A Brief History of Circumnavigators Read online

  The immediate result was a hotting up of the race to establish commercial links with the Orient. To forestall this rivalry leading to colonial warfare between two Christian princes, Rodrigo Borgia who as Alexander VI had dragged the papacy to its lowest level of corruption, calmly divided the world in two. His line was drawn a hundred leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. He allotted all new found land west of it to Spain and instructed John’s captains to confine their activities to the east. The Portuguese king immediately protested that the demarcation would interfere with navigation on the Orient route, for Portuguese ships now stood well out into the Atlantic after leaving the Cape Yerde Islands to avoid the south-east trade winds. In 1494 the concerned parties met at Tordesillas in north-west Spain and agreed on a compromise: Alexander’s line was moved a further 270 leagues to the west. This treaty, which set the pattern of European ‘armchair colonisation’ for centuries to come, proved remarkably effective as far as Atlantic exploration was concerned. But what would happen when Portuguese and Spanish conquistadores, expanding their legitimate spheres of influence, met at the backside of the world? With their imperfect grasp of terrestrial measurement they could not accurately continue the line of Tordesillas through eastern lands and seas. The result was a free-for-all.

  All that lay in the future in 1495 when John II died, to be succeeded by Manuel ‘the Fortunate’. The new king completed John’s plans for a major expedition to the Indian Ocean and, in the summer of 1497, Vasco da Gama sailed out of the Tagus with four prime ships. He returned twenty-six months later with half his fleet and less than a third of his crew but what a voyage he had accomplished! Soon all Europe was excited by his discoveries – gold mines in East Africa, ‘Christian’ princes in India, markets brimming with gems and spices. Manuel himself, writing to Rome, announced his intention of wresting control of the Orient trade from the Muslims and awarded himself a title appropriate to his grand design: ‘Lord of Guinea and of the conquest of the navigation and commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India’.2

  Da Gama, Diaz and the other brave captains of their generation were Magellan’s boyhood heroes. He watched their ships entering and leaving port, saw them received at court with all the pomp and honour due to men who have given faithful and spectacular service, heard them tell their tales of strange lands and peoples. He followed closely the plans being made to exploit da Gama’s discoveries. And when, in 1505, Captain Francisco d’Almeida was sent with a fleet of twenty armed ships to batter Arab trading posts into submission, Ferdinand Magellan was among the young adventurers who served in his expedition.

  From the young soldier’s point of view the events of the next seven years must have been thrilling and satisfying beyond measure. Almeida, and his successor, Alfonso de Albuquerques, fell upon the Arab and Indian coast towns with unbridled brutality. Mozambique and Sofala were captured. Kilwa was burned. Mombasa was destroyed. Off Diu a hastily-assembled Gujerati-Egyptian fleet was shattered. The vital entrepôt of Goa was seized and soon supplanted Calicut as the pivotal point of Indian Ocean trade. By 1511 irresistible Portuguese power had reached distant Malacca. Magellan was present at many of the major battles of this blitzkrieg. He familiarised himself with the eastern seas and became an expert navigator. During these campaigns Magellan sailed as far east as Malacca, and may have travelled on to the tiny, all-important Spice Islands (the Moluccas) of Ternate and Tidore.*

  When Magellan returned home in 1512 he had a better understanding than most men living of eastern seas and islands and of the Arab, Indian, Indonesian and Chinese mercantile fleets that were now forced to share with those of Portugal the luxury trade of the Orient. Though he spent the next few years in Europe and North Africa, he could not escape the spell the East had cast upon him. From friends such as Francisco Serrao he received first-hand accounts of the destruction of a Javanese war fleet in 1513 which laid the Spice Islands open to direct Portuguese trade. He received news of the people and the Muslim courts of those islands. Other friends helped him to compile maps and charts of the maze of islands lying between Malaysia and New Guinea.*

  And that is how Magellan fell in with Rui Faleiro, who would prove to be his evil genius. Faleiro was an astrologer. He was a mathematician. And he was mad. Specifically, he believed, with all the passion of the megalomaniac, that he had cracked the major problem facing all Renaissance cosmo-graphers: the calculation of longitude. Equipped with his navigational aids,† Faleiro insisted, explorers could now confidently venture across unknown seas and lay bare their secrets. One of his ‘discoveries’ was that no great distance lay between newly-discovered America and the Spice Islands. A corollary of this ‘fact’ was that, if the demarcation line of Tordesillas was drawn around the globe, the Moluccas would be found to lie well and truly within the Spanish hemisphere. In all this Faleiro was wrong. For Magellan the error would prove fatal.

