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February 7 - February 11, 2022
He dispatched a skiff crowded with ten men under orders to comb the landscape for signs of human life, but they found only a primitive structure sheltering two hundred gravesites. Apparently, a tribe of Fuegian Indians had used the place to bury their dead in warm weather, and then vanished into the perfumed interior.
Though disappointed, Magellan’s scouting party was probably better off avoiding the locals. Three hundred years later, Charles Darwin encountered a canoe bearing tribal members, whose lot had scarcely changed over the intervening centuries. Indeed, Darwin felt that he was peering through eons to the dawn of human society. He judged them “the most abject and miserable creatures I have any where beheld.
As the ships of the fleet glided along the fjords, they experienced only three hours of night, and the extended days allowed them to make up for the time lost in Port Saint Julian.
Estêvão Gomes, reassigned as the pilot of San Antonio, strongly dissented. Now that they had found the strait, he argued, they should sail back to Spain to assemble a better-equipped fleet. He reminded Magellan that they still had to cross the Pacific, and while no one knew how large it was, Gomes assumed it was a large gulf in which they might encounter disastrous storms.
The council was not intended as an exercise in collective decision-making; rather, it was a forum for Magellan to rally his men behind and to prepare them for the challenges that lay ahead—challenges that God alone could help them meet.
Gomes received another blow when Magellan, perhaps sensitive to Gomes’s ultimate goal to supplant him, refused to appoint him captain of San Antonio after the mutiny in Port Saint Julian. Instead, Gomes had to suffer the ignominy of serving as a pilot under the inexperienced but well-placed Álvaro de Mesquita; this was, if anything, a lesser position than that of pilot major of the flagship. More experienced and better qualified, Gomes seethed with resentment at having been passed over, and he transmitted his sense of outrage to San Antonio’s sympathetic crew.
Mesquita was so inexperienced that Gomes shouldered the responsibility for exploring these unknown waters. As a result, he knew the strait better than anyone else in the expedition, the Captain General included, and he was thoroughly unnerved by what he had seen.
Magellan, in this scheme of things, was little more than God’s servant, doing His will. To Gomes, the rebellious rationalist, Magellan’s exhortations sounded like the words of a fanatic who would lead them all to certain death in the name of king and country.
To be fair Gomes was right
“During that period we sent a well-equipped boat [Victoria] to explore the cape of the other sea. The men returned within three days and reported that they had seen the cape and the open sea.” Sighting the Pacific was itself a momentous event, but the excitement of this discovery was overshadowed by the mysterious failure of San Antonio to reappear at the appointed time and place.
At this critical moment, Magellan conferred with Andrés de San Martín, now aboard Trinidad. After consulting the position of the stars and planets, he concluded that San Antonio had indeed sailed for Spain, and worse, her captain, Mesquita, a Magellan loyalist, had been taken prisoner. His vision proved to be remarkably accurate.
Aboard the renegade San Antonio, the situation was more even complicated than Magellan or his astrologer realized. Mesquita, the captain, had attempted to rendezvous with the rest of the fleet, but he failed to locate the other ships in the strait’s confusing network of estuaries. Gomes naturally offered little help in the endeavor.
Guerra’s words sound self-serving, and perhaps they were. He had worked for Cristóbal de Haro, and was rumored to be related to the financier as well. He had shipped out on San Antonio as a mere clerk, but his remarkably high salary, 30,000 maravedís, twenty times greater than an ordinary seaman’s, signaled a much larger role. Guerra’s real mission was to look out for Haro’s interests; in other words, he was a spy.
Exactly when San Antonio tried to rejoin the rest of the fleet—if she ever did—is open to question. The ships’ officers later testified at the inquiry that they returned well before they were expected. If so, why had Magellan failed to locate the missing ship? There were two possibilities. Either she had gotten lost in the strait’s endless estuaries, or the mutineers had seized the ship, sought refuge in a concealed bay or fjord, and slipped out of the strait under cover of darkness for Spain.
Mesquita stubbornly insisted on continuing his search for Magellan, but the growing uncertainty convinced Guerra, Gomes and a few like-minded sailors that the time had come to seize the wayward ship. They swiftly overpowered Mesquita, a deed for which they could pay with their lives.
San Antonio was the largest ship in the fleet, and she carried many of the fleet’s provisions in her hold, so the loss instantly put the other sailors’ food supplies—indeed their very lives—in jeopardy.
it was overrun with thousands of penguins, the “large birds” mentioned by Pigafetta, mating, burrowing, and most of all fouling the entire islet with their droppings, whose penetrating stench not even the brisk, salty air could mask.
