Four years ago, Ferdinand Magellan, a distinguished Portuguese who had for many years sailed about the Eastern Seas as admiral of the Portuguese fleet, having quarreled with his king who he considered had acted ungratefully towards him . . . pointed out to the Emperor [Charles V] that it was not yet clearly ascertained whether Malacca was within the boundaries of the Portuguese or the Castilians, because hitherto its longitude had not been definitely known; but it was an undoubted fact that the Great Gulf [the Pacific] and the Chinese nations were within the Castilian limits. He asserted also that it was absolutely certain that the islands called the Moluccas, in which all sorts of spices grow, and from which they were brought to Malacca, were contained in the western, or Castilian division, and that it would be possible to sail to them and bring the spices at less trouble and expense from their native soil to Castile.8
As an adviser to Castile’s ruler, the Habsburg emperor Charles V, it was in Transylvanus’s interest to magnify Magellan’s obscure dispute with his sovereign. Nevertheless, it seems that by October 1517 Magellan was convinced of the validity of Castile’s claims to the Moluccas, because by then he was in Seville, working for Castile on his ambitious plans to capture the islands for Charles.
Of all the great early European voyages of discovery, none has been more misunderstood than Magellan’s first circumnavigation of the globe, which in its ambition, duration and sheer depth of human endurance eclipses the achievements of Columbus’s first voyage to the New World, or Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India. There is no evidence that Magellan ever intended to circumnavigate the globe. His proposed expedition was a calculated commercial voyage aimed at outflanking the Portuguese control of the sea route to the Indonesian archipelago via the Cape of Good Hope by sailing not eastwards but westwards. Magellan was the first known navigator to recognize the possibility of sailing round the southern tip of South America and from there navigate his way through the Pacific to the Moluccas. Once there he would load his fleet with spices and sail back via South America, claiming the Moluccas for Castile and having, he hoped, established a quicker route to the islands.
The Castilian Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566), author of the History of the Indies, and a stern critic of the brutal behaviour of the Castilian adventurers in the Americas, recalled his conversations with Magellan in Valladolid in the spring of 1518, prior to his departure. Las Casas was unimpressed by the short, limping and undistinguished man he met, but he identified why Magellan was so convinced about Castile’s claim. On his arrival in Seville, ‘Magellan brought with him a well-painted globe showing the entire world, and thereon traced the course he proposed to take’. Las Casas went on:
I asked him what route he proposed to take, he replied that he intended to take that of Cape Santa Maria (which we call Rio de la Plata), and thence follow the course south until he found the strait. I said, ‘What will you do if you find no strait to pass into the other sea?’ He replied that if he found none he would follow the course that the Portuguese took.
Presumably at this stage in his planning, Magellan maintained the official position that if he did not find a strait passing from the tip of South America into the Pacific, he would pursue the Portuguese route to the East via the Cape of Good Hope. But Las Casas knew better:
according to what an Italian named Pigafetta of Vicenza, who went on that voyage of discovery with Magellan, wrote in a letter, Magellan was perfectly certain to find the strait because he had seen on a nautical chart made by one Martin of Bohemia, a great pilot and cosmographer, in the treasury of the King of Portugal, the strait depicted just as he found it. And, because the said strait was on the coast of land and sea, within the boundaries of the sovereigns of Castile, he therefore had to move and offer his services to the king of Castile to discover a new route to the said islands of Molucca.
The Italian Antonio Pigafetta, who sailed with Magellan, confirmed that the decision to sail west to reach the east was indeed based on Magellan’s consultation of the geography of ‘Martin of Bohemia’, or Martin Behaim, the German merchant and globemaker who claimed to have participated in Portuguese voyages down the coast of Africa in the 1480s. If Behaim completed maps, as Las Casas and Pigafetta believed, none of them have survived, but Behaim did leave one object that guaranteed his lasting place in the history of cartography. In 1492, on the eve of Columbus’s departure for the New World, Behaim completed his only surviving geographical work. This was not a map or chart, but what Behaim himself called an ‘erdapfel’, or ‘earth apple’, the earliest surviving example of a terrestrial globe made by a European. Although mapmakers since the Greeks had created celestial globes of the heavens, Behaim’s is the first known globe depicting the earth.
