Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (2 page)

And yet, what a story those few survivors had to tell—a tale of mutiny, of orgies on distant shores, and of the exploration of the entire globe. A story that changed the course of history and the way we look at the world. In the Age of Discovery, many expeditions ended in disaster and were quickly forgotten, yet this one, despite the misfortunes that befell it, became the most important maritime voyage ever undertaken.

This circumnavigation forever altered the Western world’s ideas about cosmology—the study of the universe and our place in it—as well as geography. It demonstrated, among other things, that the earth was round, that the Americas were not part of India but were actually a separate continent, and that oceans covered most of the earth’s surface. The voyage conclusively demonstrated that the earth is, after all, one world. But it also demonstrated that it was a world of unceasing conflict, both natural and human. The cost of these discoveries in terms of loss of life and suffering was greater than anyone could have anticipated at the start of the expedition. They had survived an expedition to the ends of the earth, but more than that, they had endured a voyage into the darkest recesses of the human soul.

Book One
In Search of Empire

C H A P T E R   I
The Quest

He holds him with his skinny hand,
“There was a ship,” quoth he.
“Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!”
Eftsoons his hand dropt he.

O
n June 7, 1494, Pope Alexander VI divided the world in half, bestowing the western portion on Spain, and the eastern on Portugal. Matters might have turned out differently if the pontiff had not been a Spaniard—Rodrigo de Borja, born near Valencia—but he was. A lawyer by training, he assumed the Borgia name when his maternal uncle, Alfonso Borgia, began his brief reign as Pope Callistus III. As his lineage suggests, Alexander VI was a rather secular pope, among the wealthiest and most ambitious men in Europe, fond of his many mistresses and his illegitimate offspring, and endowed with sufficient energy and ability to indulge his worldly passions.

He brought the full weight of his authority to bear on the appeals of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, the “Catholic Monarchs” of Spain who had instituted the Inquisition in 1492 to purge Spain of Jews and Moors. They exerted considerable influence over the papacy, and they had every reason to expect a sympathetic hearing in Rome. Ferdinand and Isabella wanted the pope’s blessing to protect the recent discoveries made by Christopher Columbus, the Genoese navigator who claimed a new world for Spain. Portugal, Spain’s chief rival for control of world trade, threatened to assert its own claim to the newly discovered lands, as did England and France. Ferdinand and Isabella implored Pope Alexander VI to support Spain’s title to the New World. He responded by issuing papal bulls—solemn edicts—establishing a line of demarcation between Spanish and Portuguese territories around the globe. The line extended from the North Pole to the South Pole. It was located one hundred leagues (about four hundred miles) west of an obscure archipelago known as the Cape Verde Islands, located in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of North Africa. Antonio and Bartolomeo da Noli, Genoese navigators sailing for Portugal, had discovered them in 1460, and ever since, the islands had served as an outpost in the Portuguese slave trade.

The papal bulls granted Spain exclusive rights to those parts of the globe that lay to the west of the line; the Portuguese, naturally, were supposed to keep to the east. And if either kingdom happened to discover a land ruled by a Christian ruler, neither would be able to claim it. Rather than settling disputes between Portugal and Spain, this arrangement touched off a furious race between the nations to claim new lands and to control the world’s trade routes even as they attempted to shift the line of demarcation to favor one side or the other. The bickering over the line’s location continued as diplomats from both countries convened in the little town of Tordesillas, in northwestern Spain, to work out a compromise.

I
n Tordesillas, the Spanish and Portuguese representatives agreed to abide by the idea of a papal division, which seemed to protect the interests of both parties. At the same time, the Portuguese prevailed on the Spanish representatives to move the line 270 leagues west; now it lay 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, at approximately 46° 30' W, according to modern calculations. This change placed the boundary in the middle of the Atlantic, roughly halfway between the Cape Verde Islands and the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. The new boundary gave the Portuguese ample access to the African continent by water and, even more important, allowed the Portuguese to claim the newly discovered land of Brazil. But the debate over the line—and the claims for empire that depended on its placement—dragged on for years. Pope Alexander VI died in 1503, and he was succeeded by Pope Julius II, who in 1506 agreed to the changes, and the Treaty of Tordesillas achieved its final form.

The result of endless compromises, the treaty created more problems than it solved. It was impossible to fix the line’s location because cosmologists did not yet know how to determine longitude—nor would they for another two hundred years. To further complicate matters, the treaty failed to specify whether the line of demarcation extended all the way around the globe or bisected just the Western Hemisphere. Finally, not much was known about the location of oceans and continents. Even if the world was round, and men of science and learning agreed that it was, the maps of 1494 depicted a very different planet from the one we know today. They mixed geography with mythology, adding phantom continents while neglecting real ones, and the result was an image of a world that never was. Until Copernicus, it was generally assumed that the earth was at the absolute center of the universe, with the perfectly circular planets—including the sun—revolving around it in perfectly circular, fixed orbits; it is best to conceive of the earth as nested in the center of all these orbits.

Even the most sophisticated maps revealed the limitations of the era’s cosmology. In the Age of Discovery, cosmology was a specialized, academic field that concerned itself with describing the image of the world, including the study of oceans and land, as well as the world’s place in the cosmos.Cosmologists occupied prestigious chairs at universities, and were held in high regard by the thrones of Europe. Although many were skilled mathematicians, they often concerned themselves with astrology, believed to be a legitimate branch of astronomy, practice that endeared them to insecure rulers in search of reassurance in an uncertain world. And it was changing faster than cosmologists realized. Throughout the sixteenth century, the calculations and theories of the ancient Greek and Egyptian mathematicians and astronomers served as the basis of cosmology, even as new discoveries undermined time-honored assumptions. Rather than acknowledge that a true scientific revolution was at hand, cosmologists responded to the challenge by trying to modify or bend classical schemes, especially the system codified by Claudius Ptolemy, the Greco-Egyptian astronomer and mathematician who lived in the second century
A.D.

