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

by Laurence Bergreen

There are conflicting accounts concerning Antonio Ginovés, the cabin boy whose life Magellan had spared. In one version, Ginovés suffered such extreme ridicule from other crew members that he threw himself overboard and was lost. And in another, the cabin boy, an object of scorn, was thrown overboard to his death. No matter which version was correct, the double tragedy marked the only time Magellan addressed the subject of homosexuality throughout the voyage.

The lack of qualified captains in the fleet’s roster would trouble Magellan throughout the voyage. Although he had a surplus of qualified pilots, most were Portuguese, and so excluded from the top ranks of this Spanish expedition. As the voyage continued, these professional, accomplished pilots served resentfully under the figurehead captains.

Just when he believed he was approaching the mouth of the strait, all his maps turned to blank wastes and speculative renderings, and the monotonous barrier of South American coast continued without relief.

At sea, sleep became the ultimate luxury, a solace nearly impossible to come by. The crew took naps whenever they could, night or day. Hammocks had yet to be introduced on board ships, so exhausted sailors appropriated a plank or, better still, a sheltered area of the deck where they could sprawl.

The men never became accustomed to the foul odors brewing aboard their ships. Water seeping into the hold stank despite the efforts to disinfect it with vinegar; animals such as cows and pigs added to the reek, as did the slowly rotting food supply and the sickening smell of salted fish wafting from the hold.

Pests were ubiquitous, an inescapable fact of life at sea. Teredos, or shipworms, bored through the hull, slowly compromising the seaworthiness of the entire vessel, and one ship in Magellan’s fleet eventually disintegrated because of the wretched little creatures.

Rats and mice infested every ship, and the sailors learned to live with them and...

It is recorded, however, that the men of the Armada de Molucca were plagued with all manner of lice, bedbugs, and cockroaches. When conditions turned hot and humid, the insects infested the clothing, the sails, the food supply, and even the rigging.

Even worse, weevils invaded the hardtack, and it was further contaminated with the urine and feces of rodents.

Sailors found it nearly impossible to keep clean; many brought along soap and a rag for washing, but the only available water—seawater—caused itching and irritation. The sailors washed their clothes in seawater as well, with limited results.

Sailors were known everywhere for their floppy, pajamalike pants (zaragüelles), which reached below the knees. Depending on the rank of the sailor, and the money at his disposal, zaragüelles could be made of anything from the cheap coarse linen known as anjeo (after Anjou, in France) to fine wool lined with silk taffeta.

Frayed from hard use and harsh conditions, the clothing demanded constant repair, and the sailors learned to become handy with a needle. Many sailors carried knives tucked into their waistbands for safekeeping.

The Inquisition imposed strict censorship laws, and sailors submitted all books they brought to sea for approval. The surviving records afford a glimpse of the reading habits of these men. Most volumes were devotional—the lives of saints, profiles of popes, accounts of miracles, and prayers to recite. Almost as prevalent (and probably more carefully read) were popular stories of derring-do and chivalry, of knights and damsels and vanquished villains.

Magellan’s crew was overwhelmingly Castilian and Portuguese, but representatives of every major country in western Europe, as well as North Africa, Greece, Rhodes, and Sicily filled the ranks.

The common language aboard Magellan’s fleet was nautical Castilian, which contained specialized terms for every line, clew, and device to be found aboard the ships.

The bilgewater around the pumps was also the most noxious to be found anywhere on the ship, and sailors retched from the stench. Despite the various hardships involved with operating the pumps, they were an absolute necessity at sea; without them, ships slowly took on water till they sank, and operating them exhausted teams of able-bodied seamen.

The men quickly left behind the identities they had maintained on land for those imposed on them at sea. No longer did it matter if they were Castilians, Greeks, Portuguese, or Genoese; life aboard ship was lived according to a rigid social structure segregating men who nonetheless lived in extremely close quarters and who depended on each other for their survival.

