Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe

by Laurence Bergreen

  The unsuccessful efforts to repair Trinidad’s mysterious leak and the deliberations leading to the decision that Victoria would return alone consumed five days. Just before Victoria left Tidore, the crew members loaded her with as many cloves as they could salvage from Trinidad, but once they saw Victoria riding low in the water, “mistrusting that the ship might open,” they lightened her by removing sixty quintals of cloves and storing the spices in the trading house.

  Victoria was so dilapidated that many crew members refused to board her. They preferred to remain with Trinidad in Tidore until she was repaired. Still others stayed behind because they feared that those aboard Victoria would “perish of hunger” long before they reached Spain. So the crew divided itself between the two ships, each man seeking the lesser of two evils: Victoria, the flimsy vessel that would depart for Spain immediately, or the much larger Trinidad, which needed weeks if not months of repairs before she could begin her journey home. Dangers abounded both on land and at sea; starvation and shipwreck imperiled those who sailed, while headless marauders or poison might fell those who remained behind.

  In the end, Carvalho was designated captain of Trinidad, and Elcano took over the command of Victoria. Among the fifty-three men who cast their lot with Trinidad were Ginés de Mafra, the pilot; Gonzalo Gómez de Espinosa, the master-at-arms (and second in command to Carvalho); and Hans Vargue, a German gunner. Pigafetta faced the most critical decision of the entire journey: Which ship would he join? His instinct for survival had stood many tests, and he elected to go along with Elcano aboard Victoria; that ship would carry him among her crew of about sixty men, including sixteen Indians. Although he detested the Basque mariner, he clearly had more confidence in Elcano’s seamanship than in Carvalho’s. Each ship in the divided fleet contained a memoirist, Pigafetta aboard Victoria and de Mafra aboard Trinidad. The Venetian resumed his passionate, eloquent descriptions of the Indies, while de Mafra—“a man of few but true words,” by his own account—stuck to a more practical report of what he perceived as bad judgment and missed opportunities.

  Early on the morning of December 21, Almanzor, ever helpful, came aboard Victoria for the last time, delivering two pilots, paid for by the crew, to guide the ship safely through the maze of islands and shoals. The king then took his leave. Familiar with the tides, the pilots insisted that early morning was the most advantageous time to depart, but the men who remained behind persuaded Victoria to delay a few hours while they wrote long letters for her to carry home to Spain. Finally, at noon, it was time to leave the Spice Islands. “When that hour came,” Pigafetta recalled, “the ships bid one another farewell amid the discharge of the cannon, and it seemed as though they were bewailing their last departure. Our men [remaining behind] accompanied us in their boats a short distance, and then with many tears and embraces we departed.”

  This should have been a festive occasion, the ships bulging with spices, heading for home port and the prospect of a grand reception from King Charles, but the damage to Trinidad dramatically altered the final leg of this voyage around the world and mocked the proud legend painted on her sails. The crew faced more than the ordinary pangs of leaving port for another long journey at sea, although those pangs—the monotony of life at sea, the nights interrupted by watches, the gradual diminution of their fresh food to a diet of salted dried meat, salted biscuit, and salted dried fish—were hard enough to bear, but now, in addition to all that, they knew their lives would be at risk the moment they were out of sight of the Spice Islands.

  Despite the obstacles they had faced, the men of the armada had always taken comfort in the knowledge that they had extra ships at their disposal. Even two ships had a reasonable chance of making it back to Seville, but one ship was hardly equal to the task, no matter how skillful the crew’s seamanship, or how favorable the winds. One ship, alone on the high seas, was always at the mercy of storms, shoals, pirates, termites, or faulty navigation. On the high seas, no king could protect them, and at least one sovereign, the king of Portugal, wanted them dead. (Of all the captains in the armada, only Magellan had fully appreciated the full extent of Portuguese malice toward him.) Yet they had no choice but to face the tests presented by the ten-thousand-mile-long route home.

  C H A P T E R X I V

  Ghost Ship

  O Wedding-Guest! this soul hath been

  Alone on a wide wide sea:

  So lonely ’twas, that God himself

  Scarce seeméd there to be.

