Over the Edge of the World

Chapter I The Quest

He holds him with his skinny hand,

“There was a ship,” quoth he.

“Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!”

Eftsoons his hand dropt he.

On June 7, 1494, Pope Alexander VI divided the world in half, bestowing the western portion on Spain, and the eastern on Portugal.

Matters might have turned out differently if the pontiff had not been a Spaniard—Rodrigo de Borja, born near Valencia—but he was. A lawyer by training, he assumed the Borgia name when his maternal uncle, Alfonso Borgia, began his brief reign as Pope Callistus III. As his lineage suggests, Alexander VI was a rather secular pope, among the wealthiest and most ambitious men in Europe, fond of his many mistresses and his illegitimate offspring, and endowed with sufficient energy and ability to indulge his worldly passions.

He brought the full weight of his authority to bear on the appeals of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, the “Catholic Monarchs” of Spain who had instituted the Inquisition in 1492 to purge Spain of Jews and Moors. They exerted considerable influence over the papacy, and they had every reason to expect a sympathetic hear ing in Rome. Ferdinand and Isabella wanted the pope’s blessing to protect the recent discoveries made by Christopher Columbus, the Genoese navigator who claimed a new world for Spain. Portugal, Spain’s chief rival for control of world trade, threatened to assert its own claim to the newly discovered lands, as did England and France.

Ferdinand and Isabella implored Pope Alexander VI to support Spain’s title to the New World. He responded by issuing papal bulls—solemn edicts—establishing a line of demarcation between Spanish and Portuguese territories around the globe. The line extended from the North Pole to the South Pole. It was located one hundred leagues (about four hundred miles) west of an obscure archipelago known as the Cape Verde Islands, located in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of North Africa. Antonio and Bartolomeo da Noli, Genoese navigators sailing for Portugal, had discovered them in 1460, and ever since, the islands had served as an outpost in the Portuguese slave trade.

The papal bulls granted Spain exclusive rights to those parts of the globe that lay to the west of the line; the Portuguese, naturally, were supposed to keep to the east. And if either kingdom happened to discover a land ruled by a Christian ruler, neither would be able to claim it. Rather than settling disputes between Portugal and Spain, this arrangement touched off a furious race between the nations to claim new lands and to control the world’s trade routes even as they attempted to shift the line of demarcation to favor one side or the other. The bickering over the line’s location continued as diplomats from both countries convened in the little town of Tordesillas, in northwestern Spain, to work out a compromise.

In Tordesillas, the Spanish and Portuguese representatives agreed to abide by the idea of a papal division, which seemed to protect the interests of both parties. At the same time, the Portuguese prevailed on the Spanish representatives to move the line 270 leagues west; now it lay 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, at approxi mately 46° 30' W, according to modern calculations. This change placed the boundary in the middle of the Atlantic, roughly halfway between the Cape Verde Islands and the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. The new boundary gave the Portuguese ample access to the African continent by water and, even more important, allowed the Portuguese to claim the newly discovered land of Brazil. But the debate over the line—and the claims for empire that depended on its placement—dragged on for years. Pope Alexander VI died in 1503, and he was succeeded by Pope Julius II, who in 1506 agreed to the changes, and the Treaty of Tordesillas achieved its final form.

The result of endless compromises, the treaty created more problems than it solved. It was impossible to fix the line’s location because cosmologists did not yet know how to determine longitude—nor would they for another two hundred years. To further complicate matters, the treaty failed to specify whether the line of demarcation extended all the way around the globe or bisected just the Western Hemisphere. Finally, not much was known about the location of oceans and continents. Even if the world was round, and men of science and learning agreed that it was, the maps of 1494 depicted a very different planet from the one we know today. They mixed geography with mythology, adding phantom continents while neglecting real ones, and the result was an image of a world that never was. Until Copernicus, it was generally assumed that the earth was at the absolute center of the universe, with the perfectly circular planets—including the sun—revolving around it in perfectly circular, fixed orbits; it is best to conceive of the earth as nested in the center of all these orbits.

Even the most sophisticated maps revealed the limitations of the era’s cosmology. In the Age of Discovery, cosmology was a specialized, academic field that concerned itself with describing the image of the world, including the study of oceans and land, as well as the world’s place in the cosmos. Cosmologists occupied prestigious chairs at universities, and were held in high regard by the thrones of Europe. Although many were skilled mathematicians, they often concerned themselves with astrology, believed to be a legitimate branch of astronomy, a practice that endeared them to insecure rulers in search of reassurance in an uncertain world. And it was changing faster than cosmologists realized. Throughout the sixteenth century, the calculations and theories of the ancient Greek and Egyptian mathematicians and astronomers served as the basis of cosmology, even as new discoveries undermined time-honored assumptions. Rather than acknowledge that a true scientific revolution was at hand, cosmologists responded to the challenge by trying to modify or bend classical schemes, especially the system codified by Claudius Ptolemy, the Greco-Egyptian astronomer and mathematician who lived in the second century A.D.

Ptolemy’s massive compendium of mathematical and astronomical calculations had been rediscovered in 1410, after centuries of neglect. The revival of classical learning pushed aside medieval notions of the world based on a literal—yet magical—interpretation of the Bible, but even though Ptolemy’s rigorous approach to mathematics was more sophisticated than monkish fantasies of the cosmos, his depiction of the globe contained significant gaps and errors. Following Ptolemy’s example, European cosmologists disregarded the Pacific Ocean, which covers a third of the world’s surface, from their maps, and they presented incomplete renditions of the American continent based on reports and rumors rather than direct observations. 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.

Amid the confusion, two kinds of maps evolved: simple but accurate “portolan” charts based on the actual observations of pilots, and far more elaborate concoctions of cosmographers. The charts simply showed how to sail from point to point; the cosmographers tried to include the entire cosmos in their schemes. The cosmographers relied primarily on mathematics for their depictions, but the pilots relied on experience and observation. The pilots’ charts covered harbors and shorelines; the cosmographers’ maps of the world, filled with beguiling speculation, were often useless for actual navigation. Neither approach successfully applied the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas to the real world.

Although it might be expected that pilots worked closely with cosmologists, that was far from the case. Pilots were hired hands who occupied a lower social stratum. Many of them were illiterate and relied on simple charts that delineated familiar coastlines and harbors, as well as on their own instincts regarding wind and water. The cosmologists looked down on pilots as “coarse men” who possessed “little understanding.” The pilots, who risked their lives at sea, were inclined to regard cosmologists as impractical dreamers. Explorers setting out on ocean voyages to distant lands needed the skills of both; they took their inspiration from cosmologists, but they relied on pilots for execution.

