Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (4 page)

At last, he received a taste of recognition he craved when his service in battle and war wounds earned him a promotion to the rank of quartermaster. The position entitled him to a share of the spoils of war, which proved to be his undoing. In a subsequent battle, Arabs surrendered a immense herd of livestock, over 200,000 goats, camels, and horses. Magellan was among the officers responsible for distributing the spoils in an equitable fashion, and he decided to pay off tribal allies with some of the captured animals. As a result of this transaction, Magellan and another officer were indicted for selling four hundred goats to the enemy and keeping the proceeds for personal gain.

The charges were, on their face, preposterous. Magellan, as a quartermaster, was entitled to his spoils of war, and it was not clear that he received any. He failed to respond to the charges, and without authorization, left Morocco for Lisbon, where he appeared before King Manuel. Magellan did not apologize for his conduct in Morocco, but demanded an increase in the allowance he received as a member of the royal household, his
moradia.
Making a bad situation even worse, he lectured the king, reminding him that he, Ferdinand Magellan, was a nobleman, and had rendered lifelong service to the crown, and had the wounds to show for it. Nothing but a more generous
moradia
would suffice to acknowledge his stature, his sense of honor, and his idealism. Jealous rivals whispered behind Magellan’s back that his limp was merely an act designed to elicit sympathy.

King Manuel’s judgment, when it came, was swift and sure: The insolent and foolish Magellan was to return to Morocco immediately to face charges for treason, corruption, and leaving the army without authorization. This he did. After investigating the evidence, a tribunal in Morocco dismissed all charges against him, and he returned to Lisbon clutching a letter of recommendation from his commanding officer. Displaying superhuman stubbornness, Magellan went back to his sovereign king to demand the increased
moradia
with more vehemence than ever.

Once more, the king refused.

M
agellan was entering middle age, with a bad leg and an unfairly tarnished reputation. Short and dark, and teetering on the brink of poverty, he looked nothing like the aristocrat he thought himself to be. And he still yearned to distinguish himself in the service of Portugal, to make a name for himself that would rank with the important figures of the day, the explorers who opened new trade routes for Portugal in the Indies, and in the process became rich themselves. It seemed that Magellan was merely compounding his folly by asking the king who had refused to increase his
moradia
to back an entire expedition, but the would-be explorer saw matters differently. He was offering the king a scheme, admittedly a bit vague and risky, to fill the royal coffers with the wealth of the Indies. Acknowledging that he needed help to persuade King Manuel, Magellan brought a prominent personage with him: Ruy Faleiro, a mathematician, astronomer, and nautical scholar. He was, in short, that quintessential Renaissance man, a cosmologist. Documents of the era always refer to Faleiro as a
bachiller,
in other words, a student (and perhaps also a teacher) at a university. Born in Covilhã, a town in mountainous eastern Portugal, Faleiro was a brilliant but unstable man who impressed his colleagues with his demonic personality; like many scholars of the day, he may have been a
converso.
He often worked closely with his brother Francisco, an influential scholar in his own right and the author of a well-regarded study of navigation, and it was likely that each Faleiro brother planned to play a major role in the expedition.

Despite the impressive credentials he brought to the venture, Ruy Faleiro had his own troubled history with King Manuel. The king had refused Faleiro’s application to become a “Judiciary Astronomer,” and worse, had appointed a rival to a new chair in astronomy at the University of Coimbra. So when Magellan and Faleiro presented themselves at court with their plan, the king was already prejudiced against both men, the stubborn, defiant Magellan and the mercurial Faleiro, men whose requests he had refused in the past.

B
y the time Magellan made his case for a voyage, King Manuel, then fifty-one years old, had entered the throes of a personal crisis. He believed that his long reign was coming to an end; his adored wife had recently died in childbirth, and he decided to abdicate in favor of his son. But when the young man proved ungrateful, Manuel abruptly changed his mind, decided to remain on the throne, and arranged to marry his son’s fiancée, Leonor, the twenty-year-old sister of King Charles of Spain. All the while, it was rumored, she continued to have relations with the boy, Prince João, a situation that caused no end of scandal and derision at court. So the Portuguese sovereign whom Magellan petitioned with his ambitious plan was a deeply suspicious, unhappy, and conflicted man—a man determined to keep others from attaining fame and power.

