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February 7 - February 11, 2022
Had Magellan sailed on behalf of his homeland, his voyage around the world might have been lost to history.
the Spanish developed a different approach to empire building. Obsessive record keepers, given to documenting everything—laws, lineage, finances—they applied the same scrutiny to Magellan’s voyage. Unlike the Portuguese or the Arabs, the Spanish proclaimed their exploits to stake their claim to various parts of the world.
Magellan brought with him many of Portugal’s most precious and sensitive secrets: information about secret expeditions, a familiarity with Portuguese activity in the Indies, and an acquaintance with Portuguese navigational knowledge of the world beyond Europe.
Less than a year after coming to Spain, Charles was elected king of the Romans, thanks to a great deal of string-pulling by the members of his family. The appointment meant that he would eventually become crowned King Charles V, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, but to receive the title he would have to pay vast sums of money, essentially bribes, to the electors, who were based in Germany, and he looked to the Indies and the New World as a source of revenue to advance his personal ambitions.
Cruelty, hypocrisy, and tyranny imbued the social order in which Magellan now found himself, but for the moment, he prospered by appealing to the Spanish court’s longing to dominate world trade, and by insinuating himself into the country’s power structure.
The Casa’s role quickly expanded from collecting taxes and duties to administering all aspects of exploration, including registering cargoes and proclaiming rules for the outfitting of ships and their weapons.
Soon the Casa functioned as a maritime court, adjudicating contract disputes and insurance claims for all voyages to the New World. The Casa even administered cosmography, maintaining and updating the padrón real, or royal chart, which served as a master copy for charts distributed to all ships leaving Spain.
Columbus and Fonseca despised one another and fought bitterly. Fonseca was forever trying to get Ferdinand and Isabella and their successors to ignore the claims of independent entrepreneurs such as Columbus and to exert complete control over the expeditions that Spain sent to the New World. This meant, of course, that Fonseca would control the expeditions, and reap the full benefits from their trading.
When Magellan approached representatives of the Casa de Contratación and declared that he believed that the Spice Islands were located within the Spanish hemisphere, he was telling them exactly what they wanted, indeed, needed to hear.
Juan de Aranda, an ambitious merchant, took the Portuguese navigator aside and offered to lobby on behalf of the expedition in exchange for 20 percent of the profits. Privately, Magellan resented Aranda’s intrusion into his scheme, but the merchant held out the best hope for keeping the expedition’s prospects alive.
Magellan’s arrival in the capital city coincided with a period of instability within the innermost circles of the royal court. Castile’s regent, Cardinal Ximenes de Cisneiros, had just died on his way to assist the inexperienced King Charles, and poisoning was suspected.
The young king’s inner circle also included Ximenes’s successor, Chancellor Sauvage, and Cardinal Adrian of Utrecht. Despite his subsequent elevation to the papacy as Adrian VI, this cardinal seems to have earned no one’s admiration.
Serrão’s odyssey began in 1511, when he assumed command of one of three ships, dispatched by the Portuguese viceroy of India and bound for the Spice Islands, using an easterly route. Surviving shipwrecks and pirates, Serrão and several companions arrived at Ternate, in the Spice Islands, the following year. In all likelihood, they were the first Europeans to visit these fabled islands. Serrão carefully cultivated Ternate’s small ruling class, especially its king, and tried to promote trade between Ternate and Portugal, but the brisk transoceanic trade that he expected was slow to materialize.
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Significantly, Serrão’s letters placed the Spice Islands far to the east of their true position; he located them squarely within the Spanish hemisphere, as defined in the Treaty of Tordesillas.
After presenting the slaves, Magellan spoke excitedly of his intention to sail along the eastern coast of what is now called South America until the land ended and he would be able to turn west toward the Spice Islands;
No law and then no God
A crucial part of the map was obscured, however: the part that showed a waterway extending through South America toward the Spice Islands. Although Magellan, in his zeal to persuade the king’s ministers to back the expedition, all but gave the strait’s location away, he remained fearful that someone would steal his map and his strategy and launch a rival expedition before he could organize his own.