  The young soldier spent most of the years 1513–1515 fighting in Morocco. In a skirmish before the walls of Azamor he received a leg wound which left him with a permanent limp. By now Magellan had developed into a tough, proud, ruthless campaigner in his mid-thirties; the kind of man who makes loyal friends and implacable enemies. In Africa he ran into trouble. Someone accused him of trading with the enemy. Magellan tried in vain to clear his name and when King Manuel, after Magellan’s years of loyal service, refused him promotion, he felt the slight very deeply. In 1517, he shook the native dust of Portugal from his feet and travelled to Seville to sell his sword to Charles I of Spain. But he had more than valour to offer. Rui Faleiro went with him and together they had devised a scheme to make good Spain’s claim to the Spice Islands and establish a regular trade route – a westerly trade route.

  They planned their campaign carefully. They had already made contact with another Portuguese émigré who was highly placed in the department dealing with voyages to the Spanish Indies. Arrived in Seville, Magellan cemented this relationship by marrying Señor Barbosa’s daughter. He then sought and won the patronage of one of Charles’s closest advisers, the Bishop of Burgos. With this influential support the two men were ready to travel on to the court at Valladolid to present their case to the king. Charles must have been impressed by the theoretical arguments of Faleiro and the practical experience of Magellan. Although he was preoccupied with his candidature for the throne of the Holy Roman Empire (he was elected emperor as Charles V in 1519), he gave the newcomers five ships for the projected voyage, and invested them with the Order of Santiago.

  Information about the New World was flooding into the royal court of Spain and, by 1519, a special body, the Council of the Indies, had emerged to deal with all matters concerning the exploration and exploitation of the overseas empire (the Bishop of Burgos chaired this council). Charles’s ministers now knew that the Americas formed a major land barrier between Europe and Asia. His conquistadores were steadily extending their control over parts of the continent. His captains were seeking a way round it. His more adventurous subjects had already established settlements on both Atlantic and Pacific coasts. The scheme set forth by Magellan and Faleiro fitted in perfectly with this programme of expansion, a programme given urgency by Portugal’s stunning success in the East. Information about the projected voyage was not slow in reaching Lisbon, and Manuel, furious at the activities of the two ‘traitors’, sent agents to Spain to sabotage the undertaking.

  The months spent in preparation were particularly anxious ones for Magellan. In addition to the usual problems of raising reliable crewmen, and hard bargaining with ship-chandlers and victuallers, who always tried to sell inferior merchandise at inflated prices, he had to be on his guard against the Portuguese, who hated him, and the Spaniards, who did not fully trust him. Then there was the matter of Rui Faleiro. The astrologer had been appointed joint captain-general of the expedition but was quite unfit for command, as even Magellan could now see. Magellan must also have had some concern for his family. For the first time in his life he would be departing on a long and dange
rous journey, leaving behind a wife and child. Over and above all this was the anxiety about money.

  The basic realities of life have changed little in five and a half centuries. Talk to any modern pioneer venturer and he will tell you that the toughest part of any expedition is getting it off the ground. One reason why circumnavigators, polar explorers, Himalayan climbers and their like are a race apart is that they possess, not only total dedication and bottomless self-confidence, but the thick skin acquired from selling themselves to potential backers. Whether it is kings and courtiers or bankers and international corporations who must be approached, the business of raising cash is never easy. That was as true for Francis Chichester in 1966 as it was in 1518 for Ferdinand Magellan:

  . . . to raise the money we were still short of I had to approach all the suppliers, and ask if they would contribute in return for advertisement. Most firms refused, but some rallied round . . . All these business dealings not only caused me immense worry but also prevented me from carrying out the offshore sailing and the much-needed sailing drill which I had planned. As a result it was not till I was on the ocean that I discovered Gipsy Moth IV’s three major vices, which spoiled my plan for the project and nearly wrecked the voyage.4

  Eventually, the great international banking house of Fugger came to Magellan’s aid, prepared to back his highly speculative venture in the hope that the immediate profits of the voyage and the long-term income derived from trade with the Spice Islands would handsomely repay their investment. Gradually, the leader’s other problems were sorted out. Faleiro decided to stay at home because his horoscope revealed that if he embarked on the voyage he would not survive it. Perhaps he was not as crazy as he appeared. Because few Spanish seamen would submit to his leadership, Magellan had to scour the waterfront to assemble a motley crew of 265 soldiers, sailors and gentleman adventurers – Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, French, Greek, Spanish and one English gunner. His vessels were: the flagship Trinidad (110 tons), the San Antonio (120 tons), the Concepcion (90 tons), the Victoria (85 tons), and the Santiago. None of these ships was new or sufficiently robust to cope with the worst conditions it might encounter. The largest had an overall length of less than eighty feet (about the size of a modern luxury pleasure yacht), into which were crammed stores, trade goods and a crew of fifty men.

  It must have been with enormous relief that Magellan boarded the Trinidad off Sanlucar de Barrameda on 20 September 1519 and gave orders for the fleet to weigh anchor. His task was to find a channel connecting the Atlantic with the ‘South Sea’. Ever since 1513 when Vasco Nufiez de Balboa had:

  . . . stared at the Pacific – and all his men

  Looked at each other with a wild surmise –

  Silent upon a peak in Darien*

  it had been generally assumed that a fairly narrow strip of land separated the two oceans. Several captains had already patrolled the coasts of South and Central America looking for the breach which they felt must be there. Magellan’s was by far the best equipped such expedition. Having found and penetrated the strait, his task was to make the short crossing of the South Sea and establish a trading post on the Moluccas. He carried 20,000 hawk-bells, rolls of velvet, 2,000 pounds of mercury, as well as mirrors and articles of brass in order to do business with the merchant princes of the islands. And what then? No document exists detailing Magellan’s plans for the homeward leg of the journey but there is no reason to suppose that he intended anything other than to return along his outward route. Failing that, his first contingency plan must have been to make for a safe haven on the coast of Panama. (One of the surviving ships attempted this, as we shall see.) To risk his cargo, his ships and his life by trespassing in the waters consigned to the Portuguese, who would probably by then have been waiting for him, would have been very foolhardy.

  Six days sailing brought the fleet to the Spanish Canary Islands where Magellan completed the provisioning of his ships. Leaving Tenerife on 3 October the captain general set his course southwards along the coast of Africa, making use of winds and currents by now well known to Portuguese navigators. Then, presumably trying for the SE trade winds to carry him across the Atlantic narrows to Brazil, he hit the Doldrums. For two weeks his ships wallowed on oily seas and his men endured the morale-sapping humidity which caused even the lightest task to bring them out in a sweat. On a small, claustrophobic, sailing craft being becalmed is worse than being storm-tossed. As a twentieth century yachtsman observed, there is little to do but lie around listlessly and brood:

  We appear to be well and truly in the doldrums. It’s oppressively hot and we’re hardly moving. I went on deck before breakfast to try and dry off the sweat before getting hot again, eating breakfast . . . By supper time the great heat was slightly less. I’m thankful I suggested that John and I would wash up each evening after supper. The galley is a hell hole during daytime . . . An oppressive night. I lay bathed in sweat in the saloon, trying hard to slow my pulse rate. Between the hour from four to five we covered one-tenth of a mile. ‘Will we ever get out of these doldrums?’ I heard muttered in the thick darkness.5

  For Magellan’s crews it was even worse, crammed as they were by night into whatever sleeping places they could find on deck and having little to do by day but gather in small groups and grumble about their leaders. Nor was it only the men who were disaffected. The Spanish captains of Magellan’s ships were not happy serving under a foreigner. They already carried mutiny in their hearts.

