Gradually, though, the ships navigated their way through islands blessed with an abundance of chickens, palm wine, coconuts and sweet oranges (a novelty, as the oranges known in the west were the bitter Seville oranges introduced to Spain by the Arabs). There was even some gold, which was used to decorate the islanders’ daggers. As the ships penetrated deeper into the Philippine chain in March and April 1521, they found new friends among the local rajahs; it was a great help that Magellan’s Sumatran servant, Enrique, was able to speak with one of these rajahs in Malay and make himself understood. The rajah presented Magellan with porcelain jars filled with rice, and offered presents of gold and ginger; Magellan gave the king a red-and-yellow robe, ‘made in the Turkish fashion’. The rajah organized a reception for the officers, and Pigafetta found himself eating meat on Good Friday, ‘being unable to do otherwise’; on the other hand, it was a relief to discover that the rulers of these islands were ‘heathens’ and not ‘Moors’. An even greater luxury than dinner with the rajah was the chance to sleep in a soft bed made out of a mat of reeds, with cushions and pillows.

  In the spirit of previous explorers under the Spanish flag, Pigafetta noted that this rajah had a brother who ruled over a neighbouring island that contained ‘mines of gold, which is found by digging from the earth large pieces as large as walnuts and eggs’, with the result that the king dined off gold plates as a matter of course.24 The sight of Chinese porcelain here, and on islands they visited later, was a sure sign that they were not far from the luxurious empire that a generation of explorers had been trying to reach: ‘porcelain is a kind of very white earthenware, and is fifty years underground before being worked, for otherwise it would not be fine. And the father buries it for the son. And if poison or venom is put into a fine porcelain jar, it will immediately break.’25 This was evidence for trade between the Chinese ports and the Spice Islands, but Magellan preferred to find a route to the clove-scented Moluccas; after all, his fleet was the Armada de Molucca.

  All this promised good results; yet the deeper Magellan’s ships penetrated into this island world, the more the captain-general became aware of the difficulties he still faced in winning the confidence of the rajahs. The rajah of Cebu expected to receive tribute or taxes, which he levied on all boats that called at his shores. A iunco, or junk, had come in from ‘Ciama’, either Vietnam or Java, four days before Magellan arrived; the rajah introduced one of Magellan’s officers to a Muslim merchant who had reached Cebu aboard the junk, and the merchant not very helpfully warned the rajah:

  ‘Have good care, O king, what you do, for these men are of those who have conquered Calicut, Malacca, and all India the Greater. If you give them good reception and treat them well, it will be well for you, but if you treat them ill, so much the worse it will be for you, as they have done at Calicut and at Malacca.’26

  Fortunately Enrique, the Sumatran interpreter, understood what was being said, and ‘told them that his master’s king was even more powerful in ships and by land than the king of Portugal, and he declared that he was the king of Spain and emperor of all Christendom’, a fair point since Charles had already been elected to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire. This riposte was combined with threats of a Spanish invasion which cannot have made Charles of Spain sound a better friend than Manuel of Portugal.

  These threats did not destroy increasingly warm relations between Magellan and the rajah. If Pigafetta is to be believed, he swore fealty to the king of Spain and joined in the mass baptism of hundreds of islanders, as well as the querulous Moorish merchant. It hardly needs to be said that this did not result in the Christianization of Cebu, and that the inhabitants slipped back to their ‘heathen’ ways when the ships departed, just as loyalty to King Charles was easily forgotten. However, the insistence on conversion is something that can easily be lost to sight when looking at the voyages of discovery. There was a genuine desire to spread the faith; at the same time, the conversion of the rajahs of these islands would help bond them closer to the Spanish masters to whom they were nominally subject.27

  Cebu brought disaster upon the little fleet. A number of outlying islands refused to accept Magellan’s demand that they should place themselves under the control of the rajah of Cebu, who was henceforth to be the Spanish king’s representative. In other words, the real issue was not the authority of the king of Spain, about which the islanders cannot have cared, but the authority of an overweening rajah whom Magellan was enthusiastically supporting. In April 1521 Magellan, against the advice of João Serrão, insisted on joining an armed attack on one of these islands, Mactan. There, the invaders faced stiff resistance, and Magellan was killed.28 Soon after, the rajah of Cebu turned against the Spaniards and massacred twenty-seven men whom he had invited to a feast; they included João Serrão. This was a world of which the Spaniards knew very little indeed, apart from the existence of spices, and it had been a foolish mistake to become embroiled in local rivalries; after all, Magellan did not think of Cebu as his destination; he was still searching for the fabled Moluccas. Clearly it was time to move on, and in July 1521 the ships visited Brunei in Borneo, with their captains still determined to find a route to the Moluccas. Then as now Brunei had a wealthy court, and Elcano, soon to be the leader of the remnant who returned to Europe, found himself riding an elephant and being instructed in the elaborate protocol required when one entered the presence of the rajah. One was not allowed to address the ruler directly; instead one told a courtier, who told a brother of the ruler, who whispered the message to the rajah through a speaking tube, which cannot always have resulted in very accurate messages reaching his ear. The Spaniards were not at all awestruck by the solemnity of their interview and found these rules quite comic.29

  They set sail for the marvellous Moluccas, and reached the islands in November 1521. The sultan of Tidore, Rajah Sultan Mansur, told his visitors that he had had a strange dream a long time ago which foretold the arrival of ships sailing to the Moluccas from far-off lands. He was friendly, to the point where he proposed renaming Tidore ‘Castile’ out of love for the Spanish king. Pigafetta took great delight in the clove trees and learned how the spices were harvested, and was interested to see how the inhabitants made bread out of sago, a starchy food extracted from palm stems that was the staple crop in the Moluccas and remains a firm favourite in south-east Asia. But there was bad news about Francisco Serrão. He had become the commander of the troops of the rival ruler of Ternate, and during a struggle between the two sultanates he had carried off many of the chief men of Tidore as hostages. After peace was made, he visited Tidore to buy cloves. But he was deeply resented; he was given poisoned betel leaves to chew and died within a few days. This had happened only eight months earlier; Serrão had still been alive when Magellan set out from Spain.
30

  The Armada de Molucca had now reached waters that were also being probed by Portuguese based in Melaka, even if their appearances were spasmodic and their expeditions unofficial. The Spaniards met a Portuguese merchant named Pedro Afonso de Lorosa in Tidore; he arrived in a local boat, or prao, and he, like the late Serrão, lived in Ternate. He claimed to have spent sixteen years in India and ten years in the Moluccas. He knew of a ‘great ship of Malacca’ that had reached the Moluccas just under a year ago, commanded by a Portuguese captain, Tristão de Meneses, who had already heard that the Spanish king had sent a fleet out of Seville towards the Molucca Islands. Pedro Afonso was delightfully garrulous and quite incapable of keeping a secret. He told the Spaniards that the king of Portugal had reacted furiously to reports of Magellan’s voyage. He sent ships to the River Plate and to the Cape of Good Hope to block Magellan’s armada, since he did not know which route it would actually take. He also encouraged one of his captains in the Indian Ocean to sail to the Moluccas in search of Magellan with six heavily armed ships; however, when this commander heard that the Ottoman Turks were planning an expedition against Melaka he headed westwards instead, towards the coast of Arabia, sending a smaller convoy, which was forced back by contrary winds. Pedro Afonso claimed that the Moluccas were already loyal to Portugal, and that the ever-secretive court in Lisbon had simply not wanted anyone to know of its success out there.31