Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (28 page)

And he had a final word of advice for the Captain General:

I also believe that your lordship should not sail along these coasts at night, both because of the ships’ safety and the crew’s need to rest a little; since there are seventeen hours of daylight, let your lordship have the ships lie at anchor for the four or five nightly hours so that, as I said, the people can rest instead of having to bustle about the ships with the rigging; and, most importantly, in order to spare ourselves the blows that an untoward fate could inflict on us, may Heaven forbid it. For, if such blows befall us when things can be seen and observed, it should not be unfitting to fear them when nothing can be seen or known or well watched, so let your lordship have the ships anchor one hour before sunset rather than continue forward at night to cover two leagues. I have said as I feel and understand in order to serve both God and your lordship with what I believe is best for the Armada and your lordship; your lordship shall do as your lordship sees fit and as God shall guide your lordship. Please He that your lordship’s life and condition be successful, as it is my wish.

San Martín dared to express what nearly everyone on the voyage whispered: There was great danger ahead, and chances were they would not make it to the Spice Islands, wherever they were; their maps had long since proved to be useless. Give it until January, he advised, and if they had not reached their goal by then, return to Spain, and try again.

Magellan considered these carefully thought-out admonitions, but he was nevertheless inclined to proceed, no matter how long it took to reach the Spice Islands. They had at least three months’ provisions, by his reckoning. More important, he believed that God would assist them in achieving their goal; after all, He had permitted them to discover the strait, and He would guide them to their final goal.

T
he next day, Magellan gave the order to weigh anchor. The ships fired a salvo of cannon that reverberated among the splendid dark green mountains, gray ravines, and azure glaciers of the strait, and the armada set sail once again, heading west, always west.

At last, the churning, metallic waters of the Pacific came into view, and they realized they had reached the end of the strait. Magellan had done it; he had found the waterway, just as he had promised King Charles. Now that the armada had accomplished this feat, all the arguments for turning back by mid-January were never again discussed. “Everyone thought himself fortunate to be where none had been before,” Ginés de Mafra exulted.

Magellan was overwhelmed to have completed his navigation of the strait, at last. Pigafetta records that the Captain General “wept for joy.” When he recovered, he named the just-discovered Pacific cape “Cape Desire, for we had been desiring it for a long time.” As the armada approached the Pacific, the seas turned gray and rough. It was late in the day, and the dull skies were fading to darkness as the three ships put the western mouth of the strait to stern. “Wednesday, November 28, 1520, we debouched from that strait, engulfing ourselves in the Pacific sea,” noted Pigafetta with quiet satisfaction. Even with the mutiny of the
San Antonio,
and the time spent trying to recover the ship, not to mention the ubiquitous dead ends the strait presented and at least one fierce williwaw, Magellan needed only thirty-eight days and nights to travel from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific.

For Magellan and his crew, it had been a remarkable rite of passage. As they sailed beyond the strait into the open water, how could they doubt that their expedition was indeed blessed by the Almighty? Although Magellan and his crew appeared vulnerable to the elements, to starvation, to the local tribes they encountered, and most of all to each other, this was not how they saw themselves. They all believed that a supernatural power looked after them and conferred on them the unique status of global travelers.

But how much of this accomplishment of navigating the strait derived from Magellan’s skill, and how much could be attributed to plain good luck? Magellan was fortunate that the weather was relatively mild; after the intense williwaw that had menaced his ships, no other squalls surprised them, no glaciers collapsed on them, and the temperature, fluctuating as it does at that time of year between 35 degrees and 50 degrees Fahrenheit, remained within normal bounds, so the men were spared the intense cold they had suffered at Port Saint Julian. Their scouting excursions, as well as the addition of fresh vegetables to their diet, boosted both their spirits and their health. The passage through the strait, while strenuous, was far healthier than being at sea for long stretches, within the unsanitary confines of the ships, subsisting on a diet of salty, spoiled food and wine.