Las Casas and Pigafetta grasped that Magellan’s interest in Behaim lay in the revelation of a strait connecting the southern Atlantic with the Pacific – but an inspection of Behaim’s globe reveals no such strait.9 Perhaps Magellan saw other maps or charts made by Behaim which were subsequently lost or destroyed, or even later globes made by German cosmographers like Johannes Schöner. It seems more likely that Magellan consulted Behaim’s terrestrial globe, not for a navigable route to the east via South America, but because it provided a global dimension through which to imagine his projected journey westwards to the east. Maps like the Cantino planisphere gave navigators general data on sailing across the Atlantic and Indian oceans, but their very nature as flat, two-dimensional maps prevented them from projecting a comprehensive picture of both western and eastern hemispheres with any reasonable accuracy. Terrestrial globes were little better. They were not used as navigational aids – their limited size meant that using them at sea when plotting seaborne voyages was all but useless. But for pilots like Magellan, the spherical projection of a terrestrial globe allowed him to think outside the geographical mentality of his time. While most princes and diplomats in Portugal and Castile continued to envisage the world on a flat map, with no real sense of the connection between the earth’s western and eastern hemispheres, Magellan’s planned voyage suggests that he was beginning to imagine the world as a global continuum.
There was one other vital aspect of the Behaim globe that seems to have inspired Magellan to embark on his voyage. Like many of his contemporaries, Behaim continued to imagine the world according to Ptolemy. Although his exploration of the coast of west and southern Africa led to minor revisions of the Greek geographer, where Behaim’s first-hand knowledge ended he essentially reproduced Ptolemy’s ideas about the size of the earth and the dimensions of the African and Asian continents. As we know, Ptolemy underestimated the circumference of the earth by one-sixth its actual length, but overestimated the breadth of South-east Asia. Having no concept of the Americas or the Pacific, Ptolemy’s exaggeration of Asia meant that when Behaim came to plot the earth on a spherical globe, he corrected Ptolemy’s belief in a landlocked Indian Ocean, disproved by Dias’s rounding of the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, but still reproduced Asia according to the Greek geographer.
On a flat map, such exaggerations remained unremarkable to those familiar with Ptolemy, but reproduced on a terrestrial globe like Behaim’s, their impact upon the eastern hemisphere was dramatic: the space between the west coast of Portugal and the east coast of China was just 130 degrees. The actual distance is nearer double that figure, 230 degrees. Looking at Behaim’s globe would clearly have convinced Magellan that the voyage to the Moluccas via South America was shorter than the Portuguese sea route to Malacca. It was a mistake based on erroneous geography that would immortalize him for ever in world history; but it would also doom him and many of those who sailed with him.10
By the spring of 1518 Magellan was making preparations for his voyage. With the financial support of the emperor Charles V’s creditors the German House of Fugger, he fitted out five vessels for the voyage with rigging, artillery, arms, provisions and pay for a crew of 237 at a cost of over 8 million maravedís (the voyage’s sailor
s received 1,200 maravedís a month).11 He also assembled a formidable team of Portuguese geographical advisers. They included Ruy Faleiro, an astronomer renowned for his attempts to solve the calculation of longitude, two of the most influential and respected of Portuguese mapmakers, the Reinel father and son team, Pedro and Jorge, and the pilot Diogo Ribeiro, who was appointed official chartmaker to the voyage. Faleiro, who was appointed chief pilot with responsibility for making charts and navigational instruments, drew more than twenty maps for use on board the fleet. The Reinels brought their practical knowledge of previous Portuguese voyages, while Ribeiro, with his reputation for superb draughtsmanship, was responsible for collating and executing all the expedition’s maps. Not surprisingly, considering all four men had defected from their employment by the Portuguese crown, Portuguese agents followed their every move while they were in Seville. One of the Portuguese agents, known only as Alvarez, wrote a letter to the Portuguese king in July 1519, informing him of the proposed voyage and the part played by the king’s former mapmakers:
The route which is said to be followed is from San Lucar directly to Cape Frio, leaving Brazil to the right side until after the demarcation line and from there to sail West ¼ North West directly to Maluco, which Maluco I have seen represented on the round chart made here by the son of Reinel; this was not finished when his father came there, and his father achieved the whole thing and placed the Moluccas lands. From this model have been made all the charts of Diego[sic] Ribeiro and also the particular charts and globes.12
Clearly versed more in espionage than geography, Alvarez reveals in his description the devastating political implications for Portugal of Magellan’s proposed transgression of the ‘demarcation line’, the Treaty of Tordesillas: if successful, Magellan’s voyage would challenge the Portuguese domination of the spice trade, and redraw the global map of European imperial politics.
