Over the Edge of the World

Chapter III Neverlands

And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he

Was tyrannous and strong:

He struck with his o’ertaking wings,

And chased us south along.

On the tenth of August,” Antonio Pigafetta recorded in his diary, “the fleet, having been furnished with all that was necessary for it and having in the five ships people of divers nations to the number of two hundred and thirty-seven in all, was ready to depart from . . . Seville, and firing all the artillery we set sail with the staysail only.” Pigafetta’s head count probably omitted about twenty crew members also on board the ships. Only Magellan remained behind, making last-minute provisioning arrangements; he would join the fleet shortly before its final departure from Spain.

To reach the Atlantic, the five ships, their colors set, negotiated the sinuous Guadalquivir River, whose hazards immediately tested the pilots’ abilities. Fed by rainwater in winter and melting snows in spring and summer, the Guadalquivir empties into the Gulf of Cádiz. The last forty miles, traversing a seemingly endless stretch of tidal marches known as Las Marismas, presented special perils. Hidden sandbanks, the hulls of shipwrecks, and shallow areas lurked beneath the river’s turbid waters, and occasionally these obstacles visited disaster on an expedition even before it reached the open sea. Pigafetta, new to the problems of navigation, suddenly became alert to the dangers of the Guadalquivir. “There was a bridge over the river by which one went to Seville, which bridge was in ruins, although two columns remained at the bottom of the water. Wherefore you must have practiced and expert men of the country to point out the proper channel for passing safely between these two columns, for fear of striking on them.”

Although defeated and driven from Spain, the Moors had left their indelible marks on the Spanish psyche, landscape, and bloodlines. “Going by this river we passed a place named Gioan de Farax, where there was a great settlement of Moors,” Pigafetta noted of one encampment. The Guadalquivir derived its very name from the Arabic original, Wadi al-Kabir, meaning “great river,” as the Arab rulers of the region designated it. And, as everyone aboard these ships knew, Moorish pirates still patrolled the Spanish coast, looking for ships laden with precious resources and, most of all, with weapons—ships like those of the Armada de Molucca.

A week after leaving Seville, the fleet reached the snug coastal town of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, the final point of departure for the Ocean Sea. “You enter it on the west wind and depart from it on the east wind,” said Pigafetta, repeating the lore he recently learned. On arrival, the crew found a windswept seaport, seemingly poised on the edge of the world, and reverberating with a sense of adventure. Over the centuries, Sanlúcar de Barrameda had witnessed a succession of conquerors, from Roman to Arab to, most recently, King Alfonso X, who claimed it in 1264. In 1498, Christopher Columbus chose it as the departure point for his third voyage to the New World, and Magellan might have chosen the same port to announce that he planned to build on and outdo Columbus’s accomplishments.

Beyond the huddled town lay the churning waters of the Atlantic. To Magellan and his crew, the body of water was known simply as the Ocean Sea, believed to girdle the globe. At the sight of these seething green waters, every sailor’s pulse quickened; their lives depended on conquering this element. Many ships had departed from the Sanlúcar de Barrameda, and some had been fortunate enough to return from distant ports and newly discovered lands, but none had circumnavigated the entire world.

Magellan took command of his fleet just before departure, and made sure that his sailors led a pious existence during what might be their last days on land. “A few days after, the Captain General went along the said river in his boat and the masters of other ships with him,” wrote Pigafetta, “and we remained for some days at the port to hear mass on land at a church named Our Lady of Barrameda near Sanlúcar, where the Captain General ordered all those of the fleet to confess themselves before going farther. In which he showed the way to others. Moreover he would not allow any woman, whoever she might be, to come onto the fleet and to the ships, for many good reasons.”

Magellan’s autocratic style extended beyond religious observance. To stifle dissent, Pigafetta writes, Magellan concealed the ultimate goal of the expedition from his rank-and-file sailors. “He did not wholly declare the voyage that he wished to make, lest the people from astonishment and fear refuse to accompany him on so long a voyage as he had in mind to undertake, in view of the great and violent storms of the Ocean Sea whither he would go.” The assertion needs clarification. As a Portuguese mariner, Magellan was accustomed to secrecy when it came to voyages of discovery; that was the Portuguese way. Yet everyone realized the fleet was bound for the Spice Islands; it was even called the Armada de Molucca. Perhaps Pigafetta meant that Magellan wished to keep his plan to find a strait—a waterway leading to the East—to himself until it was too late for disloyal crew members to desert. Inevitably, the plan meant trouble, because once the fleet encountered storms, then uncharted waters, and finally a search for an unknown strait, the men whom he had hoodwinked into coming along were likely to rise up in rebellion against him.

