A World Lit Only by Fire (52 page)

S
OME TWENTY-FIVE
degrees from the south celestial pole two luminous galaxies, easily visible to the naked eye, span the night sky. These companions
of the Milky Way are the Magellanic Clouds, trails of glory which arouse awe, give the heavens grandeur, and testify to the
immensity of the universe. So high are they that their distance can be grasped only by a mighty sweep of the imagination.
A ray of starlight from there, traveling at its speed of over 186,291 miles per second—6 trillion miles a year—cannot
become visible on earth for 80,000 years. Thus the illumination which was leaving the Clouds when Magellan emerged from his
strait and crossed the Pacific will not reach this planet for another 795 centuries, a cosmic perspective which would have
pleased him, as, say, the Magellan Project of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory would not. The capitán-general believed in
divine mysteries. He would have had little patience with technologists who poach on territory sovereign to God.

He was not the wisest man of his time. Erasmus was. Neither was he the most gifted. That, surely, was Leonardo. But Magellan
became what, as a child, he had yearned to be—the era’s greatest hero. The reason is intricate, but important to understand.
Heroism is often confused with physical courage. In fact the two are very different. There was nothing heroic about Magellan’s
death. He went into that last darkness a seasoned campaigner, accompanied by his own men, and he was completely fearless because
as he drew his last breath he believed—indeed
knew
—that paradise was imminent. Similarly, the soldier who throws himself on a live grenade, surrendering his life to save
his comrades, may be awarded the medal of honor. Nevertheless his deed, being impulsive, is actually unheroic. Such acts,
no more reflective than the swift withdrawal of a blistered hand from a red-hot stove, are involuntary. Heroism is the exact
opposite—always deliberate, never mindless.

Neither, if it is valor of the first water, may it be part of a group endeavor. All movements, including armies, provide their
participants with such tremendous support that pursuit of common goals, despite great risk, is little more than ardent conformity.
Indeed, the truly brave member is the man who repudiates the communal objective, challenging the rest of the group outright.
Since no such discordant note was ever heard around the Round Table, young Magellan, in his enchantment with the tales of
Arthur, Lancelot du Lac, and Gawain, was being gulled. It follows that generals, presidents—all leaders backed by blind
masses—are seldom valiant, though interesting exceptions occasionally emerge. Politicians who defy their constituents over
matters of principle, knowing they will be driven from office, qualify as heroic. So, to cite a rare military instance, did
General MacArthur when, protesting endless casualty lists with no prospect of an armistice, he sacrificed his career and courted
disgrace.

The hero acts alone, without encouragement, relying solely on conviction and his own inner resources. Shame does not discourage
him; neither does obloquy. Indifferent to approval, reputation, wealth, or love, he cherishes only his personal sense of honor,
which he permits no one else to judge. La Rochefoucauld, not always a cynic, wrote of him that he does “without witnesses
what we would be capable of doing before everyone.” Guided by an inner gyroscope, he pursues his vision single-mindedly, undiscouraged
by rejections, defeat, or even the prospect of imminent death. Few men can even comprehend such fortitude. Virtually all crave
some external incentive: the appreciation of peers, the possibility of exculpation, the promise of retroactive affection,
the hope of rewards, applause, decorations—of emotional reparations in some form. Because these longings are completely
normal, only a man with towering strength of character can suppress them.

In the long lists of history it is difficult to find another figure whose heroism matches Magellan’s. For most sixteenth-century
Europeans his
Vorstellung
—to circle the globe—was unimaginable. To launch the pursuit of this vision, he had to turn his back on his own country,
inviting charges of treason. His ships, when they were delivered to him, were unseaworthy. Before his departure Portuguese
agents repeatedly tried, with some success, to sabotage his expedition. When he did sail, his hodgepodge crews couldn’t even
communicate in the same tongue, and the background of the captains assigned to him almost guaranteed mutiny and treachery,
which indeed followed. Unable even to confide in anyone else after his crushing disappointment at the Río de la Plata, he
stubbornly continued his search for the strait he alone believed in, and when he had at last found it, deserters fled with
his largest ship and the bulk of the fleet’s provisions. Of his other four vessels, three could not complete the voyage. During
the armada’s crossing of the Pacific, an epic of fortitude, it was its commander’s inflexible will which fueled morale and
stamina. His discovery of the Philippines dwarfed his original goal—the Moluccas—and he died trying to bring them into
the modern age.

The shabby circumstances of his death are troubling, representing flagrant deviance from his code of conduct. They may be
partly explained by his exhilaration after sailing around the world, and partly by the fact that, living in a God-ridden age,
he was distorted by its imperatives. Yet the distortion in him was slight when measured against other chief figures of his
time. The hands of contemporary popes, kings, and reformers were drenched with innocent blood. His were spotless. Granted
that his misjudgments on Mactan were unworthy of him, the fact remains that few men have paid so high a price for their lapses.
He lost not only his life, but, of even greater moment, the triumphant completion of his voyage and vindication in his time.

His character was, of course, imperfect. But heroes need not be admirable, and indeed most have not been. The web of driving
traits behind their accomplishments almost assures that. Men who do the remarkable—heroic and otherwise—frequently fail
in their personal relationships. This unpleasant reality is usually glossed over in burnishing the images of the great. So
many eminent statesmen, writers, painters, and composers have been intolerable sons, husbands, fathers, and friends that they
may fairly be said to have been the rule. Lincoln’s marriage was a disaster. Franklin Roosevelt, to put it in the kindest
possible way, was a dissembler.

