More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
May 21 - July 1, 2023
One fathom equals six feet. One Spanish league (legua) equals approximately four miles. One bahar (of cloves) equals 406 pounds. One quintal equals 100 pounds. One cati (a Chinese measurement) equals 1.75 pounds. One braza (of cloth) equals about five and a half feet. One maravedí equals approximately 12 modern cents.
On June 7, 1494, Pope Alexander VI divided the world in half, bestowing the western portion on Spain, and the eastern on Portugal.
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.
The Treaty of Tordesillas was not even a line drawn in the sand; it was written in water.
But spices evoked a glamour and aura all their own. The mere mention of their names—white and black pepper, myrrh, frankincense, nutmeg, cinnamon, cassia, mace, and cloves, to name a few—evoked the wonders of the Orient and the mysterious East.
The global spice trade underwent an upheaval in 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Turks, and the time-honored overland spice routes between Asia and Europe were severed. The prospect of establishing a spice trade via an ocean route opened up new economic possibilities for any European nation able to master the seas.
The difficulties in tracing Magellan’s ancestry arise from the idiosyncrasies of Portuguese genealogy. For example, until the eighteenth century, males usually assumed their father’s last name, but the females often chose other surnames for themselves.
From 1500 to about 1550, not one book concerning Portuguese discoveries was published, at least in Portugal itself. Private individuals, during most of the sixteenth century, were not allowed to possess materials pertaining to the India trade and related subjects. Portuguese charts and maps were regarded as classified information and treated as state secrets. Had Magellan sailed on behalf of his homeland, his voyage around the world might have been lost to history.
Vespucci’s descriptions, for all their charm, were not the elaborately embellished creations of Sir John Mandeville; they were generally reliable accounts looking forward to the Age of Discovery rather than backward to the Age of Faith.
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.
Soon the mainland, hardly more than a smudge on the horizon, disappeared from view, increasing the crew’s sense of isolation and anxiety. If there was ever a time for a monster to appear on the horizon, for the ocean to boil, or for a magnetic island to pull the nails from the hulls of their ships, this was it.
As scurvy claimed one life after another, burials at sea became commonplace. Sailors, many of them suffering from the early stages of scurvy themselves and seeing their own deaths foretold, wrapped the body in a remnant of an old, tattered sail, secured it with rope, and tied cannonballs to the feet. A priest, and on occasion the captain, uttered a brief prayer; two sailors lifted the corpse onto a plank, tilted it, and committed their crewmate’s mortal remains to the hungry sea.
In Magellan’s day, scurvy was a disease new to Europe, a terrible by-product of the Age of Discovery. In 1498, Vasco da Gama’s crew, exploring the African coast for Portugal, suffered the first widely noted outbreak. Da Gama observed that his men developed the telltale swelling of hands, feet, and gums. He also wrote of Arab traders offering oranges to the afflicted sailors, and the men making a miraculous recovery thereafter; the clear implication is that the Arabs, more accustomed to long ocean voyages than their European counterparts, knew the affliction and its cure.
The intense suffering experienced by da Gama’s men, and later by Magellan’s, could have been prevented by a daily dose of one spoonful of lemon juice, for that is the amount of vitamin C necessary to prevent scurvy. In the body, vitamin C, or ascorbic acid, helps to manufacture the enzyme prolyl hydroxylase, which in turn synthesizes a protein collagen used for connective tissues such as skin, ligaments, tendons, and bones, all of which give our bodies tensile strength. A vitamin C deficiency leads to the melting of the collagen fibers and a breakdown in the connective tissues, especially in
...more
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” to refer to British sailors. (At the time, a “lime” meant both lemons and limes.)
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.
Magellan decided to name the archipelago after Lazarus, but twenty-two years later, another European explorer, Ruy Lopez de Villalobos, reached these islands and later named them Las Islas Filipinas—the Philippines—after King Philip of Spain.
Although the Cape of Good Hope was first rounded in 1488 by Bartolomeu Dias and nine years later by Vasco da Gama—both major accomplishments in Portuguese exploration history—it was still considered extremely hazardous and barely navigable even by the most seaworthy of ships and the most experienced of captains. It occupied a nearly mythical place in the Portuguese consciousness as the most fearsome place in the entire world.
This was no mere bookkeeping oversight: Albo, Pigafetta, and the rest of the survivors erred because the international date line did not yet exist. No Western cosmologist or astronomer, not even Ptolemy, had anticipated that a correction would be necessary to compensate for sailing around the globe. It took the first circumnavigation to demonstrate the need for a twenty-four hour gain. By general agreement, the international date line now extends west from the island of Guam, in the Pacific Ocean.
Beyond the profits from spices, the completion of Magellan’s voyage finally gave the Spanish a water route to the Spice Islands, if they wanted it. 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 a sudden reversal of the balance of power, Spain was poised to control the spice trade and, by extension, global commerce.
In a bustling square in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, there is today a small marble plaque mounted high on the stone façade of a well-worn building. The plaque’s tarnished inscription commemorates the eighteen survivors of the first-ever circumnavigation of the globe:
Your Majesty will know best that what we should esteem and admire most is that we have discovered and made a course around the entire rotundity of the world—that going by the occident we have returned by the orient.
By general agreement, the most handsome, complete, and extravagantly illustrated version resides today in the collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. To read this memoir, and to turn its ancient vellum pages, is to be transported instantly five hundred years into the past. Although Pigafetta tells his story more or less in chronological order, he has not constructed a linear narrative; rather, it is a compilation of events, illustrations, translations of foreign tongues, prayers, descriptions, epiphanies, and bawdy asides, all of them heavily
...more
Not until 1580, fifty-eight years after Victoria returned to Seville, did another explorer, Sir Francis Drake, complete a circumnavigation. His voyage took him through the Strait of Magellan. To accomplish the feat, Drake relied on the knowledge so painfully and heroically acquired by the Captain General and his crew.
