Over the Edge of the World

Chapter IV “The Church of the Lawless”

There passed a weary time. Each throat

Was parched, and glazed each eye.

A weary time! a weary time!

How glazed each weary eye,

When looking westward, I beheld

A something in the sky.

Sixty days of furious storms left the ships of the Armada de Molucca in need of repair and ruined a good part of the precious food supply. Magellan found it necessary to reduce rations. Each man received only four pints of drinking water a day, and half that amount of wine. Hardtack, a staple of the sailors’ diet, was also reduced to a pound and a half a day. As with his other decisions, Magellan did not explain why he was reducing the amount of food and drink, and no other decision he could take was as likely to create resentment among the captains and the crew.

Once the gales abated, the battered black ships drifted into equatorial calms. As the sails luffed lamely amid rising temperatures, the ships rode helplessly in the water. The rebellious Spanish captains, with time on their hands, resumed plotting against the Captain General. They avoided overt violence on this occasion; rather, they displayed a pointed lack of regard for the status of a man they considered their social inferior.

Magellan inadvertently set the stage for their mutiny when he reminded his officers that the instructions he had received from King Charles gave him full authority over the fleet. The captain of each ship was to approach Trinidad at dusk to pay his respects to Magellan and to receive orders. Cartagena chose to defy Magellan in a studied manner. When San Antonio approached the flagship, the quartermaster rather than Cartagena spoke up and, worse, he refused to address Magellan by the correct title. Cartagena should have said, “Dios vos salve, señor capitán-general, y maestro y buena campaña.” (“God keep you, sir Captain General, and master and good company.”) Instead, the lowly quartermaster called Magellan “Captain” rather than “Captain General.”

Magellan sharply reminded Cartagena of the proper form of address, but the Castilian captain took the opportunity to insult Magellan again. If he did not approve of San Antonio’s quartermaster offering the ceremonial salute, Cartagena would select a lowly page next time. For several days after that exchange, Cartagena neglected all forms of salute. Magellan had to devise an effective way to handle Cartagena’s defiant attitude or risk losing control over the entire fleet.

At this tense moment, a new crisis erupted aboard Victoria. Magellan learned that Victoria’s master, a Sicilian named Antonio Salamón, had been discovered sodomizing a cabin boy, Antonio Ginovés. There was no question as to whether the incident had taken place, because the two had been caught in flagrante delicto; the question was what to do about it.

Under Spanish law, homosexuality was punishable by death. Spanish authorities and the Catholic Church condemned homosexuality in the harshest language possible, despite its prevalence. As Captain General of the fleet, Magellan had little choice but to take disciplinary action, but he found himself in an impossible predicament, caught between the cruelty of Spanish law and the reality of homosexuality at sea. In practice, homosexuality among sailors confined to ships over long periods of time was inevitable. There are few accounts of captains attempting to punish sailors for this behavior; instead, they simply looked the other way. Magellan took a harsher course of action. He held a court-martial of Salamón, serving as both judge and jury. The outcome of the proceeding was swift, and Salamón was condemned to death by strangulation. The deed was to be carried out several weeks hence, on December 20.

After the hearing, Magellan held a tense meeting with the other captains of the fleet in his cabin; there was Cartagena from San Antonio, Quesada from Concepción, Mendoza from Victoria, and Serrano from Santiago. As Magellan realized, all the captains, except Serrano, were determined to lead a mutiny. Cartagena immediately began attacking Magellan about the eccentric and dangerous course they had been following along the coast of Africa. First Magellan had led them into storms, Cartagena complained, and now he had gotten them trapped in equatorial calms. Cartagena insisted that the only explanation for this bizarre behavior was that Magellan intended to subvert the fleet, because no matter how loyal to King Charles he claimed to be, Magellan’s true loyalty belonged with the king of Portugal.

In his fervor to usurp Magellan, Cartagena had been misled by appearances. In fact, the Captain General had chosen the risky, unorthodox course to avoid the Portuguese caravels pursuing him and was actually doing his best to frustrate Spain’s enemies.

Another resentment fueled Cartagena’s passion for mutiny. He believed that King Charles had appointed the two of them as co-admirals of the fleet. Although Cartagena carried the title inspector general, and had been appointed persona conjunta, King Charles had intended no such power-sharing arrangement. Cartagena had little if any experience as a navigator, certainly had nothing to recommend him as an admiral of the most ambitious ocean expedition Spain ever mounted; rather, he was to serve as a symbol of the fleet’s Spanish identity. His chief qualification, besides his relationship to Archbishop Fonseca, was that he was a Castilian. On that basis, the privileged Cartagena believed he was entitled to share power equally with Magellan. Had Cartagena known the truth, that Magellan was fleeing the Portuguese to save the fleet rather than destroy it, the revelation might have defeated the Castilian’s paranoid logic, but it would not have restrained his unbridled chauvinism and his sense of entitlement.

As a Castilian loyal to his sovereign, Cartagena declared he would no longer take orders from Magellan.

Fully prepared to counter Cartegena’s challenge, the Captain General gave a sign, and Trinidad’s alguacil, or master-at-arms, Gonzalo Gómez de Espinosa, stormed the cabin. Right behind him came two loyalists, Duarte Barbosa and Magellan’s illegitimate son, Cristóvão Rebêlo, all with swords drawn. Magellan leaped at Cartagena, catching the Castilian by the ruff of his shirt, and shoved him into a chair. “Rebel!” Magellan shouted, “this is mutiny! You are my prisoner, in the King’s name.”

At that, Cartagena barked at the other traitorous captains, Quesada and Mendoza, to stab Magellan with their daggers. From the way he spoke, it was apparent that the three of them had plotted to overthrow the Captain General, but now, at the crucial moment, lost their resolve to act.

Seizing the initiative, Espinosa, in his role as alguacil, picked up Cartagena and shoved him out of the captain’s cabin to the main deck, where he was secured to stocks intended for common seamen who had committed minor offenses. The indignity of seeing a Castilian officer subjected to this ignominy was more than Quesada and Mendoza could bear. They pleaded with Magellan to free Cartagena or, failing that, to release him into their custody. They reminded their Captain General that they had demonstrated their loyalty by ignoring Cartagena. They persuaded Magellan that he had nothing to fear from them, and he agreed to free Cartagena on condition that Mendoza confine him aboard Victoria. Cartagena was immediately relieved of command.

Had he chosen, Magellan could have convened a court-martial and sentenced Cartagena to death. As Captain General, he would have been within his rights because Cartagena had plotted to kill Magellan: Nothing could be more serious. But Magellan was acutely aware of Cartagena’s privileged position and concerned that executing or severely punishing him would be inflammatory, so for once he erred on the side of caution. The lack of disciplinary action made it a certainty that the irascible Castilian would continue to challenge Magellan until only one of them remained.

With the brief mutiny at an end, Magellan ordered the trumpets aboard the flagship to sound, alerting the other ships, and he announced that henceforth, San Antonio would be commanded by Antonio de Coca.

