The Voyage of Magellan

April 17 – July 22, 1520

Ferdinand Magellan was a restless sort of captain general, who was forever wondering what the grass was like on the other side. Puerto San Julián had seemed a gift from God when the fleet had first come upon it, but who knew what might lie just a short distance further down the South American coast? Perhaps there existed an even better, more abundant anchorage than this one. Or perhaps the fleet was within striking distance of the long-sought strait passing through the continent — or, for that matter, getting close to the continent’s southern tip.

In the middle of April, the weather was actually better than it had been a fortnight earlier. Further, the sixth sense which served experienced seamen during this era as a substitute for the not-yet-invented barometer told the ones whom Magellan consulted that the decent weather had every prospect of holding for a while longer. He wasn’t willing to stake his entire fleet on their predictions, mind you; the ships had been badly battered during the trip down the coast, and desperately needed careening and refitting. But it might not be the worst idea in the world, he thought, to send a single scout a little bit farther south while the weather still allowed it, just to see what was what.

Therefore Magellan asked Captain Juan Rodríguez Serrano of the Santiago to meet with him in the little beach-side lean-to which now served as his living quarters and command post. Serrano had long since become, along with Gómez de Espinosa, one of the two men upon whom Magellan relied most of all. Although both Serrano and Espinosa were Spaniards, both were also consummate professionals, who had more in common with the Portuguese professional soldier Magellan than they had with the Spanish political appointees who had so recently fomented a mutiny. As they saw things, they had been assigned Magellan as their commander, and it was their sworn duty to support and protect him to the best of their ability. Fortunately for their captain general, both were extremely good at doing so. Serrano’s Santiago may have been the smallest ship in the fleet, but it was the most shipshape of them all. On a voyage where dilettantism and resentments had caused most of the ships to follow his sailing orders only lackadaisically much of the time, Magellan could always count on the Santiago to be right where it was supposed to be. Small wonder that he had chosen it for the dangerous assignment of scouting the rivers that led out of the Mar Dulce. Now, he had another reconnaissance mission in mind for his most reliable ship and captain.

So, at the meeting, he asked Serrano whether he would be willing to take one more trip in the Santiago during this welcome meteorological reprieve they were experiencing. It was a big request to make, as Magellan well knew. The captain general promised Serrano a bonus of 100 gold ducats if he discovered anything useful.

The reward money probably wouldn’t have been necessary for Serrano to accept the assignment, although he certainly didn’t reject it once offered. He expressed just one concern to Magellan. The Santiago had been no less battered by the winds and waves than any of the other ships of the fleet. It would need an overhaul, he said, before he would feel comfortable taking it to sea again.

Magellan had to acknowledge that this was eminently reasonable. Over the second half of April, all of the men who weren’t fishing or hunting pitched in to drag the Santiago up onto the beach and roll it gently first onto one side and then the other. They went over its hull carefully, replacing any planks that showed signs of rot or of being eaten out by the insidious shipworms. Then they re-caulked every inch of it using some of the pitch that had been purchased a seeming lifetime ago in the Canary Islands. Miraculously, the relatively good weather held throughout.

Thus the Santiago was able to set off on its reconnaissance mission on May 1. Its hold was almost empty, with enough hardtack and wine for only a couple of weeks at sea. As soon as his ship had cleared the entrance to Puerto San Julián, Serrano told his crew about the reward money, promising to split it equally with them if they should succeed in benefiting the expedition as a whole in one way or another. The prospect of the reward was cheering, but a strong, steady headwind made the ship’s forward progress painfully slow. Five days out of Puerto San Julián, the Santiago had managed only 70 miles (110 kilometers), and already the dwindling state of the ship’s supplies was beginning to prompt thoughts of turning around in its captain’s mind.

