A World Lit Only by Fire (45 page)

It was his certitude, however, which had impressed the Spanish court most. Other petitioners had speculated. Magellan said
he
knew
, and his decisive manner confirmed him. He was absolutely positive that the Moluccas belonged to Spain, and Faleiro had brought
a globe of his own design to back him up. Both men assured the court that they knew precisely where to find the paso, the
legendary open sesame to Balboa’s ocean. When the king had asked why it wasn’t shown on the globe, Magellan had replied that
the secret was too precious; they could not risk a leak.

His conviction was genuine, but it was built on quicksand. Faleiro’s globe was flawed. Due to compensating errors, his calculations
of longitude were only four degrees off, but that was enough to discredit them. The islands were on Portugal’s side of the
line, not Spain’s, and the more men learned about that part of the world the stronger Lisbon’s claim would become. And—far
more important—the partners’ assurance that Magellan could find the strait linking the Atlantic and the Pacific was equally
false. After five centuries their error is clear, though their sources seemed plausible at the time. The first was a map drawn
by Martin Behaim, the Nuremberg geographer who had been royal cartographer to the Portuguese court; the second a globe produced
by Johannes Schöner in 1515; and the third a report from the western Atlantic which reached Magellan either shortly before,
or soon after, his move from Lisbon to Seville. The map and the globe showed a southern passage between the oceans. In the
light of later evidence it is clear that Behaim and Schöner had put it in the wrong place, but they appeared to have been
confirmed in 1516, when Juan Díaz de Solís, who had been sailing along the coast of South America under the illusion that
he was near the Malayan Peninsula, came upon the gigantic funnel-shaped estuary leading to what is now Buenos Aires.

Although Díaz de Solís was killed by Indians, members of his expedition found their way home, and to Magellan their description
of the Río de la Plata, as Sebastian Cabot later named it, must have seemed to be the final piece of the puzzle. Indeed, even
today it is hard to believe that the estuary—actually the outlet of two enormous rivers—is not open sea. Its mouth is
140 miles wide, and its western shore is 170 miles inland. To Europeans accustomed to the Guadiana River of Spain and Portugal,
the Tiber, or the Rhine, it must have resembled the great straits they knew—the Dardanelles or Gibraltar. They were wrong,
and so was Magellan, misled by them. But persuasive errors have played key roles in history before. So it was here. Had the
capitán-general known the truth, his confidence would have been eroded. Carlos and his privy council would have rejected the
uncertain applicant. Even if they hadn’t, Magellan’s iron will, which was to become vital to the voyage, would have been weakened,
probably fatally.

H
OW MUCH
Lisbon learned about the Valladolid audience is unknown. Probably very little. But it was enough: a seasoned Portuguese mariner,
familiar with the Tesouraria’s holiest secrets, had been commissioned by the Castilian monarch to pry the Spice Islands loose
from Portugal. His fleet was already forming up. It is a measure of Manuel’s alarm that he instructed his ambassador to Madrid,
Álvaro da Costa, to sabotage the expedition. Fortunately for history, Costa was a fool. He attempted to coerce Magellan, and
when that failed he tried to intimidate the Spanish king, first telling him that Portugal would regard continued support of
the venture as an unfriendly act, then that Magellan and Faleiro wanted to return home but had been denied permission to leave
Seville—a lie which, when exposed, resulted in the cold dismissal of the bumbling envoy. Nevertheless, attempts to sandbag
the undertaking continued, and some of them were a nuisance. When Magellan began signing up crewmen, Sebastian Álvarez, Portugal’s
consul on the spot, urged them to desert. He also spread vicious rumors; cornering the flota’s four Spanish captains, he whispered
to them that their capitán-general was a double agent who planned to lower Spain’s colors, raise Portugal’s, and defect with
the entire armada.

This ugly seed fell on fertile ground. Only one of the four was an experienced professional mariner; the other three were
haughty young dons, Castilian courtiers held in high favor by their sovereign, resentful of their subordination to a foreigner.
Thus the enterprise began to accumulate difficulties long before its five anchors were weighed. Because of Álvarez’s dirty
tricks—he fed gossips tales that the mission was highly dangerous and the vessels unseaworthy—the recruitment of seamen
bogged down. Those who finally signed on were the dregs of the waterfront: ragged, filthy, diseased drifters who babbled to
one another in broken Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, English—even Arabic. Meddlesome officials of the port of Seville
tried to reject the Portuguese among them, including several who were Magellan relatives; Duarte Barbosa, his brother-in-law;
and Estevão Gomes, one of the ablest pilots in either Iberian country.

The capitán-general was thwarted again and again. He ordered equipment; it failed to arrive. Funds which had been promised
by Carlos and his privy council miscarried. Magellan, his patience endless, successfully appealed to the king and royal agents.
Finally he confronted the most intractable obstacle: his partner. Faleiro, who had never been to sea, insisted that they share
a joint command. It was an impossible demand; had it been met, the ships would not have survived the first leg of their long
journey. Precisely how the admiral deflected this challenge is unknown. Some accounts say that Faleiro was declared insane;
others tell of an imperial edict appointing him commander of a second expedition, which never sailed. In any event, he turned
his maps and astronomical tables over to Magellan, and the five bowsprits finally took the bone in their teeth on September
20, 1519, sailing westward before the wind, under taut sails bearing Spain’s royal cross of St. James.