  Laden with cloves and about sixty survivors, Victoria left the island of Tidore on December 21, 1521. Heading southwest, she called at a small island nearby to load firewood, and resumed her southerly course toward one of the most dangerous stretches of ocean in the world: the Cape of Good Hope.

  Embarking on the final leg of the unprecedented journey around the world should have been an occasion for relief among the homeward-bound crew members, but it was not. The character of the expedition had changed completely; the Armada de Molucca finally had its spices, but it had lost its soul. The absence of Magellan’s guiding hand, his fierce discipline, even his quixotic delusions of grandeur, left the two remaining ships and their crew members without a sense of overriding purpose. Only survival mattered now. Even if the crew survived the voyage home, they were anxious about the reception they would receive in Spain. Although they had no knowledge of San Antonio’s arrival in Seville seven months earlier, they suspected that the mutineers aboard that ship might have made it back and succeeded in discrediting Magellan. Elcano and Victoria’s crew feared they would be arrested and jailed for treason

  the moment they tied up at the dock. Desertion might have been an appealing option among the grim choices facing the sailors, except for their fear of cannibals inhabiting the islands surrounding them. In the end, staying aboard ship served as the best strategy to forestall disaster. They found themselves prisoners of peculiar circumstances, hostages to a situation created largely by those who had predeceased them.

  Even Antonio Pigafetta, so determined to bring the news of Magellan’s accomplishments back to Europe, was at a loss for words, content simply to note the islands Victoria passed: Caion, Laigoma, Sico, Giogi, and Caphi, all part of the Moluccas. On the advice of local pilots, he recorded, “We turned toward the southeast, and encountered an island that lies in a latitude of two degrees toward the Antarctic Pole, and fifty-five leagues from Maluco. It is called Sulach [later called Xulla], and its inhabitants are heathens.” Here Pigafetta briefly resumed his amateur anthropology: “They have no king, and eat human flesh. They go naked, both men and women, only wearing a bit of bark two fingers wide before their privies.” Cannibals seemed to be everywhere; Pigafetta listed ten islands to be avoided at all costs.

  Two days after Christmas, the ship found anchorage in Jakiol Bay, where the crew obtained fresh, and much needed, supplies, along with an Indonesian pilot who knew his way around these islands. Under his guidance, the crew sailed on as if in a trance, heading south, narrowly avoiding Moors and cannibals, coral reefs and hidden sandbars. Eventually, Victoria put the Indonesian islands astern, passing through the Alor Strait and eluding pirates. As a lone vessel laden with spices, Victoria was especially vulnerable to predators.

  On January 8, 1522, Victoria entered the Banda Sea, extending west of the Moluccas, and the torpid weather suddenly changed. “We were struck by a fierce storm,” Pigafetta reported, “which caused us to make a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Guidance. Running before the storm, we landed at a lofty island, but before reaching it we were greatly worn out by the violent gusts of wind that came from the mountains of that island, and the great currents of water.” The squall nearly shattered the ship, but Elcano avoided the rocks and reefs, and when the seas moderated, Victoria limped to an anchorage close to shore. The next day, divers inspecting the hull discovered extensive damage, and the men gingerly hauled the vessel onto a beach to commence repairs and caulking.

  The inhabitants of this island, known as Malua, shoc
ked even these hardened sailors. They were, said Pigafetta, “savage and bestial, and eat human flesh,” and their appearance combined the frightening and the outlandish. They went naked, or nearly so, “wearing only that bark as do the others, except when they go to fight, they wear certain pieces of buffalo hide behind, and at the sides, which are ornamented with small shells, boars’ tusks, and tails of goat skins fastened before and behind.” They lavished most of their attention on their hair, “done up high and held by bamboo pins which they pass from one side to the other.” Completing this curious picture, “They wear their beards wrapped in leaves and thrust into small bamboo tubes—a ridiculous sight.” All in all, Pigafetta judged them to be “the ugliest people in the Indies.”

