Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (25 page)

Magellan knew better than to take maps at face value, but he was deeply susceptible to their influence. They were idealized projections of what the world might be like. Instead of the dragons and magnetic islands of older maps, these contained a new marvel, one that was possibly just as mythical: a strait. They were calls to adventure rather than a set of directions, hypotheses rather than conclusions, provocative geographical cartoons that fed the fantasy of empire.

N
ow that Magellan had finally found the strait, he faced three hundred miles of nautical nightmare. Navigating the waterway would prove as daunting a challenge as simply finding it had been. Tides in the strait run as much as twenty-four feet, making it difficult to anchor ships securely, and currents are strong. Beds of kelp lurking below the water’s surface threatened to foul lines, keels, and rudders. But if Magellan could overcome the obstacles presented by the strait, and keep his mutinous crew intact, he would pioneer a new route to the Indies, to a new understanding of the continents and of the globe itself.

The ships turned west, braved the swirling tides, and entered the inland waterway. The first thing the pilots noticed was the extreme depth of the strait. “In this place it was not possible to anchor,” Pigafetta observed, “because no bottom was found. Wherefore it was necessary to put cables ashore of twenty-five or thirty cubits in length.”

Curious to learn exactly where they were, Magellan sent Carvalho ashore with orders to climb to the highest point to look for an opening. On his return, Carvalho reported that he failed to discern the Pacific to the west; nevertheless, Magellan was gripped with the conviction that he had found the waterway to Spice Islands. He ordered Albo to record the strait’s twists and turns as accurately as possible. “Within this bay we found a strait which may be a league in width,” he wrote, “and from this mouth to the spit you look east and west, and on the left hand side of the bay there is a great elbow within which are many shoals, but when you are in the strait, take care of some shallows less than three leagues from the entrance of the straits, and after them you will find two islets of sand, and then you will find the channel open. Proceed in it at your pleasure without hesitation,” he recommended. “Passing this strait we found another small bay, and then we found another strait of the same kind as the first, and from one mouth to the other runs east and west, and the narrow part runs N.E. and S.W., and after we had come out of the two straits or narrows, we found a very large bay, and we found some islands, and we anchored at one of them.” No doubt Albo had specific landmarks in mind as he wrote, but the strait defied even this precise chronicler, and his directions proved difficult for subsequent visitors to interpret.

W
ithin days, the strait’s gloomy enchantment impressed itself on the crew. As they negotiated its frigid waters, they observed thickly vegetated, forbidding shores sliding past, cloaked in eerie shadows. Late one night, during the few hours of darkness at that time of year, they caught glimpses of what they believed were signs of human settlements; distant fires with an indistinct source burst forth, their ruby flames glimmering like spectral apparitions in front of the dark green cypresses, vines, and ferns. The fires sent plumes of smoke into the hazy sky, and fouled the air with an acrid odor.

Magellan and his crew believed these fires had been set by Indians who lurked in the shadows, waiting to pounce—one more reason for the sailors to stay aboard ship, especially at night, even though their provisions were running low. This was a reasonable precaution, but the fires were most likely of natural origin, the result of lightning. In any event, Magellan called this region Tierra del Fuego, Land of Fire. Today, we know that Tierra del Fuego is actually an enormous triangular island buffeted by winds from both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and constantly beset by storms and rapidly changing weather. The Land of Fire is actually the land of storms. Tierra del Fuego covers more than 28,000 square miles of glaciers, lakes, and moraines. Magellan’s crew looked on the lowlying areas, where the hills rarely reach six hundred feet; to the south and west, the southern extension of the Andes mountain range pierces the clouds, reaching heights of over seven thousand feet.

Now that they were in the strait, the pilots found that the sky was rarely clear by day or night, which made it nearly impossible to take accurate measurements either by the stars or by the sun. Gloomy, ragged, low-hanging clouds scudded over the mountains hugging the fjords through which the ships expectantly glided. Occasionally, the leaden mists parted to allow sunlight, gleaming with painful brilliance, to stream down on the impenetrable land and the surging water.

The sunlight, when it managed to break through, could be pitiless at this low latitude and appeared to illuminate the landscape with a gray, polarized radiance. Striations of light played over the stony beaches and the glaciers frosting the mountaintops. Although Magellan traversed the strait at the warmest time of year, when the wind, for all its bite, was at its lightest, and snows had receded, the enormous glaciers were plentiful and awe-inspiring. Snow nearly always fell atop the glaciers—they were endlessly renewing themselves— and at lower altitudes the ice melted into narrow waterfalls cascading over the granite outcroppings into the fjords. Invisible to the sailors, the glaciers extended across the landscape, running through thirty miles of mountains before sheering off at the water’s edge.

As they continued to sail through the strait, Magellan’s crew observed a solid wall of ice rising majestically before them—two hundred feet, five hundred feet, and more. They were ancient edifices, these glaciers, some of them ten thousand years old, and they looked it, with their grimy faces deeply pockmarked and weathered.

Consisting of packed snow and ice, the glaciers never rested; they cracked, they groaned, they roared, and they threatened to decompose and tumble onto the beaches and water below. Their crystalline towers leaned out over the water in irregular columns, like rotting teeth in a decaying jaw. They inclined ever more precariously over the placid water until one column after another, warmed by the sun and buffeted by the wind, calved and collapsed amid a cloud of icy dust with a shattering report followed by a drumlike roll of thunder, low and resonant, announcing destruction. To everyone’s surprise, the glaciers were neither white nor gray, but a light, almost iridescent blue that in the crevasses and seams darkened to a deep azure. The countless chunks of ice broken off from the glaciers, some as large as a whale, others as small as a penguin, had the same enigmatic bluish cast as they bobbed past the ships: an armada of sculptured ice drifting toward a mysterious location.

