The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (77 page)

Some of these Christians returned to Portugal, together with two Italian merchants who had lived in India for decades. The intelligence gained from these men, together with that gleaned from captured charts and other documents, increased Portuguese knowledge of the Indian Ocean trade tremendously and helped them to identify the most strategic ports. After consolidating their position in India, between 1510 and 1515 they captured and fortified Goa, Melaka, Hormuz, and Colombo. Only Aden and the Red Sea proved impregnable. They also established innumerable factories around the Indian Ocean and farther east.

Despite the initial lack of commercial promise in the Americas, the Spanish continued to exploit their foothold in this new world while the Portuguese reaped the benefits of their ever-increasing trade in the Indian Ocean and the Spice Islands, which
Francisco Serrão reached in 1511. There remained, however, the question of whether the latter lay within the Spanish or Portuguese sphere of influence as defined at Tordesillas, and whether a western route would be shorter than that via the Cape of Good Hope. The first person to attempt to answer these questions was the Portuguese Fernão de Magalhães, or
Ferdinand Magellan, who sailed for Spain. A veteran of seven years in the east, including the capture of Melaka, Magellan was encouraged in this plan by his correspondence with Serrão, who was a trusted advisor to the local sultan. Magellan fell out with Manoel I when the king refused to support his proposed itinerary and, like Columbus before him, he submitted his proposal to the king of Spain. Charles I (soon to be Emperor Charles V) offered Magellan a ten-year monopoly on the route and two years later Magellan sailed from
Sanlúcar de Barrameda with 237 men in five ships provisioned for two years.

Magellan’s position was difficult because the Castilians resented sailing under a Portuguese commander and the Portuguese considered him a traitor. As one of Manoel’s agents wrote: “
Please God the Almighty, that they may make such a voyage as the Cortereals”—that is, be lost at sea—“and that your Highness may be at rest, and for ever be envied, as you are, by all princes.” After reaching the coast of Brazil near
Rio de Janeiro, they headed for the Río Plata and then put into
Puerto San Julian,
Argentina, for the winter. On April 1, 1520, a simmering conspiracy led by two captains and Juan Sebastian de
Elcano, master of the
Concepción,
came to a head. Magellan moved quickly and the mutineers surrendered. One captain was decapitated, drawn, and quartered, and when the fleet sailed the other captain and a priest were marooned. After wintering at Santa Cruz, the ships reached the entrance to the
Strait of Magellan between Patagonia and
Tierra del Fuego on October 21. Down to three ships (one had wrecked and another turned back to Spain), the Spanish spent five weeks defying the winds and currents of the rockbound strait.

Their route across the Pacific is unknown. Leaving the strait at about 52°S, the Spanish would have been in the teeth of the prevailing westerlies that nineteenth-century sailors called the “Furious Fifties.” Given the time of year, the ships probably sailed north across the equator to about 10°N where they picked up the northeast trades for their westward passage. Whatever the case, they saw no land for fourteen weeks, during which twenty-one of the crew died.
Antonio Pigafetta’s memoir depicts the sufferings of the starving,
scurvy-ridden crew and their desperate sorceries to create food—horrific scenes that would be repeated countless times in the age of sail.

This is one of the earliest descriptions of scurvy, a disease that results from a lack of vitamin C. Because it usually manifests after about a month without fresh vegetables, it became a significant problem for sailors only with the long-distance voyages of the age of European expansion. Its cure was not definitively ascertained until the nineteenth century.

On March 6, the three ships reached
Guam (about 13°N) in the
Mariana Islands, which the Spanish called the Ladrones (“thieves”) because the islanders stole from them; in retaliation the Spanish burned forty or fifty houses and killed seven islanders. A week later they reached the island of Samar in the
Philippine archipelago. On Limasawa, Magellan’s Malay slave, called Enrique, could make himself understood in his native language, and thus was one of
the first people to circumnavigate the globe. In April the Spanish reached the island of Cebu where Magellan converted the local rajah and several thousand of his subjects to Christianity. To impress his new ally with the might of Christian arms, Magellan led an expedition against one of the rajah’s reluctant vassals on the island of Mactan where on April 27, 1521, he was killed along with a dozen of his men. After the loss of twenty-four more crew, the survivors burned the
Concepción
and distributed the remaining crew and provisions between the
Trinidad
and
Victoria
. After several aimless months in the Philippines,
Juan Sebastian de Elcano and
Gonzalo Gómez de Espinosa took charge of the expedition.