They were achievers. Genuine paladins are even likelier to have been objectionable. Yet their flaws, though deplorable, are
irrelevant; in the end their heroism shines through untarnished. Had Ferdinand Magellan met Jesus Christ, the Galilean might
have felt a pang of disappointment—which the capitán-general might have shared—but Magellan, like Christ, was also a hero.
He still is. He always will be. Of all the tributes to him, therefore, the Magellanic Clouds are the most appropriate. Like
them, his memory shines down upon the world his voyage opened, illuminating it from infinity to eternity.

T
HE FULL
significance of the great voyage was not grasped until much later, but its most profound implication had begun to emerge
two months before the
Victoria
’s return to Spanish waters, when she was anchored off Santiago in the Cape Verde Islands. There the shore party became entangled
with the Portuguese over what at first appeared to be a trivial argument. They disagreed over which day of the week it was.
Throughout their long absence, now approaching three years, Pigafetta had scrupulously dated each day’s entry, beginning with
“Tuesday, September 20, 1519,” when the Armada de Molucca left Sanlúcar de Barrameda, and continuing with “Wednesday,” “Thursday,”
and so on. Arriving here he noted that the date was Wednesday, July 9, 1522. But crewmen who landed to pick up supplies reported
that in Santiago it was Thursday, July 10.

Don Antonio was puzzled. It was inconceivable that he could have missed a day. He checked with Albo, who, on instructions
from Magellan, had also kept a record of the days in his ship’s log. Albo agreed: It was Wednesday, no question about it.
The Cape Verde Portuguese, they decided, had somehow fallen into error. However, when they reached Sanlúcar on what they knew
to be Saturday, September 6, the Spaniards greeting them insisted that it was Sunday, September 7. Somehow the flota had dropped
twenty-four hours out of the calendar.

None of the great geographers, neither Aristotle, Ptolemy, nor Pierre d’Ailly, had anticipated this riddle. Sixteenth-century
European men of science, as startled as Pigafetta and Albo, toiled over their desks until they came up with what, they unanimously
agreed, was the only possible solution. Copernicus, they concluded, was right. The earth was rolling eastward, completing
a full cycle every day. Magellan and his men had been sailing westward, against that rotation; having traversed a full circle,
the circumnavigators had gained exactly twenty-four hours. Geocentrism—the age-old conviction that the earth was the center
of the universe—was therefore discredited. The earth was not only round; it was
moving
. In fact,
it was revolving around its own axis
.

Magellan was not there to savor the moment, but it was his finest. In many ways it was the crowning triumph of the age, the
final, decisive blow to the dead past. Those with the most to lose ignored their defeat, denied the discovery, and denounced
those who endorsed it as heretics. Couriers had galloped off to report both the circumnavigation and the confusion over dates
to the pope. He now rejected the obvious explanation. Actually, he would have been betraying his predecessors in Saint Peter’s
chair if he had accepted it. The Church had always held that whenever observed experience conflicted with Holy Scripture,
observation had to yield. And the authority of the Bible, historically interpreted, denied the possibility of a heliocentric
system.

Accordingly, the Holy Office in Rome declared that the notion of a moving earth circling the sun was “philosophically foolish
and absurd and formally heretical, inasmuch as it expressly contradicts the doctrines of Holy Scripture in many places, both
according to their literal meaning and according to the common exposition and interpretation of the Holy Fathers and learned
theologians.” Twenty-eight successive pontiffs agreed. It took the Church three hundred years to change its mind. Copernicus’s
De revolutionibus
was removed from the Catholic Index in 1758, but the ban on Galileo’s
Dialogue
continued until 1822, exactly three centuries after Albo’s log and Don Antonio’s diary had become available to the Holy See.

Nevertheless, patristic mulishness could not diminish the glory of the armada’s achievement. The power of the medieval mind
was forever broken. Medieval certitude had been weakened by the Renaissance. Nationalism, humanism, rising literacy, the new
horizons of trade—all these had challenged blind, ritualistic allegiance to the assumptions of a thousand years. But Magellan’s
voyage exposed its central myth. Europe was no longer the world, and the world was no longer the center of the universe. Since
the earth was revolving daily, heaven and hell could not be located where they had been thought to be, and in rational minds
there was a growing skepticism that either of them existed. God without heaven was inconceivable, at least the medieval God
was, but here reason ended. Christendom found the prospect of a godless world intolerable. Because faith in a higher power
was needed, it would be necessary to find, or even to fabricate, another Creator, a new King of Kings and Lord of Lords —
“
Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer
” (“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him”), Voltaire would write in 1770.

He insisted that it was unnecessary. He scorned
l’infâme
, as he called the Church, but not God’s existence—“
toute la nature crie qu’il existe
.” Yet he protested too much. Doubt plagued Voltaire. Strong, ardent, and devout men have been struggling with its challenge
for nearly five centuries. They have met with varying degrees of success. Worldwide there are now a billion Christians alive.
Confidence in an afterlife, however, is another matter. The specter of skepticism haunts shrines and altars. Worshipers want
to believe, and most of the time they persuade themselves that they do. But suppressing doubt is hard. Secular society makes
it harder. Hardest of all is the sense of loss, the knowledge that the serenity of medieval faith, and the certitude of everlasting
glory, are forever gone.