Magellan was born of the minor Portuguese nobility, probably about 1480 and probably at Oporto.[24] After service as a page in the household of Queen Leonor, he went East with the great fleet of Francisco de Almeida, first Viceroy of India, in 1505, and saw much action. He took part in the decisive naval battle off Diu in 1509, when the Egypto-Gujerati counter-offensive was shattered;[25] he was probably with Albuquerque in the first assault on Goa in 1510, and certainly at Malacca both in 1509, when he rescued Francisco Serrão, and for the successful siege of 1511. He is now thought not to have been on de Abreu's Indies voyage, but would have heard all about its results. From the scattered notices of his life before 1517, we have the impression of a man short in stature but impressive, gallant and resourceful in action, at once realistically calculating and daring, capable both of generosity and violence, independent in temper, secretive and over-taciturn, and very dogged as to his rights. His whole life shows him as a tough leader, driving men hard because driven by his own daemon. Even as a junior officer, he was capable of dissenting in open council from the terrible Albuquerque.
- 35 -Magellan was back in Portugal in time to take part in the capture of Azamor in Morocco in 1513; here he was wounded in the leg, so that he limped ever after, and was promoted to quadrilheiro mor, an officer in charge of the disposition of booty. The post was an invidious one, and Magellan was soon involved in unfounded charges of misappropriation. He did not help his case by returning to Portugal without leave, and demanding a token increase in stipend. The King, D. Manuel, sent him back to face the charges; these were dropped and his name cleared, but Magellan's demands for further recognition of his services both in the Indies and Morocco were very brusquely refused: there is no doubt that D. Manuel, never noted for generosity towards his servants, was prejudiced against Magellan, who in turn was clearly not a man to swallow insult, even from his sovereign, with any patience. This petty squabble, endlessly paralleled in Renaissance courts, had global consequences, for Magellan determined to transfer his services to Castile—‘What mighty contests rise from trivial things’!
It is of course possible that there were deeper reasons, and some authors have thought that Magellan must have broached to D. Manuel plans for a westwards voyage to the Indies:[26] few proposals could have been less welcome, and Magellan would surely have realised this in advance. Quite apart from any prudential reluctance to trespass across the Tordesillas line, this would have been a ridiculous waste of effort for Portugal, already in firm possession of the African route, and indeed completely contrary to her interests: why open new and less controllable doors? The eventual discovery of the Southwest Passage was highly unwelcome to the Portuguese, who must have read with no displeasure of the hardships and horrors of the Straits and the Ocean passage. Lagôa sums up: although the elements for Magellan's enterprise were collected while he was in the East, the idea of executing it was formed after his quarrel with D. Manuel. By this time ‘to go to the Moluccas for the Portuguese Crown, after de Abreu's voyage, would be an inglorious feat’, and a man of Magellan's temper could hardly reconcile himself to a life of inaction, the normal result of a prince's displeasure. Lagôa goes on to say that ‘the failure of Juan de Solis, coinciding with the affront inflicted on Magellan, called his attention to the momentous problem whose solution besides honour and riches, would provide him with the only way to revenge the royal insult.’[27] This seems the fairest summing-up of the question of motive.
From about 1514, then, the grand design must have been forming in Magellan's mind. How far he was influenced by the reports of his friend Serrão's position of influence, almost independence, in the Moluccas, and the letters exchanged between them, must be doubtful. According to Barros, Serrão wrote to Magellan that he had found a new world, greatly exaggerating the distance between Malacca and the Moluccas in order to inflate his own achievement (this of course would tend to place the Moluccas in the Spanish zone), and his papers, examined after his death by the Portuguese commander in the Moluccas, included a letter from Magellan saying that ‘if it were God's pleasure, he would- 36 -soon be with him; and if it were not by way of Portugal, it would be by way of Castile, for his affairs were tending that way.’[28] Lagôa inclines to discount the importance of Serrão's influence: a factor but not as important as the tradition suggests. In any case, by 1516 Magellan knew what he wanted to do; and it could be done only by renouncing his natural allegiance.