Upon reaching the Spice Island of
Tidore, the Spanish learned that
Francisco Serrão had died around the same time as Magellan, but they were warmly received by the local ruler, with whom they traded red cloth, hatchets, cups, linen, and other items for cloves, mace,
nutmeg, cinnamon, and sandalwood. On December 21,
Victoria
sailed with forty-seven European and thirteen Malay crew. After stopping on the island of Timor they set out across the Indian Ocean, doubled the
Cape of Good Hope twelve weeks out, and reached the
Cape Verde Islands on July 8 after twenty-one weeks at sea. Twenty-one of the crew had died and they had lost their foremast. A watering party of thirteen men was arrested by the Portuguese, but Elcano pressed on with his reduced and enfeebled crew. On September 6, 1522, eighteen Europeans and three
Malays limped ashore at Sanlúcar. The first circumnavigation of the globe had taken two years, eleven months, and two weeks. The disastrous loss of life notwithstanding, the Magellan expedition was a milestone in the history of navigation. Magellan had proved that the Americas were not attached to
Terra Australis—a hypothetical southern continent that explorers would search for until the nineteenth century—and that the Pacific could be crossed, if only by brute determination. Such was Magellan’s accomplishment that
Luis Vaz de Camões appropriated it for Portugal in the
Lusiads,
his epic about the Portuguese age of
exploration, claiming Magellan as “
a true Portuguese in the undertaking if not in allegiance.”

Awful though their ordeal had been, Elcano’s men fared far better than the crew of the
Trinidad,
who had attempted to sail east across the Pacific. Contrary winds forced the
Trinidad
back to Tidore, where the Portuguese arrested the crew, only four of whom would return to Spain. Charles V dispatched two fleets to rescue the
Trinidad
’s men in 1525 and 1526. Only a quarter of the 450 men of the first expedition reached the Spice Islands, where the Portuguese held them until 1536. The second lost its flagship and returned to Spain before it reached the Pacific.

The return of the
Victoria
invested the issue of the line of demarcation
between Spanish and Portuguese spheres of influence with new urgency. A panel of
Portuguese and Spanish experts convened in 1524, its members including Elcano and Columbus’s son Ferdinand for Spain, and
Juan Vespucci (Amerigo’s nephew) for Portugal. Debates over where to draw the line in the Atlantic and how to determine longitude ensured that little progress was made, and the Pacific boundary was only settled by the
Treaty of Zaragoza of 1529, by which Charles paid 350,000 ducats to Portugal in exchange for fixing the line about three hundred leagues (nine hundred miles) east of the Spice Islands. Despite the treaty, thirteen years later a Spanish fleet sailed from Mexico to the
Philippines (named for the future Philip II) on a mission for the “
discovery, conquest and colonization of the islands and provinces of the South Sea towards the west.” The expedition ended badly and again the survivors returned to Europe in Portuguese ships.

The next phase of
Spanish interest in the east began with Philip’s plan “
to establish a route to
New Spain [Mexico] from the Islands of the West,” that is, an east–west route across the Pacific. Five years later, five ships and 350 men sailed from
La Navidad, Mexico. The
pilot in fact, though not in name, was Friar
Andrés de Urdaneta, a veteran of the 1525 rescue mission who had since become an Augustinian missionary. Ineligible to serve as captain-major, he was asked to name the head of the expedition and chose
Miguel López de Legazpi. The fleet sailed west at a latitude of between 9°N and 13°N, stopping at
Guam before going on to claim the Philippines and establish Spain’s only colony in Asia. Apart from the great distances involved, the westward crossing of the Pacific posed few problems. The puzzle was finding the winds favorable for a west-to-east crossing of the Pacific, which had eluded Spanish mariners for more than forty years. On June 1, 1565, at the start of the southwest monsoon, Urdaneta began the return voyage serving as pilot aboard the galleon
San Pablo
. Sailing via the San Bernardino Strait north of Samar, Urdaneta maintained a northeasterly course until he found westerly winds in about 39°N. The Spanish sailed east for fifteen weeks, dropping south as they approached North America to make their first landfall at San Miguel Island, off
Los Angeles. Continuing south they reached Acapulco on October 8.

