Over the Edge of the World

Chapter VII Dragon’s Tail

The ice was here, the ice was there,

The ice was all around:

It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,

Like noises in a swound!

The earth’s crust can be compared to a cracked eggshell consisting of tectonic plates that bump and grind against each other, forming our oceans and continents, creating earthquakes, moving mountains. Millions of years ago, two tectonic plates merged and created a unique landscape at the southernmost tip of South America, not far from the South Pole. Over time, the plate from the east smashed into the plate from the west, which slid underneath. As a result, the eastern sea is about fifteen hundred feet deep, but the western sea reaches depths of over fifteen thousand feet. The awkward juxtaposition of two plates formed distinctive features in the landscape; the western portion contains the southernmost extensions of the Andes Mountains, which attracts moisture, while the eastern part tends to be smoother and drier. This was the landscape awaiting the Armada de Molucca.

From the moment of their departure from Port Saint Julian, their journey southward was fraught with more difficulty. After two days at sea, as they approached the mouth of the Santa Cruz River, another storm engulfed them and threatened to drive them all ashore, where they would likely meet the same fate as unlucky Santiago. Magellan gave the order to enter the broad river, and there, sheltered from the worst of the winds, the fleet rode out the squall.

After the storm passed, Magellan, with every fiber of his being, wanted to put to sea and resume the search for the strait. He gambled that if he could only survive the open water long enough to reach the strait, the channel would shelter the fleet from the storms that had plagued them for months. Yet the hazards of exploring the coast in August, as winter relented, remained overwhelming, even to Magellan, who was normally fearless. With the greatest reluctance, he decided to remain here until well into the subequatorial spring; then, and only then, would his ships have any chance of surviving at sea.

Magellan made the most of this enforced layover. For the next six weeks, the seamen busied themselves catching fish, drying and salting them, and stocking the ships. They ventured on land only to chop wood and haul it back to the ships. Occasionally, they made brief excursions to the southern shore of the Santa Cruz, where Santiago had broken up, and salvaged whatever items the sea had thrown up on shore, mainly chests and barrels.

On October 11, a celestial event of singular importance occurred, as noted in all likelihood by San Martín, the fleet’s astronomer and astrologer: “An eclipse of the sun was awaited, which in this meridian should have occurred at eight minutes past ten in the morning. When the sun reached an altitude of 421⁄2 degrees, it appeared to alter in brilliancy, and to change to a somber color, as if inflamed of a dull crimson, and this without any cloud intervening between ourselves and the solar body. . . . Its clearness appeared as it might in Castile in the months of July and August when they are burning the straw in the surrounding country.”

A week later, on October 18, 1520, Magellan decided to risk the open sea again. He supposed, correctly, that the weather was as calm as it ever gets in this region. If the fleet faced more storms, his best hope was to seek shelter in a safe harbor, but he would pause no longer than necessary. He was months behind schedule—he had expected to approach the Spice Islands at about this time—and he yearned to make up for lost time. The fleet departed from the Santa Cruz River, tracing the undulating eastern coast of South America, with the Captain General in the grip of his obsession to find the strait.

Once again, foul weather bedeviled the ships, but it was not quite severe enough to drive them back. After two difficult days without any progress, the direction of the wind changed; now it came from the north, and the four ships plunged before the wind, leaving sharp, bubbling wakes and making rapid progress along a south-by-southwest course. Increasingly desperate to find the strait, Magellan scrutinized every inlet, hoping it might contain a hidden channel leading inland, but in each instance he was disappointed and continued his southerly course. Finally, he noticed a significant spit of land extending into open waters: a cape. As he approached, he made out a broad sandbank strewn with the skeletons of whales—a suggestion that he had come across a migration route, perhaps leading from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The gray water churned angrily where competing tides vied with one another, but the opening was wide, a league or more.

Vasquito Gallego, an apprentice Portuguese seaman aboard Victoria and the son of her pilot, recalled the gradual realization that the gaping break in the land might be more than a mere bay. “As the way became narrower, they thought it was a river,” he recalled, and then, with mounting excitement, recorded that the wide mouth turned into a narrows farther ahead. “Continuing that way, they found deep salt water and strong currents, appearing to be a strait and the mouth of a big gulf that might be discharging into it.” Magellan ordered his ships to sail into the gulf, and when they were well within its embrace, he saw it: the outlet leading west, just as he prayed it would.

Magellan had finally found his strait.

On October 21, Albo, the pilot, recorded the great event in his log: “We saw an opening like a bay, and it has at the entrance, on the right hand, a very long spit of sand, and the cape which we discovered before this spit is called the Cape of the [Eleven Thousand] Virgins, and the spit of sand is in 52 degrees latitude, 521⁄2 longitude, and from the spit of sand to the other part there may be a matter of five leagues,” he observed. This is what he saw: a series of mounds, covered with tufts of grass, rising approximately 130 feet from the water. A later explorer described the cape as “three great mountains of sand that look like islands but are not.” There was no mistaking the strait for a bay or an inlet; a broad waterway cut deep into the impenetrable landmass along which the fleet had been sailing for months.

Pigafetta exulted at the sighting of the waterway. “After going and setting course to the fifty-second degree toward the said Antarctic Pole,” he wrote, “on the Festival of the Eleven Thousand Virgins, we found by miracle a strait which we called the Cape of the Eleven Thousand Virgins.” After all the ordeals suffered by the armada, the discovery of the strait did lay claim to being a miracle.

The Cape of the Eleven Thousand Virgins marks the entrance to the strait that Magellan had sought for more than two years. Precisely how he divined its existence has been the subject of debate ever since. He might have been aware of Lisboa’s expedition, which claimed to have found the strait, and he was certainly aware of maps depicting the mythical strait. According to Pigafetta, Magellan, while still in Portugal, had seen a map depicting or suggesting a strait cutting through South America, but what map had Magellan seen? “He knew where to sail to find a well-hidden strait,” Pigafetta declares, “which he saw depicted on a map in the treasury of Portugal, made by that excellent man, Martin de Boemia”—who was of course, Martin Behaim, who had created a state-of-the-art globe in 1492. (The earliest Pigafetta manuscripts employ the word carta, which could mean either a globe, a map, or a chart.)