At the bottom were the pages, assigned to the ships in pairs. Many pages were mere children, as young as eight years old; none were older than fifteen. They were commonly orphans. Not all pages were created equal. Some had been virtually kidnapped from the quays of Seville and pressed into service; if they had not been on ships, they would have been roaming the streets, learning to pick pockets and getting into minor scrapes.

Another class of page lived a very different life, privileged and relatively free of demand, under the protection of officers. These handpicked young men generally came from good, well-connected families, and worked as apprentices for their protectors; they were expected to learn their trade and to rise through the ranks.

The privileged pages maintained the sixteen Venetian sand clocks—or ampolletas—carried by Magellan’s ships. Basically a large hourglass, the sand clock had been in use since Egyptian times; it was essential for both timekeeping and for navigation.

Maintaining the ampolletas was simple enough—the pages turned them over every half hour, night and day—but the task was critical. Aboard a swaying ship, the ampolletas were the only reliable timepiece, and the captain depended on them for dead reckoning and changing the watches. A ship without a functioning ampolleta was effectively disabled.

They might carry a fistful of hardtack or salted fish, and they almost certainly regretted their chronic lack of sleep because night aboard ship was as noisy as day; the ocean never slept, and neither did they.

Defecating was even more difficult, calling for a precarious balancing act as a sailor eased himself over the rail and lowered himself onto a crude seat suspended high above the waves.

After he lowered his breeches and eased himself into the seat, the sailor had to void himself in full view of anyone who cared to watch—privacy did not exist aboard these ships—and if the sea happened to be rough, the frigid spray splattered his exposed bottom. (More than one sailor lost his life when he plunged from the jardines to the ocean.)

Once they had taken up their posts, the weary sailors studied the sea for buried shoals, examined the rigging, dried the dew from the lines, and checked the sails for damage. They scrubbed, repaired, overhauled, and polished every exposed surface of the ships. They applied pitch to fraying hemp, and repaired torn or stressed sails. They made their weapons gleam, and fought a constant, losing battle against protecting their food supply from vermin. After several months at sea, the five ships of the Armada de Molucca were in far better shape than they had been when they sailed from Seville.

Just above the pages in rank came the apprentices, or grumetes, the most expendable and vulnerable members of all the crew.

They even shaved the legs and manicured the toenails of their masters,

If an apprentice survived all the ordeals and hazards of life at sea, he could apply for certification as a “sailor,” receiving a document signed by the ship’s pilot, boatswain, and master. He was now a professional mariner, and could look forward to a career lasting about twenty years, if he lived that long.

No matter how high an ordinary sailor rose, he was outranked by specialists such as gunners, essential to expeditions exploring new lands but hard to come by. Skilled in the use of cannon, in the preparation of gunpowder, and the selection of projectiles, a gunner tended to his weapons throughout the voyage, keeping them secure, clean, free of rust, and ready for battle at all times.

No one answered to the description of cook aboard these ships because the job was considered too demeaning. One sailor telling another that his beard smelled of smoke was tantamount to provoking a fight.

Officers ranked just above the sailors and specialists in the fleet’s hierarchy. One tier consisted of the steward, charged with keeping an eye on the food supply; the boatswain, or contramaestre; the boatswain’s mate; and the alguacil. The alguacil, for which there is no exact translation, served as the king’s representative aboard the ship and served as a master-at-arms or military officer.

Accounts of exactly how much wine Magellan allowed his crew members vary, but it probably came to two liters per man each day.

As the voyage unfolded, it became apparent that he, like other captains of the day, had two obsessions: maintaining the seaworthiness of his fragile ships, and acquiring enough food for his unruly men.

Many of the men went to sea simply to escape. Some were fleeing jail, hanging, or torture; others were abandoning their families and responsibilities. Others were avoiding debtors’ prison; once they obtained a berth on a ship, they would be immune from arrest, safe for as long as they were at sea.

