Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (26 page)

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. The strait largely consisted of a network of fjords, geologic evidence of deep glaciers that still held the surroundings in their icy embrace. At low levels, the glaciers melted into narrow, glistening waterfalls that cascaded across the granite face of the mountains until they emptied into the frigid water. If any of Magellan’s men fell overboard, they would survive in these conditions for ten minutes at the most.

Here and there, along stony gray beaches, lolled families of sea elephants, easily distinguished by their length, about ten feet, their two flippers close to their torpedolike heads, and a broad stabilizing tail lazily patting the sand. Sea elephants could barely get around on land, so they lay at the water’s edge, yawning and stretching. Other indigenous wildlife in the strait included arctic foxes and penguins crowding beaches of their own. Giant black-and-white condors wheeled overhead, their wingspan extending to ten feet. They kept close to the mountain ridges, where they circled in the rising currents of warm air known as thermals. Occasionally, they nested in pairs, patrolling their eyries, appearing at rest more like the vultures they actually were.

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. There were also brightly colored clumps of tiny, hardy berries; they were bitter on the outside, sweet on the inside, their delicate fruit covered with miniature air cushions to protect them from snow. (The crew had to be careful about eating them; although the berries were not toxic, they had a severe laxative effect.) There were even small white orchids blooming in the mud. 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. “In the deep ravines, the death-like scene of desolation exceeded all description; outside it was blowing a gale, but in these hollows, not even a breath of wind stirred the leaves of the tallest trees. So gloomy, cold and wet was every part, that not even the fungi, mosses, or ferns, could flourish.” When he at last worked his way out of the enchanted forest to a summit, Darwin described a view familiar to Magellan’s crew: “irregular chains of hills, mottled with patches of snow, deep yellowish-green valleys, and arms of the sea intersecting the land in many directions. The strong wind was piercingly cold, and the atmosphere rather hazy, so that we did not stay long on top of the mountain.”

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. Like everything else in this region, the very air was alive with mystery and promise. The strait seemed to be a giant natural monastery in which the crew sought refuge, a place of quiet contemplation of the paradoxes of nature on a scale capable of inducing profound humility.

S
ince leaving Port Saint Julian, Magellan had seen no indigenous peoples, but his men remained alert, both for self-protection and the opportunity to barter for provisions. 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. It is believed that these Indians came from Asia thousands of years earlier, and had been on the losing side of battles for land ever since, displaced again and again until they were nearly at the end of the continent, occupying territory no other tribes wanted.

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. . . . These Fuegians in the canoe were quite

naked, and even one full-grown woman was absolutely so. It was raining heavily, and the fresh water, together with the spray, trickled down her body. In another harbour not far distant, a woman, who was suckling a recently-born child, came one day alongside the vessel, and remained there whilst the sleet fell and thawed on her naked bosom, and on the skin of her naked child. These poor wretches were stunted in their growth, their hideous faces bedaubed with white paint, their skins filthy and greasy, their hair entangled, their voices discordant, their gestures violent and without dignity. Viewing such men, one can hardly make oneself believe they are fellow-creatures, and inhabitants of the same world.” Clinching his disgust for the Fuegians, Darwin observed, “Nor are they exempt from famine, and, as a consequence, cannibalism accompanied by parricide.” They were, he judged, “the miserable lord of this miserable land.”

A
s 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. The prospect of successfully negotiating the strait appeared increasingly likely, at least to Magellan. But the conviction was not unanimous, as he discovered when he summoned an officers’ council to discuss the fleet’s future course. He was delighted to hear that they had sufficient provisions to last three months, more than enough, he calculated, to carry them through the strait and to the Moluccas. Encouraged, the captains and pilots indicated they were strongly in favor of pushing on—all but one, that is.

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 Captain General insisted they would continue at all costs, even if they were reduced to eating the leather wrapping their masts, but not everyone shared Magellan’s passionate determination. With his widely acknowledged piloting skills, Gomes had his own supporters among the crew, a situation that infuriated the Captain General. 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’s opposition set the stage for another mutiny, but unlike the previous uprisings, this was not a violent confrontation with flashing swords. It began more insidiously, as a grim debate at the end of the world between two respected rivals.

