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

by Laurence Bergreen

If he still refused, he faced the third degree of the strappado, in which he was suspended for a longer period of time, which dislocated his shoulders and broke his arms. Once again, he was given another chance to confess. If he still failed to make a satisfactory confession, he was subjected to the fourth degree: The victim was suspended and violently jerked, which inflicted excruciating pain. Few victims of a methodically administered strappado lasted beyond this point without confessing. In certain cases, there was a fifth degree, as well. In the final phase of the strappado, weights were attached to the victim’s feet, and they were often heavy enough to tear the limbs from his tormented body.

Andrés de San Martín suffered the full five stages of the strappado.

After enduring these torments, San Martín may have begged to be executed rather than be made to endure any more of the strappado, he may have fainted from the pain, but he survived the ordeal. In fact, he recovered sufficiently to return to his former position as astronomer-astrologer, but from then on, he remained wary of Magellan and the entire enterprise of the armada.

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.

In his letter of March 22, 1518, King Charles gave Magellan complete authority over everyone in the armada; this was the “power of rope and knife.” He had demonstrated that he had, as his orders indicated, the power of life and death over all those who served under him.

Magellan took his authoritarianism to an extreme, refusing to share power or even give the illusion of power to his captains, and they communicated their dissatisfaction down the chain of command to the ordinary seamen, making rebellion and its hideous aftermath—torture—inevitable.

Believing that he had finally demonstrated his absolute authority, Magellan commuted all forty of the death sentences to hard labor. Among the forgiven was Elcano, the Basque shipmaster who would later have his revenge on the Captain General. Those who had been freed looked on the man who controlled their fate with decidedly mixed emotions.

There were two important exceptions to the general clemency: Gaspar de Quesada, the leader and murderer of San Antonio’s master, and his servant, Luis de Molino. Magellan insisted that Quesada be executed. And he gave Molino a brutally simple choice: He could either be executed along with his master or spare his own life by beheading his master.

Magellan found himself in a difficult position. He could not bring himself to condemn a priest—even a disloyal priest—to death. And as for Cartagena, his blood ties to Archbishop Fonseca prevented Magellan from taking severe disciplinary action such as execution or torture. Instead, Magellan devised a much worse fate for Cartagena and the priest. He decided to leave them behind to fend for themselves in the wilderness of Port Saint Julian after the fleet’s departure.

I mean fair. They are assholes.

Always a perfectionist about outfitting his ships, Magellan turned his attention to his neglected fleet. The ships were in a state of disrepair, their sails and rigging in disarray, their holds fetid, their hulls leaky. He ordered his men to empty the ships and give them a thorough cleaning.

When the time came to load the provisions, they discovered more evidence that the dishonest chandlers in Seville and the Canary Islands had robbed them blind, and endangered their lives. Although their bills of lading showed enough supplies on board to last a year and a half, long enough to reach the Spice Islands, the ships’ holds actually carried only a third of that amount.

Santiago’s crew soon discovered that food was even more plentiful around the Santa Cruz River than at Port Saint Julian, and Serrano decided to linger for six days to fish and hunt for sea elephants. Given the urgency of finding the strait, his decision to tarry is peculiar.

At that moment, the storm gathered force, and the winds pushed the helpless ship toward the rocky coast and the prospect of certain death for her crew. Serrano faced every captain’s nightmare as razor-sharp rocks sawed into her hull, and she began taking on water. Luck was with her crew, since Santiago washed ashore before breaking up. One by one, her crew of thirty-seven crawled to the end of the jib boom and jumped to a rocky beach. As soon as they had abandoned ship, Santiago broke up, and the storm carried away all her life-sustaining provisions—wine, hardtack, and water, to say nothing of the freshly caught sea elephants.

The two crew members in the vanguard succeeded in mastering the river’s breadth in their rudimentary raft, and once they had landed on the far side, they set out in the direction of Port Saint Julian. At first, they followed the coast, where they could be reasonably certain to find shellfish, but vast swamps barred their progress, and they had to walk inland, over hills and mountains, eating only ferns and roots, and suffering greatly in the freezing weather. The trek lasted eleven harrowing days, and when they reached Port Saint Julian, ravaged and gaunt from their ordeal, even those who knew the survivors barely recognized them.

Relying on the small raft cobbled together from the wreck of Santiago, the rescue party ferried the survivors back across the river in groups of two or at most three; each trip consumed hours and was fraught with hazard, but miraculously everyone made it to the northern shore.