It is often assumed that Behaim’s “well-painted globe,” which Magellan had displayed to King Charles and his advisers to persuade them to back his voyage, showed the strait; in fact, Behaim’s globe, or map, did no such thing. Instead, it showed a waterway cutting through eastern Asia and the island of “Seilan.” To add to the cartographic confusion, it positioned other Asian islands to the east of the strait. It is unlikely that Magellan would have employed this fanciful, wildly inaccurate representation to persuade King Charles of the existence of a strait cutting through the American continent; indeed, it is unlikely that Magellan ever saw the Behaim globe, despite the linkage of their names.

Pigafetta was inadvertently responsible for the case of mistaken identity; in all likelihood, he confused Behaim’s rendition with that of another Nuremberg mapmaker, Johannes Schöner, a professor of mathematics who produced two maps, one in 1515 and the other in 1520, close to the time Magellan was displaying a map to King Charles. To the nonspecialist, Schöner’s maps closely resembled Behaim’s, and Pigafetta could easily have mistaken one for the other, especially because Schöner did not sign his productions.

Schöner’s globe depicted a strait cutting through the American continent in the approximate location of the Isthmus of Panama—several thousand miles north of the actual strait. There is no conclusive evidence that Magellan saw this map, either, but it does demonstrate that cartographers were starting to include some sort of strait in South America, however poorly it was understood. If this was the map Magellan had in mind, it would have been nearly useless in trying to find the strait. Even the daring Schöner hesitated to depict the western coast of South America; it was, as he termed it, terra ulterior incog.—in other words, “the land that has been hitherto unknown.”

Everything to the west was also unknown. Schöner, like other cartographers of his era, shrank the immense Pacific into an enticingly small and apparently navigable gulf, a misunderstanding that resulted in Magellan’s conviction that he could reach the Spice Islands within weeks, if not days, after exiting the strait. And like other maps of the era, it placed China in close proximity to the American continent. Finally, Schöner’s globe placed the Spice Islands well within Spanish territory as defined by the line of demarcation, and this feature—again, wildly inaccurate—might have accounted for Magellan’s conviction that the Spice Islands legitimately belonged to Spain rather than Portugal.

Magellan knew better than to take maps at face value, but he was deeply susceptible to their influence. They were idealized projections of what the world might be like. Instead of the dragons and magnetic islands of older maps, these contained a new marvel, one that was possibly just as mythical: a strait. They were calls to adventure rather than a set of directions, hypotheses rather than conclusions, provocative geographical cartoons that fed the fantasy of empire.

Now that Magellan had finally found the strait, he faced three hundred miles of nautical nightmare. Navigating the waterway would prove as daunting a challenge as simply finding it had been. Tides in the strait run as much as twenty-four feet, making it difficult to anchor ships securely, and currents are strong. Beds of kelp lurking below the water’s surface threatened to foul lines, keels, and rudders. But if Magellan could overcome the obstacles presented by the strait, and keep his mutinous crew intact, he would pioneer a new route to the Indies, to a new understanding of the continents and of the globe itself.

The ships turned west, braved the swirling tides, and entered the inland waterway. The first thing the pilots noticed was the extreme depth of the strait. “In this place it was not possible to anchor,” Pigafetta observed, “because no bottom was found. Wherefore it was necessary to put cables ashore of twenty-five or thirty cubits in length.”

Curious to learn exactly where they were, Magellan sent Carvalho ashore with orders to climb to the highest point to look for an opening. On his return, Carvalho reported that he failed to discern the Pacific to the west; nevertheless, Magellan was gripped with the conviction that he had found the waterway to Spice Islands. He ordered Albo to record the strait’s twists and turns as accurately as possible. “Within this bay we found a strait which may be a league in width,” he wrote, “and from this mouth to the spit you look east and west, and on the left hand side of the bay there is a great elbow within which are many shoals, but when you are in the strait, take care of some shallows less than three leagues from the entrance of the straits, and after them you will find two islets of sand, and then you will find the channel open. Proceed in it at your pleasure without hesitation,” he recommended. “Passing this strait we found another small bay, and then we found another strait of the same kind as the first, and from one mouth to the other runs east and west, and the narrow part runs N.E. and S.W., and after we had come out of the two straits or narrows, we found a very large bay, and we found some islands, and we anchored at one of them.” No doubt Albo had specific landmarks in mind as he wrote, but the strait defied even this precise chronicler, and his directions proved difficult for subsequent visitors to interpret.

Within days, the strait’s gloomy enchantment impressed itself on the crew. As they negotiated its frigid waters, they observed thickly vegetated, forbidding shores sliding past, cloaked in eerie shadows. Late one night, during the few hours of darkness at that time of year, they caught glimpses of what they believed were signs of human settlements; distant fires with an indistinct source burst forth, their ruby flames glimmering like spectral apparitions in front of the dark green cypresses, vines, and ferns. The fires sent plumes of smoke into the hazy sky, and fouled the air with an acrid odor.

Magellan and his crew believed these fires had been set by Indians who lurked in the shadows, waiting to pounce—one more reason for the sailors to stay aboard ship, especially at night, even though their provisions were running low. This was a reasonable precaution, but the fires were most likely of natural origin, the result of lightning. In any event, Magellan called this region Tierra del Fuego, Land of Fire. Today, we know that Tierra del Fuego is actually an enormous triangular island buffeted by winds from both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and constantly beset by storms and rapidly changing weather. The Land of Fire is actually the land of storms. Tierra del Fuego covers more than 28,000 square miles of glaciers, lakes, and moraines. Magellan’s crew looked on the low-lying areas, where the hills rarely reach six hundred feet; to the south and west, the southern extension of the Andes mountain range pierces the clouds, reaching heights of over seven thousand feet.

