Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (5 page)

Columbus and Fonseca despised one another and fought bitterly. Fonseca was forever trying to get Ferdinand and Isabella and their successors to ignore the claims of independent entrepreneurs such as Columbus and to exert complete control over the expeditions that Spain sent to the New World. This meant, of course, that Fonseca would control the expeditions, and reap the full benefits from their trading. In the midst of the dispute, Columbus physically attacked Fonseca’s accountant, kicking and assaulting him as a proxy for Fonseca himself. Nevertheless, Fonseca gradually exerted his will over Columbus, and by the time Magellan appeared on the scene, the balance of power over trading privileges had shifted decisively from the explorer to the crown. Magellan, and others in his position, would have to settle for what the crown granted them—still a fortune beyond imagining—rather than establishing their own foreign trading empires. There could be no expedition to the Spice Islands without the backing of Fonseca and his Casa de Contratación.

When Magellan approached representatives of the Casa de Contratación and declared that he believed that the Spice Islands were located within the Spanish hemisphere, he was telling them exactly what they wanted, indeed,
needed
to hear. Peter Martyr, a chronicler with access to the highest circles of the Casa, could barely conceal their gloating. “If the affair has a favorable outcome, we will seize from the Orientals and the King of Portugal the trade in spices and precious stones.”

Still, the provisions of the Treaty of Tordesillas posed serious obstacles for the proposed expedition. Members of the Casa failed to see how Magellan could avoid trespassing on Portuguese interests by sailing west until he reached the East. Anticipating this objection, Magellan referred the distinguished members of the Casa to a clause in the Treaty of Tordesillas that allowed Spain or Portugal the freedom of the seas to reach lands belonging to one empire or the other. Such a clause was open to many interpretations, and Magellan might sail into conflict with Portugal if he attempted to take advantage of it. Then there was the question of Magellan’s nationality. The prospect of a Portuguese leading a Spanish expedition through Portuguese waters made nearly everyone at the Casa de Contratación uneasy; if the Portuguese became aware of the expedition, relations between the two countries might be strained to the breaking point. Yet the Casa’s newest member looked at matters quite differently. Juan de Aranda, an ambitious merchant, took the Portuguese navigator aside and offered to lobby on behalf of the expedition in exchange for 20 percent of the profits. Privately, Magellan resented Aranda’s intrusion into his scheme, but the merchant held out the best hope for keeping the expedition’s prospects alive. And so Magellan agreed to cooperate.

Aranda wrote enthusiastically on behalf of Magellan, only to be reprimanded by the Casa de Contratación, which reminded him that he was not entitled to negotiate the terms of the expedition on his own. Worse, Magellan’s comrade Ruy Faleiro was outraged to hear that Aranda had insinuated himself into the expedition and flew into a tirade so severe that it caused Magellan to back down. There was more to Faleiro’s rage than simple indignation; it was a symptom of his growing mental instability. Aranda, for his part, attempted to apologize to Faleiro, and, despite the violent disagreement, contrived to obtain an audience for Magellan with King Charles in the city of Valladolid in north central Spain. It was here that Ferdinand and Isabella were married, and where Christopher Columbus died, and it now served as the capital city of Castile. And on January 20, 1518, Magellan, along with Ruy Faleiro and Ruy’s brother Francisco, set out from Seville for Valladolid.

M
agellan’s arrival in the capital city coincided with a period of instability within the innermost circles of the royal court. Castile’s regent, Cardinal Ximenes de Cisneiros, had just died on his way to assist the inexperienced King Charles, and poisoning was suspected. More than anyone else in Spain, the cardinal had ensured the safety of the newly arrived king, providing 32,000 soldiers to preserve order, but now he was gone, and young Charles sorely missed the prelate’s guiding hand. Instead, he relied on the advice of a group of Flemish ministers for every decision. Guillaume de Croy, Seigneur de Chièvres, perhaps the most able of the lot, had long served as Charles’s tutor, schooled him in the exercise of power, and jealously guarded his authority over the lad. The young king’s inner circle also included Ximenes’s successor, Chancellor Sauvage, and Cardinal Adrian of Utrecht. Despite his subsequent elevation to the papacy as Adrian VI, this cardinal seems to have earned no one’s admiration. Wrote one nineteenth-century historian of Adrian: “Of low extraction, and a person of weak character, his advancement must always be regarded with wonder.” Such were the men on whom an immature king from a foreign culture, speaking a foreign tongue, depended to make decisions concerning affairs of state.