Although the armada enjoyed reasonably good fortune, Magellan’s extraordinary skill as a strategist proved to be the decisive factor in negotiating the entire length of the Dragon’s Tail. He ordered lookouts scrambling to the highest perch on the ships, where they could see the waterways and obstacles that lay ahead. In addition, he regularly sent small scouting parties in the longboats. “They would go on and come back with news of the findings, and then the rest of the armada would follow. This is the way the armada operated for the whole passage of the strait,” Ginés de Mafra recalled. The information they brought back helped Magellan plot his next move; they warned him against rocky shoals, bays that deceptively resembled a continuation of the strait, and other dead ends that would have delayed his passage. Magellan even relied on the taste of seawater to guide the fleet. As the water became fresher, he knew he was traveling inland, and once it turned salty, he realized he was approaching the Pacific on the western side of the strait.

This array of tactics saved tedious days of wandering up and down dead-end channels and harbors. If one approach failed, he always had others on which to fall back. Not even the loss of his best pilot, Estêvão Gomes, and his biggest ship,
San Antonio,
defeated him; the more the fleet shrank, the more nimble it became. His sophisticated approach to navigating uncharted waters went far beyond technical ability in boat handling and direction finding; it revealed an ability to deploy novel tactics to overcome one of the great challenges of the Age of Discovery: namely, how to guide a fleet of ships through hundreds of miles of unmapped archipelagos in rough weather.

Magellan’s skill in negotiating the entire length of the strait is acknowledged as the single greatest feat in the history of maritime exploration. It was, perhaps, an even greater accomplishment than Columbus’s discovery of the New World, because the Genoan, thinking he had arrived in China, remained befuddled to the end of his days about where he was, and what he had accomplished, and as a result he misled others. Magellan, in contrast, realized exactly what he had done; he had, at long last, begun to correct Columbus’s great navigational error.

W
hen the fog receded and the sun broke through the low clouds, the Western Sea, as the Pacific was then called, turned from lifeless gray to seductive cobalt, its surface mottled with frothy whitecaps that melted into the frigid air. The water boiled menacingly and surged over the rocks and cliffs emerging from its inscrutable depths. Fearing shoals, Magellan adjusted his navigational technique; instead of gliding through deep fjords, he steered a course in rough water between two rocks later named, with a bitter irony best appreciated by wary sailors, The Evangelists and Good Hope. A cold miasma descended, blinding the pilots. “The western exit of the strait is very narrow and foggy, and there is no sign of it,” de Mafra wrote. “Having exited it and sailed three leagues into the sea, its mouth cannot be descried.”

Magellan set a northerly course along the coast of Chile. The strait they had just left seemed an enchanted refuge by comparison to the ocean they now faced. Darwin, on his journey, found the vista so horrifying that he was moved to comment: “One sight of such a coast is enough to make a landsman dream for a week of shipwreck, peril, and death.”

The men of the Armada de Molucca looked on the scene with the same foreboding. They knew the voyage was far from over; in a sense, it had only just begun. No matter how great the feat of navigating the strait from one ocean to another, it would have little value unless the armada reached the Spice Islands, wherever they were. No one aboard the fleet’s three remaining ships suspected they were about to traverse the largest body of water in the world to get there.

C H A P T E R   V I I I
A Race Against Death

The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.

T
he scale of the Pacific Ocean was past imagining to Magellan. It encompasses one-third of the earth’s surface, covers twice the area of the Atlantic Ocean, and contains more than twice as much water volume. It extends over a greater area than all the dry land on the planet, more than sixty-three million square miles. Lost in this immensity are twenty-five thousand islands, and concealed beneath its waters lurks the lowest point on earth, the Mariana Trench, buried in inky blackness thirty-six thousand feet beneath the shimmering surface. The Pacific had had the same appearance and character for tens of millions of years before Magellan and his men sailed across its surface, yet they knew nothing of these geological wonders. The men of the Armada de Molucca might as well have been sailing across the dark side of the moon.

