Magellan’s fleet departed on 20 September 1519, and within a week, while anchored at the Canaries, an argument broke out as to their course. Magellan wanted to sail south-east, but his three Spanish captains, Juan de Cartagena, Gaspar de Quesada and Luis de Mendoza, who had never been happy at sailing under a foreigner and suspected he was leading them to captivity in Portuguese West Africa, favoured a more westerly course. (According to one account, they had boasted before leaving Spain that they would kill Magellan if he displeased them.) Magellan held firm – and did indeed lead them towards Africa before striking west – but in mid-Atlantic Cartagena openly contested Magellan’s right to command. He was arrested at swordpoint, stripped of his rank and only saved from chains by Mendoza’s promise to keep him under open arrest on his ship.
Having asserted his authority, Magellan continued on his way, evading en route a Portuguese fleet that had been sent to intercept them and sailing through storms that produced the electrical phenomenon known as St Elmo’s Fire, believed to be the embodiment of St Elmo, patron saint of seamen, and a sign of divine protection. Pigafetta, who had never experienced a storm at sea, let alone an electrical one, was awed and terrified. ‘[It] appeared to us many times,’ he wrote, ‘among other times on a very dark night, in such splendour, like a blazing torch, at the top of the mainmast, and stood there some two hours or more with us, consoling us in our lamentations. When that blessed light wished to leave us, so dazzling was its brightness in our eyes, that we all remained for more than an eighth of an hour quite blinded and crying out for mercy, truly believing that we were dead. Suddenly, the sea became calm.’
They sighted Brazil on 29 November, but did not land until 13 December when they were at modern Rio de Janeiro. One of Magellan’s Portuguese officers, João de Carvalho, had already spent four years in Brazil on a previous voyage, so was well acquainted with the region. (Indeed, he had left there a half-Indian son, whom he now signed on as a member of the crew.) To the untravelled Pigafetta, however, Rio was a new and marvellous paradise. They could purchase ten parrots for the price of a mirror, and for a single needle ‘a whole basket of sweet potatoes, which taste like chestnuts and are as long as turnips’. The natives slept in hammocks and travelled in canoes – two words that Pigafetta has been credited with introducing to Europe – and painted their bodies ‘in a wonderful manner with fire in various designs’. He recorded that the women could be bought for the smallest piece of iron and that the men went mostly naked but when they dressed wore clothes made of parrot feathers that they fashioned into great wheels around their buttocks. He was worried, though, by reports of cannibalism and could not understand why it was so warm because, by his calculations, they were only twenty-three and a half degrees north of the South Pole.
Having careened and scraped his ships, and taken aboard the fruit and vegetables in which the region abounded, Magellan continued south, heading for a cape where previous navigators had reported nothing but empty sea to the south and west. It was the furthest any European had sailed along the coast, and was believed to be the point where South America either ended or was bisected by a passage leading to the Indies. Magellan proved the reports false: the cape was merely the upper lip of the River Plate estuary. In the face of a second tentative mutiny, he led his ships into unknown waters. During the next eight weeks the sea became colder and storms more frequent. Pigafetta noted the appearance of strange creatures he had never seen before: the penguin and the fur seal. ‘These goslings,’ he wrote, ‘are black and white and have feathers over their whole body of the same size and fashion, and they do not fly, and live on fish. They were so fat that we did not pluck them but skinned them, and they have a beak like a crow’s.’ As for the ‘sea wolves’, they had no feet but something resembling a human hand: ‘And if they could have run they would have been truly fierce and cruel; but they do not leave the water, where they swim wondrously and live on fish.’ The fleet was scattered three times before, in late March, Magellan took his ships into a bay on the Patagonian coast where he said they would spend the rest of the southern winter.
