The Voyage of Magellan

October 21 – November 6, 1520

“We saw an opening like a bay, and it has at the entrance, on the right hand, a very long spit of sand, and the cape which we discovered before this spit is called [by us] Cape Virgenes, and the spit of sand is 52 degrees south latitude, 67.5 degrees west longitude, and from the spit of sand to the other part there may be a matter of five leagues.”

These words in the logbook of Francisco Albo, an assistant pilot aboard the Trinidad, heralded a dramatic change in the expedition’s fortunes. And yet, as happens with so many important discoveries of the geographical and other stripes, it wasn’t immediately obvious to the sailors just what it was that they had actually stumbled upon. They had been disappointed again and again in the course of this endless voyage down the South American coast. From out to sea, this latest break in the shoreline’s monotony looked no more promising than any of the ones that had preceded it. The cape that marked the entrance to the bay was long and flat and high, a ridge of naked clay and rock standing 135 feet (40 meters) above the water, its edges marked by cliffs plunging precipitously down into the ocean. Like every other feature of the landscape in this part of the world, it seemed almost consciously sculpted to be as unwelcoming as possible. Magellan named it Cape Virgenes, or “Cape Virgins,” after Saint Ursula and her group of martyred holy virgins, whose feast day it was. It has retained that name to this day.

The ships turned west as they rounded the cape, sailing past the headland we call Punta Dúngeness. Magellan named the bay which is sheltered by the headland Bahía Posesión: “Possession Bay,” what with possession being nine-tenths of the law and all. At the bay’s western edge, the fleet found that which it had failed to find every time it had previously tried to probe the interior of the continent: a narrower body of saltwater that continued inland. Magellan decided to send the San Antonio and Concepción — the two ships with the most experienced pilots, in the persons of Estevão Gomes and João Lopes Carvalho respectively — to conduct a preliminary survey. Meanwhile the Trinidad and Victoria would stay behind to complete a thorough reconnaissance of the bay itself, looking for anything else that might be of interest. Captain Mesquita of the San Antonio and Captain Serrano of the Concepción were told to return to Bahía Posesión within five days to report their findings. If the waterway did indeed appear to be a navigable strait, the ships would then all set off down it together.

Alas, the weather made a mockery of these well-laid plans, as it so often did in this part of the world. The San Antonio and Concepción had barely set off when a fearsome gale blew in from out to sea. The Trinidad and Victoria were left in a vulnerable position. Bahía Posesión proved very deep, so deep that their anchors could touch bottom only in scattered places, and then only by playing the chains out to their utmost length. As soon as the wind began to blow in earnest, the overstretched anchors lost their purchase on the seafloor. This wouldn’t do at all; the risk of being blown aground in this constricted space was too great. Magellan had no choice but to raise sails and tack against the gale back out to sea.

But if the Trinidad and Victoria were in a vulnerable position, the San Antonio and Concepción were in a nearly untenable one. They had already passed beyond the mouth of the narrows when the storm blew in, and didn’t have enough space to tack back against the wind. Like pieces of driftwood riding a white-water rapid, they were shot deeper into what is now called the First Narrows, where the land looms close on each side and the shoreline is a minefield of jagged rocks and hidden shoals. Unable to risk dropping anchor for fear of having it torn away — and, in the case of the San Antonio, for fear of being rammed by the Concepción coming up behind — the two ships plunged at breakneck speed through the narrows, struggling desperately with rudder and sails to avoid the greedy, seeking tendrils of stone that reached up from the sea bottom to tear at their keels. Somehow they made it, careening willy-nilly into another bay that lay beyond the First Narrows, where they were finally able to drop anchor. Luckily for them, this second bay was shallower than the first, and the anchors held.

The gale blew strong most of the night, but slackened toward morning, allowing the two ships to explore their new surroundings in relative peace. The second bay, which they named Bahía Felipe after another saint whose feast day had recently passed, appeared at first to be a dead end, yet another disappointment in an interminable string of them. But then, lo and behold, they found a second narrows leading out of it at its westward edge. The two captains held a hasty conference, at which they agreed to repeat their captain general’s approach in the last bay: the San Antonio would continue onward to explore the Second Narrows, while the Concepción stayed behind to finish the reconnaissance of Bahía Felipe.