Now that they were in the strait, the pilots found that the sky was rarely clear by day or night, which made it nearly impossible to take accurate measurements either by the stars or by the sun. Gloomy, ragged, low-hanging clouds scudded over the mountains hugging the fjords through which the ships expectantly glided. Occasionally, the leaden mists parted to allow sunlight, gleaming with painful brilliance, to stream down on the impenetrable land and the surging water.

The sunlight, when it managed to break through, could be pitiless at this low latitude and appeared to illuminate the landscape with a gray, polarized radiance. Striations of light played over the stony beaches and the glaciers frosting the mountaintops. Although Magellan traversed the strait at the warmest time of year, when the wind, for all its bite, was at its lightest, and snows had receded, the enormous glaciers were plentiful and awe-inspiring. Snow nearly always fell atop the glaciers—they were endlessly renewing themselves—and at lower altitudes the ice melted into narrow waterfalls cascading over the granite outcroppings into the fjords. Invisible to the sailors, the glaciers extended across the landscape, running through thirty miles of mountains before sheering off at the water’s edge.

As they continued to sail through the strait, Magellan’s crew observed a solid wall of ice rising majestically before them—two hundred feet, five hundred feet, and more. They were ancient edifices, these glaciers, some of them ten thousand years old, and they looked it, with their grimy faces deeply pockmarked and weathered.

Consisting of packed snow and ice, the glaciers never rested; they cracked, they groaned, they roared, and they threatened to decompose and tumble onto the beaches and water below. Their crystalline towers leaned out over the water in irregular columns, like rotting teeth in a decaying jaw. They inclined ever more precariously over the placid water until one column after another, warmed by the sun and buffeted by the wind, calved and collapsed amid a cloud of icy dust with a shattering report followed by a drumlike roll of thunder, low and resonant, announcing destruction.

To everyone’s surprise, the glaciers were neither white nor gray, but a light, almost iridescent blue that in the crevasses and seams darkened to a deep azure. The countless chunks of ice broken off from the glaciers, some as large as a whale, others as small as a penguin, had the same enigmatic bluish cast as they bobbed past the ships: an armada of sculptured ice drifting toward a mysterious location.

Groping for a plausible explanation for the glaciers’ appearance, Magellan theorized that the glaciers’ distinctive color had to do with their extreme age. In fact, the bluish cast was determined by the distinctive properties of snow and ice. The surface of snow and ice reflects all light, without preference for any particular color of the spectrum, but the interior handles light differently. Snow acts as a light filter, and treats the spectrum preferentially, scattering red light more strongly than blue. Photons emerging from snow and ice generally have more blue rays than red. The deeper the snow and ice, the farther the light must travel, and the darker blue it becomes, just as water appears a deeper blue as it increases in depth. For this reason, the deep crevasses in the glaciers possess an unearthly azure hue.

Every visitor to the strait has been awed by the majestic, moody spectacle it presents. It is reminiscent of Norway, or Scotland, or Nova Scotia, but ultimately it is unlike any other place on earth. In 1578, Sir Francis Drake, the English explorer and pirate, led the first expedition since Magellan’s through the strait. One of his officers, Francis Pretty, was amazed by the spectacle passing before his eyes. “The land on both sides is very huge and mountainous; the lower mountains whereof, although they be monstrous and wonderful to look upon for their height, yet there are others which in height exceed them in a strange manner, reaching themselves above their fellows so high, that between them did appear three regions of clouds,” Pretty marveled. “This Strait is extreme cold, with frost and snow continually; the trees seem to stoop with the burden of the weather, and yet are green continually, and many good and sweet herbs do very plentifully grow and increase under them.” And when the naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison visited the strait in February 1972, he, too, fell under its spell. “One seems to be entering a completely new and strange world, a veritable Never-Never Land,” he remarked. “The Strait never freezes except along its edges, and the evergreen Antarctic beech, with its tiny matted leaves, grows thickly along the lower mountain slopes. The middle slopes support a coarse grass which turns bronze in the setting sun; and above, the high peaks are snow-covered the year round; when it rains in the Strait, it snows at 6000 feet.”

Although the sky was generally overcast, especially at night, it cleared at brief intervals to reveal a dazzling array of constellations competing for attention, with an unnaturally brilliant Milky Way. The familiar—Orion’s belt, the Big Dipper—mingled with the unfamiliar constellations of the Southern Hemisphere, especially the Southern Cross, whose presence reinforced Magellan’s conviction that the Almighty was looking over the entire venture, even here, at the end of the world.

Once the armada had negotiated the first two narrows within the strait, Magellan became increasingly cautious about the hazards ahead and decided to scout the strait’s uncharted waters. “The Captain General sent his cousin Álvaro de Mesquita to go in his vessel San Antonio through that mouth in order to find out what was inside while he and the other ships remained anchored in the wide part of the entrance until they knew what was what,” Vasquito Gallego noted. Actually, Magellan dispatched two ships (the other was Concepción), but San Antonio took most of the risks. “Álvaro de Mesquita went for fifty leagues up the strait, and in some parts he found it so narrow that between one shore and the other there was no more distance than one Lombard shot, and the strait turned toward the west whence the sea currents came in full force, so strong that they could not go on, except with difficulty,” Gallego remembered. “Mesquita turned back, saying that he thought that the great water came out of a big gulf and his advice was to go in search of its end and see the mystery, because not without reason came that water with such force from that direction.”

All the while, Victoria and Trinidad remained tied up in Lomas Bay, on the southern shore of the strait. Here the water was shallow enough to permit the ships to drop anchor, and they seemed to be safe, but at night a “great storm,” as Pigafetta called it, blew up and lasted well into the next day, battering the ships. Magellan was forced to raise anchor and let the two ships ride out the storm in the protected reaches of the bay.

The gales in this region were especially violent and seemingly appeared out of nowhere. The “great storm” of which Pigafetta spoke is called a “williwaw,” and it is peculiar to the strait. A williwaw occurs when air, chilled by the glaciers surrounding the strait, becomes unstable and suddenly races down the mountains with ever-increasing velocity. By the time it reaches the fjords, it creates a squall so powerful that it never fails to terrify and disorient any sailor unlucky enough to be caught in its grip.

