Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (18 page)

The next day, the fleet hoisted sail, but without reliable maps to point the way, the ships were in danger of running aground on treacherous shoals—a submerged reef or outcropping of sand. 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. It began with a shudder arresting the ship’s progress. Those aboard the afflicted ship would cry out in dismay, fearing the worst. If the shoal was rocky, it might slice open the hull, and the ship would sink. If it was sandy, or covered with seaweed, it might hold the ship in a death grip. To clear seaweed from the rudder, those few sailors who knew how to swim would enter the water, fearing the appearance of sharks at any moment, dive beneath the ship, and with bursting lungs remove the vegetation with their bare hands. 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.

T
he farther south he went, the more concerned Magellan became that he had accidentally passed the strait. On February 23, he retraced part of his route, and the following day, the black ships reached the expansive mouth of San Matías Gulf, on the coast of Argentina. To Magellan, the gulf appeared far more likely to lead to the strait than the Río de la Plata because the water was deep and blue and chilly. 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. And if they had gone ashore, they would have encountered an animal paradise of foxes, hares, puma, peregrine falcons, owls, flamingos, hairy armadillos, and parrots. But Magellan preferred to anchor offshore, away from danger, as he continued his singleminded quest for the strait.

The fate of the expedition depended on finding it.

Book Two
The Edge of the World

C H A P T E R   V
The Crucible of Leadership

With sloping masts and dipping prow,
As who pursued with yell and blow
Still treads the shadow of his foe,
And forward bends his head,
The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,
And southward aye we fled.

A
fter 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. Few among them had confidence that Magellan could lead them to the edge of the world and beyond with a reasonable chance of survival.

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. He emerged from the ordeal a very different man from the one who had begun the voyage. The Magellan of February teetered on the brink of being murdered by the men he commanded. The Magellan of October was on the way to earning a place in history. In the intervening months, he passed a series of tests that forced him to confront his own limits as a leader and to change his ways, or die.

H
ugging the coast, the fleet spent the last week of February sailing west toward Bahía Blanca, a spacious harbor worthy of investigation. Magellan led his ships in and around the islands of the bay, but found no sign of a strait. As he familiarized himself with the coastline, he became increasingly confident of his navigational skills, and he resumed sailing twenty-four hours a day, staying well offshore at night to avoid rocks and reefs lurking below the dark water. On February 24, the fleet came to another possible opening. “We entered well in,” Albo recorded in his log, “but could not find the bottom until we were entirely inside, and we found eighty fathoms, and it has a circuit of 50 leagues.” Magellan refused to consider this huge bay as anything more than that. His surmise proved correct and saved the fleet days of aimless investigation.

Finally, on February 27, the armada explored a promising inlet with two islands sheltering what appeared to be numerous ducks. Magellan named the inlet Bahía de los Patos, Duck Bay, and carefully explored it to locate an entrance to the strait. He cautiously committed only six seamen to a landing party charged with fetching supplies, mainly wood for fire and fresh water. Fearful of stumbling across warlike tribes that might be prowling in the forest, the landing party confined their activities to a diminutive island lacking in either fresh water or wood but seething with wildlife. On closer inspection, what appeared to be ducks turned out to be something quite different. Pigafetta identified them as “geese” and “goslings.” There were too many to count, he said, and wonderfully easy to catch. “We loaded all the ships with them in an hour,” he claimed, and they were soon salted and consumed by the voracious sailors. From his description, it is apparent that the “geese” were actually penguins: “These goslings are black and have feathers over their whole body of the same size and fashion, and they do not fly, and they live on fish. And they were so fat that we did not pluck them but skinned them, and they have a beak like a crow’s.”

Pigafetta marveled at another beast they encountered, one worthy of Pliny himself and all the more wonderful because it was absolutely real. “The sea wolves of these two islands are of various colors and of the size and thickness of a calf, and they have a head like that of a calf, and small round ears. They have large teeth and no legs, but they have feet attached to their body and resembling a human hand. And they have feet, nails on their feet, and skin between the toes like goslings. And if the animals could run, they would be very fierce and cruel. But they do not leave the water, where they swim and live on fish.”

By “sea wolves” Pigafetta meant the sub-Antarctic sea lion or the sea elephant, usually distinguished by its inflatable snout. Although these mammals spend most of their time in the ocean, diving to depths of over four thousand feet, they occasionally spend relaxing months frolicking onshore in uncannily human family groups, lolling, stretching, yawning, scratching themselves, and peering lazily at their surroundings. Each male keeps a large harem of females, as many as fifteen, and often carries deep scars from fights with other males during the mating season. The adults weigh a thousand pounds, and if butchered properly, their rich meat and blubber could provide abundant food, and their thick, glossy, silvery-gray pelts a sorely needed source of warmth in these frigid latitudes.

The six enterprising seamen crept up on family groups of “sea wolves,” stunned them with clubs, and lugged as many as they could into the longboat. Before the landing party could return to the fleet, a severe storm sprang up. The strong offshore winds blew Magellan’s ships out to sea, stranding the six seamen on the little island. They passed a wretched night fearing that they would either be devoured by the “sea wolves” or die from exposure to the extreme cold.

