Mooring inside the new cape, possibly on the southern shores of the embayment, Magellan sent on the San Antonio and Concepcion to reconnoitre; a great storm came on the night of their departure, and it was feared that they had been lost, until they were seen approaching, guns firing and crews cheering as they drew near. They had passed the First Narrows—well named Angostura de la Esperanza—and found a great opening, narrowing at the further end but then widening out again, and obviously running far into the land. This was no La Plata or Mar Dulce; the indications were for a true passage, and the fleet pressed on.
The chronology of the passage is confused. At one point Magellan sought counsel in writing of his officers, professing (from one's general impression of his character, most disingenuously) that he was always open to advice; so far as is known, only Andrés de San Martin replied, though on this or another occasion Estevão Gomes (or Esteban Gomez), a Portuguese disgruntled at not receiving command of a ship, objected to continuing the voyage: now that a passage had been discovered, it would be better to return to Spain and come out again with a better-found expedition. As Zweig says,
From the logical, the objective outlook, Gomez's proposal to return
forthwith to enjoy the honours they had won was eminently
sound. Had it been accepted, the commander and nearly two
hundred other members of the expedition who were foredoomed
to perish, would have got home safely.[50]
Once again Zweig invokes the prerogative of a genius: ‘who wishes to act heroically, must act unreasonably.’ But even discounting his intense egoism, Magellan was not unreasonable in finding the proposal utterly unacceptable: anything would be better than returning with his task half-done, his promises half-fulfilled, to face all over again the frustrations, intrigues, and hazards of resurrecting the project. It is likely that Magellan's conciliatory gesture was only pro forma; it is now that he is said to have declared ‘in a most composed manner’ that he would go on even if they had to eat the leather from the yards. According to Pigafetta, the Captain-General knew of a hidden strait from a map by Martin Behaim which he had seen in Portuguese archives; and it is largely on this that Nunn and Nowell base their view that Magellan thought of South America not as a new continent but as a southerly extension from Asia, and the Mar del Sur as Ptolemy's Sinus Magnus. Whatever the truth on this point, it seems impossible that a passage shown by Behaim along the Tropic of Capricorn should be ‘The strait which Magellan sought for and thought he found’: an error of nearly 30° in latitude is too much by far. Even if he had seen a map by or based on Behaim, it would have represented the knowledge of the 1490s, and by 1520 Vespucci and Solis had exploded it. It is true that the conviction that Columbus had found not Asia but Mundus Novus was not as yet universal, but it was already general, and apart from this reference by Pigafetta, there is little or no evidence that Magellan was much influenced by Behaim. It seems more- 46 -likely that, as Lagôa argues, he was confusing Behaim with that other Nurnberg cosmographer Schöner, whose globes and maps were far more in accord with the general knowledge and opinion of the time.[51]
At the head of Broad Reach there is a fork: Magellan went up the southwestern channel (between Brunswick Peninsula and Dawson Island) with the Trinidad and Victoria, sending the other two ships to explore the branch to the southeast. Many smokes were seen on the land to the left, hence named Tierra del Fuego, and the broad sounds and open desolate country of the eastern shores of the passage were replaced by narrow fiords walled in by densely forested and snow-capped mountains; but despite the notorious difficulties of navigation in narrow waters liable to sudden squalls from the side-valleys, the passage—some 600 km, the length of the English Channel—seems to have been a fairly smooth one. At the ‘River of Sardines’, rather more than halfway through, Magellan stopped to take in wood and water; but the other two ships had not rejoined, and he
Figure Plate VII. MAGELLAN IN THE STRAITS: THE HEROIC IMAGE.
The hero is shown steering (apparently backwards, since Tierra del Fuego is to starboard of the ship) between the Land of Giants and the Land of Fire; the Patagonian giant using an arrow as an emetic is mentioned by Pigafetta and became a standard item in Magellanic iconography (cf. Figure Plate XX, “PTOLEMY TRANSFORMED: WYTFLIET 1597. ”); the roc is obviously a stray from Madagascar. From Theodore de Bry, America, Part IV (1594), by permission of the Trustees of The British Library.
- 47 -turned back to look for them. He found only the Concepcion; the San Antonio was missing; in fact, Estevão Gomes had seized her and deserted.[52] Giving her up for lost, the fleet returned to what Magellan now knew to be the main channel, since while at the River of Sardines he had
sent a boat well provided with men and victuals to find the cape of
the other sea. They took three days going and returning, and told
us that they had found the cape and the great open sea; at which
the Captain-General, for the joy he had, began to weep, and
named that cape Cape of Desire [Cabo Deseado, close to the modern
Cape Pilar], as a thing much desired and long-time sought.
The channel was narrow but deep, the flood stronger than the ebb: there could no longer be any doubt that the Passage was found.
