The Voyage of Magellan

November 28, 1520 – March 6, 1521

After consulting with the pilot João Lopes Carvalho, Magellan decided on a straightforward plan for reaching the Spice Islands at long last. The fleet would sail north along the western coast of South America for about 1600 miles (2600 kilometers), until it reached a latitude of 32 degrees south. Then it would finally bid farewell to the continent around whose edges it had been hovering for the past year, striking northwest into the open ocean. According to Carvalho’s calculations, this course should take it directly to the Spice Islands, the northernmost of which straddles the Equator.

The first stage of the journey was the happiest the fleet had known in a long while. There was a widespread feeling among the men that the worst was now behind them, that all that remained in front of them was a fairly routine bit of sailing to reach their final destination. These men who had been without female company for so many months laid themselves down to sleep each night with images of dusky island maidens dancing in their heads. The more imaginative among them dreamed of becoming sultans in an equatorial paradise, like Magellan’s friend Francisco Serrão had done.

For all that the ships moved through unknown waters, the sailing really was easy now, a mere matter of paralleling the great landmass on the starboard side, without needing to investigate every bay and inlet they passed, as they had had to do when looking for a way to cross over from the continent’s eastern to its western flank. As if to demonstrate that their anger against the fleet was now spent, the gods of the sea provided perfect weather. The ancient words of Homer applied to each vessel: “The canvas bellied out and a dark blue wave, foaming up at the bow, sang out loud and strong as the ship made way, skimming the whitecaps, cutting toward her goal.” The days grew warmer and the compasses began to respond to minute changes in course with their old alacrity. The stars up above shifted back into more familiar configurations. Even the spirits of the dour captain general were buoyed by these signs of returning normality; Magellan seemed to have put his recent crisis of confidence in Tierra del Fuego well and truly behind him. The mysterious disappearance of the San Antonio felt less consequential now than it had back then. If, as was now widely and correctly assumed by the men of the fleet, the crew of the San Antonio really had elected to sail away on their own recognizance, it was those mutineers’ loss. Their absence from the scene just meant that more of the spoils and pleasures of paradise would be left for those who had stuck the voyage out.

Being now in a part of the world as unknown to the kidnapped Tehuelche man as it was to the rest of the sailors, the latter saw little reason to keep him in chains. He was given the run of the Trinidad, and proved himself a good sport under the circumstances. Antonio Pigafetta, whose native curiosity and friendliness knew no bounds, spent many hours trying to communicate with the man, to whom he gave the name of Paul. “He asked me for capac, that is to say bread, since they thus name that root which they use for bread, and oli, that is to say water,” Pigafetta wrote in his journal. He also took up his pen to compile the beginning of an Italian-to-Tehuelche dictionary to go along with his Italian-to-Tupi phrase book. Paul was by all indications a clever soul, who, Pigafetta was convinced, cottoned onto his interlocutor’s purpose swiftly. “When [Paul] saw me write these names after him and ask for others,” Pigafetta insists, “he understood what I was doing.” If so, it was a remarkable mental leap indeed for a man raised in an illiterate society to grasp so quickly the transformative magic of the written word.

On his side, Pigafetta endeavored to teach Paul about the Christian religion. Paul learned to kiss a crucifix held before him, and agreed to be baptized under his new name. Of course, as is the case with the nature of writing, it is difficult to say how much of the faith he actually understood across the barriers of culture and language.

Each day, Carvalho tracked the fleet’s steady northward progress via a noontime astrolabe reading. On December 19, 1520, he announced that the time had come to swing to the northwest. If all went well, it would be the last course change needed before the fleet reached its destination. Magellan now held a brief conference with his officers on the subject of provisions. Did it make sense to look for an anchorage whence they could send parties ashore to hunt and fish and gather more food and water? Everyone agreed that the delay this would impose seemed unnecessary. There was still some of the smoked seal meat they had picked up back at the Santa Cruz River left in the ships’ holds. And when that was gone, there was still a fair amount of hardtack. Better to press on immediately, while the good weather held; the distance left to be covered was considerable, to be sure, but no means unmanageable with strict rationing. Should the food situation get really sticky, there might very well be islands at which to replenish along the way.