  Despite the inhabitants’ bizarre appearance, the sailors, by this time old hands in such transactions, bestowed trinkets on them, and both sides quickly made peace. As the sailors set to work repairing the ship, the aristocratic Pigafetta, spared the indignity of physical labor, roamed the island, studying its flora and fauna, noting an abundance of fowl and goats and coconuts and pepper: “The fields in those regions are full of this pepper, planted to resemble arbors.” He was speaking of black pepper, which had been introduced to the island some time before the Europeans’ arrival, and which the inhabitants carefully cultivated.

  Two weeks later, with repairs to the hull completed, Elcano gave the order to resume their voyage home, and the crew set sail on Saturday, January 25. Victoria, having sailed five leagues or so, called at the island of Timor, towering nearly ten thousand feet above the shimmering surface of the Pacific. Everyone aboard her looked forward to a luxurious, satisfying time ashore, because food, spices, almonds, rice, bananas, ginger, and fragrant wood were all said to grow there in abundance.

  Pigafetta’s linguistic skills gave him a prominent part to play in the dealings with the locals to obtain provisions. “I went ashore alone to speak to the chief of a city called Amaban to ask him to furnish us with food. He told me that he would give me buffaloes, swine, and goats, but we could not come to terms because he asked many things for one buffalo.” Assessing his surroundings, Pigafetta realized the chief lived in luxury, attended by numerous naked serving women, all of them adorned with gold earrings “with silk tassels pendant from them, as well as amulets of gold and brass.” And the men displayed even more gold jewelry than the women.

  While Pigafetta was negotiating, two young crew members deserted; Martín de Ayamonte, an apprentice seaman, and Bartolomé de Saldaña, a cabin boy, swam ashore under cover of darkness and never returned to their ship. They were exceptions to the generally cautious behavior of Victoria’s crew in Timor. For example, they refrained from enjoying the charms of the local women, believing they were infected with syphilis—“the disease of St. Job.” They had seen evidence of what they assumed to be syphilis all over the Moluccas, according to Pigafetta, but the greatest concentration occurred here, on this island. The origins of syphilis in this part of the world are a mystery. Portuguese traders or sailors might have carried it with them (syphilis was also known as “the Portuguese disease”), but it is worth noting that the disease was reported in China centuries earlier than in Europe, and that junks regularly plied these waters. It is also possible that the sailors’ diagnosis was mistaken, and they had come across islanders affected with leprosy.

  To guarantee cooperation with the islanders, Elcano ordered a party of sailors ashore in search of a bargaining chip: “Since we had but few things, and hunger was constraining us, we restrained in the ship a chief and his son from another village.” With their hostages in hand, the armada’s officers proceeded to negotiate for the food they so desperately needed. The strategy worked exactly as planned, and the recalcitrant islanders delivered a ransom of six buffalo, a dozen goats, and as many pigs to the grateful yet rapacious sailors in exchange for the hostages’ freedom.

  Once the slaughtered beasts had been loaded, Victoria prepared to set sail once more, this time heading for the island of Java, the largest and, to Europeans, the best-known destination in the Indies. Among the crew members, Java possessed a mysterious allure, if only because the Javanese reputedly practiced exotic customs such as palang. Pigafetta relished telling the tales he heard of Java, beginning with its funeral rites. “When one of the chief men of Java dies, his body is burned,” he wrote. “His principal wife adorns herself with garlands of flowers and has herself carried on a chair through the entire village by three or four men. Smiling and consoling her relatives who are weeping, she says, ‘Do not weep, for I am going to sup with my dear husband this evening and to sleep with him this night.’ Then she is carried to the fire, where her husband is being burned. Turning toward her relatives, and again consoling them, she throws herself into the fire, where her husband is being burned. If she did not do that, she would not be considered an honorable woman or a true wife to her dead husband.” For all its melodrama, this was a fairly accurate account of a funeral ceremony as practiced on the island of Bali, located little more than a mile east of Java, and in India.