San Antonio and Concepción had an even more difficult time riding out the williwaw than the ships that stayed behind. The sailors aboard those ships had experienced terrifying storms, but nothing equal to this. The fierce winds prevented them from rounding the cape, and when they tried to rejoin the fleet, they nearly ran aground. In the darkness, the two ships became disoriented, and their pilots, without maps and unable to see the stars, feared they were lost. They hunted for a way out for the next day, and the next after that, until they finally approached a narrow channel leading to a continuation of the strait. Once they noted the exact location of the strait’s extension, they sailed back through relatively calm waters to find their Captain General.

A dramatic reunion occurred, as Pigafetta explained: “We thought that they had been wrecked, first, by reason of the violent storm, and second, because two days had passed and they had not appeared, and also because of certain smoke [signals] made by two of their men who had been sent ashore to advise us. And so, while in suspense, we saw the two ships with sails full and banners flying to the wind, coming toward us. When they neared us in this manner, they suddenly discharged a number of mortars, and burst into cheers. Then all together thanking God and the Virgin Mary, we went to seek [the strait] further on.” The rejoicing, the triumph over weather and geography, and the feeling of being blessed by divine authority were new to Magellan’s men. For the better part of two years, they had been deeply mistrustful of their Captain General, divided from one another by language and culture, and prone to mutiny. After passing through these ordeals, they had become united and saw in each other not subversion or menace but the possibility of ultimate triumph.

Despite the euphoria Magellan felt on discovering the strait, he still faced serious obstacles. Influenced by the maps he had seen in Portugal, Magellan mistakenly conceived of the strait as a single channel running through the huge landmass blocking the route to the Indies, when in fact there was no single strait; instead, he faced a complex array of tidal estuaries snaking through the mountains at the southern limit of the Andes. Instead of a simple shortcut to the Pacific, Magellan had led his fleet into a uncharted maze that would put his navigational abilities to the ultimate test.

The waterways he explored were wide enough—never less than six hundred feet across, and generally more than several miles in width—but still treacherous. The strait largely consisted of a network of fjords, geologic evidence of deep glaciers that still held the surroundings in their icy embrace. At low levels, the glaciers melted into narrow, glistening waterfalls that cascaded across the granite face of the mountains until they emptied into the frigid water. If any of Magellan’s men fell overboard, they would survive in these conditions for ten minutes at the most.

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

Despite the snow cover lasting for eight months a year, the waterfall-fed vegetation in the strait was suffocatingly lush. Within several feet of the shoreline lurked a dense forest with dozens of types of ferns; windblown, stunted trees; silky moss; and a layer of spongy tundra. There were also brightly colored clumps of tiny, hardy berries; they were bitter on the outside, sweet on the inside, their delicate fruit covered with miniature air cushions to protect them from snow. (The crew had to be careful about eating them; although the berries were not toxic, they had a severe laxative effect.) There were even small white orchids blooming in the mud. Little light penetrated the thick canopy of leaves to dispel the fertile, peaceful shade within. “So thick was the wood, that it was necessary to have constant recourse to the compass,” wrote the young Charles Darwin when he visited the strait aboard HMS Beagle in 1834. “In the deep ravines, the death-like scene of desolation exceeded all description; outside it was blowing a gale, but in these hollows, not even a breath of wind stirred the leaves of the tallest trees. So gloomy, cold and wet was every part, that not even the fungi, mosses, or ferns, could flourish.” When he at last worked his way out of the enchanted forest to a summit, Darwin described a view familiar to Magellan’s crew: “irregular chains of hills, mottled with patches of snow, deep yellowish-green valleys, and arms of the sea intersecting the land in many directions. The strong wind was piercingly cold, and the atmosphere rather hazy, so that we did not stay long on top of the mountain.”

The strait’s thick vegetation gave the air an intoxicating fragrance and buoyancy. The breezes were scented with a damp mossy odor lightened by the scent of wildflowers, freshened by the cool glaciers, and faintly tangy with the salt from the sea. Like everything else in this region, the very air was alive with mystery and promise. The strait seemed to be a giant natural monastery in which the crew sought refuge, a place of quiet contemplation of the paradoxes of nature on a scale capable of inducing profound humility.

Since leaving Port Saint Julian, Magellan had seen no indigenous peoples, but his men remained alert, both for self-protection and the opportunity to barter for provisions. He dispatched a skiff crowded with ten men under orders to comb the landscape for signs of human life, but they found only a primitive structure sheltering two hundred gravesites. Apparently, a tribe of Fuegian Indians had used the place to bury their dead in warm weather, and then vanished into the perfumed interior. It is believed that these Indians came from Asia thousands of years earlier, and had been on the losing side of battles for land ever since, displaced again and again until they were nearly at the end of the continent, occupying territory no other tribes wanted.

Though disappointed, Magellan’s scouting party was probably better off avoiding the locals. Three hundred years later, Charles Darwin encountered a canoe bearing tribal members, whose lot had scarcely changed over the intervening centuries. Indeed, Darwin felt that he was peering through eons to the dawn of human society. He judged them “the most abject and miserable creatures I have any where beheld. . . . These Fuegians in the canoe were quite naked, and even one full-grown woman was absolutely so. It was raining heavily, and the fresh water, together with the spray, trickled down her body. In another harbour not far distant, a woman, who was suckling a recently-born child, came one day alongside the vessel, and remained there whilst the sleet fell and thawed on her naked bosom, and on the skin of her naked child. These poor wretches were stunted in their growth, their hideous faces bedaubed with white paint, their skins filthy and greasy, their hair entangled, their voices discordant, their gestures violent and without dignity. Viewing such men, one can hardly make oneself believe they are fellow-creatures, and inhabitants of the same world.” Clinching his disgust for the Fuegians, Darwin observed, “Nor are they exempt from famine, and, as a consequence, cannibalism accompanied by parricide.” They were, he judged, “the miserable lord of this miserable land.”