Then his lookout spotted an inviting opening in the coastline creeping past to starboard. Turning to investigate, the Santiago threaded its way carefully in the unfavorable wind through a line of rocky shoals lurking just under the waves, until it found itself in what proved to be a large river’s seaside estuary. Now it was Serrano’s turn to name the geography he encountered. He called the river the Santa Cruz, or “Holy Cross,” because he had discovered it on the day of one of the several annual Feasts of the Cross. It was about 1000 feet (300 meters) wide and as placid as you could ask for, but a sounding taken by the ship’s longboat showed it to be only about 17 feet (5 meters) deep at the very center, too shallow for even the shallow-drafted Santiago to risk a trip up its length. And this river, like those emptying into the Mar Dulce, was freshwater. It was all too plainly not Magellan’s wished-for superhighway across South America.

The river was peculiarly sterile, with no evident aquatic life whatsoever. The surrounding landscape presented an almost equally bleak prospect, nothing but stunted, thorny plants which seemed hard pressed just to survive from day to day in this cold, blustery climate. The spark of hope which the discovery of the estuary had prompted in Serrano and his crew was extinguished. There seemed to be nothing to recommend this harbor over the one the rest of the fleet presently occupied.

But then, as the ship turned to make its way back out to sea, the lookout spotted a welcome sight indeed on one of the little islets that were scattered around the estuary: a throng of sea elephants and sea lions. This was a fine consolation prize, almost more welcome than a strait in the opinion of the hungry sailors. The anchors dropped and the ship’s boats were untied by feverish hands. These poor creatures were no more prepared for the assault that followed than their counterparts some distance to the north had been. The sailors fell upon them with clubs and axes, built shabby fires out of whatever twigs and branches they could gather, and gorged themselves on the half-cooked flesh.

When the first feeding frenzy was over, Serrano made a more careful survey of the estuary. It turned out that seals regularly came and went to and from a number of the islets. At their captain’s orders, the sailors settled down to a more methodical sort of butchery. They killed hundreds of seals. Then they smoked the meat, collected the blubber for coats and blankets, and stowed it all snugly in the hold of the Santiago. Let their friends back at Puerto San Julián worry and fret about the delay in their return. When they did come back, they would do so with a haul beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, one that should easily be worth Magellan’s 100 ducats. After two weeks in the estuary, the Santiago sat considerably lower in the water, its hold full to bursting with the bloody plunder.

As the slaughter and butchery were going on, though, the weather was becoming more threatening. Serrano saw his window of opportunity to rejoin the rest of the fleet closing fast, but he kept delaying his departure, trying to get as much of the precious cargo aboard as possible. It might have occurred to another captain to wait out the entirety of winter there in the sheltered estuary. But Serrano wasn’t such a captain; he had been ordered to search for something that could benefit the fleet and then return, and this was exactly what he intended to do.

Still, he was gambling against mercurial nature by staying so long. In the end, he overplayed his hand. On May 21, with the weather now decidedly inclement, the Santiago finally left the estuary, laden with seal carcasses stacked higher than the gunwales. A violent storm coming straight down out of the north smacked the wallowing vessel in the face late the next day. Loaded down as it was, it was unable to tack against the storm. In fact, there was no way to fight the gale whatsoever; the only thing to be done was to acquiescence to its will and ride it out. Serrano brought the ship around stern to the wind and lowered the sails. For more than eight hours, the Santiago was blown back the way it had just come at a terrifying speed. “Pell-mell the rollers tossed her along down-current, wild as the North Wind tossing thistle along the fields at high harvest,” as Homer had once written. The men aboard could only hold on for dear life in the midst of a frigid cacophony of wind and rain, ice and snow.

On the morning of May 23, they saw that they were back at the mouth of the Santa Cruz estuary. Worse — much worse — the wind had shifted direction slightly, was now blowing the ship directly toward it. Beneath the water just ahead, everyone knew, were deadly shoals. The following sea gave the rudder no purchase whatsoever. Captain Serrano shouted for the men to raise sails to try to bring the ship around. Suddenly the the keel scraped against a shoal. Timbers shattered with a sound like a musket salute and water came rushing in around the cargo of meat and blubber. Seconds later, the rudder was sheered clean off by an underwater ridge. The sailors saw it go bouncing away uselessly behind them, until it was lost to sight in the gray cascades of foam.

