The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics) (62 page)

Provisions comprised wine, oil, vinegar, sea biscuit, anchovies in barrels, smoked fish, smoked bacon, beans, lentils, flour, garlic, onions, casks of cheese rubbed in oil. These provisions were to prove insufficient during the crossing of the Pacific, the immensity of which no one could have foreseen. What is worse, they did not include any food that could have prevented scurvy, a dreadful illness whose actual cause was still not understood, though in fact it is fairly simple: it results from a vitamin deficiency that can easily be remedied by drinking lime juice and eating sauerkraut (as Captain Cook successfully instructed his sailors to do some 250 years later). Scurvy was to kill half the crew—more than military engagements, accidents and all other diseases combined.

Detailed inventories of the supplies and equipment have been preserved; for instance, there were “eight chamber pots and three rat traps for each ship; five large drums and twenty small drums for entertainment.” There were also various presents and goods for barter: “200 red caps, 200 red handkerchiefs; 20,000 small bells of three different sorts; 400 dozen German knives of very inferior quality; 50 dozen scissors; 1,000 mirrors; 1,000 combs.”

Sea charts and navigation instruments were wretchedly inadequate; longitude could not be calculated; speed and distance covered were assessed through crude and grossly inaccurate estimation. And
even if the navigators had been able to determine the exact coordinates of their position, most of the time this could hardly have amounted to more than a tiny point in the middle of a huge blank.

Finally, it should be noted that two chaplains, with all their equipment (sacred vases, liturgical vestments, altars), were attached to the expedition, which had a significant religious and apostolic character—as we shall see later on.

The flotilla left Spain in September 1519. In December, it reached Brazil, where it dropped anchor. The crew proceeded ashore for the execution of a ship’s master (each ship was under the command of a captain, seconded by a master and a pilot or navigator): on the way, Magellan had sentenced him to death for sodomising a ship’s boy.

Then the flotilla sailed south, for as long as the season allowed. Days became shorter; the weather turned cold and rough. Discontent developed among the Spanish captains, as Magellan refused fully to disclose his plans to them.

Magellan decided that the ships should lie up for winter in a desolate cove of the Patagonian coast. A mutiny broke out; one captain involved in the rebellion was killed on the spot; another was captured, sentenced, beheaded and quartered ashore. As to the true leader of the rebellion and his main accomplice—one of the priests—they were both marooned on a deserted beach, having been provided with, in total, one sword and a bottle of wine. They were never heard of again. This false clemency—more cruel, in fact, than death—was probably due to the fact that the first was related to a Spanish grandee (he was the illegitimate son of an archbishop) and the other was a man of God.

After a grim wintering of five months (in that latitude, winter days have only four or five hours of light), from early April to the end of August, the flotilla—which, by then, had lost one ship, when a sudden gale drove it ashore and destroyed it—pursued its southward course. In October 1520, one year and one month after leaving Spain, Magellan finally discovered the entrance of the passage for which he had searched with such obstinate passion, and which was to carry his name. The Magellan Strait is some 600 kilometres long; for the most part, it is wide and deep, but also scattered with reefs; it follows a meandering course at the foot of tall snowy mountains from which blasts
of icy winds blow down with sudden violence. Near the end of the strait, when the crew of the longboat that had been sent to reconnoitre returned and reported they had seen the open sea, “Magellan in his joy began to cry.” It is the only display of emotion that was ever recorded of him.

Magellan had taken thirty-four days to sail the length of the strait. A good half-century later, Drake made the same crossing in sixteen days—in winter!—with the help of a favourable wind. However, after this time it was seldom used, as the strait is so hazardous and difficult to negotiate. For sailing ships, the best way is further south; it was discovered in 1616 by a Dutch navigator, the first ever to go round Cape Horn—which he named after his native town, Hoorn.

The flotilla—which by now was reduced to three units (one ship had deserted at the entrance of the strait and returned to Spain, where, on arrival, its crew was thrown in jail)—entered the Pacific Ocean, which it took nearly three months to cross, following a diagonal course, south-east to west-north-west, from the exit of the strait to the island of Guam. The crossing was horrendous. Having exhausted their food supplies, the men were in their hunger gnawing the baggy-wrinkle of the rigging. Pigafetta, the Italian secretary who kept a record of the voyage, described their wretched condition:

The worst horror was the rottening scurvy, which turned its victims into walking corpses before killing them: “their gums became so
swollen, they could not absorb any food and starved; those who survived washed their mouths with urine and sea water.”

Blindly missing the Polynesian archipelagos, the ships crossed the vastness of the Pacific Ocean without seeing land, with the sole exception of two tiny islands—uninhabited and unapproachable. Modern commentators have attempted to identify them as various atolls; but their original descriptions suggest forbidding cliffs of volcanic origin. I wonder if they could have been the islands of Pitcairn and Henderson?

After a short stop in Guam, where fresh supplies revived the crew, the ships sailed to the Philippines. There, on the island of Cebu, Magellan established friendly relations with the local king. After one week, the king expressed his desire to become a Christian. He was thus baptised, together with the queen and 2,000 of their subjects. A makeshift church was promptly built; big crosses were erected on top of hills nearby. Magellan then suggested imposing the authority of the “Christian king” over all of his neighbours. When one of them rebuffed his interference, Magellan decided to punish him—and to use the opportunity to show the Christian king the invincible military superiority of his new friends and protectors. Taking only forty men with him in the longboat, he landed on the island of the recalcitrants; there, ambushed by a large army, he was killed with six of his companions after a brief and desperate fight.