St Julian Bay, as he named it, was a wretched, bleak spot. But not until Magellan ordered the crew to build huts and simultaneously cut their rations did they realize just how wretched and bleak it was. As Pigafetta put it, ‘The captains and crew objected to both these orders, and the dissatisfied demanded to return home.’ Magellan refused to discuss the matter, and when some of the crew persisted, he had them arrested and punished. This exasperated the men still further. On 1 April Cartagena, Mendoza and Quesada seized three of the ships and tried to escape. Magellan, however, ‘by a cunning ruse’, recaptured one of the ships – killing Mendoza in the process – and blocked the mouth of the bay. Outnumbered and unable to break free, Cartagena surrendered. Magellan’s revenge was harsh. The ringleaders among the crew were chained and sentenced to careen the ships. Cartagena and his chaplain were ordered to be marooned. Quesada was executed – by his secretary, who was spared death on condition that he behead his master – and then the corpses of Quesada and Mendoza were dismembered and hung on gibbets. After this the hut-building proceeded smoothly and nobody complained about the rations.
Magellan still believed that there was a passage to the other side of South America, and that winter he sent the Santiago on reconnaissance missions to find it. On one of these voyages the ship was driven ashore and damaged beyond repair. The crew, luckily, were able to row ashore and send a party overland to fetch help from St Julian Bay. For several weeks rescue vessels plied to and fro until the contents of the Santiago had been retrieved. During this time Pigafetta recorded the arrival of a giant in St Julian Bay. He had thin hair, a stentorian voice and was so tall ‘that we reached only up to his waist’, but he was friendly and was soon followed by other giants, dressed in skins of a strange animal (later identified as the guanaco), carrying bows and arrows which were feathered like those in Europe. Whether these giants actually existed or were an adornment to Pigafetta’s journal is unknown. His assertion that the Europeans only came up to their waist, for example, was an obvious exaggeration because he also claimed, more plausibly, that the giants were just a head taller than the white men. They did, however, feature so prominently in Pigafetta’s account that they may have had some basis in reality. He even compiled a 100-word vocabulary of their language – some of the words are still used in the region – and Magellan named the land Patagonia in their honour, the word being Portuguese slang for Big Foot. They were so exotic that Magellan captured a couple,* whereupon they became so angry that he had to find a new harbour to the south.
The fleet sailed again on 18 October, and within three days met a cape that, according to the religious calendar, he named the Cape of Eleven Thousand Virgins. On the other side of it lay what at first appeared to be an estuary but on investigation turned out to be the strait Magellan had been waiting for. The relief of his men can only be imagined, for ‘if we had not discovered this passage, the captain-general was determined to go as far south as seventy-five degrees towards the Antarctic Pole’. Surrounded by high, snow-capped mountains, it was not an easy passage – a series of bays linked by narrow channels through which flowed treacherous currents. But it was navigable, and at the last bay they encountered two openings. Magellan sent the San Antonio and Concepción to reconnoitre one, while he led the Trinidad and Victoria down the other. Seven days later Magellan found the sea. According to Pigafetta, the normally emotionless captain broke down and cried. (He called his discovery the Strait of Patagonia. Later it would be named after Magellan himself.) Returning to bring the good news to the others, however, he learned that the San Antonio was lost. The captain of the Concepción said they had separated to explore the coast of a large island, and on rounding the island the San Antonio had vanished. The three remaining ships scoured the bay; Magellan even sent the Victoria to the eastern opening of the strait. But the San Antonio was nowhere to be seen. Either it had sunk or, as seemed more likely, its command
er Estevão Gomes had mutinied and sailed back to Spain. Whatever the cause, the loss of the San Antonio was a blow: it had been their largest ship and its hold contained much of the expedition’s food.