The capitán-general watched the mainland recede in the wake of
Trinidad
—his flagship, or
capitana
. Then he opened an unsettling, last-minute dispatch from his father-in-law, relaying reports of a conspiracy between three
of the Spanish noblemen. The leader was Juan de Cartagena, commander of
San Antonio
and an intimate of the bishop of Burgos, thought by some to be the bishop’s bastard. When the right moment arrived, Diego
Barbosa had been told, Cartagena would give the signal for a mutiny.

B
ARBOSA
was no alarmist. The hostility of the dons was real. One of them had precipitated a violent public row with Magellan before
the fleet had even left Seville, and it is not unlikely that the

Magellan’s Armada de Molucca sails from Spain

Castilians had decided to get rid of him after he had disclosed his planned route. He had no choice but to take the warning
seriously, and it provided the voyage’s first test of his leadership. His response was revealing, if not altogether reassuring.
If patience and thoroughness were among his traits, so were an extraordinary passion for secrecy, insistence upon ruthless
discipline, and determination to dominate his subordinates at any cost. To plot mutiny, if the report was true, was criminal,
but the dons’ feelings of resentment were not. Nor were they unreasonable. As holders of royal commissions the officers rightly
expected that, once at sea, they would be taken into their admiral’s confidence, provided with maps, informed of the course
they would follow, and, most important, told the location of the all-important paso.

He told them nothing, gave them nothing. Resolving to force any revolt into the open but not to lose, he kept the Castilians
at a safe distance. During the first, ten-week leg of the voyage, from Spain to Brazil, the other vessels were ordered to
follow in the flagship’s wake. Late each afternoon a lantern was hung from
Trinidad
’s fantail. Under standing orders, they were required to keep it in sight, and when the lamp flashed a signal at sunset each
day the four subordinate galleons—
San Antonio
(Cartagena),
Concepción
(Gaspar de Quesada),
Santiago
(Juan Serrano), and
Victoria
(Luis de Mendoza)—approached the flagship’s stern to receive orders for the three night watches.

The dons fumed. Cartagena, as senior captain and skipper of the fleet’s largest vessel, attempted to serve as their spokesman.
He merely provoked a snub. The Spanish captains were baffled by their commander’s sailing direction. They had assumed that
he would take them directly to the New World. Instead, when they reached 27 degrees north latitude, he changed their course.
Now they were paralleling the African coast. He had an excellent reason for this. Before leaving Spain a reliable informant
had brought him ominous news: Manuel of Portugal had sent two flotillas to intercept him. They would be lying athwart the
direct route to Brazil. Magellan had decided to evade them; he would skirt Africa and then cross the Atlantic Narrows. Had
he told his skippers that, they would have understood at once. But he was taciturn by nature and distrusted them anyway. So
when Cartagena called out from his deck, asking where he was taking them, Magellan replied: “
¡Que le siguiessen Y no pidiessen más cuenta
!” (“Follow me and don’t ask questions!”)

Furious, the offended don answered this insult with one of his own. For three successive days he absented himself from the
sunset ritual, remaining below and sending his quartermaster topside with instructions to address the fleet commander, not
as capitán-general, which custom required, but merely as capitán. Magellan ignored the slight, feigning indifference, then
called a meeting of all armada officers aboard the flagship. Again Cartagena tried to question him; again the admiral disregarded
him. He was deliberately inciting insubordination, and when he succeeded—when the young nobleman lost his temper and shouted
that he would refuse to obey future orders—Magellan put him under arrest. He seized him, snapped, “
Sed preso
” (“You are my prisoner”), and turned him over to a nearby
alguacil
, or master-at-arms. Another Spanish officer, Antonio de Coca, replaced Cartagena on
San Antonio’s
quarterdeck. The other three Castilian officers stood mute and the moment passed. For the present, at least, the admiral’s
authority as capitán-general had survived defiance.

On Tuesday, November 29, 1519,
Trinidad’s
lookout raised the Brazilian coast, and two weeks later the five ships sailed into the bay of Rio de Janeiro, discovered
by the Portuguese eighteen years earlier. Although Magellan never confided in anyone, in Rio he held the first of his many
talks with a member of the expedition, a youth who, after the voyage, was to become his biographer. Antonio Pigafetta was
a member of the Venetian nobility who had come aboard representing the signory of Venice. Don Antonio’s mission was to observe
and report home on the spice trade, but soon his chief interest, and his idol, was the capitán-general. In his diary he began
entering copious descriptions of the admiral’s every move, noting, for example, that in Rio Magellan tasted pineapple for
the first time and converted all the natives on shore to Christianity.