Although the Treaty of Tordesillas was destined to collapse under the weight of its faulty assumptions, it challenged the old cosmological ways. On the basis of this fiction, based on a profound misunderstanding of the world, Spain and Portugal competed to establish their global empires. The Treaty of Tordesillas was not even a line drawn in the sand; it was written in water.

Emboldened by the Treaty of Tordesillas, Ferdinand and Isabella looked for ways to exploit the portion of the globe granted to Spain. Success proved elusive: Christopher Columbus’s voyages to the New World all failed to find a water route to the Indies. A generation after Columbus, King Charles I resumed the quest to establish a global Spanish empire. He, or his advisers, recognized that the Indies could provide priceless merchandise, and the most precious commodity of all was spices.

Spices have played an essential economic role in civilizations since antiquity. Like oil today, the European quest for spices drove the world’s economy and influenced global politics, and like oil today, spices became inextricably intertwined with exploration, conquest, imperialism. 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.

Arab merchants traded in spices across land routes reaching across Asia and became adept at boosting prices by concealing the origins of the cinnamon, pepper, cloves, and nutmeg with which they enriched themselves. The merchants maintained a virtual monopoly by insisting these precious items came from Africa, when in fact they grew in various places in India, and China, and especially throughout Southeast Asia. Europeans came to believe that spices came from Africa, when in fact they only changed hands there. To protect their monopoly, Arab spice merchants invented all sorts of monsters and myths to conceal the ordinary process of harvesting spices, making it sound impossibly dangerous to acquire them.

The spice trade was central to the Arab way of life. Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, belonged to a family of prominent merchants, and for many years traded in myrrh and frankincense, among other spices, in Mecca. Arabs developed sophisticated methods of extracting essential oils from aromatic spices used for medical and other therapeutic purposes. They formulated elixirs and syrups derived from spices, including julāb, from which the word “julep” derives. During the Middle Ages, Arab knowledge of spices spread across western Europe, where apothecaries developed a brisk trade in concoctions made from cloves, pepper, nutmeg, and mace. In a Europe starved for gold (much of it controlled by the Arabs), spices became more valuable than ever, a major component of European economies.

Despite the overwhelming importance of spices to their economy, Europeans remained dependent on Arab merchants for their supply. They knew the European climate could not sustain these exotic spices. In the sixteenth century, the Iberian peninsula was far too cold—colder than it is now, in the grip of the Little Ice Age—and too dry to cultivate cinnamon, cloves, and pepper. An Indonesian ruler was said to have boasted to a trader who wanted to grow spices in Europe, “You may be able to take our plants, but you will never be able to take our rain.”

Under the traditional system, spices, along with damasks, diamonds, opiates, pearls, and other goods from Asia, reached Europe by slow, costly, and indirect routes over land and sea, across China and the Indian Ocean, through the Middle East and Persian Gulf. Merchants received them in Europe, usually in Italy or the south of France, and shipped them overland to their final destination. Along the way, spices went through as many as twelve different hands, and every time they did, their prices shot up. Spices were the ultimate cash crop.

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. For those willing to assume the risks, the rewards of an oceanic spice trade, combined with control over the world’s economy, were irresistible.

The lure of spices impelled sober, cautious financiers to back highly risky expeditions to unknown parts of the globe, and enticed young men to risk their lives. In Spain, the best and perhaps the only reason to risk going to sea was the prospect of getting rich in the Spice Islands, wherever they were. If a sailor devoted years of his life to getting there and back, and if he managed to bring home a small sack stuffed with spices such as cloves or nutmeg, legitimately or not, he could sell it for enough to buy a small house; he could live off the proceeds for the rest of his life. An ordinary seaman might attain a modest degree of wealth, but a captain had a right to expect much more than that in the Age of Discovery—not only vast riches and fame, but titles to pass on to his heirs and foreign lands to rule.

Portugal was the first European nation to exploit the sea for spices and the global empire that went along with them. The quest began as early as 1419, when Prince Henry, the third son of João I and his English wife, Philippa, established his court at Sagres, a stark outcropping of rock at the southernmost edge of Portugal. Known as Prince Henry the Navigator, he rarely went to sea himself; instead, he inspired others to conquer the ocean. Portuguese ships faced obstacles so overwhelming, so shrouded in ignorance and superstition, that only extraordinarily confident and accomplished mariners dared to venture into the Ocean Sea, as the Atlantic Ocean was then known.

As a young soldier, Prince Henry had fought against Arabs, and he was determined to drive them from the Iberian peninsula and from North Africa. At the same time, he learned much from his avowed enemy: their trade routes, their science and mapmaking, and most of all, their navigational techniques. When Prince Henry came to Sagres, Europeans knew little about the ocean beyond latitude 27°N, marked by Cape Bojador in West Africa. It was believed that the waters south of this point teemed with monsters, that their storms made them too violent to navigate, and that inescapable fogs would envelop wayward ships. In the face of all these dangers, Prince Henry offered a bold reply, “You cannot find a peril so great that the hope of reward will not be greater.”

In pursuit of his goal, he attracted navigators, shipwrights, astronomers, pilots, cosmographers, and cartographers, both Christians and Jews, to the academy at Sagres, where they cooperated in the enterprise of exploring the world, under Henry’s direction. They designed a new type of ship, the small, maneuverable caravel, distinguished by her triangular lateen sail (the name lateen came from the word “Latin”), borrowed from Arab vessels. Until this time, European vessels such as galleys relied on oarsmen or fixed sails for power. With their shallow draught and movable sails, Henry’s caravels could set a course close to the wind, and they could tack, that is, shift their course to take advantage of the wind from one direction and then from another, zigzagging against the wind toward a fixed point. With their maneuverable sails and impressive seaworthiness, caravels became the vessels of choice for exploration.

Even so, the ocean proved extremely hazardous. Prince Henry sent no less than fourteen expeditions to Cape Bojador within twelve years, and they all failed. He convinced Gil Eannes, a Portuguese explorer, to try once more, and in 1434, Eannes finally accomplished what so many had said was impossible: He sailed safely past Cape Bojador. The following year Eannes, together with Alfonso Gonçalves Baldaya, returned to Cape Bojador; fifty leagues past the cape, they explored a large bay and came upon a caravan of men and camels. Baldaya sailed farther south and collected thousands of sealskins; this was the first commercial cargo brought back to Europe from that part of Africa. On subsequent voyages, Portuguese ships brought gold, animal hides, elephant tusks—and slaves.