As the ships of the fleet glided along the fjords, they experienced only three hours of night, and the extended days allowed them to make up for the time lost in Port Saint Julian. The prospect of successfully negotiating the strait appeared increasingly likely, at least to Magellan. But the conviction was not unanimous, as he discovered when he summoned an officers’ council to discuss the fleet’s future course. He was delighted to hear that they had sufficient provisions to last three months, more than enough, he calculated, to carry them through the strait and to the Moluccas. Encouraged, the captains and pilots indicated they were strongly in favor of pushing on—all but one, that is.

Estêvão Gomes, reassigned as the pilot of San Antonio, strongly dissented. Now that they had found the strait, he argued, they should sail back to Spain to assemble a better-equipped fleet. He reminded Magellan that they still had to cross the Pacific, and while no one knew how large it was, Gomes assumed it was a large gulf in which they might encounter disastrous storms. The Captain General insisted they would continue at all costs, even if they were reduced to eating the leather wrapping their masts, but not everyone shared Magellan’s passionate determination. With his widely acknowledged piloting skills, Gomes had his own supporters among the crew, a situation that infuriated the Captain General. The council was not intended as an exercise in collective decision-making; rather, it was a forum for Magellan to rally his men behind and to prepare them for the challenges that lay ahead—challenges that God alone could help them meet.

Gomes’s opposition set the stage for another mutiny, but unlike the previous uprisings, this was not a violent confrontation with flashing swords. It began more insidiously, as a grim debate at the end of the world between two respected rivals.

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

Gomes received another blow when Magellan, perhaps sensitive to Gomes’s ultimate goal to supplant him, refused to appoint him captain of San Antonio after the mutiny in Port Saint Julian. Instead, Gomes had to suffer the ignominy of serving as a pilot under the inexperienced but well-placed Álvaro de Mesquita; this was, if anything, a lesser position than that of pilot major of the flagship. More experienced and better qualified, Gomes seethed with resentment at having been passed over, and he transmitted his sense of outrage to San Antonio’s sympathetic crew.

Every time Magellan dispatched San Antonio on a reconnaissance mission, Gomes, her pilot, became more alarmed by the hazards of the journey. Mesquita was so inexperienced that Gomes shouldered the responsibility for exploring these unknown waters. As a result, he knew the strait better than anyone else in the expedition, the Captain General included, and he was thoroughly unnerved by what he had seen. Gomes and his crew were, in Gallego’s assessment, “disgusted with that long and doubtful navigation.”

The dispute between Gomes and Magellan pitted two competing visions of the expedition against each other. Magellan saw it as a divinely sanctioned quest for new worlds, undertaken in the name of the king of Spain, to whom he was, if anything, even more devoted than he had been to the king of his native Portugal. If Magellan succeeded, it would be because God meant him to. This was discovery as revelation, as prophecy, as a high-risk collaboration between God and His favored nation, Spain. Magellan, in this scheme of things, was little more than God’s servant, doing His will. To Gomes, the rebellious rationalist, Magellan’s exhortations sounded like the words of a fanatic who would lead them all to certain death in the name of king and country. The only sane course, in his analysis, would be to return to Spain.

Gomes did not let the matter rest there.

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

Meanwhile, San Antonio entered Magdalen Sound. Magellan gave his ships four days to return with their reports, but even after six, San Antonio failed to reappear. “We came upon a river which we called the River of the Sardine because there were so many sardines near it,” said Pigafetta of this moment of doubt and confusion, “so we stayed there for days in order to await the two ships”—Concepción and San Antonio. “During that period we sent a well-equipped boat [Victoria] to explore the cape of the other sea. The men returned within three days and reported that they had seen the cape and the open sea.” Sighting the Pacific was itself a momentous event, but the excitement of this discovery was overshadowed by the mysterious failure of San Antonio to reappear at the appointed time and place. Magellan had no idea what had become of her. Perhaps she had foundered and lay at the bottom of one of the yawning fjords. Or perhaps she had deserted just when the expedition was on the verge of its great accomplishment.

At this critical moment, Magellan conferred with Andrés de San Martín, now aboard Trinidad. After consulting the position of the stars and planets, he concluded that San Antonio had indeed sailed for Spain, and worse, her captain, Mesquita, a Magellan loyalist, had been taken prisoner. His vision proved to be remarkably accurate. “The ship San Antonio would not await Concepción because she intended to flee and to return to Spain—which she did,” Pigafetta tersely reported. The long-frustrated mutiny had finally succeeded; even worse, it had taken place when Magellan least expected it. San Antonio, and all her crew, had vanished.

Aboard the renegade San Antonio, the situation was more even complicated than Magellan or his astrologer realized. Mesquita, the captain, had attempted to rendezvous with the rest of the fleet, but he failed to locate the other ships in the strait’s confusing network of estuaries. Gomes naturally offered little help in the endeavor. During a formal inquiry after the voyage, another usurper, Gerónimo Guerra, insisted that he had deposited papers for Magellan at the precise point where the ships were supposed to meet. These papers would serve as proof of that effort, but they were never found.

Guerra’s words sound self-serving, and perhaps they were. He had worked for Cristóbal de Haro, and was rumored to be related to the financier as well. He had shipped out on San Antonio as a mere clerk, but his remarkably high salary, 30,000 maravedís, twenty times greater than an ordinary seaman’s, signaled a much larger role. Guerra’s real mission was to look out for Haro’s interests; in other words, he was a spy. Had Magellan agreed to return to Spain, Gomes’s alliance with Guerra suggests that the Haro family would have supported the decision; after all, they would have gotten their ships back safe and sound. But King Charles was another matter. At the very least, he would have sent Magellan to jail.

Exactly when San Antonio tried to rejoin the rest of the fleet—if she ever did—is open to question. The ships’ officers later testified at the inquiry that they returned well before they were expected. If so, why had Magellan failed to locate the missing ship? There were two possibilities. Either she had gotten lost in the strait’s endless estuaries, or the mutineers had seized the ship, sought refuge in a concealed bay or fjord, and slipped out of the strait under cover of darkness for Spain.

