Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe Read online

  Over the Edge

  of the World

  MAGELLEN'S TERRIFYING

  CIRCUMNAVIGATION OF THE GLOBE

  LAURENCE BERGREEN

  In memory of my brother and father

  How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by storms to the cold Country towards the South Pole; and how from thence she made her course to the tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean; and of the strange things that befell; and in what manner the Ancyent Marinere came back to his own Country.

  —Samuel Taylor Coleridge,

  “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Principal Characters

  A Note on Dates

  Measurements

  PROLOGUE: A Ghostly Apparition

  Book One: In Search of Empire

  CHAPTER I: The Quest

  CHAPTER II: The Man Without a Country

  CHAPTER III: Neverlands

  CHAPTER IV: “The Church of the Lawless”

  Book Two: The Edge of the World

  CHAPTER V: The Crucible of Leadership

  CHAPTER VI: Castaways

  CHAPTER VII: Dragon’s Tail

  CHAPTER VIII: A Race Against Death

  CHAPTER IV: A Vanished Empire

  CHAPTER X: The Final Battle

  Book Three: Back from the Dead

  CHAPTER XI: Ship of Mutineers

  CHAPTER XII: Survivors

  CHAPTER XIII: Et in Arcadia Ego

  CHAPTER XIV: Ghost Ship

  CHAPTER XV: After Magellan

  Notes on Dates

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Laurence Bergreen

  Credits

  Cover

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Principal Characters

  King Charles I (later Charles V, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire)

  King Manuel (king of Portugal)

  Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca (bishop of Burgos)

  Cristóbal de Haro (financier)

  Ruy Faleiro (cosmographer)

  Beatriz Barbosa (Magellan’s)

  Diogo Barbosa (Magellan’s father-in-law)

  The Armada de Molucca

  (at the time of departure from Seville)

  Trinidad

  Ferdinand Magellan (Captain General)

  Estêvão Gomes (pilot major)

  Gonzalo Gómez de Espinosa (alguacil. or master-at-arms)

  Francisco Albo (pilot)

  Pedro de Valderrama (chaplain)

  Ginés de Mafra (seaman)

  Enrique de Malacca (interpreter)

  Duarte Barbosa (supernumerary)

  Álvaro de Mesquita (Magellan’s relative, supernumerary)

  Antonio Pigafetta (chronicler, supernumerary)

  Cristóvão Rebêlo (Magellan’s illegitimate son, supernumerary)

  San Antonio

  Juan de Cartagena (captain and inspector general)

  Antonio de Coca (fleet accountant)

  Andrés de San Martín (astrologer and pilot)

  Juan de Elorriaga (master)

  Gerónimo Guerra (clerk)

  Bernard de Calmette, also known as

  Pero Sánchez de la Reina (chaplain)

  Concepción

  Gaspar de Quesada (captain)

  João Lopes Carvalho (pilot)

  Juan Sebastián Elcano (master)

  Juan de Acurio (mate)

  Hernando Bustamente (barber)

  Joãozito Carvalho (cabin boy)

  Martin de Magalhães (supernumerary)

  Victoria

  Luis de Mendoza (captain)

  Vasco Gomes Gallego (pilot)

  Antonio Salamón (master)

  Miguel de Rodas (mate)

  Santiago

  Juan Rodríguez Serrano (captain)

  Baltasar Palla (master)

  Bartolomé Prieur (mate)

  A Note on Dates

  Dates are given in the Julian calendar, in effect since the time of Julius Caesar. With modifications, this calendar was adopted by Christian churches around the world, including those in Spain.

  Sixty years after the completion of Magellan’s voyage, in 1582, Spain, France, and other European countries migrated to the Gregorian calendar, decreed by Pope Gregory XIII and designed to correct incremental errors in the Julian system. It took more than two centuries to complete the transition to the new calendar throughout Europe, since Protestant nations resisted the change. To correct for accumulated errors, ten days were omitted, so that October 5, 1582, in the Julian calendar suddenly became October 15, 1582, in the Gregorian.

  In addition to this calendar shift, Magellan’s voyage had its own record-keeping issues. The dates of various events recorded by the two official chroniclers of the expedition, Antonio Pigafetta and Francisco Albo, occasionally diverge by one day. The discrepancy may be due to human error, and it may also have been caused by the way each diarist reckoned the day. Albo, a pilot, followed the custom of ships’ logs, which began the day at noon rather than at midnight. In contrast, Pigafetta used a nonnautical frame of reference in his diary. Thus, an event occurring on a given morning might have been put down a day apart in the records maintained by the two.

  Finally, the international date line did not exist before Magellan’s voyage. (It now extends west from the island of Guam, in the Pacific Ocean.) As Albo and Pigafetta neared the completion of their circumnavigation, they were astonished to note that their calculations were off, and their voyage around the world actually took one day longer than they had thought.

  Measurements

  One fathom equals six feet.

  One Spanish league (legua) equals approximately four miles.

