Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe

by Laurence Bergreen

He might have undergone a variation of another common torture of the Inquisition era, the fiendish Wooden Horse, in which the victim was secured with metal bars to a hollowed-out bench, his feet higher than his head. “As he is lying in this posture,” runs an early account, “his arms, thighs, and shins are tied round with small cords or strings, which being drawn with screws at proper distances from each other, cut into his very bones, so as to no longer be discerned. Besides this, the torturer throws over his mouth and nostrils a thin cloth, so that he is scarce able to breathe through them, and in the meanwhile a small stream of water like a thread, not drop by drop, falls from on high upon the mouth of the person lying in this miserable condition, and so easily sinks down the thin cloth to the bottom of his throat so that there is no possibility of breathing, his mouth being stopped with water, and his nostrils with cloth, so that the poor wretch is in the same agony as persons ready to die, and breathing their last.