No matter what the intentions of Gomes and Guerra actually were, discontent aboard San Antonio increased. Mesquita sent smoke signals and fired cannon to try to raise the rest of the fleet, but these signs went unseen and unheard. Mesquita stubbornly insisted on continuing his search for Magellan, but the growing uncertainty convinced Guerra, Gomes and a few like-minded sailors that the time had come to seize the wayward ship. They swiftly overpowered Mesquita, a deed for which they could pay with their lives. Once the mutiny was in progress, there was no stopping it; the mutineers had to succeed or, as they well knew, they would be drawn and quartered and displayed as so many pieces of freshly butchered meat.

Desperate, Gomes flourished a dagger and stabbed Mesquita in the leg. Battling the wound’s throbbing pain, Mesquita snatched the dagger from Gomes and stabbed the attacker in the hand. Gomes howled as the iron entered his flesh, and his cries attracted reinforcements. They overwhelmed and shackled Mesquita, who was held prisoner in Guerra’s cabin. Now Mesquita would receive his bitter payback for the court-martial and suffering he had overseen in Port Saint Julian. As San Antonio set a course for Spain, the mutineers planned to torture him into signing a confession that Magellan had tortured Spanish officers.

The thought of San Antonio slipping away from the rest of the fleet filled Magellan with dread. The Captain General feared that the would-be mutineers had finally found the perfect occasion for their revenge on Mesquita. Even without the prompting of his astrologer, Magellan suspected that Gomes would sail for Spain, and, once there, attempt to tarnish Magellan’s name with a biased account of the tragic events at Port Saint Julian. Gomes could twist the truth to claim that his mutiny had actually been an act of heroic resistance in the face of Magellan’s disloyalty. In this scenario, none other than Estêvão Gomes would be Captain General for the next expedition to the Moluccas, while Magellan would hear about it from the obscurity of a Spanish prison.

San Antonio was the largest ship in the fleet, and she carried many of the fleet’s provisions in her hold, so the loss instantly put the other sailors’ food supplies—indeed their very lives—in jeopardy. The rebels also carried off another prize, an affable Patagonian giant whom they had captured several months before. Magellan had to decide whether to pursue the mutineers or hope that his cousin would regain control of the ship. He elected to resume searching for the missing San Antonio. “We turned back to look for the two ships, but we found only Concepción,” Pigafetta wrote. “Upon asking them where the other was, Juan Serrano, who was captain and pilot of the former ship (and also of that ship that had been wrecked), replied that he did not know, and that he had never seen it after it had entered the opening.” Magellan launched a search mission to recapture the missing ship, a virtual impossibility in this watery labyrinth. “We sought it in all parts of the Strait,” Pigafetta recorded, “as far as that opening whence it had fled, and the Captain General sent the ship Victoria back to the entrance of the Strait to ascertain whether the ship was there.”

In his actions, Magellan strictly followed his royal instructions of May 8, 1519, governing ships that had gone astray, to establish prominent indicators. Pigafetta described the lengths to which Magellan went: “Orders were given, if they did not find it, to plant a banner on the summit of some small hill with a letter in an earthen pot buried . . . near the banner, so that if the banner were seen the letter might be found, and the ship might learn the course we were sailing. For this was the arrangement made between us in case we went astray one from the other. Two banners were planted with their letters—one on a little eminence in the first bay, and the other in an islet in the third bay, where there were many sea wolves and large birds.”

Although Pigafetta provides scant clues, this was likely Santa Magdalena Island, a massive, windswept dune rising from the frigid waters. At that time of year, it was overrun with thousands of penguins, the “large birds” mentioned by Pigafetta, mating, burrowing, and most of all fouling the entire islet with their droppings, whose penetrating stench not even the brisk, salty air could mask. Denuded of vegetation, and located in open water, the islet made an excellent place for a marker to remain visible to a passing vessel.

Magellan waited for the errant San Antonio to return. “He had a cross set up in an islet”—in all likelihood, one of the Charles Islands—“near that river which flowed between high mountains covered with snow and emptied into the sea near the River of Sardines.” The precautions were taken in vain, lonely signals at the end of the world for a phantom ship. San Antonio never reappeared.

Once Magellan became resigned to the loss of the ship, the three remaining vessels of the Armada de Molucca pressed on. After the hardships they had endured at bleak Port Saint Julian, the crew came to welcome the variety and natural majesty the strait afforded them. As they plied its fjords, they marveled at the dolphins that swam beside their ships and jumped in agile arcs. Sailors’ lore had it that when dolphins jumped straight ahead, good weather was approaching, and when they jumped to one side or the other, the weather would turn foul.

The marvelous but hazardous strait still lacked a name. At first, the men called it simply the strait. Pigafetta took to referring to the waterway as the Patagonian Strait, while San Martín, the astrologer-pilot, preferred the name Strait of All Saints. Still others referred to it as Victoria Strait, after the first ship to enter its waters. By 1527, six years after the expedition’s conclusion, the waterway had earned the name by which it is now known, the Strait of Magellan. For all his pride, Magellan never dared to name the strait after himself; the names he did confer during his journey were either descriptive (Patagonia) or religiously inspired (Cape of the Eleven Thousand Virgins).

As one mountainous prospect gave way to another, Pigafetta wrote glowingly of the strait’s natural splendor and sustaining food. “One finds the safest of ports every half league in it, water, the finest of wood (but not of cedar), fish, sardines, and missiglioni, while smallage, a sweet herb (although there is also some that is bitter) grows around the springs. We ate of it for many days as we had nothing else.” Although the men did not realize it, their diet replenished their depleted bodies. The wild herbs they consumed contained vitamin C, which protected them against the depredations of scurvy, at least for a while.

All things considered, Pigafetta judged, “I believe there is not a more beautiful or better strait than this one.”

While Pigafetta took satisfaction in the armada’s accomplishment, Magellan succumbed to a rare moment of self-doubt, and sought the advice of his officers about whether to proceed with the expedition or return to Spain, just as Gomes had urged him to do. His uncharacteristic wavering suggests he dreaded the rumors that the rebellious crew of San Antonio would spread about his conduct if they ever reached Spain.

