A world lit only by fire: the medieval mind and the Renaissance : portrait of an age

by William Manchester

  Delighted with the weather and the local women, the fleet’s crews would have preferred to linger in Rio indefinitely, but their leader ordered them to hoist sail; according to Schöner’s globe, the Río de Solís, as the Río de la Plata was then called, lay a thousand miles to the south, and he was impatient to find his priceless paso. After hugging the shore for two weeks, the flagship, with the other vessels streaming behind, passed the cape of Santa María and then, just beyond a low hill which they christened Montevidi—today Montevideo, Uruguay—lookouts sighted the great estuary. The men, seeing that it was impossible to glimpse a far shore, cheered lustily; without exception, Pigafetta wrote, they believed this to be the mouth of the legendary strait. Their leader was sure of it, convinced that here, where Juan Díaz de Solís had died less than four years earlier, lay the inlet which would lead him to Balboa’s Mar del Sur and, six hundred leagues to the west, the coveted, disputed Spice Islands.

  HIS DISCOVERY of his crushing error came gradually, like a man’s realization that he has irrevocably lost his most prized possession. It has to be here, he tells himself, or, I left it there; it must be somewhere. The fact that it is forever gone is insupportable at first;

  The Río de la Plata, from an early atlas

  acceptance of the disaster comes slowly, accompanied by a sickening feeling of emptiness. So the bleak truth must have come to Magellan. Despite Faleiro’s calculations, Schöner’s globe, Behaim’s map, and the fourteen-year-old Portuguese pilots’ rutters in Lisbon’s Tesouraria, the capitán-general had found, not a strait, but only an immense bay. He was nothing if not stubborn. For nearly a month he explored and reexplored the Plata, desperately trying to find an opening and always failing. Finally, on Thursday, February 2, 1520, he abandoned hope. Once that happened—once he grasped the implications of his defeat—the depth of his grief can only be imagined. It meant that his every Valladolid assurance, given in good faith to King Carlos and his privy council, had been false. He could share his disappointment with no one; if his Castilian captains knew the truth, they would clap him in irons, lock him up in the flagship’s brig, and return him to Spain, a defrocked Knight Commander of Santiago charged with fraud, imposture, and extortion of royal funds. Abandoning his search was therefore out of the question. Like Cortés at Veracruz, he had burned his boats. A return to Portugal, where he was wanted for treason, was also out of the question. Either he found glory, or disgrace—and execution—would find him.

  The strait, if it existed, could only lie to the southwest; thus his future, if he had one, also lay there. In the first week of February, without a word of explanation to his baffled officers and men, who knew only that their destination was the balmy south seas, he led them crawling through treacherous currents and surging tides, down the desolate, barren, and increasingly bitter Patagonian coast toward antarctic latitudes, praying that his dream would be redeemed by the reach around the next cape, or the next, or the one after that. Every harbor, every cove was scouted, with his leadsmen taking soundings, till shoals forced him to quit and move on to the next inlet. On February 24 his hopes rose in the Golfo San Matías. He sent parties of men in ship’s boats to search thoroughly. They did, but returned weary and dejected, having found nothing. The Bahía de los Patos followed, then the Bahía de los Trabajos and the Golfo San Jorge. All ended in disappointment.

  Each day the weather grew more depressing. No European had ever been this close to the South Pole. * The days grew shorter, the nights longer, the winds fiercer, the seas grayer; the waves towered higher, and the southern winter lay ahead. To grasp the full horror of the deteriorating climate, it is necessary only to translate degrees of southern latitude into northern latitude. Rio de Janeiro, where they had first landed, is as far below the equator as Key West is above it. By the same reckoning the Río de la Plata is comparable to northern Florida, the Golfo San Matías to Boston, and Puerto San Julián, which they reached after thirty-seven days of struggling through shocking weather, to Nova Scotia. The sails of their five little ships were whitened by sleet and hail. Cyclones battered them twice a week or more. Both forecastles and after-castles had been repeatedly blown away on every vessel and replaced by ship’s carpenters. Crews shrank as the corpses of men pried loose from frozen rigging slid to briny graves. Yet the paso remained as elusive as ever.