Aranda obtained a meeting for Magellan with the king’s Flemish ministers to consider a proposal to assemble an expedition for the Spice Islands. And Magellan came well armed for what would be the most important meeting of his life. To begin, he offered tantalizing letters from his friend Francisco Serrão, a Portuguese explorer, describing the riches of the Spice Islands.

Serrão’s odyssey began in 1511, when he assumed command of one of three ships, dispatched by the Portuguese viceroy of India and bound for the Spice Islands, using an easterly route. Surviving shipwrecks and pirates, Serrão and several companions arrived at Ternate, in the Spice Islands, the following year. In all likelihood, they were the first Europeans to visit these fabled islands. Serrão carefully cultivated Ternate’s small ruling class, especially its king, and tried to promote trade between Ternate and Portugal, but the brisk transoceanic trade that he expected was slow to materialize. Rather than giving up, Serrão stayed on. Surrounded by the scent of drying cloves, soothed by the attentions of his newly acquired island wife, he wrote beguiling letters to Magellan describing the extravagant beauty and wealth of the Spice Islands and inviting his friend to visit and see for himself. “I have found here a new world richer and greater than that of Vasco da Gama,” he wrote. “I beg you to join me here, that you may sample for yourself the delights that surround me.”

Magellan had every intention of visiting Serrão in the island paradise: “God willing, I will soon be seeing you, whether by way of Portugal or Castile, for that is the way my affairs have been leaning: you must wait for me there, because we already know it will be some time before we can expect things to get better for us.” And when Magellan made a promise, he did everything in his power to keep it.

Significantly, Serrão’s letters placed the Spice Islands far to the east of their true position; he located them squarely within the Spanish hemisphere, as defined in the Treaty of Tordesillas. This error might have been intentional, to disguise the Spice Islands’ location from outsiders, but in any event his geographical legerdemain alleviated Spain’s principal anxiety: Magellan’s expedition to the Spice Islands must not violate the treaty.

To dramatize his mission, Magellan then displayed his slave of long standing, Enrique, who was believed to be a native of the Spice Islands. (This was not quite accurate, but in any event, Enrique could act as an interpreter.) According to one account, Magellan also brought another slave from the Indies, an attractive female from Sumatra who spoke many languages.

After presenting the slaves, Magellan spoke excitedly of his intention to sail along the eastern coast of what is now called South America until the land ended and he would be able to turn west toward the Spice Islands; he invoked the seven years he had spent in the service of Portugal, administering its empire and flourishing spice trade; and, to clinch his argument, he displayed a map or a globe (the wording in the original documents is ambiguous) depicting the route he planned to take. A crucial part of the map was obscured, however: the part that showed a waterway extending through South America toward the Spice Islands. Although Magellan, in his zeal to persuade the king’s ministers to back the expedition, all but gave the strait’s location away, he remained fearful that someone would steal his map and his strategy and launch a rival expedition before he could organize his own.

“Magellan had a well-painted globe in which the entire world was depicted,” wrote Bartolomé de las Casas, a historian and missionary who took part in the meeting. “And on it he indicated the route he proposed to take.” Reliable information about trade routes was so sensitive and precious that governments zealously guarded all maps and charts, which were essential to national security, and for Magellan to display a map likely purloined from Portugal was the equivalent of selling nuclear secrets at the height of the Cold War.

Magellan’s conception of the world he planned to explore was fatally inaccurate. Like most explorers of the Age of Discovery, his ideas about the size of the globe, and location of landmasses, were inspired by Ptolemy. Had Magellan comprehended the size of the Pacific, its currents, storms, and reefs, it is unlikely that he would have dared to mount an expedition. But without the Pacific Ocean to inform his calculations, the estimated length of his route came to only half the actual distance. Magellan confidently predicted that it would take him at most two years to reach the Spice Islands and return to Spain with ships bulging with precious cargo. All he would have to do was find a way to get around or through South America, and he would be at the doorstep of the Indies. This was nearly the same mistake that Columbus had made over and over, during his four voyages. And it was a mistake that would be corrected only at the cost of great suffering and of many lives during the voyage Magellan now proposed.