  One bahar (of cloves) equals 406 pounds.

  One quintal equals 100 pounds.

  One cati (a Chinese measurement) equals 1.75 pounds.

  One braza (of cloth) equals about five and a half feet.

  One maravedí equals approximately 12 modern cents.

  P R O L O G U E

  A Ghostly Apparition

  Oh! dream of joy! is this indeed

  The light-house top I see?

  Is this the hill? is this the kirk?

  Is this mine own countree?

  On September 6, 1522, a battered ship appeared on the horizon near the port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Spain.

  As the ship came closer, those who gathered onshore noticed that her tattered sails flailed in the breeze, her rigging had rotted away, the sun had bleached her colors, and storms had gouged her sides. A small pilot boat was dispatched to lead the strange ship over the reefs to the harbor. Those aboard the pilot boat found themselves looking into the face of every sailor’s nightmare. The vessel they were guiding into the harbor was manned by a skeleton crew of just eighteen sailors and three captives, all of them severely malnourished. Most lacked the strength to walk or even to speak. Their tongues were swollen, and their bodies were covered with painful boils. Their captain was dead, as were the officers, the boatswains, and the pilots; in fact, nearly the entire crew had perished.

  The pilot boat gradually coaxed the battered vessel past the natural hazards guarding the harbor, and the ship, Victoria, slowly beganto make her way along the gently winding Guadalquivir River to Seville, the city from which she had departed three years earlier. No one knew what had become of her since then, and her appearance came as a surprise to those who watched the horizon for sails. Victoria wa
s a ship of mystery, and every gaunt face on her deck was filled with the dark secrets of a prolonged voyage to unknown lands. Despite the journey’s hardships, Victoria and her diminished crew accomplished what no other ship had ever done before. By sailing west until they reached the East, and then sailing on in the same direction, they had fulfilled an ambition as old as the human imagination, the first circumnavigation of the globe.

  Three years earlier, Victoria had belonged to a fleet of five vessels about 260 sailors, all under the command of Fernão de Magalhães, whom we know as Ferdinand Magellan. A Portuguese nobleman and navigator, he had left his homeland to sail for Spain with a charter to explore undiscovered parts of the world and claim them for the Spanish crown. The expedition he led was among the largest and best equipped in the Age of Discovery. Now Victoria and her ravaged little crew were all that was left, a ghost ship haunted by the memory of more than two hundred absent sailors. Many had died an excruciating death, some from scurvy, others by torture, and a few by drowning. Worse, Magellan, the Captain General, had been brutally killed. Despite her brave name, Victoria was not a ship of triumph, she was a vessel of desolation and anguish.

  And yet, what a story those few survivors had to tell—a tale of mutiny, of orgies on distant shores, and of the exploration of the entire globe. A story that changed the course of history and the way we look at the world. In the Age of Discovery, many expeditions ended in disaster and were quickly forgotten, yet this one, despite the misfortunes that befell it, became the most important maritime voyage ever undertaken.

  This circumnavigation forever altered the Western world’s ideas about cosmology—the study of the universe and our place in it—as well as geography. It demonstrated, among other things, that the earth was round, that the Americas were not part of India but were actually a separate continent, and that oceans covered most of the earth’s surface. The voyage conclusively demonstrated that the earth is, after all, one world. But it also demonstrated that it was a world of unceasing conflict, both natural and human. The cost of these discoveries in terms of loss of life and suffering was greater than anyone could have anticipated at the start of the expedition. They had survived an expedition to the ends of the earth, but more than that, they had endured a voyage into the darkest recesses of the human soul.

  Book One

  In Search of Empire

  C H A P T E R I

  The Quest

  He holds him with his skinny hand,

  “There was a ship,” quoth he.

  “Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!”

  Eftsoons his hand dropt he.

  On June 7, 1494, Pope Alexander VI divided the world in half, bestowing the western portion on Spain, and the eastern on Portugal. Matters might have turned out differently if the pontiff had not been a Spaniard—Rodrigo de Borja, born near Valencia—but he was. A lawyer by training, he assumed the Borgia name when his maternal uncle, Alfonso Borgia, began his brief reign as Pope Callistus III. As his lineage suggests, Alexander VI was a rather secular pope, among the wealthiest and most ambitious men in Europe, fond of his many mistresses and his illegitimate offspring, and endowed with sufficient energy and ability to indulge his worldly passions.

  He brought the full weight of his authority to bear on the appeals of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, the “Catholic Monarchs” of Spain who had instituted the Inquisition in 1492 to purge Spain of Jews and Moors. They exerted considerable influence over the papacy, and they had every reason to expect a sympathetic hearing in Rome. Ferdinand and Isabella wanted the pope’s blessing to protect the recent discoveries made by Christopher Columbus, the Genoese navigator who claimed a new world for Spain. Portugal, Spain’s chief rival for control of world trade, threatened to assert its own claim to the newly discovered lands, as did England and France. Ferdinand and Isabella implored Pope Alexander VI to support Spain’s title to the New World. He responded by issuing papal bulls—solemn edicts—establishing a line of demarcation between Spanish and Portuguese territories around the globe. The line extended from the North Pole to the South Pole. It was located one hundred leagues (about four hundred miles) west of an obscure archipelago known as the Cape Verde Islands, located in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of North Africa. Antonio and Bartolomeo da Noli, Genoese navigators sailing for Portugal, had discovered them in 1460, and ever since, the islands had served as an outpost in the Portuguese slave trade.