Magellan nodded his agreement, pleased that his officers were finally showing some boldness. Alas, his acquiescence to their impatience would prove another crucial mistake, his worst one yet. For it was here that the central misconception upon which the entire expedition had been premised — that the Earth was 30 percent smaller than it actually is — would come home to bite every man still in its employ with the sharpest and cruelest of teeth.

From a point on the South American coast near the location of the modern city of Santiago, Chile, the fleet turned away from land to sail boldly right into the middle of that part of any modern map of the world that contains almost nothing but a uniform blue. The raw statistics connected with the Pacific Ocean boggle the imagination. From its farthest eastern to its farthest western edge, it stretches almost halfway around the Earth, covering about one third of the planet’s total surface area in all. It has twice the area and water volume of the Atlantic Ocean. It is larger, in fact, than all of the land on the planet combined, being greater than 63 million square miles (163 million square kilometers) in extent. And its waters are deeper than any others as well as wider, reaching down to 36,000 feet (11,000 meters) at the Mariana Trench, the lowest indentation anywhere on the Earth’s crust. The 25,000 islands that are scattered across this wide and deep vastness, most of them so tiny as to be hardly worth of the name, are so many needles in a liquid haystack.

Hewing as they did to a picture of the world that dated back to Claudius Ptolemy in the first century after Jesus Christ — a picture which simply didn’t have space enough for a watery vastness such as this — the Europeans of Magellan’s day had absolutely no conception of any of it. It wasn’t until Magellan came along that the Pacific Ocean was even given a name. And even then, as we’ve seen, he optimistically chose to call it not an ocean but a sea, presuming it to be a body of water that might be in the very worst case be similar in size to the Atlantic. Even a century after Magellan, some European mapmakers would still be underestimating the size of the Pacific Ocean by as much as 40 percent. And who can blame them? The reports of its prodigious size that reached them from those who had actually sailed it did sound like so many more examples of the tall tales that sailors loved to tell, too improbable to be real.

Sanguinely certain that their time of tribulation was at an end, Magellan’s oblivious trio of ships skated over the waves at a healthy pace, leaving their last prospect of succor in their wake with little trepidation and less compunction. The men celebrated their second Christmas since leaving Spain at sea — and almost as happy a holiday was it as the last one, that had been spent among the accommodating Tupi people. The Sun beamed its warmth down upon them while the steady breeze cooled them. The contrast to all those months spent in brutal antarctic climes between the two Christmases could hardly have been greater.

Without sighting them or being aware of their existence, the fleet passed the few patches of dry land that are to be found in the endless expanse of South Pacific blue. It sailed north of the Juan Fernández Islands, where Alexander Selkirk, the inspiration for Robinson Crusoe, would be marooned almost two centuries later; sailed north of Easter Island, where the massive human figures in stone that have made the place famous today were then still fresh and unworn; sailed north of the Pitcairn Islands, where the mutineers from the Bounty would settle in 1790; sailed north of Tahiti, that soon-to-be-fabled Shangri-La of sun and sand that wasn’t even a name yet to Magellan. In seven weeks of sailing on the open ocean, the ships stumbled across only two tiny atolls, each windblown and desolate and ringed by sharp reefs, offering nothing whatsoever to human beings. Otherwise, it was league after league and day after day of the same clear blue sky and empty blue ocean.

The monotony of weather and water that had seemed such a blessing after the ceaseless, mercurial instability of the South Atlantic came slowly to weigh upon the men. As none of the outlying islands of Asia which they had expected to see appeared in actuality, it slowly dawned on them that something might be very, very wrong. They began to wonder whether they hadn’t been fools to rush into this aquatic wasteland, began to wonder whether they would ever see the other side of it. The day came when the last of the seal meat was eaten. What hardtack remained was, according to Pigafetta, “reduced to powder and full of grubs, and stinking from the dirt which the rats had made on it when eating the good biscuit”; the remaining water too was “yellow and stinking.” Magellan tightened the hardtack and water rations a little more almost by the day, but both continued inexorably to disappear from the ships’ holds. And still there appeared no land of any account before them, only that same horizon of pale blue over dark blue, day in and day out.