In judging this transfer of loyalty, it must be remembered that there was a constant interchange of personnel, especially perhaps of those engaged in maritime affairs, between Spain, Portugal, and other countries; Juan de Solis, for example, was probably also a Portuguese, and served Castile and France as well as his own country.[29] There was already a group of Lusian exiles in Spain; Magellan married into the family of one of them, Diogo Barbosa. For many men of position loyalty was as much personal to their prince as national, and repudiation of an ungrateful sovereign may well have been deemed (except by that sovereign) merely somewhat censurable rather than really disreputable; more in doubtful taste than actually treasonable. So great was the interchange of services in the Peninsula that it seems safe to assume that Magellan's real offence was his titanic success, without which not so much would have been made of his defection; although paradoxically, this contributes to the modern tendency to condonation.[30]
In October 1517 Magellan went to Seville and formally naturalised himself as a subject of Carlos I (the Emperor Charles V); he was joined in December by Ruy Faleiro, a man of repute as a cosmographer but of somewhat unbalanced mind. Magellan and Faleiro had sincerely convinced themselves that the Moluccas lay within the Spanish sphere, assuming the Tordesillas line to be carried on round the globe; and indeed a number of Portuguese who remained loyal to their Crown were either doubtful of Lusian rights or of the same belief, whence some embarrassment for D. João III's envoys at the Badajoz conference which met to consider the new situation created by Magellan's voyage.[31] By way of insurance D. Manuel obtained a new Bull, Praecelsae devotionis (1514), from Pope Leo IX, who had been gratified by the gift of a performing elephant sent back by Albuquerque; this confirmed Romanus Pontifex and in very sweeping terms gave Portugal rights to any heathen lands wheresoever which were reached by sailing eastwards, in effect restricting the Tordesillas line to the Atlantic.[32]
The officials of the Casa de Contratacion, the royal agency busily organising the Antillean Indies from Seville, were mostly unimpressed by Magellan's promise that he could lead them to the Spice Islands without trespassing on Portuguese preserves; but one of them, Juan de Aranda, took Magellan and Faleiro more seriously. Aranda had the ear of the immensly powerful Juan de Fonseca, Bishop of Burgos and the head of the Casa; but, to Faleiro's fury, he drove a hard bargain for his good offices, insisting on an eighth of any profits that might accrue to the pair. Support was also received from Cristobal de Haro, a member of a Burgos merchant family who had worked with the Fuggers in financing the pepper trade, but had broken with D. Manuel over the latter's insistence on a crown monopoly and general tough dealing with the German- 37 -investors, and more personal grievances. Haro was apparently behind a small Portuguese expedition under João de Lisboa and Estevão Frois which between 1511 and 1514 reached the La Plata estuary or even perhaps the Gulf of San Matias in 42°S, and according to the manuscript Newen Zeytung auss Pressilandt in the Fugger archives, thought itself to have been only 600 leagues from Malacca; this is probably the source of the strait in 45°S shown on Schöner's map of 1515.[33] Haro came to Spain in 1516 and immediately allied himself with Fonseca. The joint efforts of the group secured the royal Capitulacion issued on 22 March 1518: the design, foreshadowed by Vespucci and the Solis voyage of 1515–16, was not for a circumnavigation but for a Southwest Passage to the Moluccas; and another possible objective in Magellan's mind was the gold of Tarshish and Ophir, identified with the Lequeos—the Ryukyu Islands—already known to the Portuguese, having been visited by Jorge de Mascarenhas in 1517.[34] Whether it originally included a circumnavigation may be left open, but on the whole is very doubtful, although, according to Pigafetta, Magellan had decided on this route before his death. Pace Morison, it would not make sense for a Portuguese defector to Castile to return through the Portuguese zone, against the tenor of his instructions; but, as Magellan's rashness on the day of his death suggests, hubris may already have set in.[35]