The San Antonio found these narrows to be wider and more easily navigable than the last ones. At their other end, they opened out not into another bay but into what gave every sign of being a real ocean channel, wide and deep and still very, very salty. It ran more south than west, but every instinct of every seasoned sailor aboard screamed that it had to join with the ocean again at some point ahead. Of course, they didn’t know whether it would ultimately turn back east to dump them back into the Atlantic Ocean, take them due south across the very bottom of the world, or take them to the other side of the continent. There was only one way to find out — but, in the meantime, time was running short to make the rendezvous back at Bahía Posesión. The San Antonio turned about and retraced its course, picking up the Concepción along the way.

The Trinidad and Victoria had themselves returned to Bahía Posesión after the gale blew itself out. They conducted their survey of the bay distractedly, every man aboard wondering the whole while whether the other half of the fleet had been able to weather the storm. They saw no sign of wreckage near the mouth of the First Narrows, but that didn’t mean the ships hadn’t been destroyed deeper inside. One day a lookout spotted a thin column of smoke rising from the landscape in the direction in which the San Antonio and Concepción had sailed. Was it a native campfire, or was it possibly a signal fire lit by shipwrecked sailors? Magellan refused to countenance sending a search party to find out — not now anyway, before the planned day of the rendezvous had even come. Within a few hours, the smoke vanished as mysteriously as it had appeared.

At last, the rendezvous day arrived. And right on schedule, the San Antonio and Concepción came bursting back onto the scene, looking like a pair of motley giant scarecrows, with every flag they had aboard flying proudly as they charged up to deliver their happy news. Magellan was so cheered that, in a rare moment of indulgent levity, he allowed his crew to unlimber his flagship’s cannons. Several cannonades boomed across the waters of the bay, the first time such explosions had ever been heard this far south.

Magellan ordered all of the ships to set off in the direction the San Antonio and Concepción had just come from. Through the First Narrows, then Bahía Felipe, then the Second Narrows they sailed. Then further, deeper into the unknown.

The place in which they found themselves is one of the most otherworldly to be found anywhere on our world. Here the monotony of the rolling Patagonian steppe gives way to soaring mountain peaks, the southern terminus of the Andes range that stretches all the way north to Columbia and Venezuela. No one who sees this place can ever forget its cold, austere beauty. “The land on both sides is very huge and mountainous,” wrote Francis Pretty, an English officer who sailed this way with Sir Francis Drake 58 years after Magellan. “The lower mountains, although they be monstrous and wondrous to look upon for their height, yet there are others which in height exceed them in a strange manner, reaching themselves above their fellows so high, that between them do appear three regions of clouds. This strait is extreme cold, with frost and snow continually. The trees seem to stoop with the burden of the weather, and yet are green continually, and many good and sweet herbs do very plentifully grow and increase under them.” As the ships sailed further south — ever closer to the very bottom of the world — the trees were replaced for long stretches by sheer walls of ice, glaciers which groaned and squealed, engaging in an inscrutable dialog with Mother Nature that punctured the crystalline stillness of the Antarctic spring, until the great chunks of ice calved off into the strait with a sound like rolling thunder.

Thankfully, the strait after the Second Narrows was wide enough that dodging the floating ice was not too difficult. The ocean storms which had tormented the fleet throughout its progress down the coast were largely absent from these sheltered waters. From time to time, however, they managed to pick their way through the mountain passes, to descend upon the ships as the sudden whirlwinds which sailors call williwaws, which can come out of nowhere to strip the canvas right off a mast or even capsize an unwary ship. What with the williwaws and the floating miniature icebergs, the ships dared not sail by night. The delay this caused wasn’t too frustrating, though, since the days were by now far longer than the nights.

These days were mostly gray, but, when the sun broke through, the spectacle that it revealed could take your breath away. At these sublime instants, the sailors were witness to a wonderland of dazzling, sparkling radiance, of sunlight glinting off blue ice, off ivory snow, off frigid greenish water, seemingly even off the blurry azure sky itself, where condors swooped and soared on immense outstretched wings of white and black. It was like a glimpse of the upper reaches of Mount Olympus, a realm whose terrible beauty made it a fit place only for gods. The mortals who now passed through it felt tiny and naked before its splendor, their souls seared by ineffable forces beyond their ken.

During the brief nights, sparkles and flashes periodically dispersed the darkness, as if Hephaestus was working at his divine bellows somewhere nearby. The provenance of these illuminations remains as unknown to us as it was to the sailors: they may have been lightning strikes, or some unexplained atmospheric phenomenon not that far removed from Saint Elmo’s Fire. Or they may have been the campfires of the hardy native peoples who, we now know, were living in this land of unbearable harshness and splendor in considerable numbers during this century. Just as in the daytime, from time to time at night the skies cleared and the bright white light of the Milky Way and the Southern Cross poured down upon the ships like the god of forges’ molten silver. On these occasions, the sailors took note of two illuminated “clouds” that were actually tightly packed clusters of stars; these two satellite galaxies of our own are today known as the Magellanic Clouds. Magellan was inspired to name the terrestrial region through which he was sailing Tierra del Fuego: “The Land of Fire.”