Stripped of his command, and having learned nothing from the experience of his failed mutiny, Cartagena grew intensely resentful of his inexperienced replacement. From that moment, he burned with desire for revenge against Magellan, no matter what the cost to the expedition, and as Fonseca’s son, Cartagena had power to make great trouble. Of all the perils that Magellan faced on the journey’s first leg, the greatest was Cartagena’s treachery.

With Cartagena removed from power, at least temporarily, Magellan turned his attention to his long-delayed crossing of the Atlantic. For three weeks in late October and November, the fleet headed south, vainly awaiting favorable winds. At last the sails began to fill, and Magellan ordered the ships to set a southwesterly course toward Rio de Janeiro. Learning that Concepción’s pilot, João Lopes Carvalho, had visited Rio several years before on an earlier expedition, Magellan brought him over to Trinidad to serve as pilot. To supplement Carvalho’s expertise, the Captain General carried with him a reliable, though not flawless, map of the Brazilian coast known as the Livro da Marinharia—the Book of the Sea. At about the same time, Francisco Albo began keeping a navigational log intended for use by those following in the wake of the Armada de Molucca.

Neither of these expert pilots knew of the South Equatorial Current, which carried the fleet west of its intended heading. Rather than Rio de Janeiro, the fleet raised Cape Saint Augustine on November 29. Here, Pigafetta relates, the fleet paused to take on fresh food and water, and quickly resumed following the Brazilian coast in search of Rio de Janeiro, as the best navigational minds aboard the ships puzzled over why they had veered off course. Albo recorded, “We arose in the morning to the right of St. Thomas, on a great mountain, and south slopes along the coast in the S.W. direction; and on this coast, at four leagues to sea, we found bottom at twenty-five fathoms, free from shoals; and the mountains are separated from one another, and have many reefs around them.” Finally, two weeks later, on December 13, 1519, the fleet entered the lush and gorgeous Bay of Saint Lucy and approached the mouth of the River of January—Rio de Janeiro.

Trinidad went first, slipping past Sugar Loaf and coming quietly to anchor in the harbor. Magellan had arrived in the New World.

In the final days of 1499, Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, a Spanish mariner, first saw the coast of what would later be called Brazil. Pinzón explored the easternmost shores of Brazil and ventured into the mouth of the Amazon River, but Spain failed to maintain a settlement in the newly discovered wilderness. Months later, a Portuguese explorer named Pedro Álvares Cabral claimed the entire region—whose contours were poorly mapped and poorly understood—for his king and country. For tiny Portugal, hemmed in by the Atlantic and by Spain, the newly discovered land contained great commercial and psychological promise, but it lacked quantities of gold and spices. Unsure about how to exploit their find, the Portuguese became lackadaisical in the administration of the distant realm.

For ten years, the newly discovered land went by various names; not until 1511 did “Brazil” first appear on a map, and its origins are something of a mystery. The name might have derived from the Portuguese word brasa, meaning glowing coal, thought to resemble the color of the dark red wood that came to be prized by the Portuguese. Or it might have derived from “bresel wood,” which had been imported to Europe from India since the Middle Ages. The bright red wood was used for cabinets, violin bows, and dyeing. The newly discovered South American variety resembled the traditional Indian tree, but was easier and cheaper to obtain. No matter what its derivation, the name “Brazil” was slow to catch on. In his diary, Pigafetta called the land “Verzin,” derived from the Italian word for brazilwood.

The Portuguese bestowed a valuable brazilwood monopoly lasting ten years on an influential businessman, Fernão de Noronha, in exchange for large fees, and for a while commerce flourished under his management. The coast abounded in the trees; the Portuguese cut them down, sawed the trunks and branches into a manageable size, and stored the wood in a feitoria, or factory, until a ship came to collect and transport the valuable cargo back to Lisbon. (This activity had first brought Concepción’s pilot, João Lopes Carvalho, to Brazil in 1512, aboard a commercial Portuguese ship called Bertoa. The ship soon departed, but Carvalho remained to oversee the factory, a sojourn that lasted four years.)

The Portuguese dealings in brazilwood served as a model of how that country planned to exploit the natural resources of distant lands they claimed for their own. The most unpredictable part of the enterprise proved to be the transatlantic crossings, and even they became increasingly manageable as Portuguese navigators learned the winds and currents affecting their route. In practice, though, the brazilwood trade was too far-flung to administer with any coherence. The French were already helping themselves to brazilwood without interference. The unchallenged presence of the five ships comprising the Armada de Molucca in Brazil showed how porous and vulnerable the Portuguese “monopoly” actually was. Despite Brazil’s importance, the Portuguese did not maintain a permanent settlement there. A small abandoned customshouse served as the sole evidence of the Portuguese occupation. No Portuguese ships occupied the harbor when Magellan arrived, and he felt safe enough to drop anchor.

Although this was his first visit to Brazil, Magellan was familiar with the brilliantly evocative descriptions of the land written by Amerigo Vespucci after his visit in 1502. In his words Brazil and its natural wonders were the closest approximation to Paradise that Magellan was likely to encounter during his entire voyage around the world. “This land is very delightful, and covered with an infinite number of green trees and very big ones which never lose their foliage, and through the year yield the sweetest aromatic perfumes and produce an infinite variety of fruit, gratifying to the taste and healthful to the body,” Vespucci reported. “And the fields produce herbs and flowers and many sweet and good roots, which are so marvelous . . . that I fancied myself to be near the terrestrial paradise.” Vespucci’s descriptions, for all their charm, were not the elaborately embellished creations of Sir John Mandeville; they were generally reliable accounts looking forward to the Age of Discovery rather than backward to the Age of Faith.

Discussing the region’s indigenous tribes, Vespucci wrote out of his own experience: “I tried very hard to understand their life and customs because for twenty-seven days I ate and slept with them.” He assembled a disturbing if tantalizing picture of the Indians whom Magellan and his crew would encounter in Rio de Janeiro: “They have no laws or faith, and live according to nature. They do not recognize the immortality of the soul, they have among them no private property, because everything is common; they have no boundaries of kingdoms and provinces, and no king! They obey nobody, each is lord unto himself; no justice, no gratitude, which to them is unnecessary because it is not part of their code.” Vespucci thrilled readers with gruesome accounts of the Indians’ customs. “These men are accustomed to bore holes in their lips and cheeks, and in these holes they place bones and stones; and don’t believe that they are little. Most of them have at least three holes and some seven and some nine, in which they place stones of green and white alabaster, and which are as large as a Catalan plum, which seems unnatural; they say they do this to appear more ferocious, an infinitely brutal thing.” Even more repugnant—yet fascinating to Vespucci—were their marital and sexual customs. “Their marriages are not with one woman but with as many as they like, and without much ceremony, and we have known someone who had ten women; they are jealous of them, and if it happens that one of these women is unfaithful, he punishes her and beats her.”

