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

by Laurence Bergreen

Ptolemy’s omissions inadvertently encouraged exploration because he made the world seem smaller and more navigable than it really was. If he had correctly estimated the size of the world, the Age of Discovery might never have occurred.

Christopher Columbus

Spice Islands

lateen

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.

This provision made Magellan responsible to Cartagena for all commercial decisions.

Implicitly, these new instructions to Cartagena took precedence over the prior arrangement.

As a Portuguese mariner, Magellan was accustomed to secrecy when it came to voyages of discovery; that was the Portuguese way.

Eventually, Magellan gave the Indians a name—Pathagoni, a neologism suggesting the Spanish word patacones, or dogs with great paws, by which he meant to call attention to their big feet, made even larger by the rough-hewn boots they wore. So these were the Bigfeet Indians, according to Magellan, who later gave the name to the whole region, known ever since as Patagonia.

paternoster

Cape of the Eleven Thousand Virgins

They were calls to adventure rather than a set of directions, hypotheses rather than conclusions, provocative geographical cartoons that fed the fantasy of empire.

The deeper the snow and ice, the farther the light must travel, and the darker blue it becomes, just as water appears a deeper blue as it increases in depth.

namely, how to guide a fleet of ships through hundreds of miles of unmapped archipelagos in rough weather.

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.

Not until 1795 did the British Royal Navy finally insist that sailors receive a daily ration of the juice of lemons or limes to combat scurvy, a practice leading to the term “limeys”

Since leaving the western mouth of the strait, Magellan had traveled more than seven thousand miles without interruption: the longest ocean voyage recorded until that time.

By simply following a bird’s trail at the end of the day, when it flew to its nest after a day’s fishing on the open ocean, island navigators could reach land.

nasty weapon consisting of a blade mounted on a shaft with two handles. Properly used, a halberd could slice a man in two. There were at least sixty crossbows, and hundreds of arrows to supply them. To complement the weapons, the fleet carried one hundred sets of armor (rather than the two

This was a curious offer because nothing in Magellan’s charter from King Charles mentioned fighting tribal wars or mass conversions to Christianity; he was supposed to “go in search of the Strait,” demonstrate that the Spice Islands belonged to Spain, and return in ships laden with spices.

By mid-April 1521, Magellan’s trajectory as an explorer reached its zenith.

In Seville no one knew that the Armada de Molucca had successfully navigated the strait, or crossed the immense Pacific Ocean. No one realized how close the survivors were to their ultimate goal, the Spice Islands. Everyone—from King Charles to the bureaucrats in the Casa de Contratación to the recently freed sailors looking for their next ship—assumed that the fleet was lost and the expedition a complete failure. Everyone was wrong.

There were hazards for the Europeans (the islanders might massacre them), and there were hazards for the islanders themselves (the Europeans might take their women or disturb the local balance of power).

Their voyage finally demonstrated what Columbus and so many other explorers had failed to show, that a water route to the Moluccas existed, and that it was possible to reach the East by sailing west.

The distance the armada traveled was fifteen times longer than that covered by Columbus’s first voyage to the New World, and correspondingly more dangerous.

In terms of prestige and political might, the achievement was the Renaissance equivalent of winning the space race—a competition between the world’s two great maritime superpowers, Spain and Portugal, for territory of vital economic and political importance.

In matters of empire, everything had its price.