In the pages of his diary, Pigafetta confided another and far more troubling reason for Magellan’s unusual secrecy: “The masters and captains of the other ships of his company loved him not. I do not know the reason, unless it be that he, the Captain General, was Portuguese, and they were Spaniards and Castilians, which peoples have long borne ill-will and malevolence toward one another.”

To assert his authority over his resentful and contentious captains, Magellan gave strict sailing orders designed to reinforce his unquestioned authority. They were “good and honorable regulations,” in Pigafetta’s words, and consistent with procedures followed by other fleets of the era. “First, the said Captain General desired that his ship should go before the other ships and that the others should follow him; and to this end he carried by night on the poop of his ship a torch or burning fagot of wood, which they called a farol, that his ships should not lose him from sight. Sometimes he put a lantern, at other times a thick cord of lighted rushes, called a trenche, which was made of rushes soaked in water and beaten, then dried by the sun or by smoke.” If the flagship, Trinidad, signaled, the others were to reply; that way, Magellan could tell if his fleet was following him. “And when he wished to change course because the weather changed, or the wind was contrary, or he wanted to reduce speed, he had two lights shown. And if he wanted others to haul in a bonnet (which is a part of the sail attached to the mainsail), he showed three lights. Thus by three lights, even if the weather was good for sailing faster, he meant that the said bonnet be brought in, so that the mainsail could be sooner and more easily struck and furled when bad weather came on suddenly.” Four lights on Trinidad signaled that the other ships should strike sail. If the watchman suddenly discovered land, or even a reef, Magellan would display lights or fire a mortar.

Magellan set a traditional system of watches, an essential precaution. There were to be three: “the first at the beginning of the night, the second at midnight, and the third toward daybreak. . . . And every night the said watches were changed, that is to say, he who had made the first watch made on the morrow the second, and he who had made the second then made the third. And after this manner they changed every night. Then the Captain [General] ordered that his regulations, both for signals and watches, be strictly observed, that their voyage be made with greater safety.”

Magellan’s strict procedures demanded discipline from an inexperienced crew lacking respect for the Captain General. The most innocuous aspect of his standing orders—the requirement that all ships report to Trinidad at dusk—rankled the most because it demonstrated that Magellan, and no one else, served as the leader of the Armada de Molucca.

Leaving the mouth of the Guadalquivir River on September 20, 1519, the five ships of the armada plunged into the Atlantic Ocean. Juan de Escalante de Mendoza, an experienced Spanish seaman, described the exhilaration and frenzy of sailing past Sanlúcar de Barrameda into the Atlantic. “When the hour had arrived in which they had to make sail,” he wrote, “the pilot ordered the men to raise all but one of the anchors and to attach the cable on the last anchor to the capstan . . . and with the yards and sails aloft, he ordered two apprentices to climb the foremast and stand ready to unfurl the sails when and as they were ordered and directed.” Amid the intricately choreographed flurry of activity aboard the ships, officers shouted orders, but their words at this crucial moment sounded more like prayers than commands. “And if the special pilot for the sandbar said that it was time to make sail, the ship’s pilot would call out the following to the two men aloft on the yard: ‘Ease the rope of the foresail, in the name of the Holy Trinity, Father, and Son, and Holy Spirit, three persons in one single true God, that they may be with us and give us good and safe voyage, and carry us and return us safely to our homes!’” With those words ringing in their ears, the sailors hauled the hemp ropes holding anchors, set the sails, and felt the breeze freshen against their faces. The ships picked up speed, and the coastline began to recede; there was no turning back now. It would sustain them all, or it would destroy them all. To reach his goal, Magellan would have to master both the great Ocean Sea and a sea of ignorance.

It was a dream as old as the imagination: a voyage to the ends of the earth. Yet until the Age of Discovery, it remained only a dream. At the time, Europe was deeply ignorant of the world at large. Magellan undertook his ambitious voyage in a world ruled by superstition, populated with strange and demonic creatures, and reverberating with a longing for religious redemption. To the average person, the world beyond Europe resembled the fantastic realms depicted in The Thousand and One Nights, a collection of tales including “The Seven Voyages of Sindbad the Sailor.” Going to sea was the most adventurous thing one could do, the Renaissance equivalent of becoming an astronaut, but the likelihood of death and disaster was far greater. These days, there are no undiscovered places on earth; in the age of the Global Positioning System, no one need get lost. But in the Age of Discovery, more than half the world was unexplored, unmapped, and misunderstood by Europeans. Mariners feared they could literally sail over the edge of world. They believed that sea monsters lurked in the briny depths, waiting to devour them. And when they crossed the equator, the ocean would boil and scald them to death.

