Straits Read online

  Straits

  The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Constance and William Withey Endowment Fund in History and Music.

  Straits

  Beyond the Myth of Magellan

  Felipe Fernández-Armesto

  UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

  University of California Press

  Oakland, California

  © 2022 by Felipe Fernández-Armesto

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Fernández-Armesto, Felipe, author.

  Title: Straits : beyond the myth of Magellan / Felipe Fernández-Armesto.

  Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021030558 (print) | LCCN 2021030559 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520383364 (cloth) | ISBN 9780520383371 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Magalhães, Fernão de, -1521. | Explorers—Biography. | Voyages around the world.

  Classification: LCC G286.M2 F47 2022 (print) | LCC G286. M2 (ebook) | DDC 910.92 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021030558

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021030559

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To

  The Hakluyt Society,

  in tribute and gratitude for 175 years of work in the service of scholarship on the history of travel and exploration.

  Gradiamur simul, eroque socius itineris tui.

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Preface

  1. The Globe around Magellan: The World, 1492 to 1521

  2. The Education of an Adventurer: Oporto—Lisbon—the Indian Ocean, to 1514

  3. The Trajectory of a Traitor: Morocco, Portugal, and Spain, 1514 to 1519

  4. The Making and Marring of a Fleet: Seville and Valladolid, 1517 to 1519

  5. The Cruel Sea: The Atlantic, September 1519 to February 1520

  6. The Gibbet at San Julián: Patagonia, March to October 1520

  7. The Gates of Fame: The Strait of Magellan, October to December 1520

  8. The Unremitting Wind: The Pacific, November 1520 to March 1521

  9. Death as Advertised: The Philippines, March to July, 1521

  10. Aftermath and Apotheosis: The World, from 1521

  Notes

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  FIGURES

  1. The Indian Ocean, in Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia, 1550s

  2. Magellan’s patron King Manuel of Portugal, 1516

  3. Dom Jaime I, Duque de Bragança

  4. The harbor of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, as imagined by Theodore De Bry in 1594

  5. Levinus Hulsius’s depiction of what he called “Oceanus Australis” or Southern Ocean, 1626

  6. The Book of Primaleon, Spanish edition, from 1535

  7. Picture of Magellan, Theodore de Bry in 1594

  8. Map of “the Pacific Sea” with the image of Victoria, by Abraham Ortelius, from 1589

  9. Hulsius’s illustration of the death of Magellan

  10. Robert Thorne’s map of the world, 1527

  MAPS

  1. Magellan in Iberia

  2. Magellan in the Indian Ocean

  3. Patagonia: Places named in the text

  4. The Strait of Magellan: Places named in the text

  5. The Philippines: Places named in the text

  Preface

  Failure is fatal to happiness but can be fruitful for fame. Metaphorically, resurrections often follow crucifixions. Sometimes partial but spectacular success adds glamor to a downfall, like Alexander’s or Napoleon’s. Magellan is exceptional because his failure was total. Yet his renown seems impregnable.

  Portuguese, among whom he was born, and Spaniards, to whom he belonged by naturalization, compete to ascribe him as kindred. His claims to a literally global role transcend nationalisms. Various countries vie to commemorate the quincentenary of his death.1 His name—to judge from its popularity with PR professionals—confers instant approval, triggering connotations with science, enterprise, and achievement. It dignifies, at least in aspiration, an expensive cruise ship, a costly private health care business, and firms dedicated to financial management and aerospace engineering. NASA’s mission to Venus was named after Magellan. Other, even odder uses or abuses of his name for profit—in varying degrees of ignorance and irrelevance—are mentioned in this book’s conclusion (p. 278). To judge from the numbers of businesses and projects called “Magellan,” he makes an appealing figurehead.