Every captain sponsored by Prince Henry was under orders to record the tides, the currents, and the winds, and to compile accurate charts of the coastlines. Voyage by voyage, these charts added to the Portuguese knowledge of the oceans and of the world beyond the Iberian peninsula.

Although Portugal was celebrated for leading Europe into the Age of Discovery, Portuguese kings often frustrated their heroic mariners. In 1488, during the reign of João II, Bartolomeu Dias reached the southernmost point of Africa and rounded what is now known as the Cape of Good Hope; his voyage opened new possibilities for Portuguese trade and conquest. On his return, Dias attempted to claim a reward for his feat, but received practically none. Ten years later, when King Manuel I had succeeded to the throne, Vasco da Gama retraced Dias’s route around the tip of Africa and reached Mozambique on the southeastern coast; there he replenished his supplies and sailed farther east to establish an ocean route to India. Da Gama received a royal appointment as viceroy of India, and King Manuel anointed himself “Lord of Guinea and of the navigation and commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia, and India”—all of it thanks to Vasco da Gama. Across Europe, other monarchs disparaged Manuel as “The Grocer King,” and Vasco da Gama came to believe that he had been inadequately rewarded for his service to the crown. In time he joined the ranks of explorers who became estranged from this vain ruler.

King Manuel’s indifference to those who had risked their lives to advance the cause of the Portuguese empire had much to do with his ingrained fear of rivals within Portugal. Ever since the start of his reign in 1495, he had enjoyed great commercial success as the wealth of the Indies flowed into the royal coffers, thanks to the exploits of da Gama and other Portuguese explorers, all of which the king took as his due. But King Manuel was no adventurer, and he lacked an appreciation beyond the strictly commercial aspects of what his explorers had done for the Portuguese empire. Rather than doing battle himself, he preferred to remain in his palace, faithful to his wife and to the Church, and tending to Portugal’s domestic issues.

Manuel’s harshest policies concerned the Jews of Portugal, who distinguished themselves as scientists, artisans, merchants, scholars, doctors, and cosmographers. In 1496, when King Manuel wished to take the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella as his wife, he was told that he could do so only on condition that he “purify” Portugal by expelling the Jews, as Spain had done four years earlier. Rather than lose this valuable segment of the population, Manuel encouraged conversions to Christianity—forced conversions, in many cases. As “new Christians” (the title fooled no one), Portuguese Jews continued to occupy high positions in the government, and received royal trading concessions, in Brazil especially. Despite these accommodations, anti-Semitism in Portugal led to a massacre of Jews in Lisbon in 1506. Manuel punished those responsible, but the legacy of bitterness lingered, and many Jews left the country for the Netherlands.

Throughout all the turmoil, Portugal retained its ambition to wrest control of the spice trade from the Arabs, and to reach the Spice Islands. In pursuit of this goal, daring, even reckless mariners presented themselves to the king to seek backing for their journeys of exploration to these exotic and dangerous new worlds. Most met with frustration, for the Portuguese court was a place of intrigue, suspicion, double-dealing, and envy.

Among the most persistent supplicants was a minor nobleman with a long and checkered history in the service of the Portuguese empire in Africa: Fernão de Magalhães, or Ferdinand Magellan. According to most accounts, he was born in 1480, in the remote mountain parish of Sabrosa, the seat of the family homestead. He spent his childhood in northwestern Portugal, within sight of the pounding surf of the Atlantic. His father, Rodrigo de Magalhães, traced his lineage back to an eleventh-century French crusader, De Magalhãis, who distinguished himself sufficiently to be rewarded with a grant of land from the duke of Burgundy. Rodrigo himself qualified as minor Portuguese nobility, and served as a sheriff of the port of Aveiro.

Less is known about Magellan’s mother, Alda de Mesquita, and there is room for intriguing speculation. The name Mesquita, meaning mosque, was a common name among Portuguese conversos who sought to disguise their Jewish origins. It is possible that she had Jewish ancestry, and if she did, Ferdinand was also Jewish, according to Jewish law. Nevertheless, the family considered itself Christian, and Ferdinand Magellan never thought of himself as anything other than a devout Catholic.

Even these basic outlines about Magellan’s ancestry are in doubt. In 1567, his heirs began squabbling over his estate, and questions arose over his exact place in the Magalhães family tree. 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. They took on their father’s name, or their mother’s, or even a saint’s name. And some children assumed a grandfather’s name, or their mother’s last name, or still other family names. Ferdinand Magellan’s brother Diogo took on the name de Sousa, from his paternal grandmother’s family. The irregularities make it difficult to determine even today exactly which branch of the Magalhães family tree can rightfully claim the explorer.

At twelve years of age, Ferdinand Magellan and his brother Diogo moved to Lisbon, where they became pages at the royal court; there Ferdinand took advantage of the most advanced education in Portugal, and he was exposed to topics as varied as religion, writing, mathematics, music and dance, horsemanship, martial arts, and, thanks to the legacy of Prince Henry the Navigator, algebra, geometry, astronomy, and navigation. Through his privileged position at court, Ferdinand came of age hearing about Portuguese and Spanish discoveries in the Indies, and he was privy to the secrets of the Portuguese exploration of the ocean. He even assisted with preparing fleets leaving for India, familiarizing himself with provisions, rigging, and arms.

Magellan seemed destined to become a captain himself, but in 1495, his patron, King João, the leader of a faction with only tenuous claims to the throne, suddenly died. João’s successor, Manuel I, mistrusted young Magellan, who had, after all, been allied with the opposition. As a result, the fast-rising courtier found his career stymied. Although he retained his modest position at court, the prospect of leading a major expedition for Portugal seemed to vanish.

Finally, in 1505, after a decade of anonymous service at the palace, Ferdinand and Diogo Magellan received dual assignments aboard a mammoth fleet consisting of twenty-two ships bound for India, all of them under the command of Francisco de Almeida. Ferdinand Magellan spent the next eight years trying to establish a permanent Por tuguese presence in India, dashing from one trading post to another, and from one battle to the next; he survived multiple wounds and, if nothing else, learned to stay alive in a hostile environment.

In this, the first phase of his career abroad, Magellan had displayed remarkable bravery and toughness, but in the end his foreign service proved a mixed adventure. He invested most of his fortune with a merchant who soon died; in the ensuing confusion, Magellan lost most of his assets. He petitioned King Manuel for restitution, but the king refused the request. After all those years of service abroad to the crown, all the dangers he had experienced, and the wounds he had received, his relationship to the court was no better than it had been when he left home years before.