Three times, Magellan asked for royal authorization for a voyage to the Indies to discover a water route to the fabled but little known Spice Islands. Three times, the king, who had disliked and mistrusted Magellan for more than twenty years, refused.

Finally, in September of 1517, Magellan asked if he could offer his services elsewhere, and, to his astonishment, the king replied that Magellan was free to do as he pleased. And when Magellan knelt to kiss the king’s hands, as custom dictated, King Manuel concealed them behind his cloak and turned his back on his petitioner.

T
he humiliating rejection proved to be the making of Ferdinand Magellan.

After he received the final rebuff from the Portuguese king, he suddenly found direction in his life, and he moved quickly, carried along by his own ambitions and by the tides of history. By October 20, 1517, he had arrived in Seville, the largest city in Andalusia, in southwestern Spain. Ruy Faleiro, and possibly Francisco, joined him there in December, the three of them forming a close-knit team of Portuguese expatriates seeking their fortune in a rowdy and energetic new land. Within days of his arrival, Magellan signed documents formally making him a subject of Castile and its young king, Charles I. No longer was he Fernão de Magalhães; in Spain, he became known as Hernando de Magallanes.

There was ample precedent for Magellan’s emigration to Spain. His boyhood hero, Christopher Columbus, had come to Spain from Genoa to seek backing for the discovery of a route to the Indies, and, after years of delay and frustration, had finally won it from King Charles’s grandparents, Ferdinand and Isabella. Magellan believed that he could do what the Genoese navigator had claimed to do but had never actually accomplished: reach the fabulous Indies by sailing westward across the ocean.

Tensions ran so high between Spain and Portugal that an international incident could result from an expedition following this route. Portugal had long been notoriously secretive about its empire, almost as secretive as the Arabs had been. By an edict of the Portuguese king, announced on November 13, 1504, anyone revealing discoveries or plans for missions of exploration could be executed. From 1500 to about 1550, not one book concerning Portuguese discoveries was published, at least in Portugal itself. Private individuals, during most of the sixteenth century, were not allowed to possess materials pertaining to the India trade and related subjects. Portuguese charts and maps were regarded as classified information and treated as state secrets. Had Magellan sailed on behalf of his homeland, his voyage around the world might have been lost to history.

Fortunately, the Spanish developed a different approach to empire building. Obsessive record keepers, given to documenting everything—laws, lineage, finances—they applied the same scrutiny to Magellan’s voyage. Unlike the Portuguese or the Arabs, the Spanish proclaimed their exploits to stake their claim to various parts of the world. Furthermore, the Age of Discovery coincided with the discovery of movable type and the spread of printed books and pamphlets across Europe, supplemented by influential handwritten presentation copies compiled by professional scribes for the libraries of nobility. All of these accounts helped to spread the news of the discovery of the New World, and to reshape maps and popular conceptions of the globe.

Magellan brought with him many of Portugal’s most precious and sensitive secrets: information about secret expeditions, a familiarity with Portuguese activity in the Indies, and an acquaintance with Portuguese navigational knowledge of the world beyond Europe. He was a rare breed, an explorer, schooled in the royal tradition established by Prince Henry the Navigator. But he needed a sponsor.

A
t eighteen, Charles I, king of Castile, Aragon, and Leon, was keenly aware of his august antecedents. He had preceded Magellan to Spain by only a year, and was as much of a stranger, or more. A Hapsburg, he had come of age in Flanders, drinking beer and speaking Flemish. He was now trying to learn the Spanish language and Spanish customs as quickly as he could. Endowed with a classic Hapsburg physique—tall, fair, with a hugely prominent chin—he towered above most of his subjects. He was trying to grow a beard to cover the broad expanse of his chin, and was on his way to becoming an accomplished horseman. It was said that he even participated in bullfights to display his valor.