Some of the most tenacious ideas about the world at large derived from Pliny the Elder, who died in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. His multivolume, encyclopedic Natural History, rediscovered and widely consulted in the Renaissance, sought to bring together everything that was known about the natural world: mountains, continents, flora and fauna.

Pliny’s chapters on humankind contained a potent mixture of fact and fantasy. He wrote of a tribe known as the Arimaspi, “a people known for having one eye in the middle of the forehead.” He confidently cited other classical authorities, such as Herodotus, who related tales of a “continual battle between the Arimaspi and griffins in the vicinity of the latter’s mines. The griffin is a type of wild beast with wings, as is commonly reported, which digs gold out of tunnels. The griffins guard the gold and the Arimaspi try to seize it, each with remarkable greed.” Pliny meant this vivid description literally, and while it might have generated some skepticism among naturalists of Magellan’s time, it was generally accepted as fact, as was Pliny’s curious description of “forest-dwellers who have their feet turned back behind their leg; they run with extraordinary speed and wander far and wide with the wild animals.” India offered particularly fertile ground for extraordinary creatures. Pliny evoked “men with dog’s heads who are covered with wild beasts’ skins; they bark instead of speaking and live by hunting and fowling, for which they use their nails.” At one time, says Pliny, over 120,000 of these hominids flourished throughout India.

Pliny assured his readers that wonders never ceased in the natural world; the result of his labors was a Ripley’s Believe-It-or-Not catalog tinged with the classics. “That women have changed into men is not a myth,” he wrote. “We find in historical records that . . . a girl at Casinum became a boy before her parents’ very eyes.” To emphasize his point, Pliny claimed to have firsthand knowledge of the phenomenon: “In Africa, I myself saw someone who became a man on his wedding-day.” There was more; he claimed that people in Eastern Europe had two sets of eyes, backward-facing heads, or no heads at all. In Africa, Pliny wrote, lived people who combined both sexes in one body, yet managed to reproduce; people who survived without eating; people with ears large enough to blanket their entire bodies; and people with equine feet. In India, he said, there were people with six hands. These marvelous accounts were subsequently retold by various respected chroniclers and widely credited up through Magellan’s time.

In the open waters of the ocean, lurked even more bizarre creatures, whales and sharks, six-foot-long lobsters and three-hundred-foot-long eels. Sailors had no way of telling which of Pliny’s descriptions were reliable, and which were fantasies.

They were just as ignorant about major landmasses. Only three continents were known to Europeans of the era—Europe, Asia, and Africa—although it was suspected that more would be discovered. The existence of an illusory island, Terra Australis, the South Land, was accepted as fact before and long after Magellan’s voyage. This landmass was said to lurk in the Southern Hemisphere, where its vast size supposedly counterbalanced the continents in the Northern Hemisphere. Highly schematic medieval maps depicted the three known continents as separated by two rivers, the Nile and the Don, as well as the Mediterranean, all of them surrounded by the great Ocean Sea, into which other seas and rivers flowed. This diagram resembled a T inside of an O, so medieval maps of this genre are referred as “T in O” maps. To remain consistent with religious traditions, T in O maps located Jerusalem at dead center, with Paradise floating vaguely at the top. To complicate matters, Asia occupied the Northern Hemisphere of this map, with Europe and Africa sharing the Southern. In some versions of the medieval map, the Ocean Sea flowed out into space. One could not navigate with such maps, or locate points of the compass on it, or plot realistic routes; they offered a conceptual model rather than an actual representation. As such, they were utterly useless to Magellan.

In 1513, only six years before Magellan undertook his circumnavigation, Juan Ponce de León set out to find the Fountain of Youth. Peter Martyr, another trusted authority of the Renaissance, described the Fountain of Youth as “a spring of running water of such marvelous virtue that the water thereof being drunk, perhaps with some diet, makes old men young again.” According to tradition, the fountain was located on the island of Bimini, in the Bahamas. On the strength of his reputation as a soldier, nobleman, and participant in Columbus’s second voyage to the New World, Ponce de León received a commission from King Ferdinand to claim Bimini for Spain. In a fruitless search, Ponce de León explored the Bahamas and Puerto Rico, but his failure to find the Fountain of Youth did not put the myth to rest. As late as 1601, the respected Spanish historian Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas wrote confidently about the fountain’s great efficacy in restoring youth and potency to aging men.

Although his quest seems fanciful and absurd today, Ponce de León was a man of his times. Superstition governed popular impressions, and even scholarly accounts, of the world at large. A work published in 1560 contained descriptions of various sea monsters infesting the oceans. One, known as the Whirlpool, was said to have a human countenance. Another, supposedly sighted in 1531, had hideous scaly skin. There were others: the Satyr of the Sea; the Rosmarus, which rivaled an elephant in size; and the wondrous Socolopendra, with its face of flames. Voyagers across the seas, especially those attempting to circumnavigate the globe, could expect to encounter all these creatures, and more, in the course of their journey.