  In dismal, chilly, miserable Puerto San Julián, having inched down 1,330 miles since leaving the Río de la Plata, Magellan decided to hole up in winter quarters. They had reached the forty-ninth parallel—the forty-ninth degree of south latitude. There, on Saturday, March 31, he told his royal captains that he meant to continue south until he had found the strait, even if it took them below seventy degrees. Some thought they heard him promise to turn back if their frustration continued as far down as seventy-five degrees south latitude, but if he said it, he cannot have known what it meant; at that parallel the fleet would have been frozen fast in what is now the Antarctic’s Weddell Sea. Nevertheless his mood was undeniably implacable. Sunday morning—Palm Sunday—he reduced bread and wine rations for all hands. Almost certainly he intended to provoke revolt. He was aware that the tinder was there, awaiting a spark. There were Spaniards in the crews who were loyal to their Castilian officers. And the dons, he knew, were in an ugly mood. On Monday he summoned them to dine with him. Their refusal was curt. It was a desafio, a challenge; in effect they had thrown down the gauntlet. And that evening, April 2, 1520, they mutinied.

  THEY CAME AT NIGHT—thirty armed Spaniards in a longboat, led by Juan de Cartagena, Antonio de Coca, and Gaspar de Quesada, rowing with muffled oars toward San Antonio, the largest ship in the fleet. King Carlos’s privy council would have been surprised to know that Cartagena no longer commanded the ship. In Valladolid the planners of the expedition had envisaged the capitán-general on the quarterdeck of the flagship Trinidad, with the Castilians commanding the other four. But once at sea, Magellan, exercising his supreme powers as admiral, had begun switching skippers. Now, six and a half months after their departure, a Portuguese officer, Álvaro de Mesquita, one of Magellan’s cousins, conned San Antonio. Only Concepción and Victoria remained in the hands of the dons. If Cartagena could regain his old command, however, the mutineers, controlling three vessels, could bar the way to the open sea and hold their admiral at bay. And aboard San Antonio, all hands were asleep. Why Magellan had not alerted Mesquita and ordered him to post guards is puzzling. Ordinarily he was the most vigilant of leaders, and the omens of trouble had been unmistakable. Perhaps he could not believe they would actually rebel. They were, after all, well-bred aristocrats, who had sworn holy oaths of obedience in Seville. And treachery was not only a capital offense; it was also shameful. He may also have doubted their resolve. In the coming days they were, in fact, to prove irresolute, but at the outset they moved with confidence, swarming up rope ladders and boarding the big ship, which quickly became their prize. Mesquita awoke to find himself surrounded by men with drawn swords, and, moments later, manacled and confined to the purser’s cabin. Until now the coup had been bloodless. Then Mesquita’s officers, wakened by the tumult, demanded an explanation, and one of them, the ship’s master, Juan de Elorriaga, roughly challenged the mutineers. Quesada and his servant knifed Elorriaga six times; the officer fell to the deck mortally wounded. That ended the resistance. After clapping all crewmen loyal to Magellan in irons, the mutineers broke into the storeroom and issued wine to the rest of the men. Quesada remained aboard and brought Juan Sebastián del Cano over to serve as master. The others quietly returned to their own ships.

  Tuesday morning Magellan rose as usual, unaware of any change in his command. He was soon to be enlightened. In winter quarters the fleet’s daily routine began with dispatching a ship’s boat ashore. Its mission there was to fetch water and wood for all five vessels, each of which contributed men to the working party. When the boat reached San Antonio, its bos’n was vexed to find no rope ladder lowered and no crewmen ready to join him. He angrily called f
or an explanation and was told that the ship was now under the command of Capitán Gaspar de Quesada, who no longer honored orders from the “así llamado” (“so-called”) capitán-general. The bos’n hastily returned to Trinidad. Magellan calmly instructed him to tour the other vessels, demanding pledges of loyalty. Victoria and Concepción refused. Only Santiago’s Serrano, Spanish but loyal, swore that he would remain so.

  Thus the lines of battle were drawn. In any fight Santiago—at seventy-five tons the smallest of the five—would be quickly sunk. The flagship could not continue round the world alone. The admiral seemed checkmated, but his dilemma over the paso—not to mention his temperament—meant that yielding was out of the question. Now, as so often, patience was his sheet anchor. He quietly awaited word from the rebels. When that word arrived—in the form of a letter from Quesada, speaking for the others—it revealed their pathetic weakness. Their noble birth was to be their undoing after all. The letter expressed no wrath, no piratical defiance; there was no ultimatum, nor even a list of demands. Instead the dons were submitting a suplica, a petition. On reflection they had decided to acknowledge his supreme authority, as conferred by their sovereign. In their subordinate role they merely asked for better treatment at his hands, a little respect for their high birth, and some information about his plans, particularly how he proposed to reach the Spice Islands. All this was set forth in the most florid, most oleaginous Spanish prose.