On 28 November 1520 the fleet sailed into the unknown ocean. Before they left, Magellan ordered his priest to bless the ships, and called his crew on deck for prayers. The seas, he noted, were auspiciously calm. ‘May we always find them as peaceful as this morning,’ he said. ‘In this hope, I shall name this Sea the Pacific.’ It was not the nature of the ocean that would give them trouble so much as its scale. Prevailing wisdom held the world’s circumference to be much smaller than it really was. By all accepted calculations Magellan should reach land within a matter of weeks. And had he steered north-west he would have done so, hitting the chain of Polynesian islands that would eventually lead him to larger landmasses. But without the means to calculate longitude precisely he considered such a course too risky. Instead, adhering to standard navigational procedure, he sailed north for a predetermined latitude that he could follow until he met charted waters. This roundabout approach cost time, as did the unexpected size of the Pacific. Soon they were on the brink of starvation.
Pigafetta gave a vivid account of their plight: ‘We were three months and twenty days without obtaining any kind of fresh supplies. We ate ship’s biscuit that was no longer biscuit, but crumbs swarming with worms, for these had already devoured whatever was good. Besides, it stank powerfully of the urine of rats. The water we drank was yellow and had long been putrid. We were reduced even to eating certain pieces of leather that had been placed on top of the mainyard to prevent it from chafing the ropes. From exposure to sun, rain and wind, this leather had become very hard, so that we let it macerate for four or five days in the sea then placed it for a while on the embers and thus ate it. Often, too, we ate sawdust from the ships’ timbers. Rats were sold for half a ducat a piece if we could catch any. But the worst of all our misfortunes was the following: the gums of both the lower and upper jaws of some of our men began to swell so much that they could no longer eat and consequently died. Nineteen of them died of this disease, as well as the ... Patagonian giant and one Indian from Brazil. In addition, some twenty-five or thirty more men fell ill of other diseases, in their arms, legs, or parts, so that very few remained well. I myself, by the grace of God, suffered however no sickness.’ Pigafetta escaped scurvy because he caught and ate fish on a daily basis. Why the rest of the crew did not follow his example is a mystery.
On 6 March 1521 the fleet finally berthed at a small island – possibly Guam, in the Marianas – whose inhabitants swarmed aboard and, brushing the enfeebled Westerners aside, began to steal everything they could find. They did not leave until Magellan ordered his crossbowmen to shoot. Even then, they escaped with the Trinidad’s longboat. Vengefully, Magellan went ashore with 50 men to retrieve the boat and find supplies, in the process burning an entire village and all its canoes and killing seven men. For good measure, he then shelled the coast. He did not, however, bring back the entrails of those he had killed, despite his invalids’ belief that this would cure them. Pigafetta accompanied the raiders and took notes on the natives’ appearance: ‘They wear hats woven of palm fronds, like the Albanians, and they are as tall as we and well built. They worship no God and have an olive-coloured complexion, though they are all born white. Their teeth are red and black.’ He was interested, too, in their catamarans, which had sails made of palm leaves and which he compared to a Venetian gondola: ‘For rudders they use a wooden blade like the shovel of a baker’s oven with a wooden handle. They can change stern and prow at will, and their craft leap in the water like dolphins from wave to wave.’ When the fleet left it was pursued by a regatta of these vessels, whose occupants tore their hair in grief and pelted the ships with stones.
By 18 March the fleet was anchored off Leyte in the Philippines, where the inhabitants were accustomed to foreigners – Magellan’s pilot judged that several of the people who greeted them were either Mongolian or Chinese – and were willing to trade. With Magellan’s slave Enrique acting as an interpreter, they soon established friendly relations. The sick men were taken ashore, where Magellan personally fed them coconut milk to cure their scurvy. Then the two sides bartered energetically, the Filipinos exchanging porcelain and gold for the Europeans’ trinkets. The king of Leyte was so impressed by Magellan that he attended mass and accepted Christianity. It was the same on every island Magellan visited, until he came to Cebú on 7 April. Here too, at first, things went well: the king was converted, and was baptized with hundreds of his subjects. As a sign of friendship he invited Magellan to become his blood-brother, allowed him to erect a large cross in the marketplace and swore loyalty to the King of Spain. According to Pigafetta the baptism was so successful that a paralysed man was cured: ‘This was a most manifest miracle accomplished in our times.’ The trade was even busier here than it had been on Leyte, the people of Cebú offering 10 pounds of gold for 14 of iron. His material and spiritual success filled Magellan with evangelical zeal. When he heard that the king’s vassal, Si Lapulapu, ruler of the island of Mactan, refused to accept the King of Spain as his overlord, he decided to teach him a lesson. The three Spanish ships, accompanied by a fleet of Cebú warriors, sailed at midnight on Friday 27 April. The following morning – he had always fought best on a Saturday and considered it a lucky day – Magellan led 50 men on to the beaches of Mactan.