Even educated people placed credence in fantastic realms on earth, for instance, the persistent belief in the existence of the kingdom of Prester John. It is difficult to overestimate the influence of this fabulous personage, Prester John (“Prester” is an archaic word for presbyter, or priest), on the European imagination during the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. He was part Christian ruler and part Kublai Khan. Despite an enormous number of inconsistencies and improbabilities in the details surrounding Prester John and his realm, his existence was widely believed in for several hundred years. In an era of violent conflict between Christianity and Islam, and unsuccessful Crusades, it was vastly reassuring to the faithful to believe that a sprawling and wealthy Christian outpost existed beyond Europe.

The legend originated in 1165 when a lengthy letter began to circulate among various Christian leaders; as time passed, the letter became more elaborate as anonymous authors added beguiling, utterly fantastic details; so great was its appeal that it became one of the most widely circulated and discussed documents of the Middle Ages, translated into French, German, Russian, Hebrew, English, among other languages, and with the introduction of movable type, it was reprinted in countless editions.

Addressed to Manuel, the Constantinopolitan emperor, and to Frederick, the emperor of the Romans, the letter read, “If you should wish to come here to our kingdom, we will place you in the highest and most exalted position in our household, and you may freely partake of all that we possess. Should you desire to return, you will go laden with treasures. If indeed you wish to know wherein consists our great power, then believe without doubting that I, Prester John, who reign supreme, exceed in riches, virtue, and power all creatures who dwell under heaven. Seventy-two kings pay tribute to me. I am a devout Christian and everywhere protect the Christians of our empire, nourishing them with alms.” As it continued, the letter became overtly symbolic, yet it was taken to be factual: “Our magnificence dominates the Three Indias, and extends to Farther India, where the body of St. Thomas the Apostle rests. It reaches through the desert toward the palace of the rising sun, and continues through the valley of the deserted Babylon close by the Tower of Babel.” By “India,” Prester John, or whoever wrote this missive, meant more than just the Indian subcontinent. During the Middle Ages, India was believed to include a good portion of northeastern Africa. It was an elastic term, and medieval geographers obeyed the convention that there were several Indias, some near, and some far.

Prester John described his kingdom as an enchanted realm, far more luxurious than European countries beaten down by war, plague, famine, and, among less memorialized miseries, the hardships inflicted by the Little Ice Age. In contrast, Prester John boasted of the wonders of his kingdom: “In our territories are found elephants, dromedaries, and camels, and almost every kind of beast that is under heaven. Honey flows in our land, and milk everywhere abounds. In one of our territories no poison can do harm and no noisy frog croaks, no scorpions are there, and no serpents creep through the grass. No venomous reptiles can exist there or use their deadly power. In one of the heathen provinces flows a river called the Physon, which, emerging from Paradise, winds and wanders through the entire province; and in it are found emeralds, sapphires, carbuncles, topazes, chrysolites, onyxes, beryls, sardonyxes, and many other precious stones.”

And there was much more; this mysterious religious leader claimed his dominion reached from Eastern Europe to India and contained satyrs, griffins, a phoenix, and other wonderful creatures. He lived, or so he said, in a palace without doors or windows, built of precious stones cemented with gold.

Prester John’s letter was actually written by imaginative monks toiling in anonymity, and the result begged to be read as a symbolic document, an allegory, or an expression of faith. Yet it was taken as a factual account and diplomatic initiative. Those who read the letter or heard about it wanted to know where Prester John actually lived. By 1177, the letter’s renown had grown to the point where Pope Alexander III issued a reply addressed to the “illustrious and magnificent king of the Indies and a beloved son of Christ,” and pilgrims went in search of the elusive Prester John.

Over time, the letter, like Pinocchio’s nose, grew and grew; copyists embellished the text, adding ingredients to Prester John’s domain. One important interpolation described spices in vivid detail: “In another of our provinces pepper is grown and gathered, to be exchanged for corn, grain, cloth, and leather”—which sounded plausible enough, but then the interpolation took an allegorical twist—“that district is thickly wooded and full of serpents, which are of great size and have two heads and horns like rams, and eyes which shine as brightly as lamps. When the pepper is ripe, all the people come from the surrounding countryside, bringing with them chaff, straw, and very dry wood with which they encircle the entire forest, and, when the wind blows strongly, they light fires inside and outside the forest, so that the serpents will be trapped. Thus the serpents perish in the fire, which burns very fiercely, except those which take shelter in their caves.” In the Age of Faith, the serpents were representative of the devil, which invades the Edenic garden of peppers, and which could be defeated only by the fire of faith.