More troubling, the Indians practiced cannibalism and human sacrifice in the course of their battles. “They are a warlike people, and among them is much cruelty,” he warned. “Nor do they follow any tactics in their wars, except that they take counsel of old men; and when they fight they do so very cruelly, and that side which is lord of the battlefield bury their own, but the enemy dead they cut up and eat. Those whom they capture they take home as slaves, and if [they are] women, they sleep with them; if [they are] men, they marry them to their girls, and at certain times when diabolic fury comes over them they sacrifice the mother with all the children she has had, and with certain ceremonies kill and eat them, and they did the same to the said slaves and the children who were born of them.” Vespucci concluded, “One of their men confessed to me that he had eaten of the flesh of more of than 200 bodies, and this I believe for certain.”

Vespucci’s Indians were most likely representatives of the vast network of Guaraní tribes. At the time of Magellan’s arrival, there may have been as many as 400,000 Guaraní Indians, grouped by dialects. They occupied huge regions of South America extending all the way to the Andes, and lived communally in huts sheltering about a dozen families each; polygamy was not unknown to them, but it was not common. They were short—rarely more than five feet tall—and, by European standards, stout. The men wore a simple G-string and occasionally a headpiece made of feathers; the women were fully clothed. They were adept at pottery, wood carving, and skillful in their weapons of choice: the bow and arrow and the blowgun. The origin of the name Guaraní, by which they were known to the outside world, is unclear; they called themselves Abá, their word for “men.”

The arrival of the Armada de Molucca in Rio de Janeiro coincided with heavy rains that ended a two-month drought in the region. “The day we arrived the rain began,” Pigafetta noted, “so that the people of the place said that we came from heaven and had brought the rain with us.” The sight of strange ships arriving in the harbor inspired benign rather than warlike feelings in the hearts of the Indians, as Pigafetta later learned. “They thought that the small boats of the ships were the children of the ships, and that the said ships gave birth to them when the boats were lowered to send the men hither and yon.”

Yet the Guaraní Indians disturbed Pigafetta as much as they had Vespucci. Pigafetta had no doubt that the Indians practiced cannibalism, and even contributed a story about the origins of the practice, “an established custom begun by an old woman who had but one son who was killed by his enemies.” Pigafetta continued, “Some days later, that old woman’s friends captured one of the company who had killed her son, and brought him to the place of her abode. She, seeing him and remembering her son, ran upon him like an infuriated bitch and bit him on one shoulder. Shortly afterward, he escaped to his own people, whom he told they had tried to eat him, showing them the marks on his shoulder.” The incident led to a never-ending cycle of attacks, followed by cannibalistic practices, or so Pigafetta claimed. He provided a gruesome description of how it had become part of everyday life: “They do not eat the bodies all at once, but everyone cuts off a piece, and carries it to his house, where he smokes it. Then, every week, he cuts off a small bit, which he eats thus smoked with his other food to remind him of his enemies.”

As Magellan’s ships came to rest, a throng of women—all of them naked and eager for contact with the sojourners—swam out to greet them. Deprived of the company of women for months, the sailors believed they had found an earthly paradise. Any fear they might have had of Indian cannibals melted in the flame of carnal pleasure.

Discovering that the women of Verzin were for sale, the sailors gladly exchanged their cheap German knives for sexual favors. Night after night on the beach the sailors and the Indian women drank, danced, and exchanged partners in moonlit orgies. But there were limits: “The men gave us one or two of their young daughters as slaves for one hatchet or one large knife, but they would not give us their wives in exchange for anything at all. The women will not shame their husbands under any considerations whatever, and as was told us, refuse to consent to their husbands by day, but only by night.” Even so, the sailors found it easy to take advantage of the women, and one of the women, in turn, tried to take advantage of the fleet.

“One day, a beautiful woman came to the flagship, where I was,” Pigafetta wrote, “for no other purpose than to seek what chance might offer. While there and waiting, she cast her eyes upon the master’s room, and saw a nail longer than one finger. Picking it up very delightedly and neatly, she thrust it between the lips of her vagina and, bending down low, immediately departed, the Captain General and I having seen the action.” The reason for the astonishing behavior was the great value the Guaraní Indians placed on metal objects such as nails, hammers, hooks, and mirrors, all of which were considered to be more valuable than gold, more valuable, perhaps, than life itself.

That was not the only disturbing incident involving these women. Under the strain of temptation, one of Magellan’s most trusted allies, Duarte Barbosa, who had offered critical assistance when Cartagena mutinied, all but lost his head in Rio de Janeiro. Falling under the women’s spell and envisioning a life of ease as a trader on these distant shores, he decided to desert the fleet. Magellan learned of the plan and intervened at the last minute, sending sailors to arrest Barbosa onshore and drag him back to the ships. The poor man spent the rest of the layover in Rio de Janeiro confined in fetters aboard his ship, gazing on the women and the self-indulgent life that Magellan—and duty—denied him.

While the sailors pursued their casual liaisons with the Indian women, Magellan transacted business with their men. He took on fresh supplies of water and provisions, trading insignificant trinkets, such as tiny bells that he had brought with him from Seville, for precious food. “The people of this place gave for a knife or fishhook five or six fowls, and for a comb a brace of geese,” Pigafetta wrote. “For a small mirror or a pair of scissors, they gave as many fish as ten men could have eaten. For a bell or a leather lace, they gave us a basketful of . . . fruit. And for a king of playing cards, of the kind used in Italy, they gave me five fowls, and even thought they cheated me.”

The Captain General and the fleet’s three priests intended to maintain strict religious observance throughout the voyage, both to keep their own sailors faithful and to impress the local inhabitants with the power of Christianity, and the impressionable Indians eagerly accepted Magellan’s invitation to attend worship. “Mass was said twice on shore, during which those people remained on their knees with so great contrition and with clasped hands raised aloft that it was an exceedingly great pleasure to behold them,” Pigafetta reported, with obvious gratification and pride. Only later did Magellan learn that the Indians regarded the fleet as harbingers of good fortune because its arrival coincided with rain. Whatever the reason, “Those people could be converted easily to the faith of Jesus Christ,” Pigafetta concluded.

The tranquillity of the fleet’s layover in Rio de Janeiro was interrupted by a traumatic event: carrying out Antonio Salamón’s death sentence on December 20. On the appointed day, Magellan summoned the officers and crew of Trinidad to watch the execution of the man who had committed a “crime against nature.” One of the sailors, never named, his face likely hooded to preserve his anonymity, strangled Salamón in full view of the other men, as a warning. The grisly spectacle, performed with military efficiency, increased resentment among the crew against the Captain General.

There are conflicting accounts concerning Antonio Ginovés, the cabin boy whose life Magellan had spared. In one version, Ginovés suffered such extreme ridicule from other crew members that he threw himself overboard and was lost. And in another, the cabin boy, an object of scorn, was thrown overboard to his death. No matter which version was correct, the double tragedy marked the only time Magellan addressed the subject of homosexuality throughout the voyage. If homosexual relationships flourished again aboard the ships—and they likely did—Magellan decided to follow the tradition of looking the other way.