Magellan’s five ships and crew set sail from the port of San Lúcar de Barrameda on 22 September 1519. The events of the next three years have since passed into world history. Hunger, shipwreck, mutiny, political intrigue and murder punctuated Magellan’s marathon voyage. From its outset the mainly Castilian crew were deeply suspicious of their Portuguese leader and his ambitious route to the Moluccas. Sailing down the coast of South America according to established Portuguese and Castilian navigation proved relatively unproblematic, but by the autumn of 1520 Magellan had reached uncharted waters at the tip of southern America. In November, after much searching and conflict over direction, Magellan found his way into the strait that still bears his name, and finally out into the Pacific Ocean.
Magellan named this new ocean Mare Pacificum, or ‘peaceful sea’. It was to prove anything but peaceful. At just under 170 million square kilometres, the Pacific is the largest continuous body of ocean in the world, covering just under 50 per cent of the world’s total water surface and representing 32 per cent of the total surface area of the globe. In 1520, of course, Magellan knew nothing of this, and had based his navigational calculations on Ptolemy and Behaim. The results of this miscalculation for Magellan’s crew were formidable and for some, even fatal. Sailing westwards away from South America into uncharted open seas, it took the fleet more than five months to sight land in the eastern Philippines in the spring of 1521. Magellan landed on the island of Mactan in April. There he became embroiled in the island’s local politics, and on 27 April, having sided with one of the island’s tribal leaders, he led an armed party of sixty men in a skirmish with an opposing tribe. Vastly outnumbered and too far from the support of his remaining three ships, Magellan was singled out as the party’s leader and killed.
Shocked and bewildered, the remaining crew set sail again, but now faced a series of fatal attacks from hostile local tribes, who took confidence from Magellan’s death and the realization that his sailors were not invincible. Reduced to little more than 100 crew, with most of their high command dead and just two ships intact, the remaining officers split command of the fleet between three of their number, appointing the Basque pilot Sebastião del Cano as commander of the Victoria, despite his participation in an earlier mutiny against Magellan that left him in chains. The surviving fleet finally reached the Moluccas on 6 November 1521, where they managed to embark two shiploads of pepper, ginger, nutmeg and sandalwood. As the crew prepared to leave Tidore in the Moluccas, Antonio Pigafetta calculated in his journal that the island ‘is in the latitude of twenty-seven minutes toward the Antarctic Pole, and in the longitude of one hundred and sixty-one degrees from the line of partition’; in other words, nineteen degrees within the Castilian half of the globe.13
After sailing across the Pacific for nearly a year, and reduced to just two ships, the fleet’s officers were divided about which direction to take back to Castile: did they return via the Cape of Good Hope and complete the first known circumnavigation of the globe, or go back the way they came via Magellan’s Strait? A decision was made that the Trinidad would retrace the fleet’s treacherous path through the Pacific under the command of Gonzalo Gómez de Espinossa, while the Victoria would head for the African Cape, led by del Cano. Despite the horrors of the outward journey, returning via the Indian and Atlantic oceans seemed the riskier of the two options. The Victoria was already in terrible condition, and the likelihood of being captured by patrolling Portuguese ships was high. But while del Cano set off immediately, Espinossa vacillated as to his exact route. In May 1522 the Trinidad was captured and destroyed by a Portuguese fleet, and its crew imprisoned.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Indian Ocean, the Victoria was successfully playing cat and mouse with the Portuguese all the way back to Europe. Finally, on 8 September 1522, after an eight-month return voyage, del Cano and his remaining crew reached Seville, completing the first recorded circumnavigation of the globe. Magellan was dead, four of his five ships lost, and of the 237 who had left Castile nearly three years earlier, just 18 survived to tell the tale of their extraordinary journey. In the first letter written to Charles V informing him of the voyagers’ return, del Cano announced that ‘we have discovered and made a course around the entire rotundity of the world – that going by the occident we have returned by the orient’.14