In the morning, Magellan dispatched a rescue team. When they found only the abandoned longboat, they feared the worst. They carefully explored the island, calling out for their lost crewmates, but succeeded only in scaring the “sea wolves,” several of which they slaughtered. Approaching the creatures, the rescue party came upon the lost men huddled beneath the lifeless “sea wolves,” spattered with mud, exhausted, giving off a dreadful smell, but alive. They had settled next to the creatures to find shelter from the violent storm and enough warmth to sustain them through the night.

A
s if these men had not suffered enough, another storm blasted the island just as they attempted to return to the waiting fleet. They managed to make it back safely to the ships, but the squall was fierce enough that
Trinidad’s
mooring cables parted, one after the other.

Helpless in the storm, pitching wildly, hurling her crew this way and that, the flagship veered dangerously close to the rocks near the shore. Only one cable held fast, and if it gave,
Trinidad
and her men—Magellan included—would all be lost. The sailors prayed to the Virgin and to all the saints they knew. In their abject fear, they promised to make religious pilgrimages on their return to Spain if only they survived this ordeal.

Their prayers were answered when not one but three glorious instances of Saint Elmo’s fire danced on the ships’ yardarms, casting an unearthly light of hope and inspiration. “We ran a very great risk of perishing,” Pigafetta recorded. “But the three bodies of St. Anselm, St. Nicholas, and Saint Clare appeared to us, and forthwith the storm ceased.” The last deity was especially apt, for Saint Clare was considered the patron saint of the blind and was often represented holding a lantern; it was even believed that she could clear up fog and rain. To the religious sailors, the sudden manifestation of these signs was clear evidence that God still watched over them and protected them even in the remotest regions of the globe. As proof, the sole cable protecting them from disaster held until dawn, when the storm finally relented.

Battered by the storm, Magellan sought shelter in a cove, but the weather refused to cooperate. The wind disappeared, and the Armada de Molucca remained becalmed until midnight, when a third storm descended on them, the most destructive yet. The gale lasted three days and three nights, days and nights of freezing, of near starvation, of helplessness in the face of the elements. The fierce wind and seas tore away masts, castles, even poop decks. Through it all, the beleaguered sailors, trapped in disintegrating vessels that threatened to send them to their deaths at any moment, prayed for salvation with a fervor born of desperation.

Once again, their prayers were answered. The five ships rode out the great storm. The damage inflicted by the wind and waves, while serious, could be repaired. Incredibly, no lives were lost, despite all the hazards they had encountered on land and on sea. The Captain General gave the order, and the armada finally set sail.

M
agellan resumed his search for a strait. Now that he had seen how quickly the offshore gales that raged in this region could maim or destroy his fleet, the need for an escape route became more urgent than ever. After several more days at sea, hope appeared in the form of another inviting cove. Magellan sailed into the protected waters, where he was disheartened not to find an inlet. This was merely a bay, but it would protect the fleet from severe storms—or so he thought. Six days later, another protracted tempest proved him wrong.

As before, the heavy weather stranded a landing party already ashore, this time with no “sea wolves” to provide shelter or warmth. Enduring bone-chilling cold, their skin and hair and beards soaked constantly with freezing rain, their fingers and toes numb, the men forced themselves to forage for shellfish in the freezing water. Their hands bleeding, they smashed the shells and survived on the raw flesh until, nearly a week later, they were able to return to the fleet.

L
eaving the harbor, now named the Bay of Toil, the armada resumed its southerly course into even colder weather and the approaching subequatorial winter. The days grew shorter, and each unruly puff of wind darkened the sea and pummeled the sails, threatening to bloom into yet another squall. Finally, Magellan had had enough of exploration; he decided to suspend the search for the strait until the following spring. He turned his attention to finding a safe harbor where the fleet could ride out the approaching cold weather. On March 31, at a latitude of 49° 20', he found it. From his vantage point aboard
Trinidad,
it appeared to be an ideal haven: The harbor was sheltered, and abundant fish punctured the water’s surface, as if in welcome. It was named Port Saint Julian.

The entrance to the port was framed by impressive gray cliffs rising one hundred feet as the harbor quickly contracted into a channel about half a mile in width. Although it offered protection, the narrow inlet experienced tides of over twenty feet and currents of up to six knots; in these conditions, the ships had to anchor themselves carefully and, when necessary, run cables to the shore to secure their positions.

Magellan considered Port Saint Julian a landmark of sufficient importance that he wanted to determine its longitude. He asked his pilots if they could make use of his friend Ruy Faleiro’s techniques. Not possible, they told him. He consulted San Martín, his official astronomer, who tried to accommodate him; he took measurements, consulted with the pilots, and concluded that they might have strayed into Portuguese territory as defined by the Treaty of Tordesillas. The idea appalled Magellan, under orders from King Charles to avoid Portuguese waters and, at the same time, to demonstrate that the Spice Islands lay comfortably within the Spanish realm. Now it appeared the fleet had already sailed beyond the line of demarcation. Magellan realized he might be sailing halfway around the world only to demonstrate the opposite of what he had expected. The matter was potentially so serious, so damning to the entire enterprise, that the pilots deliberately obscured the location of Port Saint Julian on their charts.