The wreck of Santiago and the hardship endured by her crew troubled Magellan more deeply than the violence and torture of the Easter Mutiny. “The loss of the ship was much regretted by Magellan,” de Mafra recalled, “although it was not the pilot’s fault, because along this coast the sea rises and ebbs eight fathoms, and this was the cause of the calamity, so that the ship found itself high and dry.”

While Álvaro de Mesquita, his first cousin, remained in command of San Antonio, Magellan appointed Duarte Barbosa, his brother-in-law, as captain of Victoria, and Juan Serrano, the unlucky skipper of Santiago, as the new captain of Concepción, the ship once commanded by Gaspar de Quesada, the mutineer whose severed head rotted on a pike.

In fact, Magellan’s appointment of his relatives as captains served to fuel the silent resentment of many crew members, even those from Portugal. When they finally returned to Spain, if they ever did, they could tell vivid tales of Magellan’s insolence toward the Spanish captains; his shameless nepotism; his reckless seamanship, culminating in the needless loss of Santiago; and, most blatant of all, the drawing and quartering of Gaspar de Quesada.

To keep his men occupied, he ordered a detachment ashore to construct a small stone enclosure for a forge to be used to repair the ships’ metal fittings, but even this modest project ended in frustration because the weather became so bitter that several sailors suffered crippling frostbite on their fingers.

The giant was a member of the tribe known as the Tehuelche Indians, who were numerous throughout the region. In reality, the Tehuelche measured about six feet tall; the impression of the Indian’s great stature derived in part from his costume and especially the elaborate boots he wore, which added to his height.

Two of the giants were shackled. Even Pigafetta recoiled at the sight, disdainfully remarking that Magellan had resorted to a “cunning trick.” For once, the expedition’s official chronicler found it painful to watch Magellan’s scheme unfold.

That night, Carvalho, still in charge of the detachment, decided they would sleep ashore. In the morning, the giants’ huts were deserted; all the Indian men and women had fled into the interior, perhaps for good, perhaps to regroup for a surprise attack.

The encounter between the European visitors and the Tehuelche Indians deteriorated drastically from its spirited and happy beginning. Conditioned by the fate of Solis and his crew, Magellan expected the Indians to bare their fangs eventually, no matter how sociable and benign their behavior seemed at first.

On August 11, 1520, Magellan carried out the sentence he had proclaimed for his nemesis, Juan de Cartagena, and the priest, Pero Sánchez de la Reina, who had conspired with the Castilian captain. At Magellan’s order, both were marooned on a small island in sight of the ships. They had no longboat, no firewood, and scant clothing. Their supplies consisted mainly of bread and wine, enough to last them the summer, perhaps, but they would have to face the next winter in Port Saint Julian alone.

Millions of years ago, two tectonic plates merged and created a unique landscape at the southernmost tip of South America, not far from the South Pole. Over time, the plate from the east smashed into the plate from the west, which slid underneath. As a result, the eastern sea is about fifteen hundred feet deep, but the western sea reaches depths of over fifteen thousand feet.

Magellan made the most of this enforced layover. For the next six weeks, the seamen busied themselves catching fish, drying and salting them, and stocking the ships.

A week later, on October 18, 1520, Magellan decided to risk the open sea again. He supposed, correctly, that the weather was as calm as it ever gets in this region.

Magellan ordered his ships to sail into the gulf, and when they were well within its embrace, he saw it: the outlet leading west, just as he prayed it would. Magellan had finally found his strait.

A later explorer described the cape as “three great mountains of sand that look like islands but are not.” There was no mistaking the strait for a bay or an inlet; a broad waterway cut deep into the impenetrable landmass along which the fleet had been sailing for months.

The Cape of the Eleven Thousand Virgins marks the entrance to the strait that Magellan had sought for more than two years. Precisely how he divined its existence has been the subject of debate ever since.

It is often assumed that Behaim’s “well-painted globe,” which Magellan had displayed to King Charles and his advisers to persuade them to back his voyage, showed the strait; in fact, Behaim’s globe, or map, did no such thing. Instead, it showed a waterway cutting through eastern Asia and the island of “Seilan.”

Pigafetta was inadvertently responsible for the case of mistaken identity; in all likelihood, he confused Behaim’s rendition with that of another Nuremberg mapmaker, Johannes Schöner, a professor of mathematics who produced two maps, one in 1515 and the other in 1520, close to the time Magellan was displaying a map to King Charles. To the nonspecialist, Schöner’s maps closely resembled Behaim’s, and Pigafetta could easily have mistaken one for the other, especially because Schöner did not sign his productions.