Serrano understood at that instant that he couldn’t save his ship. All he could do was try to save as many of his crew as possible. Spotting a reasonably clear stretch of beach on the southern bank of the estuary’s mouth, he guided his crippled charge toward it as best he could using sails alone. He ran from end to end of his quarterdeck, shouting orders, which his disciplined crew executed with dispatch even in this last exigency. Several more times there came the shuddering impact of wood on sharp rock. The Santiago was now undeniably sinking, the gunwales getting ever closer to the churning water. But still Serrano kept the ship running before the whirlwind, its canvas spread taut as a plow strap, trying to reach the shore before the ship fell to pieces beneath his feet.

It struck bottom again — sandy bottom this time. The hand of Poseidon pushed the Santiago well up onto the beach, then regathered itself to smite it into matchsticks. Now was the chance. “Abandon ship!” screamed Serrano. “Away with you! Jump for your lives!” The sailors climbed over the forecastle and threw themselves out over the bowsprit one after another. Serrano was the last to make the leap. His feet had barely touched the sandy ground when the greedy sea dragged the crew-less hulk back into its maw. Just like that, the Santiago was gone.

Choking and gasping, the sailors fought their way free of the deadly embrace that had just claimed their ship and struggled to higher ground. Captain Serrano’s clear voice rang out amidst the bedlam once again: “Over here, men! To me! To me!” One by one, the drowned rats staggered up to join their leader, who kept a careful count of the arrivals. By nightfall, he knew that 37 out of his 38 men had survived the ocean’s fury. The crew of the Santiago could count themselves very, very lucky.

Or could they? It looked to most of them like they had only traded a swift death for a slow one. They were stranded on the wrong side of the estuary with nothing more in the way of supplies than the clothes on their backs. Their comrades back in Puerto San Julián had no idea where to even begin to look for them. They huddled together through the long, cold night, a pathetic shivering bundle of humanity in the midst of a heartless wasteland.

By the next morning, the storm had passed. A sallow sun illuminated a shoreline scattered with the remains of the Santiago: spars and planks of wood, torn swatches of canvas and lengths of rope. Serrano spurred his men into action. They weren’t dead yet, he told them. There was still hope. They knew that the rest of the expedition was encamped not much more than 70 miles (110 kilometers) to the north. Surely they could find a way to cover that distance.

Shaken out of their despair by their captain’s encouragements and commands, the men gathered up whatever debris seemed like it might be useful. Then they set off overland, walking westward for the time being along the southern edge of the estuary. As they walked, they gnawed on raw fish which they caught with improvised fishing poles and barnacles which they scraped from between rocks. At night they slept in a twitching heap, each man trying constantly to burrow deeper into the pile in search of the warmth that was to be had there. In this fashion, they finally reached a point far enough inland that the water to their north was relatively calm. Even so, the estuary was still a good three miles (five kilometers) across at this point.

Now it was time for the scavenged remnants of their ship to do the sailors one final service. Using rocks as hammers, they constructed a crude raft that seemed capable of getting across the body of water before it sank. But there was only room for two men onboard the raft. No matter, thought Serrano coolly; other factors also mitigated against trying to reach Puerto San Julián en masse. Some of his men were already badly weakened by exhaustion, exposure, and hunger. Serrano doubted whether they would be up to another grueling overland journey, a much longer one in which food would be even harder to come by than it was here by the seaside. He decided it would be best to send just a couple of men to inform Magellan of their plight.

There was no question but that Serrano himself would stay behind with the majority of his men and live or die alongside them. To make the trip, he selected two strong, capable sailors whose names have sadly been lost to history. Eight days after the sinking of the Santiago, they said farewell to their comrades and boarded the crude raft. The rest of the men watched as the fragile conveyance shrank to a brownish speck amidst gray water and gray sky, then disappeared from sight altogether. There was nothing to do now but trust in the two sailors, trust in Magellan’s troth to those who served under him, and try to stay alive while they did so.