Si Lapulapu was waiting for them. He had dug parallel lines of deep trenches in the sand, through which the armoured invaders clambered with difficulty. Then, as they approached Si Lapulapu’s village, they were charged by 1,500 warriors. Even though they were vastly outnumbered, their armour saved them from the spears, stones and arrows that came their way. For a while they kept the Filipinos at a distance with crossbows and muskets. Hoping to demoralize his enemy, Magellan sent a group to burn the village. Two of the men were brought down, but the others completed the job. The sight of the flames served only to enrage the warriors. They now began to fire at the Spaniards’ unprotected legs. Magellan, wounded in the thigh by an arrow, ordered a withdrawal. At first it went smoothly, the men retreating in orderly waves across the trenches, each party giving covering fire to the next. But once they were on the beach their nerve broke. They fled for the boats – one of which overturned beneath their weight – and rowed to safety, leaving the rearguard to fend for themselves.
Knee-deep in water, Magellan and his six remaining sailors put up a valiant defence. Their armour gave them an advantage, and although Magellan’s helmet was twice knocked from his head they kept the Filipinos at bay for an hour. Extraordinarily, the ships made no attempt to rescue them, and when the king of Cebú tried to intervene they blew his canoe out of the water, killing four men. The end came when Magellan stabbed an attacker with his lance and, on drawing his sword for the coup de grace, was hit in the arm by a bamboo spear. Seizing their moment, Si Lupalupa’s men closed in. One of them slashed Magellan’s hamstring, and as he fell into the water the others belaboured him with clubs. The survivors discarded their armour and swam to the boats. Pigafetta, who had stayed with his captain-general to the last, and had been hit in the face by an arrow, recorded that even as he was being bludgeoned Magellan turned constantly to make sure that his men were safe (more likely, he was looking to see if they would rescue him). ‘Had it not been for our poor captain, not a single one of us would have been saved in the boats,’ Pigafetta mourned, ‘for the others were able to withdraw to them while he was still fighting. I hope ... that the fame of so noble a captain will never be effaced in our times.’*
In Pigafetta’s words, Magellan had been ‘our mirror, our light, our comfort and our true leader’. In his absence nobody knew what to do. They tried to recover his bones but, according to Pigafetta, ‘[The Filipinos] would not give up such a man ... for all the greatest riches in the world, but they wished to keep him in order to remember him.’ The expedition lost all purpose. Leadership was
given to two men, Duarte Barbosa of the Victoria and Juan Serrano, erstwhile captain of the Santiago, who between them tried to restore amicable relations. Using Magellan’s slave Enrique as a go-between, they arranged a dinner with the king of Cebú. The king no longer trusted them, neither did the slave, and the dinner was a trap. Serrano led 24 officers ashore, tempted by the king’s offer of a set of jewellery that he had long coveted. Two of the officers, João de Carvalho and Gonzalo Gómez de Espinosa, suspected something was wrong and left early. They had only just returned to the ships when a riot broke out on land. Strafing the shore with their artillery, they moved closer. Serrano appeared on the beach. From a shouted conversation it became clear that everyone had been murdered save Enrique and Serrano. The captain begged them to ransom him, but Carvalho and Espinosa guessed it was a trick and, unwilling to lose more men, they raised sail and left Serrano to his plight.
Off the Map Page 9