Returning to Lisbon, Magellan, still bristling with ambition, commenced a new phase in his career. Seeking to make himself useful to the crown, he involved himself with the Portuguese struggle to dominate North Africa. In 1513, he seemed to find an ideal opportunity to demonstrate his loyalty and usefulness to the crown when the city of Azamor, in Morocco, suddenly refused to pay its annual tribute to Portugal. The Moroccan governor, Muley Zayam, ringed the city with a powerful, well-equipped army. King Manuel responded to the challenge by sending the largest seaborne force ever to sail for his kingdom: five hundred ships, fifteen thousand soldiers, the entire military might of this small nation.

Among the hordes of soldiers sent to defend the honor of Portugal was Ferdinand Magellan, along with an aging steed, the only mount he could afford on his drastically reduced budget. He rode courageously into battle, only to lose his horse to the Arabs. What started so bravely for Magellan turned into a near disaster, as he barely escaped from the siege with his life. The larger picture was more favorable, as Portugal reclaimed the city, but Magellan remained indignant. He had lost his horse in the service of his country and king! And the Portuguese army was offering him only a fraction of what he considered to be his mount’s true value as compensation.

Displaying a hotheadedness and tactlessness that bedeviled his entire career, Magellan wrote directly to King Manuel, insulting numerous ministers by circumventing their jealously guarded authority, and insisted on receiving full compensation for the horse. Manuel proved no more generous than he had been on the occasion of Magellan’s previous demand for compensation of his lost investment. The new request was swiftly dismissed as a minor nuisance.

Magellan’s reaction was telling; rather than quitting the field of battle in disgust, he stubbornly remained at his post, somehow acquired a new horse, and participated in skirmishes with the Arabs who swooped out of the desert wastes to harass Portuguese soldiers guarding Azamor. Magellan showed himself to be a fearless warrior, engaging in hand-to-hand combat with the enemy on a daily basis. In one confrontation, he received a serious wound from an Arab lance, which left him with a shattered knee and a lifelong limp; it also ended his career as a soldier. With his irrational idealism and loyalty, his wounds, and his unquenchable thirst for battle and righting perceived wrongs, Magellan came to seem like a real-life Don Quixote.

At last, he received a taste of recognition he craved when his service in battle and war wounds earned him a promotion to the rank of quartermaster. The position entitled him to a share of the spoils of war, which proved to be his undoing. In a subsequent battle, Arabs surrendered a immense herd of livestock, over 200,000 goats, camels, and horses. Magellan was among the officers responsible for distributing the spoils in an equitable fashion, and he decided to pay off tribal allies with some of the captured animals. As a result of this transaction, Magellan and another officer were indicted for selling four hundred goats to the enemy and keeping the proceeds for personal gain.

The charges were, on their face, preposterous. Magellan, as a quartermaster, was entitled to his spoils of war, and it was not clear that he received any. He failed to respond to the charges, and without authorization, left Morocco for Lisbon, where he appeared before King Manuel. Magellan did not apologize for his conduct in Morocco, but demanded an increase in the allowance he received as a member of the royal household, his moradia. Making a bad situation even worse, he lectured the king, reminding him that he, Ferdinand Magellan, was a nobleman, and had rendered lifelong service to the crown, and had the wounds to show for it. Nothing but a more generous moradia would suffice to acknowledge his stature, his sense of honor, and his idealism. Jealous rivals whispered behind Magellan’s back that his limp was merely an act designed to elicit sympathy.

King Manuel’s judgment, when it came, was swift and sure: The insolent and foolish Magellan was to return to Morocco immediately to face charges for treason, corruption, and leaving the army without authorization. This he did. After investigating the evidence, a tribunal in Morocco dismissed all charges against him, and he returned to Lisbon clutching a letter of recommendation from his commanding officer. Displaying superhuman stubbornness, Magellan went back to his sovereign king to demand the increased moradia with more vehemence than ever.

Once more, the king refused.

Magellan was entering middle age, with a bad leg and an unfairly tarnished reputation. Short and dark, and teetering on the brink of poverty, he looked nothing like the aristocrat he thought himself to be. And he still yearned to distinguish himself in the service of Portugal, to make a name for himself that would rank with the important figures of the day, the explorers who opened new trade routes for Portugal in the Indies, and in the process became rich themselves. It seemed that Magellan was merely compounding his folly by asking the king who had refused to increase his moradia to back an entire expedition, but the would-be explorer saw matters differently. He was offering the king a scheme, admittedly a bit vague and risky, to fill the royal coffers with the wealth of the Indies.

Acknowledging that he needed help to persuade King Manuel, Magellan brought a prominent personage with him: Ruy Faleiro, a mathematician, astronomer, and nautical scholar. He was, in short, that quintessential Renaissance man, a cosmologist. Documents of the era always refer to Faleiro as a bachiller, in other words, a student (and perhaps also a teacher) at a university. Born in Covilhã, a town in mountainous eastern Portugal, Faleiro was a brilliant but unstable man who impressed his colleagues with his demonic personality; like many scholars of the day, he may have been a converso. He often worked closely with his brother Francisco, an influential scholar in his own right and the author of a well-regarded study of navigation, and it was likely that each Faleiro brother planned to play a major role in the expedition.

Despite the impressive credentials he brought to the venture, Ruy Faleiro had his own troubled history with King Manuel. The king had refused Faleiro’s application to become a “Judiciary Astronomer,” and worse, had appointed a rival to a new chair in astronomy at the University of Coimbra. So when Magellan and Faleiro presented themselves at court with their plan, the king was already prejudiced against both men, the stubborn, defiant Magellan and the mercurial Faleiro, men whose requests he had refused in the past.

By the time Magellan made his case for a voyage, King Manuel, then fifty-one years old, had entered the throes of a personal crisis. He believed that his long reign was coming to an end; his adored wife had recently died in childbirth, and he decided to abdicate in favor of his son. But when the young man proved ungrateful, Manuel abruptly changed his mind, decided to remain on the throne, and arranged to marry his son’s fiancée, Leonor, the twenty-year-old sister of King Charles of Spain. All the while, it was rumored, she continued to have relations with the boy, Prince João, a situation that caused no end of scandal and derision at court. So the Portuguese sovereign whom Magellan petitioned with his ambitious plan was a deeply suspicious, unhappy, and conflicted man—a man determined to keep others from attaining fame and power.

Three times, Magellan asked for royal authorization for a voyage to the Indies to discover a water route to the fabled but little known Spice Islands. Three times, the king, who had disliked and mistrusted Magellan for more than twenty years, refused.

