A Brief History of Circumnavigators Read online

  DEREK WILSON is one of the best-known authors of history and biography whose many books, radio features and TV programmes include the international best-seller Rothschild – A Story of Wealth and Power and studies of the Astors, Hans Holbein, Francis Drake, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Of his book The World Encompassed: Drake’s Great Voyage Professor J. H. Plumb wrote in the New York Times: ‘Derek Wilson displays excellent judgement not only about his sources but also about the character and actions of Drake himself.’ He and his wife live at their homes in Devon and Normandy.

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  A BRIEF HISTORY OF

  THE CIRCUMNAVIGATORS

  Derek Wilson

  ROBINSON

  London

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK as The Circumnavigators

  by Constable & Co., 1989

  This revised paperback edition published by Robinson,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2003

  Copyright © Derek Wilson 1989, 2003

  The right of Derek Wilson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication Data is available from the British Library

  ISBN 1-84119-709-2

  eISBN 978-1-47211-329-0

  Printed and bound in the EU

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Cover design: Simon Levy

  CONTENTS

  List of Illustrations

  Maps

  Introduction

  1 Primus

  2 A Pelican in her Piety

  3 The Triumph of Desire

  4 The First Travelogue

  5 ‘Enough to Destroy a Man’

  6 Conquering the Great South Sea

  7 Filling in the Gaps

  8 A Country Doomed by Nature

  9 Profit and Pleasure

  10 The Ancient Mariner

  11 The Ocean Within

  Source Notes and References

  Index

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  Illustrations

  Allegorical engraving of Magellan (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; photo: Mansell Collection)

  Sir Francis Drake (National Maritime Museum)

  The Golden Hind engaged with Cacafuego

  Thomas Cavendish

  Drawings of Chinese (Mss Rawl A315 Bodleian Library, Oxford)

  Byron landing in Patagonia (British Library)

  Dolphin being attacked in Tahiti (Rex Nan Kivell Collection NK 147, National Library of Australia)

  Harrison’s first chronometer (National Maritime Museum)

  Harrison’s pocket chronometer (National Maritime Museum)

  Captain James Cook (National Maritime Museum)

  Louis XVI commissioning La Pérouse’s expedition (Château de Versailles; photo: © Musées Nationaux)

  A Maori war canoe (British Library)

  James Forbes’s Marco Polo (National Maritime Museum)

  Cartoon from the Cape Town Owl

  Maps

  The Voyages of Magellan/Elcano and Drake

  The Voyages of Byron, Carteret and Wallis

  The Voyages of Cook and Bougainville

  Errors on Wilkes’ Antarctic Chart

  Circumnavigation and Antarctic Discovery

  INTRODUCTION

  The mythical tale is told of a medieval Englishman who decided to see the world and, despite the warnings of family and friends, set off westward. After many years of crossing broad seas and encountering strange peoples he landed upon a shore where the natives spoke the English language. Continuing through this country he reached a locality where even his own dialect was used. Then he came upon a village which looked exactly like his own and where the people all knew him. Believing himself bewitched, he fled in terror, retracing his steps and not stopping until he came safe home.

  When Sebastian d’Elcano led his little band of seventeen seamen each ‘more emaciated than any old worn-out hack horse’ through the streets of Seville on 8 September 1522, the wide-eyed citizens who gazed upon the first circumnavigators were people who could not grasp the concept that the earth was a sphere, and that therefore it was theoretically possible to travel around it. Ptolomaic geography was espoused by only a small coterie of radical scholars. It was the expedition begun by Magellan and completed by Elcano that turned their theories into facts. But it also demonstrated that the world’s wild oceans and savage lands held a thousand horrors and dangers for sixteenth century mariners and their puny ships. Throughout the rest of the century captains prepared to follow in Elcano’s wake were few and far between.

  Such were the first, hesitant voyages which began the era of circumnavigation, an era that lasted almost four hundred years and only came to an end in the last years of the nineteenth century. It was a magnificent era, one of the most exciting and formative in the long saga of the human species. During those epic years man fully possessed himself of his own planet. Whether inspired by hope of financial gain, national rivalry, scientific curiosity or the spirit of adventure, generations of travellers set out to ‘put a girdle round about the earth’. Some perished in the attempt. Some helped to build up an accurate map of earth’s remoter regions. Some emerged from and returned to a homely obscurity. Fortunately, some left a record of their experiences and impressions.
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br />   Francis Bacon, usually a wise commentator on the human scene, was mistaken when he wrote, in his essay Of Travel:

  It is a strange thing, that in sea voyages, where there is nothing to be seen but sky and sea, men should make diaries; but in land travel, wherein so much is to be observed, for the most part they omit it.