  And then there was the role palang played in Javanese courtship rites. Magellan’s relative Duarte Barbosa, in his account of the region, had described Javanese palang in excruciating detail. “They are very voluptuous,” he wrote of the inhabitants, “and have certain round hawk’s bells sewn and fastened in the head of their penis between the flesh and the skin in order to make them larger. Some have three, some five, and others seven. Some are made of gold and silver and others of brass, and they tinkle as the men walk. The custom is considered quite the proper thing. The women delight greatly in the bells, and do not like men who go without them. The most honored men are those who have the most and largest ones.”

  Pigafetta observed that the custom still formed a vital part of Javanese life. “When the young men of Java are in love with any gentlewoman, they fasten certain little bells between their penis and foreskin. They take a position until their sweetheart hears the sound. The sweetheart descends immediately, and they take their pleasure; always with those little bells, for their women take great pleasure in hearing those bells ring from the inside of their vagina. Those bells are all covered, and the more they are covered, the louder they sound.”

  Normally a careful observer, Pigafetta could not resist telling tales when the mood came over him. In the same breath as his description of palang, he conjured Amazons, among the most persistent of all the illusions of Neverland, and perhaps the hardest for the lonely sailors who roamed the world to give up. Pigafetta lent at least partial credence to an account he heard about Amazons on a neighboring island kill their male offspring and raise only females. And any man found exploring the island would be attacked instantly. Needless to say, the survivors of so many shipwrecks, mutinies, ambushes, and other disasters elected not to risk the wrath of the Amazons they believed to be in their midst.

  Although Victoria remained hundreds of miles distant from the southernmost point of China, Pigafetta heard dramatic stories of the Middle Kingdom from local traders. “The king,” as Pigafetta referred to the emperor, “never allows himself to be seen by anyone. When he wishes to see his people, he rides about the palace on a skillfully made peacock, a most elegant contrivance, accompanied by six of his principal women clad like himself; after which he enters a serpent called a nagha”—the name given to a mythical dragon— “which is as rich a thing as can be seen, and which is kept in the greatest court of the palace. The king and the women enter it so that he may not be recognized among his women. He looks at his people through a large glass which is in the breast of the serpent. He and the women can be seen, but one cannot tell which is the king. The latter is married to his sisters, so that the royal blood may not be mixed with others.”

  The emperor, it seemed, had absolute power over all his subjects, and he wielded it with impressive, if fiendish, enthusiasm. “When any seigneur is disobedient to the king, he is ordered to be flayed, and his skin dried in the sun and salted. Then the sk
in is stuffed with straw or other substance, and placed head downward in a prominent place in the square, with hands clasped above the head, so that he may be seen to be performing zonghu, that is, obeisance.” Pigafetta’s vivid evocation of Chinese customs reveals his yearning to visit the Middle Kingdom and play the role of diplomat and translator as he had throughout the voyage. Perhaps Magellan, had he been alive, would have made a detour and allowed Pigafetta to fulfill his dream, but Elcano had no such ambitions. China remained tantalizingly remote.

  In the early hours of Wednesday, February 11, Victoria weighed anchor and put the island of Timor astern, sailing along a southwesterly course. With Java and, later on, Sumatra barely visible to starboard, she headed for her meeting with destiny at the Cape of Good Hope.

  The struggle with the elements was joined within days of leaving Timor as Victoria became the plaything of the unstable weather systems of the southern latitudes. “In order that we might double the Cape of Good Hope, we descended to forty-two degrees on the side of the Antarctic Pole. We were nine weeks”—nine weeks!—“near that cape with our sails hauled down because we had the west and northwest winds on our bow quarter and because of a most furious storm,” Pigafetta explained. He went on to warn, “It is the largest of and most dangerous cape in the world.” And he was right. Although the Cape of Good Hope was first rounded in 1488 by Bartolomeu Dias and nine years later by Vasco da Gama—both major accomplishments in Portuguese exploration history—it was still considered extremely hazardous and barely navigable even by the most seaworthy of ships and the most experienced of captains. It occupied a nearly mythical place in the Portuguese consciousness as the most fearsome place in the entire world.