Finally, in September of 1517, Magellan asked if he could offer his services elsewhere, and, to his astonishment, the king replied that Magellan was free to do as he pleased. And when Magellan knelt to kiss the king’s hands, as custom dictated, King Manuel concealed them behind his cloak and turned his back on his petitioner.

The humiliating rejection proved to be the making of Ferdinand Magellan.

After he received the final rebuff from the Portuguese king, he suddenly found direction in his life, and he moved quickly, carried along by his own ambitions and by the tides of history. By October 20, 1517, he had arrived in Seville, the largest city in Andalusia, in southwestern Spain. Ruy Faleiro, and possibly Francisco, joined him there in December, the three of them forming a close-knit team of Portuguese expatriates seeking their fortune in a rowdy and energetic new land. Within days of his arrival, Magellan signed documents formally making him a subject of Castile and its young king, Charles I. No longer was he Fernão de Magalhães; in Spain, he became known as Hernando de Magallanes.

There was ample precedent for Magellan’s emigration to Spain. His boyhood hero, Christopher Columbus, had come to Spain from Genoa to seek backing for the discovery of a route to the Indies, and, after years of delay and frustration, had finally won it from King Charles’s grandparents, Ferdinand and Isabella. Magellan believed that he could do what the Genoese navigator had claimed to do but had never actually accomplished: reach the fabulous Indies by sailing westward across the ocean.

Tensions ran so high between Spain and Portugal that an international incident could result from an expedition following this route. Portugal had long been notoriously secretive about its empire, almost as secretive as the Arabs had been. By an edict of the Portuguese king, announced on November 13, 1504, anyone revealing discoveries or plans for missions of exploration could be executed. 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.

Fortunately, the Spanish developed a different approach to empire building. Obsessive record keepers, given to documenting everything—laws, lineage, finances—they applied the same scrutiny to Magellan’s voyage. Unlike the Portuguese or the Arabs, the Spanish proclaimed their exploits to stake their claim to various parts of the world. Furthermore, the Age of Discovery coincided with the discovery of movable type and the spread of printed books and pamphlets across Europe, supplemented by influential handwritten presentation copies compiled by professional scribes for the libraries of nobility. All of these accounts helped to spread the news of the discovery of the New World, and to reshape maps and popular conceptions of the globe.

Magellan brought with him many of Portugal’s most precious and sensitive secrets: information about secret expeditions, a familiarity with Portuguese activity in the Indies, and an acquaintance with Portuguese navigational knowledge of the world beyond Europe. He was a rare breed, an explorer, schooled in the royal tradition established by Prince Henry the Navigator. But he needed a sponsor.

At eighteen, Charles I, king of Castile, Aragon, and Leon, was keenly aware of his august antecedents. He had preceded Magellan to Spain by only a year, and was as much of a stranger, or more. A Hapsburg, he had come of age in Flanders, drinking beer and speaking Flemish. He was now trying to learn the Spanish language and Spanish customs as quickly as he could. Endowed with a classic Hapsburg physique—tall, fair, with a hugely prominent chin—he towered above most of his subjects. He was trying to grow a beard to cover the broad expanse of his chin, and was on his way to becoming an accomplished horseman. It was said that he even participated in bullfights to display his valor.

His thirst for fame and glory had become apparent as soon as he arrived in Spain, and it was encouraged by his advisers, most of them highly placed officials of the Church who had been in power since the days of Ferdinand and Isabella and who saw in the young king the perfect vehicle for advancing their own ambitions. Less than a year after coming to Spain, Charles was elected king of the Romans, thanks to a great deal of string-pulling by the members of his family. The appointment meant that he would eventually become crowned King Charles V, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, but to receive the title he would have to pay vast sums of money, essentially bribes, to the electors, who were based in Germany, and he looked to the Indies and the New World as a source of revenue to advance his personal ambitions. Explorers such as Magellan could be very useful to a young king in search of glory and in need of money.

The timing of Magellan’s arrival in Spain was auspicious, but his overall prospects were decidedly mixed. Although he possessed specialized knowledge and experience of the vast yet secret Portuguese empire, he was an unknown quantity to the Spanish court and ministers. He spoke Spanish haltingly, and relied on scribes for written communication in that language. He had renounced his loyalty to Portugal, but he remained an outsider in Spain, on probation and under suspicion. In these difficult circumstances, getting the financial backing for his proposed voyage would require a superhuman expenditure of effort and cunning, as well as a generous amount of luck. Spain, in this era, remained a feudal society ruled by a powerful, feared, and corrupt clergy. Bishops’ illegitimate children, often referred to as “nephews” and “nieces,” played prominent roles in public life. Cruelty, hypocrisy, and tyranny imbued the social order in which Magellan now found himself, but for the moment, he prospered by appealing to the Spanish court’s longing to dominate world trade, and by insinuating himself into the country’s power structure.

Soon after arriving in Seville, Magellan became acquainted with Diogo Barbosa, another Portuguese expatriate who had settled in this city fourteen years earlier and was now Knight Commander of the Order of Santiago, among his other distinctions. Diogo’s nephew, Duarte, had sailed for Portugal, and Magellan was probably influenced by Duarte’s accounts of his journey. At the same time, Magellan began to woo Diogo’s daughter Beatriz; the relationship developed very quickly, and they married before the year was out. Suddenly, Magellan had an important sponsor in Seville, as well as a financial stake, because Beatriz brought with her a dowry of 600,000 maravedís. She might have been pregnant at the time of their marriage; the child, named Rodrigo, was born the following year.

Guided by the Barbosa family, Ferdinand Magellan prepared to persuade the powerful Casa de Contratación, or House of Com merce, to allow him to undertake his audacious voyage. Founded in Seville on January 20, 1503, by Queen Isabella, the Casa managed expeditions to the New World on behalf of the crown, and carried out its administrative chores with the bureaucratic zeal for which the Spanish were famous. At the time of its founding, the Casa de Contratación was housed near the Seville shipyards, in the Atarazanas, or arsenal, but to emphasize its authority, Queen Isabella moved it to the royal palace itself, the Alcázar Real. The Casa’s role quickly expanded from collecting taxes and duties to administering all aspects of exploration, including registering cargoes and proclaiming rules for the outfitting of ships and their weapons. Within a few years of its founding, the Casa began giving instructions to captains, and imposing punishments for smuggling, which was ever present. Soon the Casa functioned as a maritime court, adjudicating contract disputes and insurance claims for all voyages to the New World. The Casa even administered cosmography, maintaining and updating the padrón real, or royal chart, which served as a master copy for charts distributed to all ships leaving Spain. By 1508, the Casa acquired a piloto mayor, pilot major or chief pilot, who administered a school of navigation to train navigators and sailors who wished to advance themselves. (The very first piloto mayor was Amerigo Vespucci, who gave his name to the Americas.)