The success of the Spanish venture in the Philippines depended on their reception by the Chinese, who were well established there. In 1571, Spanish sailors at
Manila rescued the crew of a Chinese ship near Mindoro, a gesture that reaped handsome dividends. The next year, Chinese traders returned to Manila, and “
With this the foundation of a lucrative commerce was laid.” In exchange for
American silver, the Chinese brought silk, “fine gilt
china and other porcelain wares,” benzoin, musk, and spices brought in Portuguese ships from Macau. Trade across “the Spanish Lake,” as the Pacific became
known, was limited officially to two ships of not more than three hundred tons per year—but such restrictions were routinely flouted and ships of a thousand tons were being built by the early seventeenth century. Almost every year until 1815 at least one “Manila galleon” crossed the Pacific each way. Despite the phenomenal riches carried aboard these ships between 1565 and 1815, only four were seized—all by English raiders.

The Portuguese objected to the Spanish colonization of the Philippines, which were clearly within the Portuguese sphere of influence, but their protests were dampened by the fact that the Philippines had no precious spices. Nonetheless, the debate lingered until 1750, when the two countries
agreed to annul the boundaries stipulated by the bull
Inter Caetera
and the Treaties of Tordesillas and Zaragoza. By the eighteenth century French, English, and Dutch mariners had long since developed the financial wherewithal, navigational acumen, and military strength to challenge the Iberian overseas empires and stripped these documents of their force, a process that took the better part of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

With the voyages of Columbus to the Americas and Gama around the Cape of Good Hope to Asia, Europe was fully embarked on what is aptly called the age of expansion. This era was unprecedented not only because extraordinary floods of people, ideas, and material wealth, as well as flora, fauna, and pathogens, were unleashed around the world, but because
Europeans were for the first time in the vanguard of world change. This is not to say that they effected great and recognizable transformations wherever they went. Certainly they did in the Americas; elsewhere “
they crawled like lice on the hide of Asia” and Africa, and made little dent in ancient patterns of trade and institutions of government. It would not be until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that Europeans would exercise extensive control over the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, China, and Africa. Yet none of these later efforts would be possible were it not for the maritime superiority achieved by the Portuguese, the commercial and financial acumen perfected by the merchants of Italy, the Low Countries, and England, or the legal doctrines articulated by canon and civil lawyers from the Mediterranean to the Baltic. While maritime initiative shifted among various European powers, supremacy at sea would remain a European monopoly until the end of the nineteenth century.

Despite the overt similarities between Spain and Portugal—staunch crusader Christianity forged in the crucible of the anti-Muslim
Reconquista,
their location at the turning point between Mediterranean and Atlantic Europe,
and their shared experience in the discovery and exploitation of the Atlantic archipelagoes—the two kingdoms embarked on their imperial projects from completely different angles and so launched themselves on distinct historical trajectories. The Portuguese found themselves in a dynamic, multilateral, and geographically vast Asian commercial network of great antiquity and complexity. As the
Spanish quickly realized, in terms of sea trade the Americas constituted a blank slate. When Columbus crossed the Atlantic he encountered no preexisting maritime commercial system, ports did not exist, and the arts of boatbuilding and navigation were nowhere near as sophisticated as those of coastal Eurasia. The Spanish could maintain their transatlantic links unimpeded by European rivals, who lacked the wherewithal or incentive to compete on a transatlantic stage. Only the Portuguese had the shipping or experience to contest Spanish claims, but they had no reason to violate the
Treaty of Tordesillas, especially since for fifty years after Columbus’s first voyage, Spain’s overseas territories produced little of value. These factors help explain the explosive if haphazard way in which Spain’s sprawling
American empire grew.