Five days later, the Armada de Molucca observed its first Christmas away from Spain in the shelter of Rio’s harbor, but there was little time to reflect on the holiday because the men busily prepared the ships for departure. Before weighing anchor, Magellan, together with his trusted pilots and navigators, attempted to determine the coordinates of Rio de Janeiro. Although they lacked the skills and instruments necessary to calibrate longitude with accuracy, they believed they could make useful calculations with the help of Ruy Faleiro’s tables and the advice of Andrés de San Martín, the fleet’s astrologer and astronomer. Not surprisingly, they arrived at an unreliable estimate, but they did make reasonably accurate calculations of the latitudes of several landmarks they had visited. Even Magellan’s best measurements, good to within a degree or two, were not accurate enough to warn subsequent travelers away from hazards such as shoals and rocks; they were, at best, rough approximations.

Just before sailing, Magellan replaced Antonio de Coca, the fleet accountant who had briefly assumed command of San Antonio from Cartagena, with the inexperienced Álvaro de Mesquita. Both de Coca and Cartagena took the shuffle as an insult, because Mesquita had shipped out aboard the flagship from Seville as a mere supernumerary. The deposed captains cried nepotism, which was true, because Mesquita was Magellan’s cousin. The lack of qualified captains in the fleet’s roster would trouble Magellan throughout the voyage. Although he had a surplus of qualified pilots, most were Portuguese, and so excluded from the top ranks of this Spanish expedition. As the voyage continued, these professional, accomplished pilots served resentfully under the figurehead captains.

After two weeks of sensual indulgence, the fleet’s departure from Rio de Janeiro on December 27 became an emotionally charged affair. João Lopes Carvalho, Magellan’s pilot, returning to Brazil after a seven-year absence, happily reunited with his former mistress, who introduced him to their son. Carvalho took an immediate liking to the lad, whom he called Joãozito, and enlisted him as a servant aboard ship. As the fleet prepared to embark, the pilot beseeched Magellan for permission to take along the mother of his child, but Magellan allowed absolutely no women on the ships. Carvalho would sail alone.

Alarmed by the prospect of other liaisons affecting the crew, Magellan ordered an inspection of every inch of every ship for female stowaways. Several were found and swiftly returned to shore. When the fleet finally weighed anchor and sailed away, Indian women followed them in canoes, tearfully pleading with the men from distant shores to stay with them forever.

Resuming a southerly course, the fleet, helped by favorable winds, reached Paranaguá Bay, off the coast of Brazil, by the last day of 1519. Intent on making up for time, Magellan ordered the ships to remain offshore rather than exploring the bay, one of the largest estuaries in the southwest Atlantic. Fully provisioned, the Armada de Molucca sailed on, day and night, until January 8, 1520, when Magellan spied a stretch of shoal extending as far as the eye could see. Concerned about hitting a concealed formation, he gave an order to drop anchor, but only for the night; in the morning, the fleet sailed on.

On January 10, the rolling hills and mountains of the South American coast yielded to barely discernible hummocks and the suggestion of offshore islands. Carvalho declared that they had arrived at Cape Santa María, rumored to be the gateway to the strait. If luck favored the fleet, Magellan could reach his goal ahead of winter storms. It was now summer in these subequatorial regions, and he wanted to take advantage of the relatively mild weather and traverse the strait before the weather turned cold. Just when he believed he was approaching the mouth of the strait, all his maps turned to blank wastes and speculative renderings, and the monotonous barrier of South American coast continued without relief.

Magellan’s hope for a swift completion to the expedition would not be fulfilled.

Five months from Seville, the crew and officers had become familiar with the ships as well as the rigors and deprivations of life at sea. They had learned of the violence of storms, the life-and-death necessity of sounding the bottom, and the limits of the proud vessels in which they sailed over the surface of the limitless sea. The misery of seasickness was at last behind them. There had been no escape from the ordeal; even veteran mariners were vulnerable to its pains. According to folk wisdom, sexual activity increased the likelihood of seasickness, but it was a rare sailor who could resist the opportunity for coupling before setting out on a long voyage.

At sea, sleep became the ultimate luxury, a solace nearly impossible to come by. The crew took naps whenever they could, night or day. Hammocks had yet to be introduced on board ships, so exhausted sailors appropriated a plank or, better still, a sheltered area of the deck where they could sprawl. They eased the wood’s bruising hardness with a straw pallet, and shielded themselves against the cold and wet with heavy blankets. Even then, comfort eluded them. The men never became accustomed to the foul odors brewing aboard their ships. Water seeping into the hold stank despite the efforts to disinfect it with vinegar; animals such as cows and pigs added to the reek, as did the slowly rotting food supply and the sickening smell of salted fish wafting from the hold.

Pests were ubiquitous, an inescapable fact of life at sea. Teredos, or shipworms, bored through the hull, slowly compromising the seaworthiness of the entire vessel, and one ship in Magellan’s fleet eventually disintegrated because of the wretched little creatures. Rats and mice infested every ship, and the sailors learned to live with them and even to play with them. Magellan’s crew might have brought along a domestic creature new to Europe at the time—the cat—to hunt the rodents, following the practice of the day, although no record confirms that they did. It is recorded, however, that the men of the Armada de Molucca were plagued with all manner of lice, bedbugs, and cockroaches. When conditions turned hot and humid, the insects infested the clothing, the sails, the food supply, and even the rigging. The sailors scratched and complained, but they had no defense against the pests. Even worse, weevils invaded the hardtack, and it was further contaminated with the urine and feces of rodents. Crew members with growling stomachs forced themselves to overcome their inhibitions and swallow this disgusting, contaminated provender.

Sailors found it nearly impossible to keep clean; many brought along soap and a rag for washing, but the only available water—seawater—caused itching and irritation. The sailors washed their clothes in seawater as well, with limited results. To keep warm and dry, sailors wore baggy, loosely fitting clothes consisting of a floppy shirt, often with a hood, over which they wore a woolen pullover known as a sayuelo, which was cinched at the waist. Sailors were known everywhere for their floppy, pajamalike pants (zaragüelles), which reached below the knees. Depending on the rank of the sailor, and the money at his disposal, zaragüelles could be made of anything from the cheap coarse linen known as anjeo (after Anjou, in France) to fine wool lined with silk taffeta.

In foul weather, sailors and officers alike donned great blue capes called capotes de la mar; it was a common sight to see a watchman huddled within his cape, with only his head exposed, peering across a storm-tossed deck for hours on end. Sailors protected their heads (and ears) with a woolen cap called a bonete: more than any other article of clothing, the bonete was the mark of a sailor. Magellan brought along a number of caps, mostly in red, to befriend the Indians he expected to encounter along his route to the Spice Islands, but most sailors wore a bonete of a more dignified black or blue. Frayed from hard use and harsh conditions, the clothing demanded constant repair, and the sailors learned to become handy with a needle. Many sailors carried knives tucked into their waistbands for safekeeping.

Sailors stored their gear in large chests. In addition to clothes, the chests contained simple wooden plates (useful for hurling during impromptu fights), eating utensils, and a jug to hold the daily ration of wine. The chests frequently contained a supply of playing cards—probably the most popular pastime aboard the ships of the Armada de Molucca—and books.

The Inquisition imposed strict censorship laws, and sailors submitted all books they brought to sea for approval. The surviving records afford a glimpse of the reading habits of these men. Most volumes were devotional—the lives of saints, profiles of popes, accounts of miracles, and prayers to recite. Almost as prevalent (and probably more carefully read) were popular stories of derring-do and chivalry, of knights and damsels and vanquished villains. A few histories found their way aboard these ships, but the more literate sailors favored the most celebrated precedent for their own journey, Marco Polo’s Travels.