Groping for a plausible explanation for the glaciers’ appearance, Magellan theorized that the glaciers’ distinctive color had to do with their extreme age. In fact, the bluish cast was determined by the distinctive properties of snow and ice. The surface of snow and ice reflects all light, without preference for any particular color of the spectrum, but the interior handles light differently. Snow acts as a light filter, and treats the spectrum preferentially, scattering red light more strongly than blue. Photons emerging from snow and ice generally have more blue rays than red. The deeper the snow and ice, the farther the light must travel, and the darker blue it becomes, just as water appears a deeper blue as it increases in depth. For this reason, the deep crevasses in the glaciers possess an unearthly azure hue.

E
very visitor to the strait has been awed by the majestic, moody spectacle it presents. It is reminiscent of Norway, or Scotland, or Nova Scotia, but ultimately it is unlike any other place on earth. In 1578, Sir Francis Drake, the English explorer and pirate, led the first expedition since Magellan’s through the strait. One of his officers, Francis Pretty, was amazed by the spectacle passing before his eyes. “The land on both sides is very huge and mountainous; the lower mountains whereof, although they be monstrous and wonderful 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 did appear three regions of clouds,” Pretty marveled. “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.” And when the naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison visited the strait in February 1972, he, too, fell under its spell. “One seems to be entering a completely new and strange world, a veritable Never-Never Land,” he remarked. “The Strait never freezes except along its edges, and the evergreen Antarctic beech, with its tiny matted leaves, grows thickly along the lower mountain slopes. The middle slopes support a coarse grass which turns bronze in the setting sun; and above, the high peaks are snow-covered the year round; when it rains in the Strait, it snows at 6000 feet.”

Although the sky was generally overcast, especially at night, it cleared at brief intervals to reveal a dazzling array of constellations competing for attention, with an unnaturally brilliant Milky Way. The familiar—Orion’s belt, the Big Dipper—mingled with the unfamiliar constellations of the Southern Hemisphere, especially the Southern Cross, whose presence reinforced Magellan’s conviction that the Almighty was looking over the entire venture, even here, at the end of the world.

O
nce the armada had negotiated the first two narrows within the strait, Magellan became increasingly cautious about the hazards ahead and decided to scout the strait’s uncharted waters. “The Captain General sent his cousin Álvaro de Mesquita to go in his vessel
San Antonio
through that mouth in order to find out what was inside while he and the other ships remained anchored in the wide part of the entrance until they knew what was what,” Vasquito Gallego noted. Actually, Magellan dispatched two ships (the other was Concepción), but
San Antonio
took most of the risks. “Álvaro de Mesquita went for fifty leagues up the strait, and in some parts he found it so narrow that between one shore and the other there was no more distance than one Lombard shot, and the strait turned toward the west whence the sea currents came in full force, so strong that they could not go on, except with difficulty,” Gallego remembered. “Mesquita turned back, saying that he thought that the great water came out of a big gulf and his advice was to go in search of its end and see the mystery, because not without reason came that water with such force from that direction.”

All the while,
Victoria
and
Trinidad
remained tied up in Lomas Bay, on the southern shore of the strait. Here the water was shallow enough to permit the ships to drop anchor, and they seemed to be safe, but at night a “great storm,” as Pigafetta called it, blew up and lasted well into the next day, battering the ships. Magellan was forced to raise anchor and let the two ships ride out the storm in the protected reaches of the bay.

The gales in this region were especially violent and seemingly appeared out of nowhere. The “great storm” of which Pigafetta spoke is called a “williwaw,” and it is peculiar to the strait. A williwaw occurs when air, chilled by the glaciers surrounding the strait, becomes unstable and suddenly races down the mountains with ever-increasing velocity. By the time it reaches the fjords, it creates a squall so powerful that it never fails to terrify and disorient any sailor unlucky enough to be caught in its grip.

San Antonio
and
Concepción
had an even more difficult time riding out the williwaw than the ships that stayed behind. The sailors aboard those ships had experienced terrifying storms, but nothing equal to this. The fierce winds prevented them from rounding the cape, and when they tried to rejoin the fleet, they nearly ran aground. In the darkness, the two ships became disoriented, and their pilots, without maps and unable to see the stars, feared they were lost. They hunted for a way out for the next day, and the next after that, until they finally approached a narrow channel leading to a continuation of the strait. Once they noted the exact location of the strait’s extension, they sailed back through relatively calm waters to find their Captain General.

A dramatic reunion occurred, as Pigafetta explained: “We thought that they had been wrecked, first, by reason of the violent storm, and second, because two days had passed and they had not appeared, and also because of certain smoke [signals] made by two of their men who had been sent ashore to advise us. And so, while in suspense, we saw the two ships with sails full and banners flying to the wind, coming toward us. When they neared us in this manner, they suddenly discharged a number of mortars, and burst into cheers. Then all together thanking God and the Virgin Mary, we went to seek [the strait] further on.” The rejoicing, the triumph over weather and geography, and the feeling of being blessed by divine authority were new to Magellan’s men. For the better part of two years, they had been deeply mistrustful of their Captain General, divided from one another by language and culture, and prone to mutiny. After passing through these ordeals, they had become united and saw in each other not subversion or menace but the possibility of ultimate triumph.

D
espite the euphoria Magellan felt on discovering the strait, he still faced serious obstacles. Influenced by the maps he had seen in Portugal, Magellan mistakenly conceived of the strait as a single channel running through the huge landmass blocking the route to the Indies, when in fact there was no single strait; instead, he faced a complex array of tidal estuaries snaking through the mountains at the southern limit of the Andes. Instead of a simple shortcut to the Pacific, Magellan had led his fleet into a uncharted maze that would put his navigational abilities to the ultimate test.