The Casa de Contratación was controlled by one man, who was neither a navigator nor an explorer. Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca, the bishop of Burgos, had served as Queen Isabella’s chaplain and had managed Columbus’s expeditions even before the Casa came into existence. A cold, manipulative bureaucrat who jealously guarded his power, Fonseca made himself essential to all Spanish expeditions to the New World. Anyone wishing Spain’s backing would have to obtain Fonseca’s blessing—which, as legions of explorers would testify, was also a curse.

Columbus and Fonseca despised one another and fought bitterly. Fonseca was forever trying to get Ferdinand and Isabella and their successors to ignore the claims of independent entrepreneurs such as Columbus and to exert complete control over the expeditions that Spain sent to the New World. This meant, of course, that Fonseca would control the expeditions, and reap the full benefits from their trading. In the midst of the dispute, Columbus physically attacked Fonseca’s accountant, kicking and assaulting him as a proxy for Fonseca himself. Nevertheless, Fonseca gradually exerted his will over Columbus, and by the time Magellan appeared on the scene, the balance of power over trading privileges had shifted decisively from the explorer to the crown. Magellan, and others in his position, would have to settle for what the crown granted them—still a fortune beyond imagining—rather than establishing their own foreign trading empires. There could be no expedition to the Spice Islands without the backing of Fonseca and his Casa de Contratación.

When Magellan approached representatives of the Casa de Contratación and declared that he believed that the Spice Islands were located within the Spanish hemisphere, he was telling them exactly what they wanted, indeed, needed to hear. Peter Martyr, a chronicler with access to the highest circles of the Casa, could barely conceal their gloating. “If the affair has a favorable outcome, we will seize from the Orientals and the King of Portugal the trade in spices and precious stones.”

Still, the provisions of the Treaty of Tordesillas posed serious obstacles for the proposed expedition. Members of the Casa failed to see how Magellan could avoid trespassing on Portuguese interests by sailing west until he reached the East. Anticipating this objection, Magellan referred the distinguished members of the Casa to a clause in the Treaty of Tordesillas that allowed Spain or Portugal the freedom of the seas to reach lands belonging to one empire or the other. Such a clause was open to many interpretations, and Magellan might sail into conflict with Portugal if he attempted to take advantage of it.

Then there was the question of Magellan’s nationality. The prospect of a Portuguese leading a Spanish expedition through Portuguese waters made nearly everyone at the Casa de Contratación uneasy; if the Portuguese became aware of the expedition, relations between the two countries might be strained to the breaking point. Yet the Casa’s newest member looked at matters quite differently. Juan de Aranda, an ambitious merchant, took the Portuguese navigator aside and offered to lobby on behalf of the expedition in exchange for 20 percent of the profits. Privately, Magellan resented Aranda’s intrusion into his scheme, but the merchant held out the best hope for keeping the expedition’s prospects alive. And so Magellan agreed to cooperate.

Aranda wrote enthusiastically on behalf of Magellan, only to be reprimanded by the Casa de Contratación, which reminded him that he was not entitled to negotiate the terms of the expedition on his own. Worse, Magellan’s comrade Ruy Faleiro was outraged to hear that Aranda had insinuated himself into the expedition and flew into a tirade so severe that it caused Magellan to back down. There was more to Faleiro’s rage than simple indignation; it was a symptom of his growing mental instability. Aranda, for his part, attempted to apologize to Faleiro, and, despite the violent disagreement, contrived to obtain an audience for Magellan with King Charles in the city of Valladolid in north central Spain. It was here that Ferdinand and Isabella were married, and where Christopher Columbus died, and it now served as the capital city of Castile. And on January 20, 1518, Magellan, along with Ruy Faleiro and Ruy’s brother Francisco, set out from Seville for Valladolid.

Magellan’s arrival in the capital city coincided with a period of instability within the innermost circles of the royal court. Castile’s regent, Cardinal Ximenes de Cisneiros, had just died on his way to assist the inexperienced King Charles, and poisoning was suspected. More than anyone else in Spain, the cardinal had ensured the safety of the newly arrived king, providing 32,000 soldiers to preserve order, but now he was gone, and young Charles sorely missed the prelate’s guiding hand. Instead, he relied on the advice of a group of Flemish ministers for every decision. Guillaume de Croy, Seigneur de Chièvres, perhaps the most able of the lot, had long served as Charles’s tutor, schooled him in the exercise of power, and jealously guarded his authority over the lad. The young king’s inner circle also included Ximenes’s successor, Chancellor Sauvage, and Cardinal Adrian of Utrecht. Despite his subsequent elevation to the papacy as Adrian VI, this cardinal seems to have earned no one’s admiration. Wrote one nineteenth-century historian of Adrian: “Of low extraction, and a person of weak character, his advancement must always be regarded with wonder.” Such were the men on whom an immature king from a foreign culture, speaking a foreign tongue, depended to make decisions concerning affairs of state.

Aranda obtained a meeting for Magellan with the king’s Flemish ministers to consider a proposal to assemble an expedition for the Spice Islands. And Magellan came well armed for what would be the most important meeting of his life. To begin, he offered tantalizing letters from his friend Francisco Serrão, a Portuguese explorer, describing the riches of the Spice Islands.

Serrão’s odyssey began in 1511, when he assumed command of one of three ships, dispatched by the Portuguese viceroy of India and bound for the Spice Islands, using an easterly route. Surviving shipwrecks and pirates, Serrão and several companions arrived at Ternate, in the Spice Islands, the following year. In all likelihood, they were the first Europeans to visit these fabled islands. Serrão carefully cultivated Ternate’s small ruling class, especially its king, and tried to promote trade between Ternate and Portugal, but the brisk transoceanic trade that he expected was slow to materialize. Rather than giving up, Serrão stayed on. Surrounded by the scent of drying cloves, soothed by the attentions of his newly acquired island wife, he wrote beguiling letters to Magellan describing the extravagant beauty and wealth of the Spice Islands and inviting his friend to visit and see for himself. “I have found here a new world richer and greater than that of Vasco da Gama,” he wrote. “I beg you to join me here, that you may sample for yourself the delights that surround me.”

Magellan had every intention of visiting Serrão in the island paradise: “God willing, I will soon be seeing you, whether by way of Portugal or Castile, for that is the way my affairs have been leaning: you must wait for me there, because we already know it will be some time before we can expect things to get better for us.” And when Magellan made a promise, he did everything in his power to keep it.