The remnants of his little troop re-embarked in disarray. This unexpected rout gave the Christian king food for thought: these strangers were, after all, only temporary visitors, whereas he had to live permanently with his neighbours—it would therefore be wiser to accommodate the latter. He invited to a feast some twenty-six officers and sailors and, in a surprise move, massacred them all. He failed, however, to overtake the three ships; in panic, they lifted anchor and set sail at once, abandoning ashore their dead and dying. Thus ended the stay in Cebu; it had lasted only twenty-three days.

The expedition had not only lost its leader, it did not have enough crew now to man the three ships. It was decided to burn one of them; her crew and equipment were divided between the two remaining units,
Trinidad
and
Victoria
.

For the following eight months, from May to December 1521, the search for cloves resumed; the ships wandered through the Indonesian archipelago, now trading, now indulging in occasional piracy. At long last they reached the Moluccas, where they spent six weeks on the island of Tidore, the main producer of cloves. Loaded with this precious cargo, the
Victoria
set sail for Europe under the command of Elcano. It was out of the question that her crew—so reduced and exhausted—could face again a crossing of the Pacific, followed by the hazards and rigours of the Magellan Strait; therefore, Elcano had no choice but to follow the traditional Portuguese route. The
Trinidad
could not set sail immediately: its hull, eaten up by shipworms, had turned into a sieve. After various mishaps, the
Trinidad
was eventually to fall into the hands of the Portuguese. Her crew spent a long time in the Portuguese jails of Malaya, India and Africa; a few last survivors eventually returned to Spain many years later.

The
Victoria
took seven months to cross the Indian Ocean, to go round the Cape of Good Hope and finally reach the islands of Cape Verde, on the west coast of Africa. Another thirteen men died on the way, of illness and exhaustion. The hull leaked badly; pumps had to be manned all the time. At Cape Verde, Elcano wished to buy some African slaves to work the pumps, which the crew was now too weak to operate. Twelve men were sent ashore to negotiate this purchase; as they were offering cloves in payment, Portuguese authorities immediately suspected that the
Victoria
had trespassed into the trading preserve of Portugal. They arrested the twelve and prepared to take possession of the ship and confiscate her priceless cargo. Elcano had barely time to lift anchor and escape; his crew, further depleted, scarcely managed to hoist at half-mast a mainsail that was now too heavy for them.

On 6 September 1522, the
Victoria
returned to that same port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda she had left three years earlier. Of the original crew only eighteen men remained. On Tuesday, 9 September, “they all entered Sevilla, barefoot, each only in his shirt, with lit candle in hand, to thank God for having brought them back alive into port.” And just as Phileas Fogg was to observe at the end of his journey around the
world in eighty days, they discovered with amazement that their calculation of the date was mistaken by one day—“and therefore they had eaten flesh on Fridays and celebrated Easter on a Monday.”

* * *

The above narrative should not lead you to believe that I am very knowledgeable on this particular subject. Actually, regarding Magellan, I knew hardly more than the hypothetical educated person quizzed at the outset. However, I have just finished reading a monumental work,
Voyage de Magellan (1519–1522): La relation d’Antonio Pigafetta & autres témoignages
, edited by Xavier de Castro, Jocelyne Hamon and Luis Filipe Thomaz, and published in Paris last year. It gathers in two volumes (1,000 pages) all the documents pertaining to this extraordinary expedition, as well as contemporary records of participants and witnesses (with the addition of notes on various questions of history, geography, linguistics and anthropology). It is a model of lucid, rigorous and exhaustive scholarship. In what I have written here, I have barely touched on what makes the reading of this book such a disturbing experience. The feeling of absolute outlandishness, of extreme exoticism, does not result from the evocation of remote tribes in far-away lands speaking incomprehensible tongues and practising bizarre religious rituals or weird sexual customs—no, it is in fact the way in which Magellan and his companions appear to us utterly unknowable. In a letter addressed to a woman who wrote historical novels, Henry James pointed out (very courteously) what appeared to him the essential impossibility of her activity:

What gives such an overwhelming power to this book is precisely the fact that it is the “real thing,” in all its mystery.

* * *

One last word, regarding the Christian king (and his subjects, all converted in one week and baptised en masse): the Western navigators had vested much hope in him, yet did not seem particularly surprised by his eventual betrayal—after all, Christian kings in Europe did not behave differently. There are still in Indonesia—precisely in the Moluccas area—some old Christian communities whose fidelity is all the more heroic that it is maintained against a tide of Islamist persecution. It is remarkable to learn that the Jesuits welcome more novices there than they do in their neighbouring Australian province. One can almost foresee the day when Indonesian missionaries might be sent to preach the Gospel in a largely de-Christianised Australia . . .

As the Portuguese say: God writes straight with crooked strokes.[
1
]

I
T IS OFTEN
said that Richard Henry Dana’s
Two Years Before the Mast
is the most beautiful of all books of the sea, but this seems to me a somewhat poisoned compliment, as if one were to praise
Madame Bovary
for being the best account of adultery in Normandy or to celebrate
The Diary of A.O. Barnabooth
as a masterpiece of hotel and railway sleeping-car literature.