  Mutineers may command, but they cannot beg. Their strength derives from force alone; if they disavow it, they are naked. Magellan now had their measure; with audacity, he could regain control of his fleet. He knew the rebel captains expected him to lunge toward San Antonio. The ship’s size argued for that; so did his cousin’s imprisonment there; so did the presence on its quarterdeck of Quesada, now the chief conspirator. Therefore Magellan, knowing the value of the unexpected, decided to retake Victoria, whose Castilian commander was the less formidable Luis de Mendoza. The counterattack would be made by two longboats. The larger boat, with the wind at its back, would carry fifteen heavily armed men led by Duarte Barbosa. To lead the other, smaller craft the admiral picked Gonzalo Gómez de Espinosa, the fleet’s master-at-arms and commander of its marine guard. Gómez’s crew consisted of only five men, but its mission was crucial—to strike the first blow and thereby create a diversion.

  Piloting his boat to within hailing distance of Victoria, Gómez called ahead that he bore a letter from the capitán-general. Mendoza, feeling unthreatened by the little boat—he had sixty Spaniards behind him—gave the master-at-arms permission to board. That closed the trap, for while Gómez had the undivided attention of the ship’s crew, Barbosa and his men, unobserved in the bleak fog, slipped around the vessel’s lee side.

  Magellan’s letter bluntly summoned Mendoza to the flagship. After reading it, the don, scornful of so obvious a trap, cried derisively, “You won’t catch me going there!”—“¡No me pillarás allá!” His laugh was cut off; Gómez, with one violent slash, had slit his throat. That was a signal to Barbosa and his party; they sprang on deck and attacked the mutineers from behind. Within minutes Victoria was the admiral’s prize and Barbosa was issuing orders to hoist sails. Before the other two rebel ships could grasp what had happened, Trinidad, Santiago, and Victoria had formed a rough line across the mouth of the bay, cutting off the only line of escape. Helpless, they capitulated. Mesquita, freed from his irons, chaired the subsequent court-martial. On Saturday his cousin the capitán-general passed sentence.

  Knowing he would need as many hands as possible once he resumed the voyage, Magellan spared all but Quesada, Cartagena, and a Spanish priest who had fomented the rebellion. There was only one execution; Quesada, guilty of murder, had to die. Because he was an aristocrat, he was spared the garrote. But there was also blood on the hands of his servant, Luis de Molino. Molino protested that he had only been obeying orders, and Magellan, giving that weight, told him that he would be permitted to live provided he swung the blade decapitating his master—a grisly choice, though it cannot have taken Molino long to make it. As was customary in that time, the bodies of both treacherous captains, Mendoza and Quesada, were drawn and quartered, after which the reeking, bleeding quarters were displayed on poles, the theory being that the spectacle would intimidate any men too dull to have learned the wages of mutiny.

  That left Cartagena, who had held high office under the king, and the priest, an anointed man of God. The capitán-general could not bring himself to shed the blood of either. Yet carrying them around the world in irons was impractical. Therefore they were to be imprisoned until the fleet departed Puerto San Julián and then left behind. As the five vessels sailed on August 24, the two marooned men were abandoned on the frigid shore with a thin ration of wine and food. Magellan had declared that he was leaving their fate to a merciful God, but in the sixteenth century the quality of divine mercy had proved to be strained and brackish. During the wretched days that lay ahead for the castaways they may have envied their drawn and quartered co-conspirators.