Back in Puerto San Julián, Magellan had by now concluded that the Santiago must have met with some sort of disaster, although he had no way of knowing what or where. He regretted deeply the loss of his best-run ship and the loyal captain who had made it so, but he was a practical man, not much given to rumination. There was much else that had to be seen to.

The fact is that Magellan didn’t make life much easier for the sailors who had stayed at Puerto San Julián than it was for their comrades who were stranded to the south. After the Santiago had departed on its doomed reconnaissance mission, Magellan had insisted that each of the four other ships be hauled out of the water and refurbished as well, one after another. The work was essential in itself, but the captain general also had another motive. In this cold and gloom, where the nights were now three times as long as the days, lethargy was the inevitable prelude to death. The men simply had to be kept moving, for the sake of their own survival. So, as the days continued to grow shorter and shorter, they hammered and sawed and caulked deep into the hours of darkness.

Not only were they cold, but they were hungry too; the fish which had been so abundant in the little bay when they had arrived were becoming scarcer as winter marched on. Yet Magellan still kept the hardtack under armed guard; it was for the voyage onward, not for this sojourn. The sailors often saw roaming around the steppes behind their encampment herds of an animal that seemed to them as bizarre as any of the monsters encountered by Odysseus. Like so many mythological beasts, it appeared to have been cobbled together from pieces of other animals: the head of a mule, the neck and body of a camel, the legs of a deer, and the tail of a horse. These strange, ungainly-looking creatures, which we know as guanacos today — close relatives of the llamas that are found farther north in South America — proved to be deceptively fleet-footed, keen-eared, and hard to corner. They almost seemed to be teasing the strangers from across the water, what with the way they scampered into view and then scampered away to safety again before the sailors’ muskets could bring them down.

But the guanacos were not the only terrestrial inhabitants of Puerto San Julián. One day while the sailors were about their usual labors in the encampment, they were astonished to spot a tall man — a veritable giant in their eyes — marching boldly across the steppe toward them. This was the first human being the expedition had met since leaving the Mar Dulce. When he reached the perimeter of the encampment, he capered about like mad, dancing and leaping and singing in a strange language. Sometimes he scooped up sand and sprinkled it over his head, a gesture whose meaning no one could guess.

A sailor volunteered to approach him. This sailor was a clever fellow; he danced and sang in imitation of the giant, who responded by redoubling his own gamboling. The pantomiming white man and the brown-skinned native made their way over to where Magellan stood waiting to receive them. It could now be seen that the native’s face was dyed a bright red, with yellow circles around the eyes and two yellow hearts on the cheeks. His hair was dyed white, and he was clad in the skin and fur of a guanaco; even his feet were shod in great swaddles of fur, which made them look rather like bear paws. He carried a bow and had a bundle of arrows slung over his broad shoulders. Taken as a whole, he was an impressive and intimidating sight to behold. He belonged, we now know, to a group of native people called the Tehuelche, who had made this uncongenial southernmost stretch of the Americas their home for many centuries before the arrival of these first Europeans, who were destined here as everywhere to be the heralds of a dramatic change in the native people’s lives and fortunes.

Just like his Tupi and Querandí predecessors, this native representative seemed to intuitively recognize Magellan as the authority figure he was. Somehow managing to shrink before the little captain general despite the enormous difference in the two men’s statures, he raised one finger toward the heavens and brought it down again, seeming to equate the visitors with gods. Magellan, who was becoming used to serving as ambassador to the native peoples he encountered, held a mirror up before the giant, who was so shocked at the sight of his own visage that he jumped to get out of the polished glass’s view, knocking several sailors down as he did so. The captain general gave his guest the usual baubles — bells and beads and a comb in addition to the unnerving mirror — and convinced him to lead a party of sailors to the place nearby where the rest of his nomadic tribe had set up camp.