  It would be hard to exaggerate the difficulties of command on these early, pioneering voyages. The dangers and discomforts experienced by sailors were bad enough without the added fear of the unknown into which their superiors were leading them. Small wonder that ships were usually manned by the desperate and the reckless. Magellan’s crews included a large proportion of criminals and men who had gone to sea to escape creditors. At the other end of the social scale were the gentleman adventurers who hoped to make their fortunes in private trading and colonial exploitation of newly-discovered lands. Such men, like the ships’ captains, expected to be consulted on all major decisions. But voyages of exploration cannot be run by committees, and several circumnavigation attempts came to grief because of a failure to grasp this basic fact (Fenton’s expedition and Cavendish’s second round-the-world bid, to name but two; see below, pp. 47ff). There has to be someone in command, someone with a clear vision, someone capable of sufficient enthusiasm, determination and, if necessary, ruthlessness to drive men beyond the known limits of their endurance. Magellan was such a man. He would prove it at Port St Julian.

  His ships broke out of the Doldrums at last and made landfall on the coast of Brazil on 29 November. This territory, added to the discoverers’ charts in 1501, was a no man’s land. Although claimed by Portugal, it remained unsettled and unexplored. On 13 December the little fleet anchored in the wide bay of Rio de Janeiro and the next two weeks were devoted to essential repairs and taking on fresh water. This was the last accurately located place on Magellan’s maps. When he led his ships out of the harbour after Christmas, he was heading into the unknown.

  The fleet sailed steadily south-west by south before the prevailing winds, turning into every wide bay that might be the entrance to a channel. On Easter Saturday (31 March) 1520 it came to anchor in Port St Julian, far to the South in latitude 49° 20′. It was, and still is, a desolate spot where there is but sparse vegetation to break the monotonous grey of sea, sky and rocks. But it was sheltered and, with the southern winter drawing on rapidly, the captain general decided to wait here until the spring. Not so his senior officers. They had resolved on a showdown. They had tolerated long enough this arrogant Portuguese with his insane quest for a mythical passage to the South Sea. On Easter morning the captains of the Concepcion, San Antonio and Victoria, representing perhaps a majority of the officers, delivered a petition demanding that in future Magellan should consult with them before setting course. They also made it clear that they and their men were unwilling to sail farther along t
hat hostile coast in search of a strait which other sailors had sought in vain.

  It was one of those moments when fortunes and reputations are made or lost. Magellan was outmanned, outgunned and, it seemed, outmanoeuvred. Yet he responded with firmness. He rejected the petition, sent the petitioners back to their ships and took stock of the situation. That night, when the mutineers made their move, he was ready for them. Under cover of darkness, a boatload of armed men from the Concepcion boarded the San Antonio and overpowered the loyal members of the crew. But almost simultaneously Magellan sent men to capture the Victoria. Her captain, Luis de Mendoza, was killed and his body hanged from a yardarm. The San Antonio’s anchor cables were cut and she tried to slip away in the darkness. A burst of gunfire from the flagship put a swift end to that manoeuvre. The Concepcion surrendered without a struggle and long before dawn Magellan had re-established control of his fleet.

  Now was the time for reprisals and these created an even greater test for the captain general’s leadership. He had to make examples, to demonstrate the power of ‘cord and knife’ bestowed upon him as commander, and to break once and for all the back of incipient rebellion. Yet he dared not indulge in draconian punishment. Disease and shipboard accidents took a steady toll of life without Magellan further depleting his crews with a spate of executions. His solution was to use capital punishinent sparingly but dramatically. As a first step he took the already dead body of Mendoza, had it quartered and the portions displayed prominently on the ships of the fleet. Next he ordered Gaspar de Quesada, captain of the Concepcion, to suffer the indignity of being publicly beheaded by one of his own servants. Two other ringleaders, he announced, would be consigned to the lingering death of being marooned on the coast of Patagonia, when the ships weighed anchor. Magellan sentenced a further forty mutineers to death. It was only a gesture and within days he commuted the penalty: the offenders were clapped in irons and condemned to hard labour for the remainder of the five month stay in St Julian’s Bay.