Magellan’s crew was overwhelmingly Castilian and Portuguese, but representatives of every major country in western Europe, as well as North Africa, Greece, Rhodes, and Sicily filled the ranks. Their number included alliances of natural enemies: Britons and Basques, Flemish and French, all speaking in mutually unintelligible tongues.

The common language aboard Magellan’s fleet was nautical Castilian, which contained specialized terms for every line, clew, and device to be found aboard the ships. In this idiom Magellan and his captains gave orders to the crew. “Izá el trinquete,” they cried, to raise the foresail; “Tirá de los escotines de gabia,” to haul in the topsail sheets. “Dad vuelta,” uttered with special vehemence, meant put your back into it. And there were many other orders, enough to cover every operation a sailor could be expected to perform. “Dejad las chafaldetas” . . . well the clew lines. Alzá aquel briol . . . heave on that buntline. Levá el papahigo . . . hoist the main course. Pon la mesana . . . set the mizzen. Tirá de los scotines de gabia . . . haul in the topsail sheets. The cry of “Suban dos á los penoles” dispatched two sailors, scampering in tandem up the mast, trying not to look down on the heaving deck as they hauled themselves toward the sky; and the order “Juegue el guimbalate para que la bomba achique” sent more hands below to perform the backbreaking labor of working the pumps until the blasted thing sucked water out of the hold. The bilgewater around the pumps was also the most noxious to be found anywhere on the ship, and sailors retched from the stench. Despite the various hardships involved with operating the pumps, they were an absolute necessity at sea; without them, ships slowly took on water till they sank, and operating them exhausted teams of able-bodied seamen. It was not unheard-of for mariners to collapse and die during the ordeal of working the pump to save a ship.

The sailors had their secular chants, or saloma, for the arduous routine tasks they performed. The men knew them all by heart. If they were hauling the anchor, the chanteyman would shout or perhaps sing the first half of the line, and the others, gripping the rope, would complete the second half. “O dio,” cried the chanteyman, “Ayuta noy,” the men replied in unison. “O que somo,” he sang out; “Servi soy” came the reply. “O voleamo . . . Ben servir.” And so on until the order came to make fast the line, and the men fell out to catch their breaths.

The men quickly left behind the identities they had maintained on land for those imposed on them at sea. No longer did it matter if they were Castilians, Greeks, Portuguese, or Genoese; life aboard ship was lived according to a rigid social structure segregating men who nonetheless lived in extremely close quarters and who depended on each other for their survival.

A strict division of labor ruled over all. At the bottom were the pages, assigned to the ships in pairs. Many pages were mere children, as young as eight years old; none were older than fifteen. They were commonly orphans. Not all pages were created equal. Some had been virtually kidnapped from the quays of Seville and pressed into service; if they had not been on ships, they would have been roaming the streets, learning to pick pockets and getting into minor scrapes. They were treated harshly, exploited shamelessly, deprived of adequate pay, and occasionally made the victims of sexual predators among older crew members. Their chores included scrubbing the decks with saltwater hauled from the sea in buckets, serving and cleaning after meals, and performing any menial task assigned to them.

Another class of page lived a very different life, privileged and relatively free of demand, under the protection of officers. These handpicked young men generally came from good, well-connected families, and worked as apprentices for their protectors; they were expected to learn their trade and to rise through the ranks. Their duties were far lighter than those of the unfortunate boys who had been pressed into service.

The privileged pages maintained the sixteen Venetian sand clocks—or ampolletas—carried by Magellan’s ships. Basically a large hourglass, the sand clock had been in use since Egyptian times; it was essential for both timekeeping and for navigation. The ampolletas consisted of a glass vessel divided into two compartments. The upper chamber contained a quantity of sand trickling into the lower over a precisely measured period of time, usually a half hour or an hour. Maintaining the ampolletas was simple enough—the pages turned them over every half hour, night and day—but the task was critical. Aboard a swaying ship, the ampolletas were the only reliable timepiece, and the captain depended on them for dead reckoning and changing the watches. A ship without a functioning ampolleta was effectively disabled.

Operating the ampolletas aboard the armada had religious overtones, and the pages, in their presumed innocence, doubled as the ships’ acolytes. When they turned over the sand clocks, they recited psalms or prayers invoking divine guidance for a safe voyage. Usually, the prayers required a chorus, and they had to chant loudly enough to demonstrate that they were on the job and fulfilling their duties promptly. At the end of the day, their high voices could be heard above the ship’s bawdy clamor, reciting prayers to the Virgin Mary, reminding all of their religious obligations, even here, thousands of miles from home.

Finished with their prayers, the boys called the new watch to their post. “Al cuarto!” they cried. Al cuarto! On deck! On deck! And the members of the day watch staggered to their accustomed places, where they could crouch comfortably against a sheltering plank or overhanging wooden ornament. They might carry a fistful of hardtack or salted fish, and they almost certainly regretted their chronic lack of sleep because night aboard ship was as noisy as day; the ocean never slept, and neither did they.

If the sailors had a moment before reporting for duty, they might relieve themselves, an unpleasant, even ridiculous chore aboard the ships. To urinate, they simply stood and faced the ocean wherever they could be sure that the wind would not send the stream back on them, or anyone else. Defecating was even more difficult, calling for a precarious balancing act as a sailor eased himself over the rail and lowered himself onto a crude seat suspended high above the waves. There were two such seats, fore and aft, known as jardines, a name ironically suggesting flowers. After he lowered his breeches and eased himself into the seat, the sailor had to void himself in full view of anyone who cared to watch—privacy did not exist aboard these ships—and if the sea happened to be rough, the frigid spray splattered his exposed bottom. (More than one sailor lost his life when he plunged from the jardines to the ocean.) When he was done, he wiped himself with a length of pitch-covered rope, and then climbed back on deck, where he no doubt breathed a sigh of relief.

Was it any wonder that the ship, with all its filth and noise and nauseating odor, was called pájaro puerco, a flying pig?

Once they had taken up their posts, the weary sailors studied the sea for buried shoals, examined the rigging, dried the dew from the lines, and checked the sails for damage. They scrubbed, repaired, overhauled, and polished every exposed surface of the ships. They applied pitch to fraying hemp, and repaired torn or stressed sails. They made their weapons gleam, and fought a constant, losing battle against protecting their food supply from vermin. After several months at sea, the five ships of the Armada de Molucca were in far better shape than they had been when they sailed from Seville.

Just above the pages in rank came the apprentices, or grumetes, the most expendable and vulnerable members of all the crew. Ranging in age from seventeen to twenty, they were the ones who sprang on the rigging the moment the captain ordered them to furl or unfurl the sail; to scamper to the dangerous lookout posts atop the masts, to pull on the oars in the longboats, and to operate the complex mechanical devices aboard ship, the pulleys and cranes, the cables and anchors, the fixed and movable rigging. They teamed up to operate the capstan, rotating its drum with levers to load (or unload) heavy supplies, weapons, and ballast. They even shaved the legs and manicured the toenails of their masters, perhaps setting the stage for sexual relations between the two, even though such behavior was strictly forbidden. Apprentices were the group most likely to be disciplined, to be whipped for disobedience, or to be confined to the stocks for as long as a week.