After making his presentation to the ministers, Magellan was invited to discuss the proposed expedition in greater detail with Fonseca and Las Casas.

“I asked him what way he planned to take,” the historian wrote, “and he answered that he intended to go by Cape Saint Mary, which we call the Río de la Plata, and from thence to follow the coast until he hit the strait.” Las Casas remained skeptical of Magellan’s belief in the strait. “But suppose you do not find any strait by which you can go into the other sea?” he asked. Magellan told him that if he could not locate the strait, he “would go the way the Portuguese took.” Although Magellan sounded ready to contravene the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas, the king and his advisers were too intrigued to turn him away. “This Ferdinand Magellan must have been a man of courage and valiant in his thoughts for undertaking great things,” Las Casas marveled, “although he was not of an imposing presence because he was small in stature and did not appear in himself to be much, so that people thought they could put it over him for want of prudence and courage.”

In Magellan’s case, appearances were deceiving. His ideas were big enough, and promised to be lucrative enough, to convince King Charles and his powerful advisers to back them.

I
mmediately after the meetings at Valladolid, the potential coleaders of the expedition presented a list of demands to the crown; they were couched in respectful language, but they were demands nonetheless. They included an exclusive franchise on the Spice Islands for a full ten years, 5 percent of the rent and proceeds “of all such lands that we would discover,” and the privilege of trading for their own accounts, so long as they paid taxes to the king. They asked to keep any “islands” they discovered for themselves, if they discovered more than six, as well as permission to pass the newly discovered lands on to “our heirs and successors.”

Magellan’s insistence on a ten-year exclusive on voyages to the Spice Islands appeared preposterous in a fast-changing world, but he was concerned that Spain would send duplicate expeditions as soon as his was out of sight of land, expeditions guided by his theories and secrets, expeditions that might succeed if he failed. Magellan was right to insist on this point, although he was powerless to enforce it.

O
n March 22, 1518, King Charles, from his royal seat in Valladolid, offered Magellan and Faleiro a contract “regarding the discovery of the Spice Islands.” The document was a charter to discover a new world on behalf of Spain. “Inasmuch much as you, Bachelor Ruy Faleiro and Ferdinand Magellan, gentlemen born in the Kingdom of Portugal, wishing to render us a distinguished service, oblige yourselves to find in the domains that belong to us and are ours in the area in the Ocean Sea, within the limits of our demarcation, islands, mainlands, rich spices,” it began, “we order that the following contract with you be recorded.”

In the first clause, King Charles appeared to accede to Magellan’s insistence on a ten-year exclusive: “Since it would be unjust that others should cross your path, and since you take the labors of this undertaking upon yourselves, it is therefore my wish and will, and I promise that, during the next ten years, I will give no one permission to go on discoveries along the same regions as yourselves.” Nevertheless, he did not honor this promise. Just as Magellan feared, King Charles dispatched a follow-up expedition to the Spice Islands only six years after Magellan’s departure from Spain. The Spice Islands were too valuable to entrust to the luck and skill of a single explorer.

King Charles enjoined Magellan and Faleiro to respect Portugal’s territorial rights under the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas: “You must so conduct this voyage of discovery that you do not encroach upon the demarcation and boundaries of the Most Serene King of Portugal, my very dear Uncle and Brother, or otherwise prejudice his interests, except within the limits of our demarcation.” He reminded Magellan of the delicate diplomatic and family situation complicating the rivalry of Spain and Portugal for mastery of the seas and of world trade. Portugal’s sovereign, King Manuel, had married not just one but
two
of Charles’s aunts, first Isabel and then María. And now he was planning to marry Charles’s sister, Leonor, within a matter of weeks. The family ties, with their complex web of sentiment and formality, kept Spain and Portugal from all-out war with each other, but they did not extinguish the intense rivalry between the two nations; they drove it underground or into the diplomatic realm, where it was no less fierce.