On 28 November they passed the Cape of Desire, and now other tears, not of joy, were to be shed:
we entered into the pacific sea where we stayed three months and
twenty days without taking on victuals or other refreshments, and
we ate only old biscuit turned to powder all full of worms and
stinking with the odour of the urine the Rats had made on it, after
eating the good part. And we drank putrid yellow water. We also
ate the hides of cattle which were very hard because of the sun,
rain, and wind. And we left them four or five days in the sea,
then put them for a little while over the coals. And so we ate them.
Also rats which cost half a crown each one. And even so we
could not find enough of them.[53]
And Pigafetta goes on to describe the worst horror of all, the scurvy. But the sea was well named the Pacific, for they met with no storms.
During the whole traverse to Guam, they saw only two small uninhabited islands. The generally accepted version of Magellan's route takes him up the Chilean coast to about 32 or 34°S (so as to reach warmer climes as quickly as possible) and thence across the Ocean in a generally west-northwesterly direction, borne on by the Southeast Trades. The two islands seen, San Pablo and Los Tiburones (‘The Sharks’) are generally identified respectively with Pukapuka, Fangahina, or Angatau, outliers of the Tuamotus, and Caroline, Vostock, or Flint in the Line Islands. G. E. Nunn, however, puts forward a closely argued but unconvincing case for a track right up the South American coast to about 10°S, thence northwest to the area of Cipangu (which he holds to be a main objective of Magellan's) as shown on Waldseemüller's map of 1507—that is, a large rectangular island extending from Baja California to about 8°N. Not finding this island, Magellan gave up the search and meeting with favourable winds—the southern limb of the Northeast Trades—he struck west, in accordance with the principles of latitude sailing. On this view the two islands would be Clipperton and Clarion (in the Revillagigedos), about 10 and 19°N respectively—surely- 48 -much too large a difference from the 16–19°S for San Pablo and the 9–14°S for Tiburones given by Pigafetta, Francisco Albo, and the ‘Genoese pilot’, the three recorders who were actually on the voyage. The main basis of Nunn's argument is that the pilot Albo, who alone gives a coherent sequence of positions, consistently falsified his results after Magellan's death (but what is the force of this?) so as to make sure that the Spice Islands would be shown in the Spanish half of the world. Much of Nunn's argument seems circular.[54]
The ‘incidental remark’ by Pigafetta about Cipangu on which Nunn relies is so extremely vague and confused that nothing can be safely built upon it. The fact that Magellan saw only two islands before Guam is certainly rather surprising, but by no means so extraordinary a phenomenon as Nunn asserts: in the relevant longitudes (that is as far west as 160°W, where the traditional track enters an island-free zone), the island screens are arranged en echelon, and Magellan was passing along them, not athwart. Schouten and Le Maire in 1616 saw only four islands east of 160°W, all in the Tuamotus and all within four days; Byron in 1765, in a course close to the traditional track of Magellan in these longitudes, saw five, again all in the Tuamotus and again all so close together as hardly to count as more than two; the ship of Magellan's immediate successor Loaysa met with one island only. Nunn arrives at his course largely, if not mainly, by correcting for compass declination; but it appears from Pigafetta—in a less dubious reference than that to Cipangu—that Magellan did insist on his- 49 -pilots adjusting for declination, and a further correction would be gratuitous and misleading. The Nunn route is materially longer—by nearly 2800 km—than the traditional one, and it seems highly unlikely that Magellan, already very short of provisions and with one mutiny and one probably presumed desertion behind him, would have risked setting his pilots such a course, especially when he had found favourable winds in the Southeast Trades—that would have been an open invitation to further discontents. It seems also gratuitous to labour the suspicious precision of Albo's latitudes and the discrepancies between his and other accounts for San Pablo and Los Tiburones (only three to five degrees) while at the same time insisting that all the early authorities were either deceivers or deceived to the tune of 25 to 30 degrees. Why should Pigafetta, an Italian and a Knight of Rhodes, join in the deception? and while he was by no means a professional, he could surely tell the difference between 10 or 20° south and 10 or 20° north—in January! Nunn's paper is an elegant essay in deduction, but there seem to be too many interdependent variables for it to carry conviction. Nor, given the Spanish clinging to a Ptolemaic view of the world, the complete and natural uncertainty as to the width of the gap between Asia and Castilla del Oro, and the genuine doubt as to the position of the Spice Islands relative to an extension of the Tordesillas line around the globe, can one see any very compelling reason for the falsification.
