12 Fernão de Magalhães, d. 1521 (Ferdinand Magellan)

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Fernão de Magalhães, d. 1521 (Ferdinand Magellan)
To register the appropriate incredulity and awe about Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition’s circumnavigation of the world, consider this: Christopher Columbus’s hallowed crossing of the Atlantic Ocean took thirty-six days; Magellan’s transit of the Pacific Ocean required ninety-eight days. Day after day, no land. Stagnant water to drink. Rats, sawdust, and leather to eat. But that is getting ahead of the truly unique voyage that began Europe’s pursuit of the Pacific.
            A Portuguese nobleman and navigator, Magellan sought the support of his king, Manuel I, on three separate occasions for an exploratory expedition to seek a new water route to the Spice Islands. He had acquired experience and demonstrated loyalty, having served the king in a crucial role on an eight-year (1505–1513) expedition attempting to create a permanent Portuguese presence in India and to conquer Malacca (today’s Melaka, Malaysia), followed by military service in Morocco, where he was seriously wounded in hand-to-hand fighting. He had squandered most of his personal fortune in service to the crown. For various reasons, mostly personal, King Manuel rebuffed Magellan but allowed the officer to offer his services elsewhere. It was September 1517.
            By the end of October, Magellan was in Seville, becoming a Spanish citizen. The timing was good, for Charles I, the new Spanish king of Castile, Aragon, and León, was also new to Spain, having arrived from Flanders the year before. The eighteen-year-old monarch was athletic, energetic, and eager for fame and glory, but to become Charles V, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, he would need vast sums of money to pay the electors. Hence, Magellan’s familiarity with Portugal’s secretive navigational knowledge—nothing was published in Portugal between 1500 and 1550 about its navigators’ discoveries—and the prospects of riches in the Indies made a rare and appealing combination. By sailing west, as Magellan intended, Spain also would respect the tenets of the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), which had given Portugal rights to all the new territory found east of a line drawn 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. (For more on this treaty, see the Lines of Demarcation box in the Spice Islands section.)

The Armada de Molucca, as it was called, departed from Seville on August 10, 1519, sailed down the Guadalquivir River to the coast at Sanlúcar de Barrameda, where they waited for Magellan, who had remained behind to deal with last-minute preparations. The ships finally entered the Atlantic on September 20. The majority of the crew were Spanish, but there were also Portuguese, Italians, Greeks, and Frenchmen. Included were Magellan’s brother-in-law Duarte Barbosa, Magellan’s indentured servant Enrique of Malacca, and Antonio Pigafetta, a Venetian scholar who had signed on as a supernumerary and had been assigned the role of official expedition chronicler. The fleet stopped briefly in the Canary Islands for more provisions; later, Magellan learned that his suppliers had swindled him by misrepresenting the quantity and quality of supplies they provided.
            He ordered the fleet south along the coast of Africa to avoid and outrun two fleets that had been sent by the Portuguese king to intercept the expedition and arrest the Captain General for his treason. After weeks of storms, followed by doldrums, Magellan’s ships reached Sierra Leone, then headed west and crossed the Atlantic, finding anchorage in Rio de Janeiro on December 13, 1519. A layover period of sensual indulgence, as the sailors enjoyed the favors of willing Indian women, was disturbed by Magellan’s execution of a sailor who had sodomized a cabin boy. Thereafter, the crew became increasingly resentful of their leader.
            The fleet hugged the coast of South America, heading steadily south—sailing only during the day and anchoring at night—searching for the strait that would take them to the Spice Islands. The Rio de la Plata offered hope but proved to be too shallow. As the southern hemisphere slowly entered its winter, the fleet established a settlement at Puerto San Julián in Patagonia (Argentina), at a latitude of 49°20′ S, where they encountered the tall Tehuelche Indians. Pigafetta’s description of these people would give birth to the myth of the Patagonian Giants. (For more, see the Patagonian Giants box in the Strait of Magellan section.)
            Magellan reduced rations and tried to keep the men busy, but dissension, especially among the Spanish captains and crew, soon erupted into midnight mutiny on April 2. But with subterfuge and some luck, Magellan quickly seized control. Luis de Mendoza, the captain of Victoria, was killed in the fighting; Gaspar de Quesada, the captain of Concepción, was executed—their dead bodies were drawn and quartered and put on display. (Later, two other conspirators, Juan de Cartagena, the captain of San Antonio, and a priest named Padre Sánchez de la Reina, were left marooned on the coast when the fleet left.) The Santiago was sent to do some southerly scouting and was wrecked in a powerful storm, yet all of its crew survived the long journey, in freezing weather, back along the land.