A dragon’s tail was a fitting image for the strait, suggesting that it was dangerous, sinuous, and possibly mythological. Columbus believed in its existence, too. That mystical explorer supposedly received a vision prior to his fourth voyage in which he saw a map depicting the strait. He never found it, of course.

Like Magellan, Solis was a skilled and ambitious Portuguese mariner who found a receptive patron in Spain, but quite unlike Magellan, he was a fugitive from justice who had fled to Spain after murdering his wife.

In 1511, Cristóbal de Haro had backed a covert Portuguese expedition to Brazil. The fleet consisted of two caravels commanded by Estêvão Froes and João de Lisboa. The Spanish knew nothing of the expedition until Froes’s ship arrived in the Caribbean for repairs before heading northeast across the Atlantic to Portugal.

According to this account, the expedition came to a strait, entered it, and sailed west until violent storms forced the ships to turn back. Lisboa might even have navigated the strait all the way to the Pacific. Although incomplete, the description of Lisboa’s clandestine voyage was consistent with the strait that Magellan eventually explored.

At the same time, a report circulated throughout Spain that Vasco Núñez de Balboa had glimpsed the vast ocean to the west: the Pacific. Within months of hearing the news, King Ferdinand once again sent Juan de Solis to find the strait, or, as El Rey put it, “to discover the back parts of Golden Castile.”

The expedition, consisting of three ships and seventy men, embarked on October 8, 1515. Solis reached South America, sailed along its coast, and spotted a tribe that seemed friendly, at least from a distance. In good spirits, he went ashore with a landing party of seven men to greet them.

Magellan’s crew displayed considerable courage, even foolhardiness, when they confronted Indians in the region where Solis had met disaster.

When they were face to face, Magellan offered the Indian two gifts, a shirt and a jersey. The Captain General then displayed a piece of metal, hoping to learn if the Indian was familiar with it. Recognizing the object, the Indian indicated that his tribe possessed some form of metal. Assuming the Indian would leap at the chance to obtain more, Magellan expected to barter metal objects such as bells and scissors for food and scouting assistance, but after the Indian left Trinidad, he never returned. The fleeting encounter with the indifferent tribal leader baffled Magellan and his officers.

Despite the many indications that they had found nothing but a large river, the other captains held fast to the belief that the Río de la Plata would lead them to the Indies, and they urged Magellan not to abandon his reconnaissance. But he had made up his mind to turn back, and once Magellan decided on a course of action, nothing could deter him.

As they ventured toward 40 degrees latitude, passing along the eastern coast of what is now Argentina, the weather steadily turned colder, a warning of the discomfort and hazards that awaited them.

Without realizing it, they were heading into latitudes notorious for sudden, frequent, and violent squalls, and on February 13, they ran into another storm, tossing the boats, damaging Victoria’s keel, and terrifying the sailors with thunder and lightning and torrential downpours.

The water was so shallow, and the shoals so well concealed, that Victoria struck bottom, not once, but several times. Colliding with a shoal was a sickening sensation dreaded by every sailor.

Tides were critically important to a ship stuck on a shoal; a rising tide could free her, and a low tide could leave her beached, trapped, impossible to move. By waiting for a rising tide, Victoria managed to free herself from the shoal’s grip each time, but Magellan, in search of deeper water, eventually decided to lead the fleet away from shore and shoals even though he could no longer see land—or a strait.

The men of the fleet might have seen whales because this was the principal breeding site of the Southern Right Whale. If they sailed close to land, they would have spotted penguins, sea lions, and even huge elephant seals lolling on the rocky shores.

After six months at sea, Magellan’s ability to lead the armada was still in grave doubt. Many of the most influential Castilian officers, and even the Portuguese pilots, were convinced their fierce and rigid Captain General was leading them all to their deaths in his zeal to find the Spice Islands.

A crucial evolution of Magellan’s style of leadership, and perhaps his character, occurred over a period of nine trying months, from February to October 1520.