The ships crossed the Equator on February 13, 1521, at just about the same moment that the last of the food and water ran out. They had made incredible time, going from nearly the bottom of the world to its vertical midpoint whilst also crossing about a quarter of its horizontal circumference in well under three months. But nobody was thinking about this. The sailors thought only about their hunger and thirst, and about the fact that the Spice Islands which Magellan and Carvalho had promised them were still nowhere to be seen. Not only was there no land in sight, but there were none of the telltale signs of approaching land to which sailors grow so attuned: no hint of vegetation on the breeze, no flocks of birds whirling off on the horizon. All was watery emptiness. The reality was that they were as far removed from other humans as it is possible to be on our planet anywhere between the Polar and Antarctic Circles, as alone as any single group of human beings would ever be until men flew to the Moon 450 years later. But the Apollo astronauts would at least know precisely where they were and where they were going, and would be in constant contact with their comrades back on Earth. Magellan’s men knew nothing and could contact no one. If they died out here, no one would ever know what had become of them.

The thirst was if anything worse than the hunger. There was water all around them, and yet not a drop to drink the vast majority of the time. Freshwater was limited to what the sailors could collect during the gentle rains that passed over the fleet from time to time. Each meandering shower was hailed as a gift from a merciful God, to be greeted with mouths held open wide to the heavens and every bucket and barrel aboard set out to collect the precious moisture. In between these ecstatic happenstances, throats burned like fire and tongues swelled up so big that speech became almost impossible.

The pangs of scurvy had been making themselves felt for weeks already, but now the suffering took hold in earnest. Gums were covered with ugly pustules that burst without warning, turning the men into grotesque vampires, blood dribbling down the chin and neck. Teeth fell out. Old sores that had seemed to be healed bled anew all over the sailors’ bodies. Arms and legs simply refused to move, no matter how hard their owners strained. The tragic irony in all this is that the scurvy might easily have been kept at bay had anyone known to collect and crush sufficient barberries back at the Sardine River; a single teaspoonful of the juice per man per day would have been sufficient to alleviate the worst symptoms of the affliction. But of course no one knew this.

Although he was the oldest man with the expedition, Magellan was not among those laid most low by hunger, thirst, and disease. This was not because he had access to more or better food or water; he insisted that every man receive exactly the same ration, regardless of rank. In other respects, though, his mental and moral condition seemed to be deteriorating faster than his body. In the past, he had deployed his legendary anger strategically, as a way of proving his authority and keeping his underlings on track toward their goals. Now, though, his bouts of rage were growing increasingly random. Those around him learned to hide from his sight when one of his black moods was upon him. His pilot Carvalho took the worst of it; he had cause to be glad that he still lived and worked aboard the Concepción, visiting the Trinidad only for the occasional consultation. One day shortly after crossing the Equator, Magellan suddenly ripped a sheaf of maps and charts from the navigation table on his quarterdeck and threw them into the ocean. “The Spice Islands are not to be found where our vaunted pilot says they are!” he cried impotently, then commenced roundly cursing Carvalho, the fates, and just about everyone else who had created the conditions for this waking nightmare.

Those around the captain general watched these childish tantrums with growing dismay. Even when things had been at their worst in the past, they had always been able to count on his steadiness. Only now, when Magellan seemed on the verge of cracking up, did they understand what a blessing that had been. The brief-lived time of shared purpose and good fellowship disappeared along with the last of the provisions in the ships’ holds. Once more the men began to mutter darkly about their leader. In particular, they remembered how he had decided to turn away from the coast of South America without even attempting to resupply the ships first. With the absolution that not having been the ones to make the final decision gave them, even many of the officers who had recommended just such a course of action spoke in the same tones. In light of this, Magellan might have had cause to worry about yet another mutiny on top of everything else, but for the fact that his underlings now lacked the strength to even contemplate such an act.