  There are several reasons why mariners before and since the sixteenth century wrote accounts of their voyages. There was the need to produce rutters for fellow sailors and to keep logs which might be demanded by owners and financial backers. There were the long days to be filled when a vessel languished becalmed or scudded before the obliging trade winds. And there were strange and terrible experiences to be recorded which would thrill or chill the blood of friends at home. So far from there being ‘nothing to be seen but sky and sea’, the oceans presented a vivid kaleidoscope of changing moods, and their depths teemed with creatures, curious, beautiful and terrifying. For these and other reasons many of the men who went down to the sea in ships left behind an extensive literature of published works, manuscript journals, letters and log books. It is on such material that this history is largely based.

  Captains, ordinary seamen, pirates, merchants, yachtsmen and yachtswomen, these are the principal characters of the long drama of circumnavigation. Their stories are fascinating not only as travellers’ tales which tell us of battles with the sea and encounters with strange peoples. Their narratives reveal much more about the voyagers themselves – how they prepared, how they raised the money, how they handled subordinates, how they stood up to crises, how they coped with loneliness. It is always instructive to learn the various ways in which the human spirit reacts when pressed to the limits, for it is a spirit that we all share.

  Some readers may question my assertion that the age of circumnavigation has passed. After all, more men and women now travel round the world than ever before: rucksacked youngsters determined to explore their planet before settling to the routine of earning a living; businessmen constantly shuttling between international airports; retired people going to the exciting expense of a world cruise. But this very fact proves my point: circling the globe is no longer the adventure it once was. Just as the ‘Dark Continent’ has lost its mysterious terrors and can be traversed by a well-maintained Land Rover; just as the South Pole which cost the lives of Scott and his companions is now manned by huts full of men and computerised gadgetry; so distant, ‘romantic’ locations can today be reached so quickly that the traveller must rest on arrival to recover from jet lag. Human progress has made the world a smaller and safer place. Perhaps it has made it a duller place, too.

  Circumnavigation today can be made into an adventure but only by a voyager who imposes extra limitations on himself; who tries to accomplish it single-handed, or in the fastest time, or the smallest boat, or by a more taxing route. Going around the world does not, in itself, present the hydra-headed challenge which confronted our ancestors. We can legitimately, therefore, speak of the era of circumnavigation in the past tense.

  I am grateful to the following publishers for permission to quote extensively from the works specified: Thorson’s Publishing Group Ltd, for J. Ridgway and A. Briggs, Round the World Non-stop; Hodder and Stoughton Ltd, for F. Chichester, Gipsy Moth Circles the World.

  1

  PRIMUS

  It all began with a death. Not an especially noble death. In fact, when Ferdinand Magellan was brutally felled by a rain of iron-tipped, bamboo spears on 27 April 1521, he suffered a fate he had arrogantly and needlessly brought upon himself. The swarthy, black-bearded Portuguese who had driven his diminishing band of sailors and adventurers through seventeen thousand miles of unimaginable hell, now involved them recklessly in the petty rivalries of two island princes:

  Zzula, lord of the aforesaid island of Mactan . . . begged that on the following night he would send but one boat with some of his men to fight [against his rival, Lapulapu]. The captain general resolved to go there with three boats . . . we set forth, sixty men armed with corselets and helmets . . . and arrived at Mactan three hours before daylight.

  When day came we leaped into the water, being forty-nine men, and so went for a distance of two crossbow flights before we could reach the harbour, and the boats could not come farther inshore because of the stones and rocks which were in the water. The other eleven men remained to guard the boats.

  Having thus reached land we attacked them. Those people had formed three divisions, of more than one thousand and fifty persons* and immediately they perceived us, they came about us with loud voices and cries, two divisions on our flanks, and one around and before us. When the captain saw this he divided us in two, and thus we began to fight. The hackbutmen [i.e. men armed with primitive handguns] and crossbowmen fired at long range for nearly half an hour but in vain, merely piercing their shields, made of strips of wood unbound, and their arms . . . When those people saw that we fired the hackbuts in vain . . . they fired at us so many arrows and lances of bamboo tipped with iron, and pointed stakes hardened by fire, and stones that we could hardly defend ourselves . . .