Strangest and most unnervingly of all, the ships’ compasses behaved erratically, only sometimes pointing in their accustomed direction, and even then rather lazily, as if they were growing as weary of this expedition as their owners. Modern science tells us that this was because the magnetic forces are weakest in and around the Antarctic regions. To the sailors, however, it was just one more tried and true rule from their world that no longer held here in this land of capricious gods.

On November 1, the ships reached a spot where the waterway split into two, passing to either side of a large land mass, which we now know as Dawson Island.  Feeling more convinced than ever that the passage must be a proper strait, Magellan finally gave it a name: Todos los Santos, or “Strait of Saints,” because November 1 was All Saints’ Day. Within a few years, it would be officially rechristened the Strait of Magellan by no less an authority than King Charles of Spain.

The fleet now faced a fork in the road, as it were. Not only did the strait branch in two directions just ahead, but another wide channel or bay opened out directly to the east. Magellan called a meeting of all his captains, pilots, and other senior officers aboard his flagship, with the purpose of discussing next steps. He was inclined to split the fleet once again, to send one ship to explore the bay and the easterly channel while the other ones continued into the more westerly branch, which naturally seemed the more promising pathway if reaching the western side of the continent was one’s goal. Captain Mesquita of the San Antonio, being full of youthful zeal and eager to atone to Magellan for his rather ignominious failure to protect his command during the Easter Mutiny, immediately volunteered to take his ship east. Pleased with his cousin’s initiative in an almost fatherly way, Magellan acquiesced.

But then Mesquita’s pilot Estevão Gomes, who had long nursed a grudge against the captain general for succeeding where he had failed to convince the Spanish crown to fund a westward expedition like this one, raised his hand to voice his disagreement with the plan. In fact, he said, he didn’t think that any of the ships should sail any further at all. Yes, they had found a waterway that might very well be a transcontinental strait, but it was too far south and too treacherous in all of its particulars to represent a viable alternative trade route to Asia. The men of the expedition had done everything that their king could ask of them already. A straightforward westward route to Asia simply didn’t exist. The route around the bottom of Africa which the Portuguese had been following for decades was clearly the only practical way to reach Asia from Europe by sea. There was no shame in returning to Spain now to report these facts, disappointing though they were.

Whatever his personal motivations for saying these things may have been, nothing Gomes stated was incorrect on the face of it. Nevertheless, Magellan was left fairly spluttering with indignation. They had all endured months of staggering stress and hardship to arrive at this place and this moment. And now Gomes wished to turn around and go home? “Even if we are forced to eat the leather chafing gear on the yards before we reach our destination,” Magellan barked, “we must go forward and complete the task we promised to the Holy Roman Emperor. If we continue to do our duty, God will help us and bring us good fortune!” Gomes sat silently through the rest of the meeting with a scowl on his face.

After the conclave adjourned, Magellan conferred with several of his most trusted officers about the sullen pilot, who now made no secret of his contempt for not only his captain general but for the youthful captain of his own vessel as well. In spite of this, everyone was loath to relieve him of his post, because he was still generally regarded as the most talented pilot in the fleet; this reputation was the reason he had originally been attached to Magellan’s own flagship, and the reason Magellan had reassigned him to the San Antonio when the inexperienced Mesquita had taken over that ship. It would be a shame — possibly a dangerous shame — for the fleet to lose a man like that. Swallowing his misgivings, Magellan elected to leave Gomes in his post, trusting in the pilot’s sense of professional ethics to ensure that he continued to carry out his duties well despite his personal feelings, as he largely had up to this point. Subsequent events would leave Magellan wishing he had listened to his gut instead of his advisors while he still had the chance.

The sailors aboard the Trinidad, Victoria, and Concepción waved farewell to their comrades aboard the San Antonio and steered their vessels into the more westerly channel while the latter ship headed east. The plan was for the whole fleet to rendezvous back at the point of departure within five days to compare notes.