Significantly, Serrão’s letters placed the Spice Islands far to the east of their true position; he located them squarely within the Spanish hemisphere, as defined in the Treaty of Tordesillas. This error might have been intentional, to disguise the Spice Islands’ location from outsiders, but in any event his geographical legerdemain alleviated Spain’s principal anxiety: Magellan’s expedition to the Spice Islands must not violate the treaty.

To dramatize his mission, Magellan then displayed his slave of long standing, Enrique, who was believed to be a native of the Spice Islands. (This was not quite accurate, but in any event, Enrique could act as an interpreter.) According to one account, Magellan also brought another slave from the Indies, an attractive female from Sumatra who spoke many languages.

After presenting the slaves, Magellan spoke excitedly of his intention to sail along the eastern coast of what is now called South America until the land ended and he would be able to turn west toward the Spice Islands; he invoked the seven years he had spent in the service of Portugal, administering its empire and flourishing spice trade; and, to clinch his argument, he displayed a map or a globe (the wording in the original documents is ambiguous) depicting the route he planned to take. A crucial part of the map was obscured, however: the part that showed a waterway extending through South America toward the Spice Islands. Although Magellan, in his zeal to persuade the king’s ministers to back the expedition, all but gave the strait’s location away, he remained fearful that someone would steal his map and his strategy and launch a rival expedition before he could organize his own.

“Magellan had a well-painted globe in which the entire world was depicted,” wrote Bartolomé de las Casas, a historian and missionary who took part in the meeting. “And on it he indicated the route he proposed to take.” Reliable information about trade routes was so sensitive and precious that governments zealously guarded all maps and charts, which were essential to national security, and for Magellan to display a map likely purloined from Portugal was the equivalent of selling nuclear secrets at the height of the Cold War.

Magellan’s conception of the world he planned to explore was fatally inaccurate. Like most explorers of the Age of Discovery, his ideas about the size of the globe, and location of landmasses, were inspired by Ptolemy. Had Magellan comprehended the size of the Pacific, its currents, storms, and reefs, it is unlikely that he would have dared to mount an expedition. But without the Pacific Ocean to inform his calculations, the estimated length of his route came to only half the actual distance. Magellan confidently predicted that it would take him at most two years to reach the Spice Islands and return to Spain with ships bulging with precious cargo. All he would have to do was find a way to get around or through South America, and he would be at the doorstep of the Indies. This was nearly the same mistake that Columbus had made over and over, during his four voyages. And it was a mistake that would be corrected only at the cost of great suffering and of many lives during the voyage Magellan now proposed.

After making his presentation to the ministers, Magellan was invited to discuss the proposed expedition in greater detail with Fonseca and Las Casas.

“I asked him what way he planned to take,” the historian wrote, “and he answered that he intended to go by Cape Saint Mary, which we call the Río de la Plata, and from thence to follow the coast until he hit the strait.”

Las Casas remained skeptical of Magellan’s belief in the strait. “But suppose you do not find any strait by which you can go into the other sea?” he asked. Magellan told him that if he could not locate the strait, he “would go the way the Portuguese took.” Although Magellan sounded ready to contravene the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas, the king and his advisers were too intrigued to turn him away. “This Ferdinand Magellan must have been a man of courage and valiant in his thoughts for undertaking great things,” Las Casas marveled, “although he was not of an imposing presence because he was small in stature and did not appear in himself to be much, so that people thought they could put it over him for want of prudence and courage.”

In Magellan’s case, appearances were deceiving. His ideas were big enough, and promised to be lucrative enough, to convince King Charles and his powerful advisers to back them.

Immediately after the meetings at Valladolid, the potential co-leaders of the expedition presented a list of demands to the crown; they were couched in respectful language, but they were demands nonetheless. They included an exclusive franchise on the Spice Islands for a full ten years, 5 percent of the rent and proceeds “of all such lands that we would discover,” and the privilege of trading for their own accounts, so long as they paid taxes to the king. They asked to keep any “islands” they discovered for themselves, if they discovered more than six, as well as permission to pass the newly discovered lands on to “our heirs and successors.”

Magellan’s insistence on a ten-year exclusive on voyages to the Spice Islands appeared preposterous in a fast-changing world, but he was concerned that Spain would send duplicate expeditions as soon as his was out of sight of land, expeditions guided by his theories and secrets, expeditions that might succeed if he failed. Magellan was right to insist on this point, although he was powerless to enforce it.

On March 22, 1518, King Charles, from his royal seat in Valladolid, offered Magellan and Faleiro a contract “regarding the discovery of the Spice Islands.” The document was a charter to discover a new world on behalf of Spain. “Inasmuch much as you, Bachelor Ruy Faleiro and Ferdinand Magellan, gentlemen born in the Kingdom of Portugal, wishing to render us a distinguished service, oblige yourselves to find in the domains that belong to us and are ours in the area in the Ocean Sea, within the limits of our demarcation, islands, mainlands, rich spices,” it began, “we order that the following contract with you be recorded.”

In the first clause, King Charles appeared to accede to Magellan’s insistence on a ten-year exclusive: “Since it would be unjust that others should cross your path, and since you take the labors of this undertaking upon yourselves, it is therefore my wish and will, and I promise that, during the next ten years, I will give no one permission to go on discoveries along the same regions as yourselves.” Nevertheless, he did not honor this promise. Just as Magellan feared, King Charles dispatched a follow-up expedition to the Spice Islands only six years after Magellan’s departure from Spain. The Spice Islands were too valuable to entrust to the luck and skill of a single explorer.

King Charles enjoined Magellan and Faleiro to respect Portugal’s territorial rights under the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas: “You must so conduct this voyage of discovery that you do not encroach upon the demarcation and boundaries of the Most Serene King of Portugal, my very dear Uncle and Brother, or otherwise prejudice his interests, except within the limits of our demarcation.” He reminded Magellan of the delicate diplomatic and family situation complicating the rivalry of Spain and Portugal for mastery of the seas and of world trade. Portugal’s sovereign, King Manuel, had married not just one but two of Charles’s aunts, first Isabel and then María. And now he was planning to marry Charles’s sister, Leonor, within a matter of weeks. The family ties, with their complex web of sentiment and formality, kept Spain and Portugal from all-out war with each other, but they did not extinguish the intense rivalry between the two nations; they drove it underground or into the diplomatic realm, where it was no less fierce.