Even today, the Pacific remains mysterious and alluring to scientists and oceanographers. Until recently, more was known about the surfaces of Mars or Venus than about the depths of the Pacific. Nor does the scientific community agree about the origin of the oceans. One hypothesis maintains that in the first billion or so years after the earth was formed, comets—space ice—continually crashed to the surface, and they melted to form our oceans. Another suggests that the most ancient building blocks of earth—asteroidal material in the solar nebula and space dust—began to accrete and to heat. The heavier material sank to the center of the planet, and the lighter material remained nearer the surface. When the earth’s crust was formed, water may have been released and formed oceans. As Magellan’s men journeyed across the Pacific, they slowly and painfully came to realize what everyone knows now: Oceans cover 70 percent of the earth’s surface. Our planet has been misnamed; it is the
ocean
planet.

Magellan anticipated a short cruise to the Spice Islands, followed by a longer but untroubled voyage home through familiar waters. He believed that his men had learned from their ordeals. The mutinies had weeded out the faint of heart and the uncooperative. The crew, once numbering 260 men and boys in five ships, was now less than 200 in three vessels:
Trinidad,
still the flagship of the fleet;
Concepción,
where Juan Serrano ruled; and
Victoria,
under Duarte Barbosa’s command. Still, he had no idea of the real challenge that lay ahead, not one of shoals or climate but of distance.

T
he fleet’s progress was rapid, but just how rapid is open to question. In his log, Albo noted, “On the morning of December 1, [1520,] we saw bits of land like hillocks.” The usually scrupulous pilot gives his latitude as 48 degrees south, but his calculations may have been off by as much as one degree south; thus the fleet might have traveled even farther and faster than he supposed. In a cryptic entry, Pigafetta noted in his diary: “Daily we made runs of 50, 60, or 70 leagues
a la catena ho apopa
”—a phrase generally taken to mean “at the stern.” Pigafetta might have been referring to Magellan’s method of dead reckoning—the time it took for a log or other object to pass from one end of the ship to the other—but he did not furnish enough details to explain the fleet’s exact speed or distance. For the crew, the days at sea went by in a trance throughout December and most of January 1521.

To while away the idle hours, Pigafetta turned his attention to birds that occasionally flew overhead. He was of the opinion that they were undiscovered species. Swooping and diving into the waters of the Pacific, the birds hunted for flying fish, which occasionally lifted themselves out of the sea and landed on the deck of the ships with a distinctive thud. Pigafetta called the flying fish
colondrini,
by which he probably meant the flying gurnard, also known as the Oriental helmet gurnard, whose fins can expand into an impressive display of fanlike wings tipped with bluish spines. An exotic, forbidding-looking creature, the gurnard served as a reliable supply of food for the crew.

“In the Ocean Sea one sees a very amusing fish hunt,” Pigafetta wrote. “The fish are of three sorts, and are a cubit or more in length, and are called dorado, albacore, and bonito. They follow and hunt another kind of fish that flies and is called
colondrini,
a foot or more in length and very good to eat. When the above three find any of those flying fish, the latter immediately leap from the water and fly as long as their wings are wet—more than a crossbow’s flight,” Pigafetta marveled. “While they are flying, the others run along back of them under the water following the shadow of the flying fish. The latter have no sooner fallen into the water than the others immediately seize and eat them. It is a very fine and amusing thing to watch.”

L
ife at sea—so uncertain during the Port Saint Julian mutiny and the intricate maneuvering through the strait—became routine. From the first light of dawn, the crew kept time with an hourglass; when it was turned over, the pages sang their familiar incantations. Each day at noon the pilot, Albo, shot the sun and determined latitude, generally with considerable accuracy. Every evening, the other two captains went on deck, drew close to
Trinidad,
and saluted Magellan:
¡Dios vos salve, señor capitán-general, y señor maestro y buena compaña!