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

by Laurence Bergreen

Beyond the huddled town lay the churning waters of the Atlantic. To Magellan and his crew, the body of water was known simply as the Ocean Sea, believed to girdle the globe.

Magellan’s autocratic style extended beyond religious observance. To stifle dissent, Pigafetta writes, Magellan concealed the ultimate goal of the expedition from his rank-and-file sailors.

As a Portuguese mariner, Magellan was accustomed to secrecy when it came to voyages of discovery; that was the Portuguese way. Yet everyone realized the fleet was bound for the Spice Islands; it was even called the Armada de Molucca. Perhaps Pigafetta meant that Magellan wished to keep his plan to find a strait—a waterway leading to the East—to himself until it was too late for disloyal crew members to desert.

In the pages of his diary, Pigafetta confided another and far more troubling reason for Magellan’s unusual secrecy: “The masters and captains of the other ships of his company loved him not.

To assert his authority over his resentful and contentious captains, Magellan gave strict sailing orders designed to reinforce his unquestioned authority.

Magellan set a traditional system of watches, an essential precaution.

Magellan’s strict procedures demanded discipline from an inexperienced crew lacking respect for the Captain General. The most innocuous aspect of his standing orders—the requirement that all ships report to Trinidad at dusk—rankled the most because it demonstrated that Magellan, and no one else, served as the leader of the Armada de Molucca.

Yet until the Age of Discovery, it remained only a dream. At the time, Europe was deeply ignorant of the world at large. Magellan undertook his ambitious voyage in a world ruled by superstition, populated with strange and demonic creatures, and reverberating with a longing for religious redemption.

Going to sea was the most adventurous thing one could do, the Renaissance equivalent of becoming an astronaut, but the likelihood of death and disaster was far greater.

in the Age of Discovery, more than half the world was unexplored, unmapped, and misunderstood by Europeans.

Some of the most tenacious ideas about the world at large derived from Pliny the Elder, who died in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79.

Cue Sawbones

Only three continents were known to Europeans of the era—Europe, Asia, and Africa—although it was suspected that more would be discovered. The existence of an illusory island, Terra Australis, the South Land, was accepted as fact before and long after Magellan’s voyage.

Highly schematic medieval maps depicted the three known continents as separated by two rivers, the Nile and the Don, as well as the Mediterranean, all of them surrounded by the great Ocean Sea, into which other seas and rivers flowed. This diagram resembled a T inside of an O, so medieval maps of this genre are referred as “T in O” maps.

To complicate matters, Asia occupied the Northern Hemisphere of this map, with Europe and Africa sharing the Southern. In some versions of the medieval map, the Ocean Sea flowed out into space.

Superstition governed popular impressions, and even scholarly accounts, of the world at large. A work published in 1560 contained descriptions of various sea monsters infesting the oceans.

Even educated people placed credence in fantastic realms on earth, for instance, the persistent belief in the existence of the kingdom of Prester John.

The legend originated in 1165 when a lengthy letter began to circulate among various Christian leaders; as time passed, the letter became more elaborate as anonymous authors added beguiling, utterly fantastic details; so great was its appeal that it became one of the most widely circulated and discussed documents of the Middle Ages, translated into French, German, Russian, Hebrew, English, among other languages, and with the introduction of movable type, it was reprinted in countless editions.

By “India,” Prester John, or whoever wrote this missive, meant more than just the Indian subcontinent. During the Middle Ages, India was believed to include a good portion of northeastern Africa.

Prester John’s letter was actually written by imaginative monks toiling in anonymity, and the result begged to be read as a symbolic document, an allegory, or an expression of faith. Yet it was taken as a factual account and diplomatic initiative.

Over time, the letter, like Pinocchio’s nose, grew and grew; copyists embellished the text, adding ingredients to Prester John’s domain. One important interpolation described spices in vivid detail: “In another of our provinces pepper is grown and gathered, to be exchanged for corn, grain, cloth, and leather”—which sounded plausible enough, but then the interpolation took an allegorical twist—“that district is thickly wooded and full of serpents, which are of great size and have two heads and horns like rams, and eyes which shine as brightly as lamps.