News of the return of the remains of Magellan’s expedition reverberated across Europe. The papal nuncio to Germany, Francesco Chiericati, wrote to his friend Isabella d’Este in Mantua. Like her father Ercole (the owner of the purloined Cantino planisphere), Isabella was hungry for reports of the Castilian voyages of discovery, and Chiericati was happy to provide them. He told Isabella that Antonio Pigafetta ‘has returned highly enriched with the greatest and most wonderful things in the world, and has brought an itinerary from the day he left Castile until the day of his return – which is a wonderful thing’. Describing the journey to the Moluccas, Chiericati reported that the surviving crew ‘gained not only great riches, but what is worth more – an immortal reputation. For surely this has thrown all the deeds of the Argonauts into the shade.’15
For the educated elite of Renaissance Italy like Chiericati and Isabella, steeped in the classical past of Greece and Rome, the voyage indeed represented the eclipse of the great voyages of ancient myth, but for the diplomats of Portugal and Castile at the centre of a vital imperial dispute, the consequences were altogether more pragmatic. Del Cano’s account of the voyage was very clear about his priorities. ‘We discovered many very rich islands,’ he reported, ‘among them Banda, where ginger and nutmeg grow, and Zabba, where pepper grows, and Timor, where sandalwood grows, and in all the aforesaid islands there is an infinite amount of ginger.’16 The Portuguese were horrified. In September 1522 King John III lodged a formal protest with the Castilian authorities over what he regarded as their infringement of Portuguese territory, and insisted that Charles V accepted Portugal’s monopoly of all commercial traffic in and around the Moluccas. Charles V refused and instead claimed the Moluccas as lying within Castile’s territorial dominion under the
terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas. The Portuguese responded by refuting the claim, insisting that the voyage broke the terms of the treaty and maintaining that the Moluccas fell within their half of the globe. Charles countered again by offering to submit the matter to diplomatic arbitration, to which the Portuguese agreed.
Castile’s initial diplomatic claims to the islands revolved around a fascinating, if slightly mendacious definition of ‘discovery’. Charles’s diplomats argued that even if Portuguese ships had seen and ‘discovered’ the Moluccas prior to Magellan’s voyage, this did not technically represent imperial possession, and that Magellan’s crew had extracted what they regarded as an oath of allegiance to the emperor from the island’s native rulers, a standard Castilian practice when claiming newly discovered territory. Not surprisingly, the Portuguese refuted such semantic quibbles, arguing that the onus was on Castile to prove their possession of the islands according to geography. They also insisted that as negotiations continued, Castile should refrain from dispatching any further fleets to the Moluccas.
In April 1524 both sides agreed on formal negotiations aimed at resolving the dispute. They met on the border between the two empires at the towns of Badajoz and Elvas, high on the plains of Estremadura and separated by the Guadiana River. As the delegates arrived in the spring of 1524, they began to realize the magnitude of their task: this was no simple settlement of a territorial boundary dispute, but an attempt to split the known world in half. The Castilian delegation knew that if their claim was successful, their rule would stretch from northern Europe, across the Atlantic, and encompass the whole of the Americas and the Pacific Ocean. For Portugal, the loss of the Moluccas threatened to end the monopoly they had established over the spice trade, which had transformed the kingdom in less than a generation from a poor and isolated realm on the edge of Europe to one of the continent’s most powerful and wealthy imperial powers.
A History of the World in 12 Maps Page 25