Generous swaths of the Prester John letter found their way into the two most popular travel books of the Middle Ages: The Travels of Marco Polo and The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, lending credence to the travel accounts and to the Prester John legend.

Polo’s account, the earlier of the two, was written when he was a prisoner of war in Genoa in 1298 and 1299, with the help of a writer of romances known as Rustichello of Pisa. The son of a prominent Venetian merchant, Marco Polo had spent two decades in the East, traveling throughout the Mongol empire and China, and made it as far east as Burma. His father and uncle spent years in exile at the summer court of the Grand Khan, known as Shang-tu, whose kingdom served as the inspiration for Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Xanadu, and eventually they returned to Europe as the khan’s emissaries. Marco Polo had spent much of his youth in their company.

As might be expected of its co-authors, The Travels of Marco Polo is not strictly a travelog, and it is replete with inconsistencies. It has even been suggested that Marco Polo never made it to China, despite his apparently firsthand descriptions of that region. Why did he not mention the Great Wall, for instance, or tea? Although Travels included Polo’s experiences closer to home, enlivened with shrewd observations, the account was embellished with various wonders of the East, notably Prester John, which added to its readability and appeal, even as they compromised its claims to authenticity. To compound the problem, the manuscript was written in a French-Italian dialect that defied easy translation. Nor was there anything like a definitive text; over one hundred manuscripts, all of them different, were in circulation.

Polo, a tireless name-dropper, says he first encountered Prester John by reputation, as the lord of the Tatars, the inhabitants of northern China, who “paid him a tribute of one beast in every ten.” Polo and his collaborator merged the Prester John legend with another figure at least partly inspired by an actual person, his Tatar rival. In 1200, Polo says, Genghis Khan sent word to Prester John to announce that he wished to marry the priest’s daughter. “Is not Genghis Khan ashamed to seek my daughter in marriage?” Prester John exclaimed to the messengers. “Does he not know he is my vassal and my thrall? Go back to him and tell him that I would sooner commit my daughter to flames than give her to him as his wife.” Polo’s collaborator displayed a fanciful touch by explaining that Genghis Khan became so distressed that “his heart swelled within him to such a pitch that it came near to bursting within his breast.” When he recovered, predictably enough, he decided to go to war against Prester John.

The battle—an epic struggle, according to Marco Polo—pitted the largest armies ever assembled on a “wide and pleasant plain called Tenduc, which belonged to Prester John.” This is thought to be Mongolia, but as with so much else to do with Prester John, it is impossible to know for certain. Just before taking up arms, Ghengis Khan asked his astrologers to predict the outcome, and to his delight they announced that he would carry the day. Two days later, the battle began in earnest: “This was the greatest battle that was ever seen. Heavy losses were suffered on both sides; but in the end the fight was won by Ghengis Khan. In this battle Prester John was killed. And from that day he lost his land, which Ghengis Khan continued to subdue.”

Polo adds a curious postscript to the defeat of Prester John and Christianity in China. Tenduc, Polo says, became the home for descendants of both Genghis Khan and Prester John. “The province is ruled by a king of the lineage of Prester John, who is a Christian and a priest and also bears the title ‘Prester John.’ His personal name is George. He holds the land as a vassal of the Great Khan—not all the land that was held by Prester John, but a great part of it. I may tell you that the Great Khans have always given one of their daughters or kinswomen to reigning princes of the lineage of Prester John.” Polo populates Tenduc with all sorts of marvelous creatures; even the biblical Gog and Magog can be found there. Despite these imaginative excesses, The Travels of Marco Polo inspired Europe to conceive of trading with the kingdoms of Asia, and of exploring the world. Many of the sailors on Magellan’s voyage were familiar with it, and at least one brought a copy of Polo’s account along with him.

John Mandeville served as the other great traveler and storyteller of the era. With suave assurance, he deftly mixed accounts from ancient authors with what he claimed were his personal experiences, but Mandeville was actually a compiler rather than a traveler, and he drew much of his material directly from Speculum Mundi, a medieval encyclopedia, which contained extracts from Pliny and Marco Polo, among other authorities. As a finishing touch, he wove long passages from the Prester John letter into his account and passed it off as his own work.

Mandeville told jaw-dropping stories of his pilgrimages to the Holy Land, an unlikely event; he probably never got any farther than a noble’s well-stocked library. He claimed he traversed India, which he said was filled with yellow and green people; visited Prester John’s kingdom, without giving comprehensible directions; and even made it all the way to the borders of Paradise, but failed to enter because he considered himself unworthy. He naturally claimed to have found the Fountain of Youth in the course of his travels, and imbibed three draughts of its life-giving waters: “And evermore since that time I feel me the better and wholer.”