  The tally of his failures is almost as long as the list of his honorific homonyms. On the voyage for which he is celebrated, most of the ships were lost and all but a handful of his men died or deserted. The cash profit usually ascribed to the outcome is a myth. Magellan did not even reach his nominal destination. In his mission to find a short route from Spain to the Spice Islands, he did more than just fail: he drove on to disaster when failure was already obvious. His ambitions for himself—to conquer a profitable fief—foundered because he made lethal mistakes. He never considered—let alone accomplished—the circumnavigation of the world; but common opinion continues to credit him for it. It strikes his admirers as universally significant, like the first wireless broadcast or the first moon landing: a contribution to knowledge and science, rather than an exercise of crude might or material exploitation, like the work of most other dead white explorers.

  His intentions were imperial; yet he has escaped, so far, the scattershot of postcolonial revulsion and vengeance. His conduct, though bold and resolute, was as bloody and destructive as that of most would-be conquistadores. But he died without establishing a colony: that was another of his failures. In consequence, unlike Columbus, say, or Cortés, he can more or less dodge arraignment for imperialism. Of all the celebrated or formerly celebrated European explorers of the “Age of Expansion,” Magellan seems the most suitable hero, or least obvious villain, for postcolonial times and politically correct scrutineers.

  In many ways, he deserved the esteem he has attracted. Qualities he exhibited in abundance include intrepidity, single-mindedness, resilience in misfortune, and devotion to the noble, chivalric ethos in which he was well educated and well read. He also had, for good and ill, an elusive but unmistakable charisma that inspired loyalty in friends and followers in moments of peril and hardship—of which there were plenty in his career. His life, as we shall see, exemplifies reasons why explorers are celebrated, even when they offend officious and anachronistic demands.

  But the people who praise him or try to appropriate his renown do not know who Magellan really was. They ought to think again. The best reasons for commemorating him—which appear in the pages that follow—have been overlooked in favor of falsehoods. And anyone prompted by the worldwide celebrations already under way and due to climax in 2022 may care to discard the myths, penetrate the truth, and learn what the explorer’s life and times were like.

  The sources do not permit the kind of intimate biographies possible for Columbus and Vespucci because Magellan left so little copy in his own words. In the pages that follow, however, I undertake the closest reading ever of the texts that are available. As a result, I think, I can show more of what Magellan was like than any of my predecessors. In particular, I disclose some of the dynamism of his character, as experience changed it; and I discern previously unnoticed influences, which shaped his self-perception and provided models for his life or values to guide his sometimes inscrutable or perplexing behavior. His actions, as far as they can be distinguished among the contradictory narrat
ives, descriptions, and assessments that survive from his day, are evidence of his interactions with the world that surrounded him; so I spend a lot of time on the context—starting with that of the world in his lifetime, or at least the parts of it in which he lived and fought and explored.

  Because so little can be said for certain, and because unwarranted assumptions, myths, assertions, and falsehoods dominate the historical tradition, I try to keep the reader in constant touch with the evidence and to provide matter for dissent when I make a judgment that involves imagination or intuition of my own. I make no apology, however, for wielding imagination disciplined by the evidence and informed by long study of the subject. I first worked on the sources when editing The Times Atlas of World Exploration some thirty years ago. I did not write the sections of that book in which Magellan appears and would not now endorse everything said there. But the experience sparked an interest sustained ever since. The history of exploration has remained a recurrent theme in my work and provides the broad context in which I try to understand what Magellan did and why and to what extent it matters for the world.

  In the tradition of prefaces I have to offer some self-exculpation.

  In some places, indicated in the text and the critical apparatus, I have extended the normal limits of scholarly convention by turning reported speech into dialogue. I hope fastidious readers will see why, in each case, this break with convention is justified and how it helps to make the evidence vivid and the events more intelligible than they would otherwise be. In chapter 1, in introducing parts of the background, especially to Magellan’s irruptions into the Indian Ocean and Swahili Coast, I have drawn on pages from a previous book of mine, 1492. As the present book was largely written during the pandemic of 2020–21, I had to juggle with spells of isolation and was not always able to get access to the best editions of all texts. In such cases, I cite in the critical apparatus the text I used at the time and the superior version, where available, against which I may subsequently have been able to check it. Except where indicated, translations are my own; but in quoting translations from Antonio Pigafetta’s narrative of the great voyage, I have relied (except where stated in the notes) on the excellent publication by my colleague Theodore Cachey. He worked from a 1987 edition, by the well-known poet and critic Mariarosa Masoero, of the most authoritative manuscript, which I have not been able to consult; I have checked the translation against the famous edition by Mosto (see below, p. 300) and include cross-references in the notes.