Reliable information about trade routes was so sensitive and precious that governments zealously guarded all maps and charts, which were essential to national security, and for Magellan to display a map likely purloined from Portugal was the equivalent of selling nuclear secrets at the height of the Cold War.
Magellan’s conception of the world he planned to explore was fatally inaccurate. Like most explorers of the Age of Discovery, his ideas about the size of the globe, and location of landmasses, were inspired by Ptolemy. Had Magellan comprehended the size of the Pacific, its currents, storms, and reefs, it is unlikely that he would have dared to mount an expedition. But without the Pacific Ocean to inform his calculations, the estimated length of his route came to only half the actual distance.
All he would have to do was find a way to get around or through South America,
Oh sure THAT
In the first clause, King Charles appeared to accede to Magellan’s insistence on a ten-year exclusive: “Since it would be unjust that others should cross your path, and since you take the labors of this undertaking upon yourselves, it is therefore my wish and will, and I promise that, during the next ten years, I will give no one permission to go on discoveries along the same regions as yourselves.” Nevertheless, he did not honor this promise.
Surprise
Portugal’s sovereign, King Manuel, had married not just one but two of Charles’s aunts, first Isabel and then María. And now he was planning to marry Charles’s sister, Leonor, within a matter of weeks.
Charles I had every intention of overtaking the elderly king of Portugal. No matter what the language of the contract seemed to say, the impatient young king wished to bend the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas to Spain’s advantage by insisting that the Spice Islands lay within the Spanish hemisphere. And if it was impossible to prove this point, then it was equally impossible to disprove it.
From Fonseca’s point of view, this was hardly an advantageous contract, for it gave Magellan too much power over the expedition. It would take Fonseca months, but eventually he would have his revenge on Magellan, and exert the control over the expedition that had been denied him in the royal contract.
The ships were mostly black—pitch black. They derived their blackness, and their ominous aura, from the tar covering the hull, masts, and rigging, practically every exposed surface of the ship except for the sails.
The ships were among the most complicated machines of their day, wonders of Renaissance technology, and the product of thousands of hours of labor by skilled artisans working at their specialized trades. They were relatively small, out of necessity.
Although King Charles was supposed to pay for Magellan’s ships, according to the contract, he was deeply in debt. To cover the expedition’s cost, the Casa de Contratación turned to a familiar presence in financial circles, Cristóbal de Haro, who represented the House of Fugger, an influential banking dynasty based in Augsburg, Germany.
For an explorer in need of financial backing, Cristóbal de Haro was the ideal friend; the House of Fugger, for which he worked, had enough money to finance ten expeditions, or more; indeed, it had more money than King Charles. By bringing in Haro, the king and his advisers would be giving up a significant amount of the profits.
If successful, or even partly successful, a fleet returning from the Indies could yield a profit of 400 percent;
Magellan’s pay came to 50,000 maravedís, and an additional 8,000 maravedís each month. By royal order, his monthly salary went directly to his wife, Beatriz.
As the language made clear, Magellan and Faleiro had absolute authority at sea.
When word of Magellan’s spectacular commission reached Portugal, King Manuel reacted with alarm. The navigator had betrayed them all, and the members of the royal court were at a loss to understand why he had done so.
Really?!
No one in Portugal dared to admit the actual reason for Magellan’s behavior, that King Manuel had refused to back the navigator, humiliating him over and over again.
King Manuel did what he could to ruin Magellan’s name while, at the same time, trying to lure Magellan and Faleiro back to Portugal. He involved the Portuguese ambassador to King Charles’s court, Álvaro da Costa, who sought out the two exiles, promising that King Manuel would reconsider their request for an expedition. Da Costa was explicit about the dire consequences that would befall the two if they continued with their plan to sail for Spain; they would offend God, King Manuel, and relinquish all personal honor.