No account of the exotic East would be complete without a discussion of spices, and when it came to this subject, Mandeville skirted close enough to the truth to lure unsuspecting readers into taking his description seriously. He sounded entirely knowledgeable about a “forest” of pepper in a Neverland he called Combar, which might or might not have been based on the Spice Islands or some other actual place. “You must know that pepper grows in the manner of wild vines beside the trees of the forest, so that it can rely on them for support. Its fruit hangs in great clusters, like bunches of grapes; they hang so thick that unless they were supported by other trees, the vines could not carry their fruit. When the fruit is ripe, it is all green like the berries of ivy. They gather the fruit and dry it in the sun, then lay it on a drying floor until it is black and wrinkled.” This account was convincing enough to inspire European merchants and governments to attempt to find the mythical spice.

Sailors setting out to sea with Magellan paid special attention to Mandeville’s unnerving descriptions of powerful magnetic rocks capable of destroying unwary ships, warning of “great sea rocks of the stone that is called adamant . . . which draws . . . iron.” In consequence, “There should pass no ships that had nails of iron there away because of the foresaid stone, for he should draw them to him, therefore they dare not wend thither.” If they did, the magnetic rock would draw the nails from the hulls, and the ships would leak and even sink.

Among other far-fetched tales that Mandeville tried to pass off as fact were talking birds (perhaps he was thinking of parrots); trees that sprout at dawn, bear fruit by midday, and die before dusk; sixty-foot-high cannibals; and women who rejoice at the rebirth of their deceased infants. For good measure, he dusted off the legend of Amazons, but made his account more explicit than those of antiquity. “These women are noble and wise warriors,” he claimed, “and therefore kings of neighboring realms hire them to help them in their wars. This land of Amazons is an island, surrounded by water, except at two points where there are two ways in. Beyond the water live their lovers to whom they go when it pleases them to have bodily pleasure with them.”

This was, in short, a book of marvels. Despite all its improbabilities, Mandeville’s account was taken to be true. It was widely anthologized, and its most blatant inaccuracies excused on the basis that they must have been errors or corruptions of the original text committed by scribes and copyists over the years. His many borrowings from classical authors, rather than being seen as a form of plagiarism, added to his stature as a scholarly authority.

Mandeville argued that it was possible for people to circumnavigate the globe, but he warned, “There are so many routes, and countries, where a man can go wrong, except by special grace of God.” He proposed one man who had accomplished the trick. “He passed India and so many isles beyond India, where there are more than 5,000 isles, and traveled so far by land and sea, girdling the globe, that he found an isle where he heard his own language being spoken,” Mandeville wrote. “He marveled greatly, for he did not understand how that could be. But I conjecture that he had traveled so far over land and sea, circumnavigating the earth, that he had come to his own border; if he had gone a bit further, he would have come to his own district. But after he heard that marvel, he could not get transport any further, so he turned back the way he had come; so he had a long journey!”

Accounts of the natural world circulating throughout Europe were so terrifying and fantastic that François Rabelais, the French friar and physician turned popular author, enthusiastically satirized them in his comic epic Gargantua and Pantagruel, which appeared as a series of books beginning in 1532. Rabelais mocked the unreliable accounts by the revered figures of antiquity with his own farcical version of exotic lands and the strange creatures to be found there. Among his authorities on the world was a blind old hunchback called Hearsay, who possessed seven tongues, each divided into seven parts, and maintained a school. In Rabelais’s hands, this figure becomes a vicious parody of a cosmologist and his entourage of flunkies. “Around him I saw innumerable men and women listening to him attentively, and among the group I recognized several with very important looks, among them one who held a chart of the world and was explaining it to them succinctly. Thus they became clerks and scholars in no time, and spoke in choice language—having good memories—about a host of tremendous matters, which a man’s whole lifetime would not be enough for him to know a hundredth part of. They spoke about the Pyramids, the Nile, Babylon, the Troglodites, the Himantopodes, the Blemmyae, the Pygmies, the Cannibals, the Hyperborean Mountains, the Aegipans, and all the devils—and all from Hearsay.” Rabelais had a serious point to make; he was directing his readers back to the classical Greek concept of autopsis, seeing for one’s self (and the origin of our word “autopsy”). Autopsis stressed the value of firsthand reporting; the next best thing was obtaining a reliable account from an eyewitness with firsthand knowledge.