  In work about Magellan or Magallanes or Magalhães, consistency in rendering names is impossible. At least “Ferdinand Magellan” has the advantage of familiarity to readers of many languages and eludes commitment in the custody battle between Spanish and Portuguese aspirants. Except for the names of Spanish monarchs (for whom I use Castilian for reasons explained below) I use versions naturalized in English, where available. For place-names that postcolonial toponymy has changed in recent years, I give the new equivalents at an early mention.

  It would not have been possible to write this book in such adverse circumstances without the prior work of the editors of the sources, who are all acknowledged in the critical apparatus. I pay special tribute to those who have worked hard via the Internet to make available fresh, accurate transcripts or facsimiles of well-known documents, especially Cristóbal Bernal, Tomás Mazón, and Braulio Vázquez and their dedicated collaborators among the professional staffs of the archives concerned. Research, especially by F. Borja Aguinalde, Salvador Bernabeu, José Manuel Garcia, and Juan Gil, has brought important new evidence or reflection to the table in recent years. I sometimes dissent from their interpretations but could not have managed without their work.

  I have also to thank Guido van Meersbergen, with whom the idea that I should write this book started; Tessa David, who persuaded me to do it and provided helpful suggestions for how I might go about it; Andrew Gordon, who generously allowed me to work with a rival agent; Michael Fishwick, Niels Hooper, Francisco Reinking, and Elisabeth Magnus—selfless and sagacious editors; and Sebastian Armesto, Theodore Cachey, Joyce Chaplin, Kris Lane, Manuel Lucena Giraldo, Lincoln Paine, Carla Rahn Phillips, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, who kindly and helpfully read parts or all of this book in draft, saving me from follies, leaving such errors and infelicities as are my fault alone. I am grateful to colleagues, students, and staff at the University of Notre Dame for providing the best possible environment for teaching and learning, and especially to the personnel of the Hesburgh Library for supplying materials in defiance of the virus that has afflicted the world while I have been writing. This book is unsympathetic to “great men”; but it has its heroes.

  CULWORTH, NORTHAMPTONSHIRE—NOTRE

  DAME, INDIANA

  January 2020–August 2021

  CHAPTER 1

  The Globe around Magellan

  The World, 1492 to 1521

  And the channels of the sea appeared, the foundations of the world were discovered, at the rebuking of the Lord, at the blast of the breath of his nostrils.

  —2 Samuel 22:16

  FIGURE 1. The Indian Ocean, where Magellan’s overseas adventures began in 1505, was the world’s richest arena of commerce at the time. Until the 1490s most fifteenth-century European maps of the world showed the Indian Ocean as enclosed and inaccessible from Europe by sea, thanks to the influence of the Geography of the revered second-century Alexandrian cosmographer Claudius Ptolemy. Interpretations of his text informed most educated Europeans in the late fifteenth century, as in this example, reproduced, from a model of the 1480s, in Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia, which appeared in successive editions in the 1550s, showing the ocean surrounded by enveloping lands. Putti blow winds onto the world from a cloudy firmament. Magellan retained elements of Ptolemy’s image, including the peninsula, here marked “India extra Gangem,” to the east of India, and the island of Taprobana, corresponding roughly to modern Sri Lanka. Spanish cosmographers claimed that the meridian of the great bay marked “Sinus Gangeticus” marked the dividing line between zones of navigation agreed upon by Spain and Portugal. Courtesy of the James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota.