  The papal bulls granted Spain exclusive rights to those parts of the globe that lay to the west of the line; the Portuguese, naturally, were supposed to keep to the east. And if either kingdom happened to discover a land ruled by a Christian ruler, neither would be able to claim it. Rather than settling disputes between Portugal and Spain, this arrangement touched off a furious race between the nations to claim new lands and to control the world’s trade routes even as they attempted to shift the line of demarcation to favor one side or the other. The bickering over the line’s location continued as diplomats from both countries convened in the little town of Tordesillas, in northwestern Spain, to work out a compromise.

  In Tordesillas, the Spanish and Portuguese representatives agreed to abide by the idea of a papal division, which seemed to protect the interests of both parties. At the same time, the Portuguese prevailed on the Spanish representatives to move the line 270 leagues west; now it lay 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, at approximately 46° 30' W, according to modern calculations. This change placed the boundary in the middle of the Atlantic, roughly halfway between the Cape Verde Islands and the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. The new boundary gave the Portuguese ample access to the African continent by water and, even more important, allowed the Portuguese to claim the newly discovered land of Brazil. But the debate over the line—and the claims for empire that depended on its placement—dragged on for years. Pope Alexander VI died in 1503, and he was succeeded by Pope Julius II, who in 1506 agreed to the changes, and the Treaty of Tordesillas achieved its final form.

  The result of endless compromises, the treaty created more problems than it solved. It was impossible to fix the line’s location because cosmologists did not yet know how to determine longitude—nor would they for another two hundred years. To further complicate matters, the treaty failed to specify whether the line of demarcation extended all the way around the globe or bisected just the Western Hemisphere. Finally, not much was known about the location of oceans and continents. Even if the world was round, and men of science and learning agreed that it was, the maps of 1494 depicted a very different planet from the one we know today. They mixed geography with mythology, adding phantom continents while neglecting real ones, and the result was an image of a world that never was. Until Copernicus, it was generally assumed that the earth was at the absolute center of the universe, with the perfectly circular planets—including the sun—revolving around it in perfectly circular, fixed orbits; it is best to conceive of the earth as nested in the center of all these orbits.

  Even the most sophisticated maps revealed the limitations of the era’s cosmology. In the Age of Discovery, cosmology was a specialized, academic field that concerned itself with describing the image of the world, including the study of oceans and land, as well as the world’s place in the cosmos.Cosmologists occupied prestigious chairs at universities, and were held in high regard by the thrones of Europe. Although many were skilled mathematicians, they often concerned themselves with astrology, believed to be a legitimate branch of astronomy, practice that endeared them to insecure rulers in search of reassurance in an uncertain world. And it was changing faster than cosmologists realized. Throughout the sixteenth century, the calculations and theories of the ancient Greek and Egyptian mathematicians and astronomers served as the basis of cosmology, even as new discoveries undermined time-honored assumptions. Rather than acknowledge that a true scientific revolution was at hand, cosmologists responded to the challenge by trying to modify or bend classical schemes, especially the system codified by Claudius Ptolemy,
the Greco-Egyptian astronomer and mathematician who lived in the second century A.D.

  Ptolemy’s massive compendium of mathematical and astronomical calculations had been rediscovered in 1410, after centuries of neglect. The revival of classical learning pushed aside medieval notions of the world based on a literal—yet magical—interpretation of the Bible, but even though Ptolemy’s rigorous approach to mathematics was more sophisticated than monkish fantasies of the cosmos, his depiction of the globe contained significant gaps and errors. Following Ptolemy’s example, European cosmologists disregarded the Pacific Ocean, which covers a third of the world’s surface, from their maps, and they presented incomplete renditions of the American continent based on reports and rumors rather than direct observations. Ptolemy’s omissions inadvertently encouraged exploration because he made the world seem smaller and more navigable than it really was. If he had correctly estimated the size of the world, the Age of Discovery might never have occurred.

  Amid the confusion, two kinds of maps evolved: simple but accurate “portolan” charts based on the actual observations of pilots, and far more elaborate concoctions of cosmographers. The charts simply showed how to sail from point to point; the cosmographers tried to include the entire cosmos in their schemes. The cosmographers relied primarily on mathematics for their depictions, but the pilots relied on experience and observation. The pilots’ charts covered harbors and shorelines; the cosmographers’ maps of the world, filled with beguiling speculation, were often useless for actual navigation. Neither approach successfully applied the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas to the real world.