After what seemed an interminable five months, the remaining four ships of the armada weighed anchor on August 24, 1520. Foul weather hindered their progress, but on October 21 (the feast day of St. Ursula of the Eleven Thousand Virgins), around 52° S latitude, they reached a headland they called the Cape of the Eleven Thousand Virgins (today’s Vírgenes), beyond which, cutting into the landmass, stretched a broad and deep waterway with strong currents: it was the longed-for strait. Navigating its 350 miles would prove to be a nautical nightmare, owing to the high tides (up to twenty-four feet) and strong winds and currents.
            Magellan methodically advanced into this Never Never Land. Seeing distant fires at night, indicative of human settlements, he named the area Tierra del Fuego, Land of Fire. After thirty-eight days, negotiating channels, bays, and glacier-fed fjords, past huge, snow-capped mountains and coarse, evergreen shores, surviving a fierce williwaw and the rebellion of another ship—San Antonio, the largest in the fleet, containing many provisions, had stealthily headed back to Spain—Magellan achieved part of his goal: the Pacific Ocean. Overcoming all of the challenges was a remarkable testament to his abilities as a navigator and strategist and to his crews’ forbearance and skill. The three ships reached Cape Desire on November 28, 1520, and entered an ocean Magellan called pacific for its mildness. According to historical weather research, Magellan probably benefited from El Niño, which provided calm winds across the Pacific during his crossing. (Note that later, however, after exiting the Magellan Strait, Sir Francis Drake would encounter very strong westerlies that forced him far south and east, into what would become known as the Drake Passage.)
            Some cautionary notes were sounded, for supplies were low and great danger inevitably awaited them. Yet all realized that the voyage was worthless without reaching the Spice Islands, which they assumed would be a short distance away. Of course, no one realized that the greatest expanse of water on the planet lay ahead. And Magellan’s course, first northward along the western coast of South America and then west, unluckily avoided virtually all of the ocean’s twenty-five thousand islands. In fact, during the transpacific crossing, they sighted land only once—barren atolls of the Tuamotu Islands, which Magellan dubbed Islands of Disappointment—before reaching Guam in the Ladrones (“Islands of Thieves,” today’s Marianas) on March 6, 1521, after ninety-eight days on the ocean.
            Pigafetta spent much of that time with Paul, their captive Patagonian Giant, learning some of his language and converting him to Christianity just before he died. Scurvy made its deathly appearance and carried off about thirty of the men, who had been reduced to eating biscuits swarming with worms, drinking putrid yellow water, soaking (softening) then chewing the ox-hide top coverings of sails, eating sawdust from boards, and trading rats. The officers fared better for reasons unknown to them: they had a supply of preserved quince, a potent anti-scorbutic. Magellan was desperate and depressed, confounded by the distance and amount of time they had spent sailing.
            They approached Guam with great relief yet caution, anchoring in a large turquoise lagoon (today’s Umatac Bay). The taller, stronger indigenous people, the Chamorros, surrounded the fleet in their proas (their multihulled sailing canoes), quickly boarded the flagship, and started stealing anything loose that they could. Altercations developed, guns were fired, arrows shot, but the fighting subsided when Magellan ordered his men to stop—soon food was being distributed to the starving crew and some trading took place. However, when the captain’s skiff was stolen, Magellan sent a raiding party ashore the next day: many houses were burned and seven native men killed. A template for European first encounters with Pacific peoples had been created.
            Guam was not the Spice Islands, and so the fleet moved on to points still unknown, reaching Homonhom Island at the edge of the Philippine archipelago on March 16. Magellan’s servant, Enrique, who had been with him since Malacca days, was able to communicate with a nearby island’s inhabitants, whose Filipino leader, Rajah Kolambu, treated Magellan like royalty. Wanting to impress, Magellan demonstrated the Spaniards’ weaponry and offered to subdue the king’s enemies. Kolambu offered pilots to lead them to a larger, more impressive island, Cebu, ruled by an ally, Raja Humabon. There the fleet arrived on April 7.
            Humabon and Magellan quickly formed a tight bond as blood brothers. Once Humabon and his queen were baptized as Christians, their subjects followed suit. Tribute to Magellan was given, allegiance to Spain was offered—it seemed too perfect. Buoyed by these developments and his own confidence, Magellan demanded obedience from neighboring islands to Humabon and the conversion of their inhabitants to Christianity. (He was exceeding the instructions King Charles had given him.)
            One of the two chieftains of Mactan, Lapu Lapu, refused and challenged Magellan to a fight. Determined to show the power of the Spanish armored warriors, and against the advice of his own men to engage in a needless battle, Magellan sailed to Mactan on Saturday, April 27, 1521. The coastal water was shallow, forcing the ships to anchor well offshore. The men had to wade through two crossbow flights of thigh-high water to reach the shore. In the “Battle of Mactan,” forty-nine European musketeers and crossbowmen confronted three divisions of Mactan fighters, more than one thousand men, armed with arrows, bamboo spears tipped with iron, and fire-hardened stakes. Further inciting the islanders’ wrath, Magellan ordered the burning of nearby homes. The fighting lasted about an hour, culminating, as Pigafetta describes it, with Magellan’s death:

Which seeing [Magellan wounded in the arm], all those people threw themselves on him, and one of them with a large javelin . . . thrust it into his leg, whereby he fell face downward. On this all at once rushed upon him with lances of iron and of bamboo and with these javelins, so that they slew our mirror, our light, our comfort, and our true guide. [vol. 1, p. 88]

It was an undignified end, offshore, in water up to his knees. His hacked body pieces were kept by the Mactans as a memorial; no armor was ever recovered.