  “Write what you know,” said Robert Graves, who rarely observed the maxim. It has become a shibboleth for writing teachers but seems contemptible: facile, challengeless, narrow-minded, anxious for success. The unknown is magnetic: an invitation to endlessly unwinding problems, a lure to the receding horizon that seduced Magellan, or a way into the improbable stories he composed for himself in his head and tried to act out in his life. In sticky, smelly classrooms, amid Gradgrind-mark schemes and marginal ticks, history is “about facts.” But, for me, facts are there only to feed problems: insoluble problems—for preference—that flirt and flit as you grasp at them.

  I think I know as much about Magellan as you can know in your head. I can unpick the contradictions of the evidence. I can reproach predecessors with errors and straighten tangles in the chronology. I can get patternless details into focus: I know, for instance, as previous inquirers have known, how many arrows (21,600) and compass needles (thirty-five) appear in Magellan’s ships’ manifests, how many hourglasses (eighteen), how many barrels of anchovies and tons of biscuit (below, p. 110).1

  I also think I know—or sense convincingly—a lot about his heart: the tragically flawed social ambition, the heroic self-delusion, the vexing self-righteousness, the cruelly streaked sense of humor. They all appear in the pages that follow. I can trace the way his journey through life changed him, and reconstruct the strange mood of religious exaltation in which he died. But there’s gut knowledge too, which eludes me. Magellan was one of at least 150 men who died on the voyage he led. If you leave out those who survived by deserting or in captivity, the death rate was about 90 percent. Even by the standards of the day, when failure was routine on alarmingly overoptimistic journeys, Magellan’s project beggared belief. Objectively considered, the chances of survival, let alone success, were always minimal. As we shall see
, the cost in lives bought no quantifiable return. Despite previous historians’ assertions, the balance sheet of crude profit and loss ended in the red. The voyage Magellan captained failed in every declared objective.

  What made such an egregious adventure attractive, not just to the men who risked it, but also the backers who put money into it? I am not sure I know or can know that. Life was cheap, for reasons, partly intelligible, to which we shall come in a moment. “To set sail,” said Luis de Camões, the well-traveled poet who turned Portuguese maritime history into verse in 1572, “is essential. To survive? That’s supererogatory.”2 What made such a shocking inversion of common sense seem reasonable? Why were seamen’s lives so dispensable—so much cheaper than everyone else’s? What made Magellan and some of his men persist as their prospects worsened? What induced the king of Spain and hard-headed merchants in Seville and Burgos to believe in Magellan? Why would they put up money for a proposal from a man who came to them with a reputation for treachery, a dearth of relevant experience, and a scientific sidekick, Rui Faleiro, who, to the psychiatry of the day, was literally, certifiably insane?

  • • •

  To approach the problems we have to start by trying to understand the constraints and opportunities of the world around Magellan.

  That world was riven with paradox. Every textbook will tell you that the centuries in which Magellan lived were an “age of expansion,” when stunning new departures happened. In Europe the retrieval of classical tradition intensified in the Renaissance, which equipped minds for new art and thought and endeavor and which spread to much of the rest of the world, including parts of the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa: the first genuinely global intellectual event.3 The so-called Scientific Revolution was exhibiting early signs when Magellan took to sea, enabling the formerly backward West to catch up with and (in some respects, over the next hundred years or so) to overtake Chinese science and technology. Meanwhile, a global ecological exchange swapped life-forms across a formerly divergent world, spreading creatures, plants, and pathogens, for good and ill, across the globe. A persistent historical tradition even claims that Magellan’s lifetime roughly coincided with “the origins of modernity”: the distribution and divisions of world religions were taking on something like their present configurations; some of the world’s most widely and creatively deployed languages and literatures were taking shape in forms intelligible to today’s readers. The world’s major civilizations—Christendom, Islam, and the Buddhist world—literally expanded, engrossing territory and people, stretching out to each other across chasms of culture, spreading contacts, conflicts, commerce, and contagion.