  But at that point Magellan’s prospects did not appear to be much brighter. In quelling the mutiny he had, in a sense, increased the odds against himself. If he reappeared in Seville discredited by failure, it was doubtful that Spanish authorities would accept his version of the violent interlude in San Julián. The gruesome deaths of three Castilian noblemen and a priest would certainly be investigated, and it was by no means certain that the dons’ mild suplica would be seen as justification for execution. The capitán-general might well find himself on trial for murder. Only if he returned a conqueror could he expect amnesty, and as weeks wore on conquest had seemed more elusive than ever. The armada was down to four ships now; Santiago, sent on an exploring mission, had been lost in a storm. Mighty gales tossed them daily; the weather was growing steadily worse. To the west, snowcapped mountains were clearly visible. They began to see “seawolves,” or seals, and penguins, which they called “ducks without wings” (“patos sin alas”). After anchoring below fifty degrees south latitude, Magellan decided to hibernate for another eight weeks, until he could be certain that winter was spent. By now he must have been close to total despair. Every hope had died glimmering. The possibility of redemption seemed very remote. During a year at sea he had covered nearly nine thousand miles, suppressed a bloody uprising, explored every indentation in what seemed to be an endless coast of rocks and sand, and found absolutely nothing.

  His desolation was ironic, for during those eight fearful, brooding weeks, from August 26 to October 18, he was only 150 miles —two sailing days—from immortality.

  ON SUNDAY, October 21, 1520, a day of high, harsh, howling winds, lookouts clinging to the fleet’s topmasts sighted a steep eminence which, as they approached, was perceived as a wall of naked white cliffs. Closing, they saw that these formed a cape, beyond which lay an immense bay of black water. The day was St. Ursula’s. In remembrance of her, Magellan christened the peninsula Cabo de los Vírgenes. But his officers, still dreaming of the south seas, were unimpressed. The sound, all four pilots agreed, was a fjord similar to those which had been observed in Norway. “We all believed,” Don Antonio Pigafetta wrote afterward, “that it was a blind alley.” Only their commander was curious. However, because he had wasted over three weeks investigating the Río de la Plata nine months earlier, he could spare little for this exploration. He told San Antonio and Concepción that he wanted them to see how far westward they could sail into the bay, but he wanted them back in five days at most.

  As the fifth day waned with no sign of them, he grew anxious, and then was alarmed when the lookout in the masthead of his flagship reported a distant column of smoke—then the maritime signal sent by shipwrecked sailors. Magellan was issuing the order to lower boats when the sails of both missing vessels appeared off the port bow. They were gaily decorated with flags, all hands were shouting and waving, and as they hove to their cannons fired three thundering salvos. Clearly something extraordinary had happened.r />
  Serrano boarded the flagship from Concepción to explain. They had been approaching the western end of the harbor, he reported, when a squall overtook them. As it cleared they saw that the bay did not end. Instead a channel—“first narrows,” he called it—opened. Passing through this, they had entered a broad body of water, then “second narrows,” followed by another widening in the channel. On the third day they had to turn about, to return in the five days allotted them. But they had found no end to the passage; every narrowing led to another opening. The width of the labyrinthine waterway varied from two to twenty miles. Seamen casting lead had found no bottom. They had not entered a river; the water was brine all the way, and on both sides the tides ebbed and flowed.

  The stoical Magellan betrayed no excitement, but he called for a final salvo of bombards in honor of King Carlos—who, unknown to him, was now being crowned Emperor Charles V—and led his men in prayer. The following morning, Thursday, October 25, with his Trinidad leading the way, all four ships glided past the barren headlands, and entered the strange new watercourse, named Canal de Todos los Santos by the capitán-general but known to history as the Strait of Magellan. Off his starboard prow, although he did not know it, was the southernmost tip of what is now known as South America; to port, a large island and a maze of smaller islands beneath which lay Cape Horn, some 350 miles above the Antarctic Peninsula. So cold was the island maze that the shivering Indians who lived there warmed themselves over perpetual fires. The flames, visible to Magellan, prompted him to call the southern shore Tierra del Fuego—Land of Fire.

  Negotiating the strait’s tortuous turns later challenged sailors of all ages, but for the flota’s helmsmen, dependent upon wooden tillers and clumsy, bellying sails, it was exhausting. The passage was a confused, tangled skein. At various points it led westward, northward, and southward. Again and again it halved and became two channels, forcing the admiral to pause and divide his command until he knew which one was the throughway. The bays assumed weird shapes. In the lateral channels rocks, appearing beneath sudden shoals, threatened to gouge holes in the ships’ bottoms, and on the first day one wild squall followed another, sometimes threatening to capsize the lead ship, Magellan’s Trinidad. Then the weather improved. In this they were singularly lucky; subsequent navigators found that foul weather was usually prevalent throughout the strait. Indeed, that became a major reason for their failure to get through it.