Ferdinand Magellan

• 1. Introduction

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  Ferdinand Magellan died face down in the surf off a small island called Mactan, killed by a chief named Lapulapu and his men on the 27th of April 1521. Nothing of his body survived. The grieving rajah-king of Cebu offered Lapulapu a ransom of copper and iron to recover the remains, and Lapulapu refused. He meant to keep the corpse as a war trophy. Magellan's wife and child had already died in Seville. For a moment it seemed every trace of the man had vanished from the earth.

  Yet his name now marks a strait at the bottom of South America, two dwarf galaxies in the southern sky, and a NASA spacecraft. The Portuguese explorer who planned the first voyage around the world never finished it himself. So how did a sailor reviled as a traitor in two countries come to be remembered as the architect of the greatest sea voyage of the age? Who carried the truth home after he fell? And why did the man who completed the circle receive less credit than the man who began it?

• 2. The Apprentice Of Asia

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  In March 1505, at the age of 25, Magellan enlisted in a fleet of 22 ships sent to escort Francisco de Almeida as the first viceroy of Portuguese India. He remained in the East for eight years, posted at Goa, Cochin, and Quilon. His name does not even appear in the chronicles, yet the record shows he fought in several battles, including Cannanore in 1506, where he was wounded, and Diu in 1509.

  Francisco Serrão was Magellan's friend and possibly his cousin, and their fates twined together in Malacca. Sailing under Diogo Lopes de Sequeira on the first Portuguese embassy there, the expedition fell victim to a conspiracy and ended in retreat. Magellan warned Sequeira and risked his life to rescue Serrão and others who had landed. Two years later, under the governor Afonso de Albuquerque, the two friends helped conquer the city in 1511.

  After the conquest their paths split. Magellan was promoted and returned to Portugal in 1512 or 1513, bringing with him a Malay man he had indentured and baptized, Enrique of Malacca. Serrão went the other way, joining the first expedition to find the Spice Islands in the Moluccas. He stayed, married a woman from Amboina, and became military advisor to the Sultan of Ternate, Bayan Sirrullah. From there Serrão sent letters back to his friend, describing the spice-producing territories. Those letters would later prove decisive.

• 3. A Quarrel With A King

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  In mid-1513, fighting at the Moroccan stronghold of Azemmour, Magellan took a leg wound that left him with a permanent limp. He was then accused of trading illegally with the Moors. The charge was proven false, but it cost him. After the 15th of May 1514, no further offers of royal employment came.

  King Manuel I of Portugal repeatedly denied Magellan's requests to lead an expedition to the Spice Islands by sailing westward. After a final quarrel in 1517, Magellan left for Spain and offered the same plan to Charles I, the young king who would become emperor Charles V. The plan turned on the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, which gave Portugal the eastern routes around the Cape of Good Hope. Magellan proposed a southwestern passage around South America instead, a feat never before accomplished.

  To win Charles, Magellan made a bold argument. By the account of the writer Bergreen, he claimed his slave Enrique had been a native of the Spice Islands, and used Enrique and Serrão's letters to argue the islands lay so far east they fell within Spain's half of the world. King Manuel saw the whole affair as an insult. He allegedly ordered Magellan's coat of arms vandalized at the family house in Sabrosa, his home town, and may even have asked for the navigator's assassination.

• 4. The Armada Of Molucca

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  Five ships left Spain on the 20th of September 1519, carrying supplies for two years and a crew of about 270 men. They were a mixed company. Roughly 60 percent were Spaniards from across Castile, followed by 28 Portuguese and 27 Italians, with smaller numbers of French, Greek, Flemish, German, Irish, English, and Malaysian mariners among them.

  In late November the fleet made landfall near present-day Recife, at Cabo de Santo Agostinho, where the Tupi natives already knew Europeans and received them warmly. In December they reached Guanabara Bay, the site of present-day Rio de Janeiro, and stayed two weeks replenishing provisions. The expedition's first execution happened there. During the Atlantic crossing a crewman, Antonio Salomon, had been caught raping a cabin boy. Found guilty, he was garroted on the shore of the bay.

  The port of Saint Julian tested Magellan harder than any storm. The fleet wintered there five months, and shortly after landing the Spanish captains Juan de Cartagena, Gaspar de Quesada, and Luis de Mendoza rose in mutiny. Magellan lost control of three of his five ships before crushing it. Mendoza was killed in the fighting. Magellan had Quesada beheaded and Cartagena marooned, and put the lesser conspirators to hard labor in chains. During the same winter the ship Santiago was lost in a storm while surveying nearby waters, though no men died.