If an apprentice survived all the ordeals and hazards of life at sea, he could apply for certification as a “sailor,” receiving a document signed by the ship’s pilot, boatswain, and master. He was now a professional mariner, and could look forward to a career lasting about twenty years, if he lived that long. Sailors advanced through the ranks by learning how to handle the helm, deploy the sounding line, splice cables, and, if they were mathematically inclined, marking charts and taking measurements of celestial objects to fix the ship’s position.

Most sailors were in their teens or twenties. Anyone who had reached his thirties was considered a veteran scalawag; by the time he had survived to that age, he had seen what life at sea held: brutality, loneliness, and disease; he had experienced flashes of camaraderie and heroism, as well as persistent dishonesty and callousness. He knew all about the avarice of shipowners, the uncomprehending indifference of kings under whose flags the expedition sailed, and the tyranny of captains. Men rarely went to sea beyond the age of forty. Magellan, nearly that age when he left Seville, was among the oldest, if not the oldest person aboard the Armada de Molucca.

No matter how high an ordinary sailor rose, he was outranked by specialists such as gunners, essential to expeditions exploring new lands but hard to come by. Skilled in the use of cannon, in the preparation of gunpowder, and the selection of projectiles, a gunner tended to his weapons throughout the voyage, keeping them secure, clean, free of rust, and ready for battle at all times. Although most gunners were Flemings, Germans, or Italians, the Casa de Contratación kept a gunnery instructor on its staff to train Castilians. The Casa provided the cannon, but the gunners-in-training had to pay the instructor’s fees, as well as the cost of gunpowder, which was enough to discourage many potential students. Less glamorous but equally necessary fields of specialization included carpenters, caulkers, and coopers. This last group repaired the hundreds of casks and buckets aboard the ships by replacing hoops or staves and sealing leaks. There was also a complement of divers aboard the fleet, whose job it was to swim under the ships and, when necessary, clear seaweed from the rudder and keel, and inspect the hull for signs of exterior damage and leaks.

The ship’s barber, another specialist, was deceptively named because trimming beards was the least of his responsibilities. He served as the onboard dentist, doctor, and surgeon, ministering to the crew out of his chest of nostrums, herbs, and folk remedies. The fleet’s barber was named Hernando Bustamente, who shipped out aboard Concepción. Records show that his medical supplies were purchased from an apothecary named Johan Vernal on July 19, 1519, shortly before departure. Included were distillations of various herbs, among them fennel, thistle, and chicory; a purgative known as diacatholicon; turpentine; lard; various unguents and oils; six pounds of chamomile; honey; incense; and quicksilver—all of them carefully stored in canisters. Bustamente also carried an assortment of tools with him. Medical chests of the era contained a brass mortar and pestle to grind compounds, and a selection of surgical instruments including scissors, a lancet, a tooth extractor, an enema syringe made from copper, and a scale. This slender store of medical supplies and equipment would have to serve the needs of 260 men of the fleet in all climates and conditions for several years. In practice, Bustamente’s most frequent duty at sea was extracting teeth, not treating disease.

No one answered to the description of cook aboard these ships because the job was considered too demeaning. One sailor telling another that his beard smelled of smoke was tantamount to provoking a fight. So the crew took turns cooking, or paid the apprentices to cook for them. And during foul weather, there was no cooking at all, and the sailors endured cold repasts of hardtack, salted meat, and wine.

In addition to these traditional roles, the armada’s roster included phantom crew members: saints who, by custom of the sea, found their way onto the ships’ rosters. Magellan’s fleet included Santo Adelmo, the patron saint of Burgos; Santo António de Lisboa, the popular patron saint of Lisbon, who was reputed to rescue shipwrecked sailors and provide favorable winds to their ships; Santa Bárbara, whom Spaniards invoked as a safeguard against violent storms; and Nuestra Señora de Montserrat, to whom a famous Benedictine shrine was dedicated. Even more remarkable, each of these ghostly personages was accorded a share of the fleet’s profits in return for divine protection; the arrangement was a clever way of donating a portion of the expedition’s profits to the Church.

Officers ranked just above the sailors and specialists in the fleet’s hierarchy. One tier consisted of the steward, charged with keeping an eye on the food supply; the boatswain, or contramaestre; the boatswain’s mate; and the alguacil. The alguacil, for which there is no exact translation, served as the king’s representative aboard the ship and served as a master-at-arms or military officer. If Magellan needed to arrest a crew member, he ordered the alguacil to perform the deed. This was not a job designed to endear him to the other crew members, and the alguacil stood apart from the rest of the crew.

At the top of the pinnacle came the pilot, who plotted the ship’s route; the master, who supervised the precious cargo; and finally the captain. Each of the top three officers had his own page (as Captain General, Magellan had several, including his illegitimate son), and they lived a life as separate as possible from the rank-and-file sailors and apprentices. The officers had their own cabins, cramped, to be sure, but a mark of distinction, and they rarely ate with the crew. To most of the men aboard the fleet, even the flagship, Trinidad, Ferdinand Magellan seemed a remote, imperious figure, authoritarian and arbitrary, a man whose every word was law, and on whose skill, luck, and good judgment their lives depended.

Although sea captains, Magellan included, could be notoriously high-handed, the sailors’ lot was governed, at least in theory, by the Consulado del Mare, the Spanish maritime code that had been in existence—and in force—for several centuries before it was formally compiled in 1494. The code described approved methods for hiring and paying sailors, and spelled out the ordinary seaman’s exhausting chores (“to go to the forest and fetch wood, to saw and to make planks, to make spars and ropes, to bake, to man the boat with the boatswain, to stow goods and to unstow them; and at every hour when the mate shall order him to go and fetch spars and ropes, to carry planks, and to put on board all the victuals of the merchants, to heave the vessel over”), as well as the punishments they could expect to receive if they failed to follow orders (“A mariner ought not to undress himself if he is not in a port for wintering. And if he does so, for each time he ought to be plunged into the sea with a rope from the yard arm three times; and after three times offending, he ought to lose his salary and the goods which he has in the ship”). In addition, a sailor was bound to go wherever the captain ordered, even “to the end of the world.” So, under the Consulado, Magellan had the right to take his crew wherever he wished, all the way to the Spice Islands, and even beyond.

The provisions of the Consulado afforded some protection to sailors by specifying their diet. They were entitled to meat three days a week, “That is to say on Sundays, Tuesday, and Thursdays.” Other days, they were to be served “porridge, and every evening of every day accompaniment with bread, and also on the same three days in the morning he ought to give them wine, and also he ought to give them the same quantity of wine in the evening.” Accounts of exactly how much wine Magellan allowed his crew members vary, but it probably came to two liters per man each day. And on Feast Days, which were frequent, the Consulado specified that the captain was to double his crew’s rations. Magellan, from all accounts, followed these guidelines scrupulously, except when he had to cut back on rations to prevent starvation. As the voyage unfolded, it became apparent that he, like other captains of the day, had two obsessions: maintaining the seaworthiness of his fragile ships, and acquiring enough food for his unruly men.