By 1527, six years after the expedition’s conclusion, the waterway had earned the name by which it is now known, the Strait of Magellan. For all his pride, Magellan never dared to name the strait after himself; the names he did confer during his journey were either descriptive (Patagonia) or religiously inspired (Cape of the Eleven Thousand Virgins).
Although the men did not realize it, their diet replenished their depleted bodies. The wild herbs they consumed contained vitamin C, which protected them against the depredations of scurvy, at least for a while.
San Martín dared to express what nearly everyone on the voyage whispered: There was great danger ahead, and chances were they would not make it to the Spice Islands, wherever they were; their maps had long since proved to be useless.
At last, the churning, metallic waters of the Pacific came into view, and they realized they had reached the end of the strait. Magellan had done it; he had found the waterway, just as he had promised King Charles. Now that the armada had accomplished this feat, all the arguments for turning back by mid-January were never again discussed.
Even with the mutiny of the San Antonio, and the time spent trying to recover the ship, not to mention the ubiquitous dead ends the strait presented and at least one fierce williwaw, Magellan needed only thirty-eight days and nights to travel from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific.
how much of this accomplishment of navigating the strait derived from Magellan’s skill, and how much could be attributed to plain good luck? Magellan was fortunate that the weather was relatively mild; after the intense williwaw that had menaced his ships, no other squalls surprised them, no glaciers collapsed on them, and the temperature, fluctuating as it does at that time of year between 35 degrees and 50 degrees Fahrenheit, remained within normal bounds, so the men were spared the intense cold they had suffered at Port Saint Julian. Their scouting excursions, as well as the addition of
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Magellan even relied on the taste of seawater to guide the fleet. As the water became fresher, he knew he was traveling inland, and once it turned salty, he realized he was approaching the Pacific on the western side of the strait.
Magellan’s skill in negotiating the entire length of the strait is acknowledged as the single greatest feat in the history of maritime exploration. It was, perhaps, an even greater accomplishment than Columbus’s discovery of the New World, because the Genoan, thinking he had arrived in China, remained befuddled to the end of his days about where he was, and what he had accomplished, and as a result he misled others.
Fearing shoals, Magellan adjusted his navigational technique; instead of gliding through deep fjords, he steered a course in rough water between two rocks later named, with a bitter irony best appreciated by wary sailors, The Evangelists and Good Hope.
The strait they had just left seemed an enchanted refuge by comparison to the ocean they now faced. Darwin, on his journey, found the vista so horrifying that he was moved to comment: “One sight of such a coast is enough to make a landsman dream for a week of shipwreck, peril, and death.”
No matter how great the feat of navigating the strait from one ocean to another, it would have little value unless the armada reached the Spice Islands, wherever they were. No one aboard the fleet’s three remaining ships suspected they were about to traverse the largest body of water in the world to get there.
The scale of the Pacific Ocean was past imagining to Magellan. It encompasses one-third of the earth’s surface, covers twice the area of the Atlantic Ocean, and contains more than twice as much water volume. It extends over a greater area than all the dry land on the planet, more than sixty-three million square miles.
The Pacific had had the same appearance and character for tens of millions of years before Magellan and his men sailed across its surface, yet they knew nothing of these geological wonders. The men of the Armada de Molucca might as well have been sailing across the dark side of the moon.
Until recently, more was known about the surfaces of Mars or Venus than about the depths of the Pacific. Nor does the scientific community agree about the origin of the oceans.
As Magellan’s men journeyed across the Pacific, they slowly and painfully came to realize what everyone knows now: Oceans cover 70 percent of the earth’s surface.
Magellan anticipated a short cruise to the Spice Islands, followed by a longer but untroubled voyage home through familiar waters. He believed that his men had learned from their ordeals. The mutinies had weeded out the faint of heart and the uncooperative. The crew, once numbering 260 men and boys in five ships, was now less than 200 in three vessels: Trinidad, still the flagship of the fleet; Concepción, where Juan Serrano ruled; and Victoria, under Duarte Barbosa’s command. Still, he had no idea of the real challenge that lay ahead, not one of shoals or climate but of distance.
At rest, they observed the diamond-bright stars etched on the canopy of the heavens. Pigafetta turned his ever curious mind to making astronomical observations: “The Antarctic Pole is not so starry as the Arctic. Many small stars clustered together are seen, which have the appearance of two clouds of mist.” Without realizing it, Pigafetta had just recorded an observation of great consequence. These “clouds” are in fact two irregular dwarf galaxies orbiting our own galaxy and containing billions of stars enveloped in a gaseous blanket; they are known today as the Magellanic Clouds.