Magellan dictated a lengthy missive to Duarte Barbosa, Victoria’s captain, an indication that relations had become so strained that the Captain General feared that simply bringing them together would lead to yet another mutiny. The document reveals his urgent need to build a consensus: “I, Ferdinand Magellan, Knight of the Order of Santiago, and Captain General of this Armada which His Majesty sends to the discovery of the Isles of the Spices, etc., hereby inform you, Duarte Barbosa, captain of Victoria, and its pilots and boatswains, that I am aware of your deeming it a very grievous thing that I shall be determined to continue onwards, because you think that time is short to accomplish our journey,” he said.

And since I am a man who never despised the advice and opinion from others, on the contrary, all of my decisions are taken jointly with everyone and notified to one and all, without my offending anyone; and because of what happened in San Julian with the deaths of Luis de Mendoza and Gaspar de Quesada, and the banishment of Luis de Cartagena and Pero Sánchez de la Reina, priest, you out of fear refrain from telling me and advising me on everything you believe to be useful to His Majesty and the Armada’s well-being, but if you do not tell me so, you are going against the service of the Emperor-King, our lord, and against the oath and homage you took with me; therefore I ask you on behalf of the said lord, and I myself beg you and order you to write down your opinions, each one individually, stating the reasons why we should continue onwards or else turn back, and all this showing no respect for anything that may prevent you from telling the truth. . . . Being aware of those reasons and opinions, I will then say mine and my willingness to conclude what should be done.

—Written in the Canal de Todos los Santos, opposite the Río de la Isleta, on the 21st of November, Thursday, at fifty-three degrees, of 1520. Ordered by Captain General Ferdinand Magellan.

This remarkable document—Magellan’s longest statement to have survived—reveals the suspicion and mistrust running rampant at what should have been one of their most harmonious and triumphant intervals. The normally resolute Magellan sounds as though he is about to apologize for the protracted trial and cruel executions he ordered at Port Saint Julian, and he clearly realizes that as a result of his severe (though legally sanctioned) disciplinary measures, he has alienated his officers, even those closest to him. Afraid of losing still more of his ships to mutiny, Magellan’s isolation at this moment was nearly complete.

Thrust into an unaccustomed position of authority, Andrés de San Martín, the fleet’s astronomer, urged that they continue the expedition at least through mid-January, although he remained skeptical that the strait would ultimately prove to be the miraculous passage to the Spice Islands. After January, he warned, the days would grow short, and the williwaws, whose destructive power they had already experienced, would become even more ferocious; furthermore, they must not sail by night because the men would be exhausted after a long, strenuous day battling high winds and rough waters. “Most magnificent Lord,” he began,

Having seen your lordship’s command, of which I was notified on Friday 22nd of November of 1520 by Martín Méndez, clerk of the ship of His Majesty named Victoria, and which orders me to give my view as regards what I believe to be better for this journey, either to continue, or to turn back, with the reasons behind either choice, I say: That, aside from doubting that neither through this Canal de Todos los Santos, in which we now are, nor through the other two straits lying to the East and East-Northeast, there might be found any passage to the Moluccas, this is irrelevant to the question of what could be eventually found, weather permitting, insofar as we are in the prime of summer. And it seems that your lordship must continue ahead in search of it, and depending on what shall be found or discovered until the middle of this coming January of 1520, you may consider the possibility of returning to Spain, because from then on the days suddenly dwindle and the weather shall worsen. And since now, even though the days last seventeen hours, added to the dawn and dusk, we still suffer stormy and shifting weather, much more so can be expected when the days decrease from fifteen to twelve hours and much more in winter, as we already know. So your lordship may want to leave these straits and spend the month of January in reaching the outside and then, after collecting enough water and fuel, head towards Cádiz and the port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, whence we departed.

San Martín’s position was reasonable and well argued, but cautious.

Continuing nearer the Austral Pole than we presently are, as you instructed the captains at the river of Santa Cruz, I do not think it feasible, due to the terrible and stormy weather, because if at this latitude sailing proves so hazardous and painful, what shall it be like when we find ourselves at sixty or seventy-five degrees or more, as your lordship said he must go in search of the Moluccas by way of the Eastern and East-Northeastern routes, rounding the Cape of Good Hope? By the time we should arrive there it would already be winter, as your lordship well knows, and also the crew is thin and lacking in strength; moreover, if there are now sufficient provisions, they are not many nor enough to regain energies and enable too much working without the crew’s health suffering it, and I also have noticed how it takes the ill ones long to recover.

On the positive side of the ledger, San Martín reminded Magellan that the three remaining ships of the fleet were still seaworthy, but, he warned, their reduced provisions would not be sufficient to last them all the way to the Moluccas. “Even though your lordship’s ships are good and well equipped (praise be God), some ropes are missing, especially in Victoria, and besides, the crew is thin and weak, and the provisions are not enough to reach the Moluccas by the aforesaid route, and then return to Spain.”

And he had a final word of advice for the Captain General:

I also believe that your lordship should not sail along these coasts at night, both because of the ships’ safety and the crew’s need to rest a little; since there are seventeen hours of daylight, let your lordship have the ships lie at anchor for the four or five nightly hours so that, as I said, the people can rest instead of having to bustle about the ships with the rigging; and, most importantly, in order to spare ourselves the blows that an untoward fate could inflict on us, may Heaven forbid it. For, if such blows befall us when things can be seen and observed, it should not be unfitting to fear them when nothing can be seen or known or well watched, so let your lordship have the ships anchor one hour before sunset rather than continue forward at night to cover two leagues. I have said as I feel and understand in order to serve both God and your lordship with what I believe is best for the Armada and your lordship; your lordship shall do as your lordship sees fit and as God shall guide your lordship. Please He that your lordship’s life and condition be successful, as it is my wish.

San Martín dared to express what nearly everyone on the voyage whispered: There was great danger ahead, and chances were they would not make it to the Spice Islands, wherever they were; their maps had long since proved to be useless. Give it until January, he advised, and if they had not reached their goal by then, return to Spain, and try again.