This was a revolutionary concept in the Age of Discovery, to go see for one’s self, to study the world as it was, not as myths and sacred texts suggested that it should be. And that was exactly what Magellan proposed to do; he would see for himself if there was a water route to the Spice Islands, he would find the strait leading to them if it existed, and then he would report back to King Charles on his findings. So Magellan stood on the knife-edge dividing the ancient and medieval worlds from the modern. His voyage would be a completely practical and empirical approach to discovery. He would go and see for himself: the first-ever global autopsis. That ambition alone made it a daring and significant endeavor. The time was ripe for Magellan and his armada to sweep away a thousand years of accumulated cobwebs. The reign of Hearsay was coming to an end.

Fair weather favored the Armada de Molucca, and gusts carried the black ships southwest to the Canary Islands, off the coast of the western Sahara. “We left Sanlúcar on Tuesday, September twentieth of the said year, laying a course by the southwest wind,” Pigafetta noted. “And on the twenty-sixth of the said month, we arrived at an island of the Grand Canary named Tenerife . . . where we remained three and a half days to take in provisions and other things which we needed.”

For centuries this group of seven volcanic islands (Grand Canary, Fuerteventura, Lanzarote, Tenerife, La Palma, Gomera, and Hierro) had served as a stopover for ships bound to and from the Iberian peninsula. They were known to Pliny, and classical historians may have been referring to the Canaries when they wrote of The Fortunate Islands. Later, a succession of Arab and European voyagers, carried by strong, favorable winds, frequently called on the Canaries to replenish their supplies, convert the islanders, or capture slaves; the islands began to appear on maps in 1341. At the time of Magellan’s arrival, in late September, the Canaries glistened in the waters of the Atlantic.

While there, Pigafetta confirmed an ancient story about the Canaries: “Know that among the other islands that belong to the said Grand Canary, there is one where no drop of water coming from spring or river is found, save that once a day at the hour of noon there descends from heaven a cloud which encompasses a great tree in the said island, then all its leaves fall from it, and from the leaves is distilled a great abundance of water that it seems a living fountain. And from this water the inhabitants of the said place are satisfied, and the animals both domestic and wild.” This observation marked the first time that Pigafetta tested his firsthand experiences against the claims of ancient writers, in this case Pliny, who wrote of a magical fountain in the Canaries with no source. It seemed to Pigafetta that there was a natural source of water, a rain cloud. Though hardly a revolutionary insight, the comment set Pigafetta apart from sages such as Pliny and Marco Polo, who relied on hearsay or the artful blending of hearsay with fact. If Pigafetta had any idea of emulating Polo, he gave up that notion now. Instead of embellishing timeworn legends about the world, he would present phenomena as he observed them with his own eyes. And he would test the legends against what he actually saw and experienced. With this entirely factual approach, Pigafetta broke with a tradition that reached back to antiquity.

During those brief days in the Canaries, Magellan busied himself with the final provisioning of his fleet. He worked quickly—too quickly, as he would later discover to his horror, for the merchants and chandlers of the Canaries, practiced in deception, swindled Magellan by falsifying their bills of lading. They vastly overstated the amount of supplies they sold to the fleet, and what they did sell was in poor condition. This type of cheating was common, and very dangerous to the expeditions whose lives depended on the food acquired in the Canaries. Although Magellan was normally meticulous in preparing the ships, this time he was too trusting of his suppliers.

After three busy days in one of Tenerife’s harbors, Pigafetta wrote, “We departed thence and came to a port called Monterose, where we remained two days to furnish ourselves with pitch, which is a thing very necessary for ships.” While there, Magellan heard disturbing news: The king of Portugal had dispatched not one but two fleets of caravels to arrest him—a drastic measure, but not without precedent. A generation earlier, Manuel’s father had sent ships to intercept Columbus. Magellan also received a secret communiqué from his father-in-law, Diogo Barbosa, warning that the Castilian captains in the Armada de Molucca planned to mutiny at the very first chance. They might even kill Magellan to attain their goal. “Keep a good watch,” Barbosa admonished. The ringleader’s name came as no surprise to Magellan: Juan de Cartagena, the Castilian with blood ties to Bishop Fonseca.

In his reply to Barbosa, Magellan insisted he had accepted command of the fleet, come what may, but he promised that he would work closely with his captains for the good of the fleet and of Spain. Barbosa showed these conciliatory words to the Casa de Contratación, and Magellan won praise for gracious sentiments, at least in the short term. Despite this display of diplomacy, Magellan’s concern about the safety of his fleet, and his own life, could only have increased as he contemplated the Portuguese ships in hot pursuit. Unwilling to give his rebellious captains further cause for alarm, he kept both warnings to himself.

Under the circumstances, Magellan decided that the best course of action was to leave the Canaries immediately. If the Portuguese caravels caught up with Magellan, they would return him in shackles to the Portuguese court, where he would be convicted of treason, tortured, and perhaps executed. Poorly provisioned, but afraid for his life and the welfare of the fleet, Magellan gave the order to raise anchor and set sail at midnight, October 3.