His thirst for fame and glory had become apparent as soon as he arrived in Spain, and it was encouraged by his advisers, most of them highly placed officials of the Church who had been in power since the days of Ferdinand and Isabella and who saw in the young king the perfect vehicle for advancing their own ambitions. Less than a year after coming to Spain, Charles was elected king of the Romans, thanks to a great deal of string-pulling by the members of his family. The appointment meant that he would eventually become crowned King Charles V, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, but to receive the title he would have to pay vast sums of money, essentially bribes, to the electors, who were based in Germany, and he looked to the Indies and the New World as a source of revenue to advance his personal ambitions. Explorers such as Magellan could be very useful to a young king in search of glory and in need of money.

T
he timing of Magellan’s arrival in Spain was auspicious, but his overall prospects were decidedly mixed. Although he possessed specialized knowledge and experience of the vast yet secret Portuguese empire, he was an unknown quantity to the Spanish court and ministers. He spoke Spanish haltingly, and relied on scribes for written communication in that language. He had renounced his loyalty to Portugal, but he remained an outsider in Spain, on probation and under suspicion. In these difficult circumstances, getting the financial backing for his proposed voyage would require a superhuman expenditure of effort and cunning, as well as a generous amount of luck. Spain, in this era, remained a feudal society ruled by a powerful, feared, and corrupt clergy. Bishops’ illegitimate children, often referred to as “nephews” and “nieces,” played prominent roles in public life. Cruelty, hypocrisy, and tyranny imbued the social order in which Magellan now found himself, but for the moment, he prospered by appealing to the Spanish court’s longing to dominate world trade, and by insinuating himself into the country’s power structure. Soon after arriving in Seville, Magellan became acquainted with Diogo Barbosa, another Portuguese expatriate who had settled in this city fourteen years earlier and was now Knight Commander of the Order of Santiago, among his other distinctions. Diogo’s nephew, Duarte, had sailed for Portugal, and Magellan was probably influenced by Duarte’s accounts of his journey. At the same time, Magellan began to woo Diogo’s daughter Beatriz; the relationship developed very quickly, and they married before the year was out. Suddenly, Magellan had an important sponsor in Seville, as well as a financial stake, because Beatriz brought with her a dowry of 600,000
maravedís.
She might have been pregnant at the time of their marriage; the child, named Rodrigo, was born the following year.

G
uided by the Barbosa family, Ferdinand Magellan prepared to persuade the powerful Casa de Contratación, or House of Commerce, to allow him to undertake his audacious voyage. Founded in Seville on January 20, 1503, by Queen Isabella, the Casa managed expeditions to the New World on behalf of the crown, and carried out its administrative chores with the bureaucratic zeal for which the Spanish were famous. At the time of its founding, the Casa de Contratación was housed near the Seville shipyards, in the Atarazanas, or arsenal, but to emphasize its authority, Queen Isabella moved it to the royal palace itself, the Alcázar Real. The Casa’s role quickly expanded from collecting taxes and duties to administering all aspects of exploration, including registering cargoes and proclaiming rules for the outfitting of ships and their weapons. Within a few years of its founding, the Casa began giving instructions to captains, and imposing punishments for smuggling, which was ever present. Soon the Casa functioned as a maritime court, adjudicating contract disputes and insurance claims for all voyages to the New World. The Casa even administered cosmography, maintaining and updating the
padrón real,
or royal chart, which served as a master copy for charts distributed to all ships leaving Spain. By 1508, the Casa acquired a
piloto mayor,
pilot major or chief pilot, who administered a school of navigation to train navigators and sailors who wished to advance themselves. (The very first
piloto mayor
was Amerigo Vespucci, who gave his name to the Americas.)

The Casa de Contratación was controlled by one man, who was neither a navigator nor an explorer. Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca, the bishop of Burgos, had served as Queen Isabella’s chaplain and had managed Columbus’s expeditions even before the Casa came into existence. A cold, manipulative bureaucrat who jealously guarded his power, Fonseca made himself essential to all Spanish expeditions to the New World. Anyone wishing Spain’s backing would have to obtain Fonseca’s blessing—which, as legions of explorers would testify, was also a curse.