A friendship soon developed between the natives and the foreigners. It was not quite as congenial — or as carnal — as the one with the Tupi, for these men were, as Antonio Pigafetta wrote in his journal with perhaps an underlying note of disappointment, “very jealous of their wives.” Yet the Tehuelche were a blessing nonetheless for these cold and hungry Europeans stranded so far from home. Their existence revolved around the guanaco. They gave their new friends guanaco meat to eat, gave them warm clothing made from guanaco fur, loaned them domesticated guanacos to serve as beasts of burden. The Tehuelche even taught the sailors how to hunt guanacos for themselves. The trick was to use a young one as a lure: tie it up in the open, hide in the brush, and then shoot the adult animals when they came in response to its frantic bleating. It was cruel, yes, but it was effective. In addition, the Tehuelche taught the sailors how to flush out hidden foxes, sparrows, and rabbits, as well as how to find the mussels and oysters that clung to hidden hollows in the rocky shore all year round. (A few lucky sailors discovered pearls inside the shells when they cracked them open.)

In recompense for all of this, some of the sailors tried to teach the natives about Christianity. They even baptized one particularly amiable young man, naming him after John the Baptist and urging him to go forth and proselytize among his people as his namesake had done. Of course, it was hard to know how much of the religion he really understood, for all that he learned to say his new name and “Ave Maria.”

Magellan coined the name Patagones for the Tehuelche. The etymology is unclear, but it may have been an allusion to the Patagón Giant, a character in a popular contemporary chivalric novel by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo. (Miguel de Cervantes would later satirize this novel, and with it the Patagón Giant, in Don Quixote.) As it happened, Magellan’s name for these people would not stick; “Tehuelche” is the closest transcription we can manage of the name by which they know themselves, a name which it is only right and proper for us as well to use for them. (If only Christopher Columbus’s American “Indians” had been so lucky…) But, ironically, Magellan’s preferred name did come to be applied to the region of the world in which the Tehuelche live. Today the southernmost 1000 miles (1600 kilometers) of South America, which includes parts of the nations of Argentina and Chile, is still known as Patagonia.

Antonio Pigafetta, who had survived all of the fleet’s recent adventures without losing his passion for anthropology, was eager to learn and record all he could about the Tehuelche. He mixed fact and legend, speculation and tall tales with every bit as much abandon as Marco Polo before him. He insisted in his journal, for example, that the tallest sailors on the expedition were no taller than a  Tehuelche man’s waist. He claimed that the Tehuelche remedy for a stomachache was to swallow an arrow two feet (60 centimeters) long. Slightly more credibly, he said that their remedy for a headache was to slash open their forehead, because blood “does not like to remain in the place where pain is felt.” If Pigafetta is to be believed, the Tehuelche had at least one thing in common with contemporary Europeans: they were obsessed with demons and devils, whom they believed to have horns on their heads and to breath fire out of their mouths, just like their European counterparts.

Some time after the memorable first meeting with the Tehuelche, on another day when most of the sailors were swarming over a beached ship, one of them looked up from his labors to see a pair of stooped, forlorn-looking figures half-walking, half-crawling toward him over the scrubby steppe. Assuming that the bedraggled, emaciated men must belong to some other, far less prosperous native tribe than the one the expedition had already befriended, the sailor pointed them out to his mates. One ran to alert the captain general of this latest incursion, while the rest watched the pair make their way slowly but purposefully toward them. It took a long time to dawn on the sailors that these were not more natives; they were a pair of white men, much the worse for wear. A shout echoed across the encampment as soon as that point finally struck home, and suddenly everyone was running at once toward the visitors.