We sailed on the course to the south,” Pigafetta wrote. “Engulfing ourselves in the Ocean Sea, we passed Cape Verde and sailed for many days along the coast of Guinea or Ethiopia, where there is a mountain called Sierra Leone, which is in eight degrees of latitude.”

Magellan ordered the fleet to sail both day and night, attempting to place as much distance as possible between his ships and the Portuguese caravels and to take evasive action by following an unexpected course. He led the fleet southwest, hugging the coast of Africa, rather than west across the Atlantic. From the deck of San Antonio, following closely behind the flagship, Cartagena immediately challenged Magellan’s orders. Why, he demanded, was Magellan following this unusual route?

Follow and do not ask questions, instructed the Captain General.

Cartagena continued to protest, insisting that Magellan should have consulted his captains and his pilots. Was he trying to get them all killed by following this dangerous course? Magellan did not attempt to explain; he simply reminded the other captains to follow, and that they did. The mutiny that he expected to break out any moment failed to materialize, and order reigned aboard the ships, at least for the time being.

For the next fifteen days, the Armada de Molucca ran before the wind; the favorable conditions placated the irritable captains and gave Magellan time to strategize about the best way to avoid his Portuguese pursuers. Although he had seen no evidence of them, he continued to follow the coast of Africa rather than head west. But as they worked their way farther south, the weather turned foul, the winds confused and contrary day after day. They had no reliable nautical charts, no indications of rocks or other hazards that might have been lying in wait, and no idea when their miserable weather would change. Cooking fires were extinguished, the men went without sleep, and life on board the battered vessels became exceedingly precarious. One slip, and a sailor could plunge into the sea without hope of rescue.

The changeable winds blew the ships sideways into the troughs between waves. As the ships were tossed about, their yardarms dipped into the seething water, a prelude to a possible shipwreck. To keep from being dragged under, the captains on several occasions came close to ordering their men to chop down the masts, a desperate measure that would have disabled the fleet once the weather began to clear. Instead, they cleared nearly all their sail, offering bare masts to the relentless wind. “Thus we sailed for sixty days of rain to the equinoctial line,” Pigafetta wrote. “Which was a thing very strange and uncommon, in the opinion of the old people and of those who had sailed there several times before.” They were buffeted “by squalls and by wind and currents that came head on to us so that we could not advance. And in order that our ships should not perish or broach to us (as often happens when squalls come together), we struck the sails. In this manner we did wander hither and yon on the sea.”

Throughout the ordeal, sharks constantly circled the ships, terrifying the crew. “They have terrible teeth,” Pigafetta wrote, plainly aghast at the sight, “and eat men when they find them alive or dead in the sea. And the said fish are caught with a hook of iron, with which some were taken by our people. But they are not good to eat when large. And even the small ones are not much good.”

After weeks of constant, life-threatening storms, several hissing, incandescent globes mysteriously appeared on the yardarms of Magellan’s ship, Trinidad. Saint Elmo’s fire!

Here was a natural phenomenon to rival any fanciful, supernatural apparition cataloged by Pliny or Sir John Mandeville. Saint Elmo’s fire is a dramatic electrical discharge that looks like a stream of fire as it trails from the mast of a ship; it can even play about someone’s head, causing an eerie tingling sensation. The superstitious sailors, always alert to omens, associated the phenomenon with Saint Peter Gonzalez, a Dominican priest who was considered the patron saint of mariners and who had acquired the name Saint Elmo; the “fire” was regarded as a sign of his protection.

This is how Saint Elmo’s fire first appeared to the terrified, storm-tossed crew: It assumed “the form of a lighted torch at the height of the maintop, and remained there more than two hours and a half, to the comfort of us all. For we were in tears, expecting only the hour of death. And when this holy light was about to leave us, it was so bright to the eyes of all that we were for more than a quarter of an hour as blind as men calling for mercy. For without any doubt, no man thought he would escape from that storm.” Once the apparition subsided, some crew members believed that supernatural powers had singled out the Captain General for a special destiny. But their deliverance from the perils of the sea proved brief, and their faith in Magellan’s ability to save them would soon be tested again.

For the moment, Magellan’s official chronicler, Antonio Pigafetta, enjoyed a rare moment of repose and pondered the mysteries of the sea. No monsters with flaming faces menaced the ships; instead, flying fish leaped from the water, and not just a few, but “so great a quantity together that it seemed an island in the sea.” The wonderful sight, half real, half illusion, mesmerized Pigafetta. In the sea below, as in the heavens above, there were marvels and perils beyond comprehension. This was not the world as described by the speculative historians of antiquity and the Middle Ages; it was stranger and richer, and even more dangerous.