Generous swaths of the Prester John letter found their way into the two most popular travel books of the Middle Ages: The Travels of Marco Polo and The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, lending credence to the travel accounts and to the Prester John legend.

Despite these imaginative excesses, The Travels of Marco Polo inspired Europe to conceive of trading with the kingdoms of Asia, and of exploring the world. Many of the sailors on Magellan’s voyage were familiar with it, and at least one brought a copy of Polo’s account along with him.

John Mandeville served as the other great traveler and storyteller of the era. With suave assurance, he deftly mixed accounts from ancient authors with what he claimed were his personal experiences, but Mandeville was actually a compiler rather than a traveler, and he drew much of his material directly from Speculum Mundi, a medieval encyclopedia, which contained extracts from Pliny and Marco Polo, among other authorities.

No account of the exotic East would be complete without a discussion of spices, and when it came to this subject, Mandeville skirted close enough to the truth to lure unsuspecting readers into taking his description seriously.

Despite all its improbabilities, Mandeville’s account was taken to be true. It was widely anthologized, and its most blatant inaccuracies excused on the basis that they must have been errors or corruptions of the original text committed by scribes and copyists over the years.

Accounts of the natural world circulating throughout Europe were so terrifying and fantastic that François Rabelais, the French friar and physician turned popular author, enthusiastically satirized them in his comic epic Gargantua and Pantagruel, which appeared as a series of books beginning in 1532. Rabelais mocked the unreliable accounts by the revered figures of antiquity with his own farcical version of exotic lands and the strange creatures to be found there.

They spoke about the Pyramids, the Nile, Babylon, the Troglodites, the Himantopodes, the Blemmyae, the Pygmies, the Cannibals, the Hyperborean Mountains, the Aegipans, and all the devils—and all from Hearsay.”

Rabelais had a serious point to make; he was directing his readers back to the classical Greek concept of autopsis, seeing for one’s self (and the origin of our word “autopsy”). Autopsis stressed the value of firsthand reporting; the next best thing was obtaining a reliable account from an eyewitness with firsthand knowledge.

So Magellan stood on the knife-edge dividing the ancient and medieval worlds from the modern. His voyage would be a completely practical and empirical approach to discovery. He would go and see for himself: the first-ever global autopsis.

During those brief days in the Canaries, Magellan busied himself with the final provisioning of his fleet. He worked quickly—too quickly, as he would later discover to his horror, for the merchants and chandlers of the Canaries, practiced in deception, swindled Magellan by falsifying their bills of lading.

While there, Magellan heard disturbing news: The king of Portugal had dispatched not one but two fleets of caravels to arrest him—a drastic measure, but not without precedent. A generation earlier, Manuel’s father had sent ships to intercept Columbus.

Under the circumstances, Magellan decided that the best course of action was to leave the Canaries immediately. If the Portuguese caravels caught up with Magellan, they would return him in shackles to the Portuguese court, where he would be convicted of treason, tortured, and perhaps executed. Poorly provisioned, but afraid for his life and the welfare of the fleet, Magellan gave the order to raise anchor and set sail at midnight, October 3.

For the next fifteen days, the Armada de Molucca ran before the wind; the favorable conditions placated the irritable captains and gave Magellan time to strategize about the best way to avoid his Portuguese pursuers.

Sixty days of furious storms left the ships of the Armada de Molucca in need of repair and ruined a good part of the precious food supply. Magellan found it necessary to reduce rations. Each man received only four pints of drinking water a day, and half that amount of wine. Hardtack, a staple of the sailors’ diet, was also reduced to a pound and a half a day. As with his other decisions, Magellan did not explain why he was reducing the amount of food and drink, and no other decision he could take was as likely to create resentment among the captains and the crew.

Magellan inadvertently set the stage for their mutiny when he reminded his officers that the instructions he had received from King Charles gave him full authority over the fleet. The captain of each ship was to approach Trinidad at dusk to pay his respects to Magellan and to receive orders.