Why did sailors put up with it all? Why did the ordinary seamen and trained officers abandon hearth and home to live amid these grim circumstances for years on end? Why did they endure starvation rations, the indignity and agony of the lash and the stocks, torment by vermin, thirst, sunstroke, and the lack of women? They went to sea for a variety of reasons, for glory and greed, for escape, out of habit, out of desperation, and through pure chance. To Juan de Escalante de Mendoza, the veteran Spanish mariner, sailors came in two varieties. “The first sort includes all those who commence to sail as a livelihood, such as poor men. . . . Seafaring is the most suitable occupation they can find to sustain themselves, especially for those born in ports and maritime areas. This sort is the most numerous among mariners,” he noted. “Although they might want to be schooled for some other occupation, they do not have the disposition or the means to be able to do it.” So they went to sea because it was their livelihood, and in all likelihood their fathers’ before them; because they knew the sea better than they knew land; because they could throw off the concerns of ordinary life; because, if they stayed home, they knew the dreary routines life held in store for them, whereas at sea anything could happen; because, if they survived the ordeal of an ocean voyage, they would have a fund of stories to draw on for the rest of their lives; and finally because if they successfully smuggled even a small amount of gold or spices, they would have a nest egg to sustain them and their families against the vicissitudes of life.

Many of the men went to sea simply to escape. Some were fleeing jail, hanging, or torture; others were abandoning their families and responsibilities. Others were avoiding debtors’ prison; once they obtained a berth on a ship, they would be immune from arrest, safe for as long as they were at sea. Many sailors planned to desert their ships once they reached the fabled Indies, with their gold and women and luxury. For them, the Indies served, in Cervantes’s words, as “the shelter and refuge of Spain’s desperadoes, the church of the lawless, the safe haven of murderers, the native land and cover for cardsharps, the general lure for loose women, and the common deception of the many and the remedy of the particular few.”

In the late hours of January 10, 1520, a severe storm descended on the Armada de Molucca, forcing Magellan to seek shelter. He ordered the fleet to reverse course and head north, toward the shelter offered by Paranaguá Bay. During the journey to safety, fierce but erratic winds blew the fleet off course, and Magellan found himself in dangerously shallow waters. Before him stretched the mouth of the Río de la Plata, a funnel-shaped river located on the coast of what is now Argentina.

We know, though Magellan did not, that the Río de la Plata is fed by two important rivers, the Río Uruguay and the Río Paraná, whose headwaters originate in the Andes. Sailing into these shallow, sediment-rich waters, Magellan thought he might have been entering the waterway leading to Asia, but the weather frustrated his efforts at reconnaissance. The region’s climate is typical of the temperate middle latitudes. Dry winds, called zondas, swoop down from the Andes; when they combine with cold offshore currents in the Atlantic, the result can be coastal storms called sudestadas, and it was probably a robust sudestada that caused Magellan to turn back and seek shelter.

Magellan faced difficult choices. If he lowered sail and tried to ride out the storm, the winds might blow his helpless fleet onto the shoals, or even ashore, where disaster awaited. But if he attempted to enter the harbor under short sail, he might run aground in the shallow water. He chose to proceed north with extreme caution; he made sure to sound the waters, and learned to his relief that they were deep enough for his ships to pass unharmed.

When the storm finally relented, Magellan turned south again and returned to the Río de la Plata. Although many on board the fleet argued that the river led to the strait, Magellan remained skeptical. Still, he would have to conduct a careful surveillance, just in case. And even if there was no strait, they had at least found abundant provisions. During the next two weeks, the men took on water and caught fish, or rather, learned how to catch fish.

Years before Magellan arrived at the Río de la Plata, both Spanish and Portuguese ships had searched for the strait at this very point. Antonio Galvão, who served as the Portuguese governor of the Moluccas, wrote about a “most rare and excellent map of the world, which was a great helpe to Don Henry (the Navigator) in his discouries.” In 1428, Galvão said, the king of Portugal’s eldest son made a journey through England, France, Germany, and Italy “from whence he brought a map of the world which had all the parts of the world and earth described. The Streight of Magelan was called in it the Dragon’s taile.” A dragon’s tail was a fitting image for the strait, suggesting that it was dangerous, sinuous, and possibly mythological. Columbus believed in its existence, too. That mystical explorer supposedly received a vision prior to his fourth voyage in which he saw a map depicting the strait. He never found it, of course.

In 1506, Ferdinand of Aragon and Philip I of Castile commissioned two explorers, Juan de Solis and Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, to undertake an expedition to determine the position of the line of demarcation and to find a strait to the Indies. Like Magellan, Solis was a skilled and ambitious Portuguese mariner who found a receptive patron in Spain, but quite unlike Magellan, he was a fugitive from justice who had fled to Spain after murdering his wife. The Solis-Pinzón expedition, which embarked in 1508, discovered nothing, and when the expedition’s two ships returned to Spain, an enraged and disappointed King Ferdinand clapped Solis in jail.

Two years later, in 1512, Solis, deftly manipulating the levers of influence, rehabilitated himself, and King Ferdinand made him pilot major; he then received an ambitious new commission to claim the Spice Islands for Spain. When King Manuel of Portugal protested, Ferdinand, shading the truth a bit, explained that Solis’s task was simply to find the line of demarcation, and nothing more. Soon after, Ferdinand canceled the expedition, but he sent word to his representatives in the Caribbean to look for any sign of a strait and to arrest any Portuguese ships that might be searching for the same thing. Sure enough, the authorities in that distant outpost of the Spanish empire found a Portuguese caravel that had wandered into the Caribbean. She turned out to be a ship filled with secrets.

In 1511, Cristóbal de Haro had backed a covert Portuguese expedition to Brazil. The fleet consisted of two caravels commanded by Estêvão Froes and João de Lisboa. The Spanish knew nothing of the expedition until Froes’s ship arrived in the Caribbean for repairs before heading northeast across the Atlantic to Portugal. The Spanish authorities seized the crew and threw them into jail. Meanwhile, the other ship returned to Spain, where Lisboa revealed his discoveries to an agent of his financiers, the Fuggers of Germany. After that, Lisboa’s secrets gradually became public knowledge.

In 1514, a published account of Lisboa’s exploits surfaced in Germany. Newen Zeytung auss Presillg Landt, or “News from the Land of Brazil,” as the broadsheet was called, indicated that Lisboa had ventured seven hundred miles farther south than any prior expedition. According to this account, the expedition came to a strait, entered it, and sailed west until violent storms forced the ships to turn back. Lisboa might even have navigated the strait all the way to the Pacific. Although incomplete, the description of Lisboa’s clandestine voyage was consistent with the strait that Magellan eventually explored. In Spain and Portugal, mariners and cosmographers alike seized on this remarkable document.