For they were the two sailors whom Captain Serrano had dispatched to inform Magellan of the loss of the Santiago and the current plight of its crew. Through swollen lips and tongues, they tried to explain to their swarming comrades all that they had been through — to explain how, after reaching the other side of the estuary safely in their raft, they had spent almost two weeks toiling their way northward, freezing in the near-perpetual darkness; the sun was visible for barely four hours each day now, and the light and warmth it gave even during that period were feeble indeed. They had plucked insects from their skin and eaten them, eaten ferns and roots which only made them sick and cost them further delays while they rolled around in the clammy dirt clutching their bellies. The cold had eaten away fingers, toes, earlobes, and tips of noses. But somehow they had persevered. In comparison to the waking nightmare they had just experienced, the hardscrabble encampment at Puerto San Julián seemed as luxurious as a royal palace. Their comrades wrapped them in guanaco furs, plied them with guanaco meat, and poured warm guanaco milk down their throats while they shared their story.

Serrano’s faith that his captain general would not abandon him in his time of need was not misplaced. While the two wanderers rested and regained their strength, Magellan put together a rescue party, consisting of twenty of the hardiest sailors, under the command of his other stalwart lieutenant, Gómez de Espinosa. He even authorized them to carry with them some of the hardtack which was otherwise kept strictly off-limits. As soon as the two frostbitten returnees were up to it — they were needed to serve as guides — the rescue party set off. This time progress was quicker. They reached the raft, which still lay where it had been left on the northern shore of the estuary, on June 26. Espinosa and one of the original messengers from the Santiago pushed off on it for the final stage of the journey.

And so there followed a mirror image of the homecoming that had just taken place at Puerto San Julián. Serrano’s men were clustering together for warmth on the far shore, half-starved but alive. (Alas, they had no way of reaching the islets where the seals gathered.) One of the castaways looked up, then blinked his eyes. Then he shouted that the raft was returning, and suddenly men who had barely had enough strength left to move their limbs a moment before were jumping for joy, calling and waving to their deliverers.

The return journey was a more daunting prospect for the rescue party than the hike down to the Santa Cruz estuary. The weather was more miserable than ever, for one thing; it was now truly the dead of winter, when the world did actually seem dead, or at least in a frozen state of stasis, but for the constant howling wind. Many of the men from the Santiago were so weak they could barely stand, much less walk. But the first and in many ways the most difficult challenge of all was that of getting everyone across the estuary. Over a period of more than two weeks, the improvised ferry made the crossing again and again under the control of the most confident boatman in the group, another sailor who must remain anonymous. With each round trip, he brought one more man that much closer to safety. At last, all of the castaways were across, and the whole group could set off overland. Their progress was halting, what with the poor condition of so many of them. But they made it in the end, arriving back at Puerto San Julián on July 22, six weeks after the rescue party had departed and not quite three months after the Santiago had done so.

Another captain general might have reprimanded and punished Juan Rodríguez Serrano for the error in judgment that had cost the expedition one of its ships. Magellan, however, was not such a captain general. He recognized that Serrano had erred on the side of boldness and devotion to duty, something that precious few of his other officers had shown any sign of being likely to do. Then, too, he recognized that some of the blame belonged to himself, for having sent his subordinate on such a sketchy, vaguely defined mission in the first place. Most of all, though, he recognized that he needed men of initiative and courage now more than ever. So, far from reprimanding him, Magellan gave Serrano the captaincy of the Concepción, a position that had been vacant since Gasper de Quesada was sent to meet his maker.

The rest of the survivors from the Santiago were distributed throughout the remaining four ships to offset the slow attrition their crews had undergone over the past months. Magellan was hopeful that the ethic of competence, discipline, and loyalty which Serrano had instilled in his men would rub off on the rest of the ramshackle fleet. But he and his sailors didn’t get their 100 ducats; their captain general could be forbearing, even forgiving, but he wasn’t in the habit of paying for services that hadn’t been rendered.

Captain Mesquita of the San Antonio and Captain Barbosa of the Victoria were, you’ll remember, members of Magellan’s own extended family. Thus even as the events of recent months has cost Magellan one of his ships, they had given him something else, something he ought to have had from the moment the fleet sailed from Spain: the confidence that each and every one of the ships would unfailingly answer to his commands. Only time would tell whether that confidence was even now misplaced.

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