Gomes was Portuguese, so this time the dispute was not a matter of Spanish-Portuguese rivalry. In fact, Gomes had defected from Portugal with Magellan in 1517. He seemed to be an integral member of Magellan’s tightly knit group of trusted mariners, but Gomes harbored ambitions of his own, and he skillfully leveraged his relationship with Magellan to further his ends. Within a few months of arriving in Seville, he received a pilot’s commission, and immediately afterward began promoting his own Armada de Molucca. He nearly achieved his goal, but then Magellan, with his superior experience and connections, including his advantageous marriage to Beatriz Barbosa, appeared before the king, who promptly forgot all about Gomes. On April 19, 1519, Gomes settled for a commission as Magellan’s pilot major; the appointment only served to whet his appetite for still more power and to encourage his bitterness toward the Captain General under whom he served. The enmity between the two was no secret; even Pigafetta, normally circumspect, was aware of the bitter history: “Gomes . . . hated the Captain General exceedingly, because before the fleet was fitted out, the emperor [King Charles] had ordered that he [Gomes] be given some caravels with which to discover lands, but his Majesty did not give them to him because of the coming of the Captain General.”

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.

Every time Magellan dispatched
San Antonio
on a reconnaissance mission, Gomes, her pilot, became more alarmed by the hazards of the journey. 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. Gomes and his crew were, in Gallego’s assessment, “disgusted with that long and doubtful navigation.”

The dispute between Gomes and Magellan pitted two competing visions of the expedition against each other. Magellan saw it as a divinely sanctioned quest for new worlds, undertaken in the name of the king of Spain, to whom he was, if anything, even more devoted than he had been to the king of his native Portugal. If Magellan succeeded, it would be because God meant him to. This was discovery as revelation, as prophecy, as a high-risk collaboration between God and His favored nation, Spain. 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. The only sane course, in his analysis, would be to return to Spain.

Gomes did not let the matter rest there.

U
nder Magellan’s command,
Trinidad
steadfastly continued the westward exploration of the strait. According to Albo’s log, on October 28, little more than a week after discovering the strait, they tied up at an island guarding the entrance to another bay; this was either Elizabeth Island or Dawson Island. Here the strait extended in two directions, Froward Reach and Magdalen Sound. To choose a course, Magellan dispatched two ships to reconnoiter.
Concepción,
under the direction of Serrano, sailed westward into Froward Reach to Sardine River. Given the paucity of navigational detail supplied by Pigafetta’s diary and Albo’s log, it is difficult to say for certain what the expedition meant by Sardine River; it might have been what is now called Andrews Bay.

Meanwhile,
San Antonio
entered Magdalen Sound. Magellan gave his ships four days to return with their reports, but even after six,
San Antonio
failed to reappear. “We came upon a river which we called the River of the Sardine because there were so many sardines near it,” said Pigafetta of this moment of doubt and confusion, “so we stayed there for days in order to await the two ships”—
Concepción
and
San Antonio.
“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. Magellan had no idea what had become of her. Perhaps she had foundered and lay at the bottom of one of the yawning fjords. Or perhaps she had deserted just when the expedition was on the verge of its great accomplishment.

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. “The ship
San Antonio
would not await
Concepción
because she intended to flee and to return to Spain—which she did,” Pigafetta tersely reported. The long-frustrated mutiny had finally succeeded; even worse, it had taken place when Magellan least expected it.
San Antonio,
and all her crew, had vanished.

A
board 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. During a formal inquiry after the voyage, another usurper, Gerónimo Guerra, insisted that he had deposited papers for Magellan at the precise point where the ships were supposed to meet. These papers would serve as proof of that effort, but they were never found.

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. Had Magellan agreed to return to Spain, Gomes’s alliance with Guerra suggests that the Haro family would have supported the decision; after all, they would have gotten their ships back safe and sound. But King Charles was another matter. At the very least, he would have sent Magellan to jail.