Magellan considered these carefully thought-out admonitions, but he was nevertheless inclined to proceed, no matter how long it took to reach the Spice Islands. They had at least three months’ provisions, by his reckoning. More important, he believed that God would assist them in achieving their goal; after all, He had permitted them to discover the strait, and He would guide them to their final goal.

The next day, Magellan gave the order to weigh anchor. The ships fired a salvo of cannon that reverberated among the splendid dark green mountains, gray ravines, and azure glaciers of the strait, and the armada set sail once again, heading west, always west.

At last, the churning, metallic waters of the Pacific came into view, and they realized they had reached the end of the strait. Magellan had done it; he had found the waterway, just as he had promised King Charles. Now that the armada had accomplished this feat, all the arguments for turning back by mid-January were never again discussed. “Everyone thought himself fortunate to be where none had been before,” Ginés de Mafra exulted.

Magellan was overwhelmed to have completed his navigation of the strait, at last. Pigafetta records that the Captain General “wept for joy.” When he recovered, he named the just-discovered Pacific cape “Cape Desire, for we had been desiring it for a long time.”

As the armada approached the Pacific, the seas turned gray and rough. It was late in the day, and the dull skies were fading to darkness as the three ships put the western mouth of the strait to stern. “Wednesday, November 28, 1520, we debouched from that strait, engulfing ourselves in the Pacific sea,” noted Pigafetta with quiet satisfaction. Even with the mutiny of the San Antonio, and the time spent trying to recover the ship, not to mention the ubiquitous dead ends the strait presented and at least one fierce williwaw, Magellan needed only thirty-eight days and nights to travel from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific.

For Magellan and his crew, it had been a remarkable rite of passage. As they sailed beyond the strait into the open water, how could they doubt that their expedition was indeed blessed by the Almighty? Although Magellan and his crew appeared vulnerable to the elements, to starvation, to the local tribes they encountered, and most of all to each other, this was not how they saw themselves. They all believed that a supernatural power looked after them and conferred on them the unique status of global travelers.

But how much of this accomplishment of navigating the strait derived from Magellan’s skill, and how much could be attributed to plain good luck? Magellan was fortunate that the weather was relatively mild; after the intense williwaw that had menaced his ships, no other squalls surprised them, no glaciers collapsed on them, and the temperature, fluctuating as it does at that time of year between 35 degrees and 50 degrees Fahrenheit, remained within normal bounds, so the men were spared the intense cold they had suffered at Port Saint Julian. Their scouting excursions, as well as the addition of fresh vegetables to their diet, boosted both their spirits and their health. The passage through the strait, while strenuous, was far healthier than being at sea for long stretches, within the unsanitary confines of the ships, subsisting on a diet of salty, spoiled food and wine.

Although the armada enjoyed reasonably good fortune, Magellan’s extraordinary skill as a strategist proved to be the decisive factor in negotiating the entire length of the Dragon’s Tail. He ordered lookouts scrambling to the highest perch on the ships, where they could see the waterways and obstacles that lay ahead. In addition, he regularly sent small scouting parties in the longboats. “They would go on and come back with news of the findings, and then the rest of the armada would follow. This is the way the armada operated for the whole passage of the strait,” Ginés de Mafra recalled. The information they brought back helped Magellan plot his next move; they warned him against rocky shoals, bays that deceptively resembled a continuation of the strait, and other dead ends that would have delayed his passage. Magellan even relied on the taste of seawater to guide the fleet. As the water became fresher, he knew he was traveling inland, and once it turned salty, he realized he was approaching the Pacific on the western side of the strait.

This array of tactics saved tedious days of wandering up and down dead-end channels and harbors. If one approach failed, he always had others on which to fall back. Not even the loss of his best pilot, Estêvão Gomes, and his biggest ship, San Antonio, defeated him; the more the fleet shrank, the more nimble it became. His sophisticated approach to navigating uncharted waters went far beyond technical ability in boat handling and direction finding; it revealed an ability to deploy novel tactics to overcome one of the great challenges of the Age of Discovery: namely, how to guide a fleet of ships through hundreds of miles of unmapped archipelagos in rough weather.

Magellan’s skill in negotiating the entire length of the strait is acknowledged as the single greatest feat in the history of maritime exploration. It was, perhaps, an even greater accomplishment than Columbus’s discovery of the New World, because the Genoan, thinking he had arrived in China, remained befuddled to the end of his days about where he was, and what he had accomplished, and as a result he misled others. Magellan, in contrast, realized exactly what he had done; he had, at long last, begun to correct Columbus’s great navigational error.

When the fog receded and the sun broke through the low clouds, the Western Sea, as the Pacific was then called, turned from lifeless gray to seductive cobalt, its surface mottled with frothy whitecaps that melted into the frigid air. The water boiled menacingly and surged over the rocks and cliffs emerging from its inscrutable depths. Fearing shoals, Magellan adjusted his navigational technique; instead of gliding through deep fjords, he steered a course in rough water between two rocks later named, with a bitter irony best appreciated by wary sailors, The Evangelists and Good Hope. A cold miasma descended, blinding the pilots. “The western exit of the strait is very narrow and foggy, and there is no sign of it,” de Mafra wrote. “Having exited it and sailed three leagues into the sea, its mouth cannot be descried.”

Magellan set a northerly course along the coast of Chile. The strait they had just left seemed an enchanted refuge by comparison to the ocean they now faced. Darwin, on his journey, found the vista so horrifying that he was moved to comment: “One sight of such a coast is enough to make a landsman dream for a week of shipwreck, peril, and death.”

The men of the Armada de Molucca looked on the scene with the same foreboding. They knew the voyage was far from over; in a sense, it had only just begun. No matter how great the feat of navigating the strait from one ocean to another, it would have little value unless the armada reached the Spice Islands, wherever they were. No one aboard the fleet’s three remaining ships suspected they were about to traverse the largest body of water in the world to get there.