Ptolemy’s massive compendium of mathematical and astronomical calculations had been rediscovered in 1410, after centuries of neglect. The revival of classical learning pushed aside medieval notions of the world based on a literal—yet magical—interpretation of the Bible, but even though Ptolemy’s rigorous approach to mathematics was more sophisticated than monkish fantasies of the cosmos, his depiction of the globe contained significant gaps and errors. Following Ptolemy’s example, European cosmologists disregarded the Pacific Ocean, which covers a third of the world’s surface, from their maps, and they presented incomplete renditions of the American continent based on reports and rumors rather than direct observations. Ptolemy’s omissions inadvertently encouraged exploration because he made the world seem smaller and more navigable than it really was. If he had correctly estimated the size of the world, the Age of Discovery might never have occurred.

Amid the confusion, two kinds of maps evolved: simple but accurate “portolan” charts based on the actual observations of pilots, and far more elaborate concoctions of cosmographers. The charts simply showed how to sail from point to point; the cosmographers tried to include the entire cosmos in their schemes. The cosmographers relied primarily on mathematics for their depictions, but the pilots relied on experience and observation. The pilots’ charts covered harbors and shorelines; the cosmographers’ maps of the world, filled with beguiling speculation, were often useless for actual navigation. Neither approach successfully applied the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas to the real world.

Although it might be expected that pilots worked closely with cosmologists, that was far from the case. Pilots were hired hands who occupied a lower social stratum. Many of them were illiterate and relied on simple charts that delineated familiar coastlines and harbors, as well as on their own instincts regarding wind and water. The cosmologists looked down on pilots as “coarse men” who possessed “little understanding.” The pilots, who risked their lives at sea, were inclined to regard cosmologists as impractical dreamers. Explorers setting out on ocean voyages to distant lands needed the skills of both; they took their inspiration from cosmologists, but they relied on pilots for execution.

Although the Treaty of Tordesillas was destined to collapse under the weight of its faulty assumptions, it challenged the old cosmological ways. On the basis of this fiction, based on a profound misunderstanding of the world, Spain and Portugal competed to establish their global empires. The Treaty of Tordesillas was not even a line drawn in the sand; it was written in water.

E
mboldened by the Treaty of Tordesillas, Ferdinand and Isabella looked for ways to exploit the portion of the globe granted to Spain. Success proved elusive: Christopher Columbus’s voyages to the New World all failed to find a water route to the Indies. A generation after Columbus, King Charles I resumed the quest to establish a global Spanish empire. He, or his advisers, recognized that the Indies could provide priceless merchandise, and the most precious commodity of all was spices.

Spices have played an essential economic role in civilizations since antiquity. Like oil today, the European quest for spices drove the world’s economy and influenced global politics, and like oil today, spices became inextricably intertwined with exploration, conquest, imperialism. But spices evoked a glamour and aura all their own. The mere mention of their names—white and black pepper, myrrh, frankincense, nutmeg, cinnamon, cassia, mace, and cloves, to name a few—evoked the wonders of the Orient and the mysterious East.

Arab merchants traded in spices across land routes reaching across Asia and became adept at boosting prices by concealing the origins of the cinnamon, pepper, cloves, and nutmeg with which they enriched themselves. The merchants maintained a virtual monopoly by insisting these precious items came from Africa, when in fact they grew in various places in India, and China, and especially throughout Southeast Asia. Europeans came to believe that spices came from Africa, when in fact they only changed hands there. To protect their monopoly, Arab spice merchants invented all sorts of monsters and myths to conceal the ordinary process of harvesting spices, making it sound impossibly dangerous to acquire them.

The spice trade was central to the Arab way of life. Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, belonged to a family of prominent merchants, and for many years traded in myrrh and frankincense, among other spices, in Mecca. Arabs developed sophisticated methods of extracting essential oils from aromatic spices used for medical and other therapeutic purposes. They formulated elixirs and syrups derived from spices, including julab, from which the word
“julap”
derives. During the Middle Ages, Arab knowledge of spices spread across western Europe, where apothecaries developed a brisk trade in concoctions made from cloves, pepper, nutmeg, and mace. In a Europe starved for gold (much of it controlled by the Arabs), spices became more valuable than ever, a major component of European economies.

Despite the overwhelming importance of spices to their economy, Europeans remained dependent on Arab merchants for their supply. They knew the European climate could not sustain these exotic spices. In the sixteenth century, the Iberian peninsula was far too cold—colder than it is now, in the grip of the Little Ice Age—and too dry to cultivate cinnamon, cloves, and pepper. An Indonesian ruler was said to have boasted to a trader who wanted to grow spices in Europe, “You may be able to take our plants, but you will never be able to take our rain.”

Under the traditional system, spices, along with damasks, diamonds, opiates, pearls, and other goods from Asia, reached Europe by slow, costly, and indirect routes over land and sea, across China and the Indian Ocean, through the Middle East and Persian Gulf. Merchants received them in Europe, usually in Italy or the south of France, and shipped them overland to their final destination. Along the way, spices went through as many as twelve different hands, and every time they did, their prices shot up. Spices were the ultimate cash crop.