Plunged into the wastes of the Ocean, and however desperate the physical and moral condition of the company, obviously ‘returning were as tedious as go o'er.’ The long agony drew near an end, or at least an intermission, when on 6 March 1521 they sighted three islands, inhabited and promising: Guam, Rota, and perhaps Saipan. But this first contact between Europeans and Oceanians was far from happy. Magellan wished to obtain fresh supplies, but the natives came aboard and stole everything they could carry away, dexterously making off with a small boat from the Trinidad’s stern. Going ashore with forty armed men, Magellan burned houses and boats in reprisal, killing seven men. Leaving these Islands of the Ladrones, or Robbers, on 9 March, they came a week later to a high island of considerable size: Samar.
Magellan had taken a course which brought him well north of the Moluccas, allegedly giving as a reason that food would be in short supply there, but perhaps rather on the scent of Tarshish and Ophir, thought of as in the Lequeos (Ryukyus), or with a more realistic idea than Columbus's of the location of Cipangu. On any view, he must have thought himself near Asia, and perhaps his motive was the simple and sensible desire to replenish his supplies and recuperate his crews before a possible encounter with the Portuguese in the Moluccas. The islands he had reached were obviously large and desirable; not yet christened the Philippines, they were named for the day of their discovery, the Islas de San Lazaro. The barrier that Vespucci had divined, the great sea that Balboa had glimpsed—both had been overcome.
- 50 -Landing on a small uninhabited island, they set up tents for the sick, and two days later a canoe with nine men arrived.[55] Magellan commanded his people to wait in silence; but these men were welcoming. Trade trifles were exchanged for fruit, coconuts, and arrack, and more provisions were promised. With rest and fresh food, all took new heart; the Captain-General gave coconut-milk to the sick with his own hand. Relations with the local people remained cordial, and on 28 March, when they had moved on to another little island, they met a man who could converse with Magellan's Malayan slave Enrique: it was now certain that they had reached the confines of Asia.
The first Easter after the mutiny at Puerto San Julian was marked by an impressively solemn Mass, at which two local ‘kings’ kissed the Cross. They were among a people of civility, even elegance, who had justice, weights and measures, intriguing customs; Pigafetta was fascinated by such strange new things as betel-chewing and flying foxes. There was also gold.… Accompanied by their new friends, they moved on to the large island of Cebu, where these first favourable impressions were enhanced.
The Rajah of the island, Humabon, startled and impressed by gunnery salutes, yet wished for ‘tribute’, pointing out a merchant from Siam who had paid his dues. The Captain-General replied that he was servant to a great King, one greater than the King of Portugal, who paid no man tribute; war or peace was at the Rajah's choice. The Moor merchant interposed: be careful, these are the men who have conquered Calicut, Malacca, India. Doubtless reflecting on the artillery, the Rajah chose peace, accepting Spanish protection and desiring to be received into the Church of these powerful strangers. On 14 April he and his wife were baptised under the names of Don Carlos and Dona Juana, in honour of the King-Emperor and his mother; five hundred of their subjects followed them into the Faith. All this was done with great ceremony and solemnity; one wonders if Pigafetta remembered the party a few days earlier, where he had enjoyed the dancing of three girls, quite naked.
Cuius regio, eius religio—as the King, so the religion—seems to have applied as it did in contemporary Europe; once the Rajah led the way, mass conversion followed perforce. But some of the neighbouring vassal chiefs were recalcitrant, and—against his instructions—the Captain-General decided to intervene personally; if ‘Don Carlos’ was to be of use as a puppet king to maintain Spanish influence in the islands, he must be supported to the full. Doubtless Magellan saw the affair as a test of credibility; this was to be by no means the last time in these regions that a client was to drag a ‘great and powerful friend’ into disaster. Had he succeeded, Magellan might have been called many things, but we would not have heard of his lack of judgment; and the Portuguese in the East were wont to take on very heavy numerical odds against much stronger foes: as at Cannanor, as at Diu, as at Malacca, in all of which actions Magellan had served.
At midnight of 26 April 1521 the Captain-General and Humabon-Don Carlos set out with sixty Europeans and several hundred Cebuans to bring into their- 51 -joint allegiance the Rajah of Mactan, Lapulapu, now honoured as the first hero of Filipino resistance to colonialism. Next morning forty-nine men waded ashore, for Magellan, here truly and arrogantly injudicious, had asked the Rajah and his men to stay in their boats and see how Spaniards could fight. The 1500 defenders opposed them with unexpected resolution and tactical skill; musket and crossbow fire was opened at too great a range to be effective, and finally Magellan ordered a retreat. All but six or eight of his men fled; the mortars in the boats were too far away to give adequate covering fire. In the end the Captain-General, bravely covering the flight, was overborne by numbers and hacked to death. The disheartened survivors tried to ransom the body, to be told that they of Mactan would never give up such a man, such a trophy, for the wealth of the world. The last words must always be Pigafetta's simple tribute: ‘so great a captain’.