At the same time, a report circulated throughout Spain that Vasco Núñez de Balboa had glimpsed the vast ocean to the west: the Pacific. Within months of hearing the news, King Ferdinand once again sent Juan de Solis to find the strait, or, as El Rey put it, “to discover the back parts of Golden Castile.” The strait, according to the best information of the day, ran through what is now Panama. The expedition, consisting of three ships and seventy men, embarked on October 8, 1515. Solis reached South America, sailed along its coast, and spotted a tribe that seemed friendly, at least from a distance. In good spirits, he went ashore with a landing party of seven men to greet them.

The best record of what befell the explorers comes from the pen of Peter Martyr, writing close to the time of the events. Martyr’s account, in Latin, was translated into English in 1555 by Richard Eden, a Cambridge-educated scholar, in his best-known work, The Decades of the Newe Worlde or West India, Conteyning the Navigations and Conquestes of the Spanyards, with the Particular Description of the most Rych and Large Landes and Islandes lately Founde in the West Ocean. In this popular work, he recorded the appalling turn of events in robust language:

Sodenly a great multitude of the inhabitants burst forth upon them, and slue them every man with clubbes, even in the sight of their fellows, not one escaping. Their furie not thus satisfied, they cut the slayne men in peeces, even upon the shore, where their fellows might behold this horrible spectacle from the sea. But they being stricken with feare through this example, durst not come forth of their shippes, or devise how to revenge the death of their Captayne and companions. They departed therefore from these unfortunate coastes, and . . . returned home agayne with losse, and heavie cheare.

It became part of the lore of the expedition that the unfortunate Europeans had not merely been killed but devoured as their shipmates looked on helplessly.

Magellan’s crew displayed considerable courage, even foolhardiness, when they confronted Indians in the region where Solis had met disaster. Magellan dispatched not one but three longboats. The men were armed, which gave them an advantage, but otherwise at the mercy of the indigenous people of the river basin. No sooner had the boats landed than the men jumped into the surf and chased the Indians observing them. Rather than standing and fighting, the Indians simply outran them. “They made such enormous strides that with all our running and jumping we could not overtake them,” Pigafetta noted.

That night, a large canoe left the shore and approached the Trinidad. Standing upright in the middle of the vessel was an Indian covered with animal skins, apparently a chief. As the canoe drew close, the men aboard the flagship noticed that he exhibited no sign of fear. He indicated that he wished to come aboard, and Magellan agreed.

When they were face to face, Magellan offered the Indian two gifts, a shirt and a jersey. The Captain General then displayed a piece of metal, hoping to learn if the Indian was familiar with it. Recognizing the object, the Indian indicated that his tribe possessed some form of metal. Assuming the Indian would leap at the chance to obtain more, Magellan expected to barter metal objects such as bells and scissors for food and scouting assistance, but after the Indian left Trinidad, he never returned. The fleeting encounter with the indifferent tribal leader baffled Magellan and his officers. If they were received well, the sailors were ready for orgies, and the priests for conversions; if they were attacked, they were ready for battle. But they were not prepared to be ignored.

During the fleet’s layover, Magellan constantly sounded the depths of the Río de la Plata, hoping that the water would swallow the lead, indicating that he had found the strait, but the stream remained precariously shallow. A channel or a strait would be deeper, he reasoned, and its current would run faster.

Unwilling to commit the entire fleet to the river, he dispatched Santiago, the smallest ship, and the one with the shallowest draught, to explore its murky and seductive reaches. Santiago spent two days sailing upstream, constantly sounding the river, trying to avoid running aground.

Magellan meanwhile temporarily abandoned the flagship, Trinidad, to explore the waterway for himself aboard Santiago. At no point was the river deeper than three fathoms, too shallow for the ships to pass safely, and too shallow to suggest that it was a strait running all the way to Asia and the Spice Islands. Despite the many indications that they had found nothing but a large river, the other captains held fast to the belief that the Río de la Plata would lead them to the Indies, and they urged Magellan not to abandon his reconnaissance. But he had made up his mind to turn back, and once Magellan decided on a course of action, nothing could deter him. By the end of January, Magellan gave up and reversed direction, now facing directly into winds that made his return to the coast slow and erratic.

On February 3, 1520, the fleet resumed its southward course in search of the real strait—if it existed—but San Antonio was found to be leaking badly. Within two days, the leak was repaired, and the Armada de Molucca rounded what is now known as Cape Corrientes.

Magellan adopted measures to ensure that he did not sail past the strait for which he was searching. He dropped anchor at night and resumed sailing in the morning as close to shore as he dared, always on the lookout for any formation suggesting a strait. As they ventured toward 40 degrees latitude, passing along the eastern coast of what is now Argentina, the weather steadily turned colder, a warning of the discomfort and hazards that awaited them. Their deliverance from the brisk days and frigid nights at sea would come only in the form of the strait, if such a strait existed, but it proved maddeningly elusive. Without realizing it, they were heading into latitudes notorious for sudden, frequent, and violent squalls, and on February 13, they ran into another storm, tossing the boats, damaging Victoria’s keel, and terrifying the sailors with thunder and lightning and torrential downpours. When the storm finally blew itself out, Saint Elmo’s fire once again appeared on the masts of the flagship, lighting the way, reassuring the sailors that they enjoyed divine protection.

The next day, the fleet hoisted sail, but without reliable maps to point the way, the ships were in danger of running aground on treacherous shoals—a submerged reef or outcropping of sand. The water was so shallow, and the shoals so well concealed, that Victoria struck bottom, not once, but several times. Colliding with a shoal was a sickening sensation dreaded by every sailor. It began with a shudder arresting the ship’s progress. Those aboard the afflicted ship would cry out in dismay, fearing the worst. If the shoal was rocky, it might slice open the hull, and the ship would sink. If it was sandy, or covered with seaweed, it might hold the ship in a death grip. To clear seaweed from the rudder, those few sailors who knew how to swim would enter the water, fearing the appearance of sharks at any moment, dive beneath the ship, and with bursting lungs remove the vegetation with their bare hands. Tides were critically important to a ship stuck on a shoal; a rising tide could free her, and a low tide could leave her beached, trapped, impossible to move. By waiting for a rising tide, Victoria managed to free herself from the shoal’s grip each time, but Magellan, in search of deeper water, eventually decided to lead the fleet away from shore and shoals even though he could no longer see land—or a strait.

The farther south he went, the more concerned Magellan became that he had accidentally passed the strait. On February 23, he retraced part of his route, and the following day, the black ships reached the expansive mouth of San Matías Gulf, on the coast of Argentina. To Magellan, the gulf appeared far more likely to lead to the strait than the Río de la Plata because the water was deep and blue and chilly. The men of the fleet might have seen whales because this was the principal breeding site of the Southern Right Whale. If they sailed close to land, they would have spotted penguins, sea lions, and even huge elephant seals lolling on the rocky shores. And if they had gone ashore, they would have encountered an animal paradise of foxes, hares, puma, peregrine falcons, owls, flamingos, hairy armadillos, and parrots. But Magellan preferred to anchor offshore, away from danger, as he continued his single-minded quest for the strait.

The fate of the expedition depended on finding it.