The channel down which the three ships under Magellan proceeded soon widened out into a sound with outlets in several directions; it was by now becoming clear that Dawson Island was indeed an island. Magellan chose the obvious path in light of his interests, sticking close to the coastline on his starboard side. He couldn’t know it at the time, but as he rounded the cape we call Cape Froward he was seeing the very southernmost tip of the Brunswick Peninsula, itself the southernmost tip of mainland South America.

Here the southern reaches of the Andes Mountains reared up higher than ever to either side, their lower slopes concealed beneath dense forests of beech trees, their middle slopes covered with a coarse bronze grass like nothing the sailors had ever seen, their peaks capped with crowns of china white. When rain fell on the ships, snow could be seen falling on the mountaintops. Waterfalls cascaded down from the heights to the feet of the mountains, where they met meadows festooned with bright flowers of every hue imaginable, and some that were not. Bizarre flightless ducks scudded about on the waves by whirling their stubby wings around in a circular motion that would remind later explorers of paddle wheels, thus winning them the appellation of “steamer ducks.” On one or two occasions the sailors saw what looked like the remnants of native camps from their ships, but they never glimpsed any other humans in the flesh.

Overjoyed to be sailing northwest instead of being driven yet further south, Magellan pressed onward much farther than he ought to have if he was to make his planned rendezvous with the San Antonio. The three ships continued to hug the coastline to starboard, moving slowly against the current amidst the shifting, unpredictable winds, doing their best to stay well clear of the maze of small fjords that fractured the landscape to port. The breakout to open ocean which Magellan sought stubbornly refused to arrive; the strait just seemed to go on and on. At last, on November 6, the planned day of the rendezvous, he begrudgingly ordered a halt at what he assumed to be the mouth of a river, which was probably in truth the narrow outlet of Seno Otway, a large inland sound. The faithful and efficient Captain Serrano of the Concepción believed that, if he sailed back to the rendezvous point alone, he could reach that destination within three days; such was the advantage of sailing on known rather than unknown waters, and of doing so as a lone vessel, without the need to coordinate with others.

Magellan agreed to this plan, and the Concepción departed. While they awaited the return of it and the San Antonio, the sailors from the Trinidad and Victoria fished for sardines, which were so abundant here that Magellan named his “river” the Sardine River. The men ventured ashore to forage and to smoke the tiny fish, a fine delicacy indeed after weeks of seal meat and hardtack. The wood here burned with an unusual fragrance, which only seemed to enhance the flavor of the succulent morsels. On a voyage filled with as many and diverse pains as this one, the wise man sucked the very marrow out of every small pleasure that came his way.

The shore parties also gorged themselves on the barberries that grew along the coast, whose cheek-curdingly sour taste they unaccountably craved. We now know that barberries are enormously rich in Vitamin C, a sailor’s best ally in the war against scurvy. The men’s bodies, in other words, knew better than their minds what was needed to sustain them. Had that situation been otherwise, the sailors might have thought to crush the barberries into a juice or mash and store them in barrels aboard their ships. Doing so could have saved all of them from much torment in the months to come, would probably have saved more than a few of their lives. But it was not to be.

Meanwhile the San Antonio had been having a far less enjoyable time of it. It was once again a deeply troubled ship in terms of the chain of command, as it had been so often before during this expedition.  Estevão Gomes’s insolent demeanor toward Captain Mesquita would have prompted a stronger and more experienced leader — say, Mesquita’s cousin Magellan — to have him clapped in irons. As it was, though, the captain needed his pilot’s navigational skills in these tricky, unknown waters far more than his pilot needed him. By now, there was a real question among the rank and file of just who was actually in charge of the San Antonio. Certainly Gomes issued his orders from the quarterdeck as if the ship belonged to him, and Mesquita was too timid to override him.

The San Antonio first explored the bay to the east, which would be named Useless Bay by the much later British explorer Philip Parker King. Finding that it lived up to its future name in the sense of providing no useful outlets, the ship then proceeded down the eastern side of Dawson Island, until the main branch of the waterway took a turn to the southeast, the precise opposite of the direction the fleet wanted to be traveling. Gomes said that there was no point in trying to explore further down this inauspicious channel, and, as usual, Captain Mesquita deferred to his judgment. Mesquita’s hopes of pleasing his cousin through some exciting discovery or other had come up dry.

The San Antonio thus returned to the rendezvous point right on schedule, on November 6, 1520, the same day that Magellan finally called a temporary halt to his ships’ progress well to the west, on the other side of the Brunswick Peninsula. The captain general was about to pay dearly for his impatience to press on further up the strait that now bears his name. For his failure to keep the rendezvous would provide the final spark needed to ignite the expedition’s second mutiny.

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