From our remove of many centuries, we can only speculate about what was going on in Magellan’s head. It does appear, however, that the twin shocks of the loss of the San Antonio and the failure to find the Spice Islands where they were supposed to be, combined with the unrelenting physical torment to which he was being subjected, broke something deep inside the man. What had been sternness in the interest of attaining an important goal in the past now became cruelty for its own sake; what had been stalwartness turned into pig-headedness.

Not knowing what else to do, and receiving no useful advice from a thoroughly confounded Carvalho, he kept the fleet sailing northwest for eleven more hellish days after crossing the Equator. Not until February 24, having reached a latitude of 12 degrees north, did he order a change in course to due west. If the ships had somehow missed the Spice Islands, as now appeared to be the case, there was just one hope left: perhaps they could still reach the Asian mainland before everyone aboard perished. According to Carvalho’s charts and calculations, they ought to have struck it already — but then, nothing was where it was supposed to be anymore, was it?

So, they sailed onward in this new direction, still seeing and sensing nothing that smacked of dry land. They passed north of the Solomon Islands, where some of the most pitched battles of the Second World War would be fought. And they passed almost within sight of the Marshall Islands, where  the first hydrogen bomb would be exploded with all the force of a Biblical apocalypse in the 1950s. Had it ever been the expedition’s goal to circumnavigate the globe, and had the men been healthy enough to appreciate such things, they might have been gratified to know that they reached the exact opposite side of the planet from Spain during these days of suffering, marking the halfway point of any such trip. But such was not their goal, and healthy they most definitely were not.

The sailors soaked their ships’ chafing gear — leather coverings that protected delicate ropes and canvas — in the ocean to soften it, cooked it over a fire, and gnawed on it as best they could with their loose teeth. (In so doing, they turned a bit of argumentative hyperbole by their captain general whilst they were still in Patagonia into a tragic prophecy in the eyes of history.)  They ate the scrawny mice and rats that washed up in the bilges, starved now just like they were. They ate the rodents’ droppings too, ate the lice that infested their blankets and hair, tried to eat clothing and sawdust.

And then the dying began. Some men curled up to sleep and simply never rose again. Mad from thirst, some climbed over the gunwales and down the hulls, dangled their heads in the ocean, and gulped down great swallows of seawater, only to convulse and die in agony minutes later. As soon as a sailor perished, his body was thrown overboard with little ceremony by the order of the normally pedantically pious captain general, who now feared — not without good reason — that his men would otherwise resort to cannibalism, which he knew to be as quick and sure a route to eternal damnation as there was to be found on Earth.

Nineteen sailors died in all, about 15 percent of the remaining crews of the three ships. Among them was Paul, the Tehuelche man. Pigafetta did ensure that Pedro de Valderrama, the expedition’s one remaining priest, gave him the proper last rites, which was more than some of the other dead sailors received. Those men who were still alive scuttled over the decks like hunchbacked beetles, trying in the face of a lethargy born of hunger and sickness to keep up with the daily tasks needed just to keep their perpetually leaky vessels afloat and making forward progress. The seamen were often harried into action by officers who prodded them with whips in their heartless desperation. If a storm had come, the crews would surely have allowed their ships to go under out of sheer exhaustion; if the wind had ceased to blow strongly and steadily in the right direction, everyone aboard would have died in a slower, grimmer fashion. But the winds continued favorable, and kept the ships moving briskly westward despite the distress of their crews. In this sense, Magellan and his men were actually very, very lucky — or, if you chose to see it that way, blessed. “But for the grace of God and the Blessed Virgin in sending us such magnificent weather,” writes Pigafetta, “we should all have perished in this gigantic ocean.”

In fact, they were lucky or blessed in still one more sense than this one. For it so happened that Magellan had finally made the decision to turn due west at the perfect moment to intersect land. Thus just after dawn on March 6, 1521, there came a cry from the lookout aboard the Victoria, a cry that most of the sailors had been more than half certain they would never hear again: “Tierra! Tierra!”

The fleet had covered as much distance in the past three months and one week as it had managed during the fourteen months prior to reaching the Pacific: more than 7000 miles (11,000 kilometers), the longest nonstop sea voyage anyone had ever managed in the history of the world to date. And now, at the furthest extremity of its endurance, it had struck land again in the nick of time.

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