Charles I had every intention of overtaking the elderly king of Portugal. No matter what the language of the contract seemed to say, the impatient young king wished to bend the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas to Spain’s advantage by insisting that the Spice Islands lay within the Spanish hemisphere. And if it was impossible to prove this point, then it was equally impossible to disprove it. To succeed, Magellan’s expedition need only give Spain a reasonable argument for claiming the Spice Islands.

From Magellan’s standpoint, this was a remarkable contract because it gave him nearly everything he had wanted. The grant of lands, for instance, proved more generous than Magellan had any right to expect. “It is our wish and our will that of all the lands and islands that you shall discover, to grant to you . . . the twentieth part, and shall besides receive the title of Lieutenant and Governors of the said lands and islands for yourselves and your sons and heirs in freehold for all times, provided that the supreme [authority] shall remain with Us and with the Kings who come after Us.” Magellan would find his name all over the newly redrawn maps of the world, maps depicting lands that he not only discovered, but possessed: Magellan islands, Magellan lands, entire realms belonging to Ferdinand Magellan and his legitimate male heirs. The world, or at least a significant part of it, could be his.

From Fonseca’s point of view, this was hardly an advantageous contract, for it gave Magellan too much power over the expedition. It would take Fonseca months, but eventually he would have his revenge on Magellan, and exert the control over the expedition that had been denied him in the royal contract.

King Charles also promised Magellan five ships: “two each of 130 tons, two each of 90 tons, and one of sixty tons, equipped with crew, food, and artillery, to wit that the said ships are to go supplied for two years, and the other people necessary.” The fleet would be called the Armada de Molucca, after the Indonesian name for the Spice Islands.

The ships were mostly black—pitch black. They derived their blackness, and their ominous aura, from the tar covering the hull, masts, and rigging, practically every exposed surface of the ship except for the sails. Their sterns rose high out of the water, towering as much as thirty feet over the waves, so high that a man standing on the stern deck seemed to rule the sea itself. Their height exaggerated movement; even in relatively calm water, they tossed the men about like toy figures.

The ships were among the most complicated machines of their day, wonders of Renaissance technology, and the product of thousands of hours of labor by skilled artisans working at their specialized trades. They were relatively small, out of necessity. One of Seville’s limitations as a port was the shallowness of the Guadalquivir River; ships had to be sufficiently small and light to negotiate the narrow waterway to the Atlantic. Thus Magellan’s flagship, Trinidad, weighed 100 tons; San Antonio, which carried many of the provisions, weighed 120 tons; Concepción 90 tons, Victoria 85 tons; and Santiago, to be used for reconnaissance, weighed just 75 tons.

With the exception of Santiago, a caravel, the ships were all classified as naos, a term that simply meant ships. No illustrations of them have survived, so it is difficult to determine exactly how they were configured, but accounts from Magellan’s time mention their daunting stern castles, their multiple decks, and the profusion of obras muertas, or “dead wood,” to ornament the officers’ quarters. Each ship had three masts, one of which carried a lateen sail.

Although King Charles was supposed to pay for Magellan’s ships, according to the contract, he was deeply in debt. To cover the expedition’s cost, the Casa de Contratación turned to a familiar presence in financial circles, Cristóbal de Haro, who represented the House of Fugger, an influential banking dynasty based in Augsburg, Germany. Haro’s name derived from the city of Haro, in north central Spain. Haro (the city) flourished as a center of winemaking, and it also sheltered a community of Jewish goldsmiths and bankers until a civil war broke out in the fourteenth century and drove the Jews from their homes. Many of the persecuted Jews adapted by becoming conversos, adopting Christian-sounding names, Cristóbal de Haro’s ancestors among them.

For years, Haro served as the Fuggers’ man in Lisbon, trading in spices, lending money for secret Portuguese expeditions, and forging friendships with many of the great explorers of the era, including Bartolomeu Dias. His familiarity with secret Portuguese expeditions, or with tantalizing rumors about their findings, gave him privileged information concerning the existence of a strait leading through the American landmass to the Indies—the same possibility that animated Magellan’s furious desire to explore the East. Following a bitter dispute with King Manuel, Haro left Lisbon for Seville, where he renewed his acquaintanceship with Magellan, and combined their enthusiasm for a search for the strait.

For an explorer in need of financial backing, Cristóbal de Haro was the ideal friend; the House of Fugger, for which he worked, had enough money to finance ten expeditions, or more; indeed, it had more money than King Charles. By bringing in Haro, the king and his advisers would be giving up a significant amount of the profits. Given the hazards of the spice trade, and the uncertainty of long ocean voyages, financiers like Haro could be induced to risk their capital on such ventures for only one reason: the lure of extraordinary profits. If successful, or even partly successful, a fleet returning from the Indies could yield a profit of 400 percent; the more pragmatic Haro estimated that Magellan’s expedition could yield a profit of 250 percent. Meanwhile, he advanced money at an interest rate of 14 percent.

The official accounting of the expedition put the cost at 8,751,125 maravedís, including the five ships, provisions, salaries paid out in advance, and fittings for the ships. Magellan’s pay came to 50,000 maravedís, and an additional 8,000 maravedís each month. By royal order, his monthly salary went directly to his wife, Beatriz.

Of the overall cost of the expedition, the king’s share came to 6,454,209 maravedís, much of it provided at high interest by Haro. Although royal documents place Haro’s contribution to the great enterprise at a modest 1,616,781 maravedís, that number is deceptive. Because his backers, the House of Fugger, also financed expeditions for Portugal, they probably concealed the full extent of their contribution by loaning additional money to the king.

In a final piece of official business, King Charles conferred the title of captain on both Magellan and Faleiro. Given the hazards of exploration, it was not unusual for expeditions in the Age of Discovery to have co-captains, but in this case, the arrangement unintentionally sowed the seeds of bitter disputes at sea. The powers granted to the pair were sweeping and unequivocal. “We order the master and boatswains, pilots, seamen, ship boys and pages, and any other persons and officials there may be in the said fleet, whatever persons who are and reside in the said lands and islands to be discovered . . . that they shall regard, accept, and consider you as our Captains of the said fleet. As such, they shall obey you and comply with your orders, under the penalty or penalties which, in our name, you shall impose.” As the language made clear, Magellan and Faleiro had absolute authority at sea. “We authorize you to execute sentence on their persons and goods. . . . If during the voyage of the said fleet there should arise any disputes and conflicts, at sea as well ashore, you shall deliver, determine and render justice with respect to them, summarily and without hesitation nor question of law.”

Magellan could only have marveled at the speed with which his plan to reach the Spice Islands had come together. King Charles risked Spain’s authority and reputation on the expedition, and the backers risked their capital, but Magellan would risk even more: his very life.