Summoning all his meager diplomatic skills, Magellan replied that he had formally renounced his allegiance to King Manuel and given his loyalty to King Charles. He had no obligation to serve anyone else.
Ultimately, da Costa’s false claims hurt Portugal’s cause, and hardened King Charles’s determination to stand by his two embattled explorers. Portugal’s attempt to attack Magellan confirmed the belief of King Charles’s advisers that they had hit on a scheme of great strategic value.
Rather than competing head to head on the Iberian peninsula, Spain and Portugal would grapple for control of trade routes around the world. They remained simultaneously rivals and allies, as affairs of state and matters of the heart alternated in rapid succession.
Now, at the height of the Age of Discovery, Seville hovered at the apex of its prosperity and influence. The city straddling the Quadalquivir River was an amalgam of Roman, Visigoth, Muslim, Jewish, and Christian cultures.
Above all, Seville was a commercial center, “well adapted to every profitable undertaking, and as much was brought there to sell as was bought, because there are merchants for everything,” in the words of a sixteenth-century observer.
Only Seville was capable of providing Magellan with the technology, the labor, and the financial resources to travel halfway around the world in search of lands to claim and spices to bring back to Europe.
As Magellan and Faleiro arrived in Seville to commence preparations in earnest for the voyage, the ill will between Spain and Portugal led to rumors that the lives of the Portuguese co-commanders were in danger. It was said that Bishop Vasconcellos, a confidant of King Manuel, inspired an assassination attempt.
Unlike many captains, Magellan involved himself in the day-to-day preparations, even loading goods onto the ships as if he were an ordinary seaman, not the Captain General, and that was how the trouble started. Despite his close interaction with the sailors and dockworkers, or perhaps because of it, Magellan believed he did not receive the cooperation and respect to which he was accustomed.
“I had to haul one of the ships to shore because there was an ebb tide. I got up at three in the morning to make sure that the riggings were in place and when it was time to work I ordered the men to put up four flags with my coat of arms on the mast where those of the captain are customarily placed, while those of Your Majesty were to be placed on top of Trinidad, which is the name of the ship.” The unusual juxtaposition of signs, emphasizing that a Portuguese captain was sailing for Spain, attracted a large, gossipy crowd of onlookers.
As Magellan was explaining all this to the official, the man who had first approached him, “without any warning and without any authority to do so . . . came up the steps calling the people to seize the Portuguese captain who had put up the flags of the King of Portugal.” He demanded to know why Magellan chose to display these flags, and Magellan, not surprisingly, refused to explain.
At that point, the two officials who had challenged Magellan got into a fight with each other over how to treat Magellan.
Magellan’s fury at the incident was understandable. An exile, he enjoyed the protection of King Charles, but in reality he was at the mercy of the mob and self-appointed busybodies.
On April 6, 1519, the king sent orders to another officer, Juan de Cartagena—orders that became the most controversial aspect of the entire expedition—to serve as the inspector general of the fleet under the command of the two Portuguese commanders.
Essentially, Cartagena was to have the final say over all commercial aspects of the expedition; he was the chief accountant and representative of the king’s treasury.
The wording (“to the greatest possible advantage to our estates”) enabled Cartagena to step in at any moment and prevent Magellan from enriching himself, even if he believed he was entitled to do so under his own contract with King Charles.
The instructions were so thorough that a Spaniard predisposed to mistrust Magellan and Faleiro could conclude that he, and not they, had the final say on the conduct of the entire voyage. And that was exactly the conclusion to which Cartagena came.
Magellan and Faleiro were ordered to record every landfall and landmark they attained, and if they came across any inhabited lands, they were to “try and ascertain if there is anything in that land that will be to our interest.” They were also to treat humanely any indigenous peoples they happen to find, if only to make it possible for the fleet to assure its supply of food and water. Magellan could seize any Arabs he found in the Portuguese hemisphere—an implicit admission that he might violate the Treaty of Tordesillas, after all—and, if he wished, sell them for slaves.