  But as a good captain and a knight he still stood fast with some others, fighting thus for more than an hour and, as he refused to retire further, an Indian threw a bamboo lance in his face, and the captain immediately killed him with his lance, leaving it in his body. Then, trying to lay hand on his sword, he could draw it out but halfway, because of a wound . . . that he had in his arm. Which seeing, 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 . . . they slew our mirror, our light, our comfort and our true guide.1

  From that moment onwards an attempt at circumnavigation, which had not formed part of Magellan’s plans, was inevitable. To accomplish what their dead leader had set out to achieve eighteen months before, a remnant of his followers would have to attempt something he had never contemplated – a long sea journey home through enemy-patrolled waters. By an ironical twist of fate the first circuit of the globe which is for ever associated with the name of Ferdinand Magellan would probably never have been attempted if Magellan had survived that skirmish in the Philippines and continued to lead the expedition. He dared not have sailed his tiny, vulnerable fleet westward across the Indian Ocean for, over the last twenty years the Portuguese had made themselves the masters of that ocean, establishing bases around its borders from the Cape to Malacca. And Ferdinand Magellan was a renegade Portuguese, who, after twelve years or more of faithful service to his king, had sold himself to the ruler of Spain and was now seeking to weaken Portugal’s hold on the Orient trade. There could be no mercy for such a man if he fell in with ships commanded by any of his erstwhile countrymen.

  Ferdinand Magellan was one of those rare men who lived in a remarkable age, and knew it and wanted to be part of it. The tiny village of Sabrosa in the vine-covered hills of Portugal’s Douro Littoral claims the explorer as its son. Within that village a plaque on a substantial stone house announces that Ferdinand Magellan was born there ‘circa 1480’. The claim has not gone undisputed but, in this case, the geographical accident of a man’s birthplace is of no importance. What matters is that Ferdinand’s father belonged to the fourth order of Portuguese nobility and that he died while his son and heir was still a minor. Ferdinand thus became a royal ward and, at the age of ten or eleven was taken to Lisbon to be a page in the household of Queen Leonor, consort to John II, the ‘perfect prince’.

  King John, who earned his nickname by being shrewd, intelligent and forceful, showed remarkable similarities to his English contemporary and ally, Henry VII. It was John who finally broke the power of the feudal nobility, established the authority of the crown and gave royal power a sound financial base. He took a keen interest in overseas trade and the expansion of empire and was frequently to be found in the casa da mina, the office and warehouse complex on the ground floor of the palace. From
its waterfront windows he could watch the ships coming to their moorings in the Tagus to offload their cargoes of gold, slaves and ivory, brought from his African dominions. The palace, like many other buildings in the Alfama, Lisbon’s ancient quarter, did not survive the 1755 earthquake but it takes little imagination to picture an impressionable boy standing at one of its arched casements and observing as excitedly as his sovereign the comings and goings in the harbour and determining that one day he too would sail to the lands of the East, rich in spices, precious metals, silk, monkeys and multi-coloured parrots.

  For over half a century Portugal had been trying to break the Muslim stranglehold on the Orient trade. She had fought fruitless battles with the Levantine Moors. She had sent ill-fated expeditions to search for Prester John, the African Christian king of legend. She had, more profitably, probed the western seaboard of the southern continent, building forts and trading posts from which to plunder the land of the black men. Then, in 1488, some three years before young Magellan came to Lisbon, the streets of the capital buzzed with the news that Captain Diaz had found Africa’s southernmost tip and sailed past it into another ocean. The seaway to the East was open.

  John II wasted no time in exploiting this new discovery. He sent Pedro da Covilha overland to Asia to spy out the strengths and weaknesses of the Arab and Persian merchant princes who controlled Indian Ocean trade. He sent his captains on secret voyages into the southern Atlantic to learn more about the prevailing winds and currents. At the same time he cleared the diplomatic ground with Spain. In 1492–3 Christopher Colombus had set off westwards in an attempt to reach those very golden lands that King John’s captains were seeking and returned, as he claimed, triumphant and successful. Originally he had offered his services to the ‘perfect prince’ and John had considered his scheme. But the royal advisers asserted (rightly, as we now know) that Columbus vastly underestimated the distance from Iberia to Cathay by the western route. So the Genoese captain offered his services to the Spanish crown, an example not lost on young Magellan.