Everything to the west was also unknown. Schöner, like other cartographers of his era, shrank the immense Pacific into an enticingly small and apparently navigable gulf, a misunderstanding that resulted in Magellan’s conviction that he could reach the Spice Islands within weeks, if not days, after exiting the strait.

Magellan knew better than to take maps at face value, but he was deeply susceptible to their influence. They were idealized projections of what the world might be like.

Now that Magellan had finally found the strait, he faced three hundred miles of nautical nightmare. Navigating the waterway would prove as daunting a challenge as simply finding it had been.

Tides in the strait run as much as twenty-four feet, making it difficult to anchor ships securely, and currents are strong. Beds of kelp lurking below the water’s surface threatened to foul lines, keels, and rudders.

In any event, Magellan called this region Tierra del Fuego, Land of Fire. Today, we know that Tierra del Fuego is actually an enormous triangular island buffeted by winds from both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and constantly beset by storms and rapidly changing weather. The Land of Fire is actually the land of storms.

Now that they were in the strait, the pilots found that the sky was rarely clear by day or night, which made it nearly impossible to take accurate measurements either by the stars or by the sun.

The sunlight, when it managed to break through, could be pitiless at this low latitude and appeared to illuminate the landscape with a gray, polarized radiance.

As they continued to sail through the strait, Magellan’s crew observed a solid wall of ice rising majestically before them—two hundred feet, five hundred feet, and more. They were ancient edifices, these glaciers, some of them ten thousand years old, and they looked it, with their grimy faces deeply pockmarked and weathered.

To everyone’s surprise, the glaciers were neither white nor gray, but a light, almost iridescent blue that in the crevasses and seams darkened to a deep azure.

In fact, the bluish cast was determined by the distinctive properties of snow and ice. The surface of snow and ice reflects all light, without preference for any particular color of the spectrum, but the interior handles light differently. Snow acts as a light filter, and treats the spectrum preferentially, scattering red light more strongly than blue. Photons emerging from snow and ice generally have more blue rays than red.

Although the sky was generally overcast, especially at night, it cleared at brief intervals to reveal a dazzling array of constellations competing for attention, with an unnaturally brilliant Milky Way. The familiar—Orion’s belt, the Big Dipper—mingled with the unfamiliar constellations of the Southern Hemisphere, especially the Southern Cross, whose presence reinforced Magellan’s conviction that the Almighty was looking over the entire venture, even here, at the end of the world.

The gales in this region were especially violent and seemingly appeared out of nowhere. The “great storm” of which Pigafetta spoke is called a “williwaw,” and it is peculiar to the strait. A williwaw occurs when air, chilled by the glaciers surrounding the strait, becomes unstable and suddenly races down the mountains with ever-increasing velocity. By the time it reaches the fjords, it creates a squall so powerful that it never fails to terrify and disorient any sailor unlucky enough to be caught in its grip.

Despite the euphoria Magellan felt on discovering the strait, he still faced serious obstacles. Influenced by the maps he had seen in Portugal, Magellan mistakenly conceived of the strait as a single channel running through the huge landmass blocking the route to the Indies, when in fact there was no single strait; instead, he faced a complex array of tidal estuaries snaking through the mountains at the southern limit of the Andes. Instead of a simple shortcut to the Pacific, Magellan had led his fleet into a uncharted maze that would put his navigational abilities to the ultimate test.

The waterways he explored were wide enough—never less than six hundred feet across, and generally more than several miles in width—but still treacherous.

If any of Magellan’s men fell overboard, they would survive in these conditions for ten minutes at the most.

Despite the snow cover lasting for eight months a year, the waterfall-fed vegetation in the strait was suffocatingly lush. Within several feet of the shoreline lurked a dense forest with dozens of types of ferns; windblown, stunted trees; silky moss; and a layer of spongy tundra.

Little light penetrated the thick canopy of leaves to dispel the fertile, peaceful shade within. “So thick was the wood, that it was necessary to have constant recourse to the compass,” wrote the young Charles Darwin when he visited the strait aboard HMS Beagle in 1834.

The strait’s thick vegetation gave the air an intoxicating fragrance and buoyancy. The breezes were scented with a damp mossy odor lightened by the scent of wildflowers, freshened by the cool glaciers, and faintly tangy with the salt from the sea.