Under Spanish law, homosexuality was punishable by death. Spanish authorities and the Catholic Church condemned homosexuality in the harshest language possible, despite its prevalence. As Captain General of the fleet, Magellan had little choice but to take disciplinary action, but he found himself in an impossible predicament, caught between the cruelty of Spanish law and the reality of homosexuality at sea.

Magellan took a harsher course of action. He held a court-martial of Salamón, serving as both judge and jury. The outcome of the proceeding was swift, and Salamón was condemned to death by strangulation. The deed was to be carried out several weeks hence, on December 20.

In his fervor to usurp Magellan, Cartagena had been misled by appearances. In fact, the Captain General had chosen the risky, unorthodox course to avoid the Portuguese caravels pursuing him and was actually doing his best to frustrate Spain’s enemies.

His chief qualification, besides his relationship to Archbishop Fonseca, was that he was a Castilian. On that basis, the privileged Cartagena believed he was entitled to share power equally with Magellan. Had Cartagena known the truth, that Magellan was fleeing the Portuguese to save the fleet rather than destroy it, the revelation might have defeated the Castilian’s paranoid logic, but it would not have restrained his unbridled chauvinism and his sense of entitlement.

At that, Cartagena barked at the other traitorous captains, Quesada and Mendoza, to stab Magellan with their daggers. From the way he spoke, it was apparent that the three of them had plotted to overthrow the Captain General, but now, at the crucial moment, lost their resolve to act.

Stripped of his command, and having learned nothing from the experience of his failed mutiny, Cartagena grew intensely resentful of his inexperienced replacement.

Neither of these expert pilots knew of the South Equatorial Current, which carried the fleet west of its intended heading. Rather than Rio de Janeiro, the fleet raised Cape Saint Augustine on November 29. Here, Pigafetta relates, the fleet paused to take on fresh food and water, and quickly resumed following the Brazilian coast in search of Rio de Janeiro, as the best navigational minds aboard the ships puzzled over why they had veered off course.

Finally, two weeks later, on December 13, 1519, the fleet entered the lush and gorgeous Bay of Saint Lucy and approached the mouth of the River of January—Rio de Janeiro. Trinidad went first, slipping past Sugar Loaf and coming quietly to anchor in the harbor. Magellan had arrived in the New World.

Months later, a Portuguese explorer named Pedro Álvares Cabral claimed the entire region—whose contours were poorly mapped and poorly understood—for his king and country. For tiny Portugal, hemmed in by the Atlantic and by Spain, the newly discovered land contained great commercial and psychological promise, but it lacked quantities of gold and spices. Unsure about how to exploit their find, the Portuguese became lackadaisical in the administration of the distant realm.

The unchallenged presence of the five ships comprising the Armada de Molucca in Brazil showed how porous and vulnerable the Portuguese “monopoly” actually was. Despite Brazil’s importance, the Portuguese did not maintain a permanent settlement there.

Vespucci’s Indians were most likely representatives of the vast network of Guaraní tribes. At the time of Magellan’s arrival, there may have been as many as 400,000 Guaraní Indians, grouped by dialects.

Discovering that the women of Verzin were for sale, the sailors gladly exchanged their cheap German knives for sexual favors. Night after night on the beach the sailors and the Indian women drank, danced, and exchanged partners in moonlit orgies. But there were limits: “The men gave us one or two of their young daughters as slaves for one hatchet or one large knife, but they would not give us their wives in exchange for anything at all.

The reason for the astonishing behavior was the great value the Guaraní Indians placed on metal objects such as nails, hammers, hooks, and mirrors, all of which were considered to be more valuable than gold, more valuable, perhaps, than life itself.

Under the strain of temptation, one of Magellan’s most trusted allies, Duarte Barbosa, who had offered critical assistance when Cartagena mutinied, all but lost his head in Rio de Janeiro. Falling under the women’s spell and envisioning a life of ease as a trader on these distant shores, he decided to desert the fleet.

Only later did Magellan learn that the Indians regarded the fleet as harbingers of good fortune because its arrival coincided with rain. Whatever the reason, “Those people could be converted easily to the faith of Jesus Christ,” Pigafetta concluded.