• 5. The Long Water

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  In October 1520, three days after resuming the search, the fleet found a bay that opened into the strait now bearing Magellan's name. The passage to the Pacific cost him another ship. While exploring the strait, the San Antonio deserted and turned back east to Spain. By the end of November the four remaining became three, and the open ocean lay ahead.

  Magellan expected the crossing to Asia to take perhaps three or four days, based on the broken geography of the time. It took three months and twenty days. Food and water ran out, and around 30 men died, mostly of scurvy. Magellan himself stayed healthy, perhaps owing to his personal store of preserved quince.

  Landfall came on the 6th of March 1521 at the island of Guam, where the Chamorro people came aboard and took rigging, knives, and a ship's boat. They may have believed they were trading, since they had already given the fleet supplies, but the crew read it as theft. Magellan sent a raiding party ashore, killing several Chamorro men, burning their houses, and recovering the goods. He had renamed this vast water the Mar Pacifico, the Pacific Ocean.

• 6. Crosses And Compacts

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  On the 16th of March 1521, the fleet sighted Samar in the eastern Philippines and anchored at the uninhabited island of Homonhon, resting a week while sick crewmen recovered. Magellan befriended the tattooed locals of nearby Suluan, trading goods and learning the names of the islands. Through Enrique of Malacca, his interpreter from Sumatra, he could finally speak with the people of this side of the world.

  On the 28th of March, off Limasawa, the expedition met the balangay warships of Rajah Kulambo of Butuan and his son, then Kulambo's brother, Rajah Siawi of Surigao. The rulers and their people wore a great quantity of golden jewelry, which caught Magellan's eye. On the 31st of March, his crew held the first Mass in the Philippines and planted a cross on the island's highest hill. The rulers pointed him toward Cebu, the largest trading port, and the fleet reached it on the 7th of April.

  Rajah Humabon of Cebu first asked for tribute, mistaking the strangers for ordinary traders. Magellan refused, declaring he served the most powerful king in the world, and offered peace for peace or war for war. Humabon welcomed them instead. Magellan converted the king and his wife, Queen Humamay, who were renamed Carlos and Juana after Spain's monarchs. Drawn to it in tears, the queen begged for an image of the Child Jesus, the Santo Niño, and Magellan gave it to her along with an image of the Virgin Mary and a bust of Christ. The king sealed the bond with a blood compact, then asked the Spaniards to go to Mactan and kill his enemy, Lapulapu.

• 7. The Captain Falls

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  By the time Magellan turned toward Mactan, he had converted as many as 2,200 locals to Christianity, including Humabon and most leaders of the islands around Cebu. Only Lapulapu, the datu of Mactan, refused. To keep Humabon's trust, Magellan sailed with a small force on the morning of the 27th of April 1521.

  Antonio Pigafetta, who was there, left the fullest account of what followed. Forty-nine men leaped into water up to their thighs and waded more than two crossbow flights to shore, the boats held back by rocks. More than 1,500 islanders charged with loud cries. Muskets and crossbows fired uselessly, the shots only passing through shields. The attackers recognized Magellan and turned on him, knocking his helmet off twice. A spear struck his face. Wounded in the arm, he could draw his sword only halfway. A cutlass slashed his left leg and he fell face down, and they finished him with iron and bamboo spears. Pigafetta called him our mirror, our light, our comfort, and our true guide.

  After his death, co-commanders Juan Serrano and Duarte Barbosa took charge. Then Humabon betrayed his former allies, poisoning many Spanish soldiers at a banquet, furious that they had failed to defeat Lapulapu. The survivors reached the Moluccas in November 1521 and loaded spices. Of two remaining ships only the Victoria was seaworthy. Captained by Juan Sebastián Elcano, she returned to Spain by the 6th of September 1522. Of the 270 who set out, only 18 or 19 came home.

• 8. The Slandered And The Scribe

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  Few in Spain or Portugal celebrated the man who planned the first circumnavigation. In Portugal some branded Magellan a traitor for sailing under a foreign crown. In Spain the survivors' accounts ran against him. The first news came from the deserters of the San Antonio, led by Estêvão Gomes, who reached Seville on the 6th of May 1521. Put on trial, they were exonerated after painting Magellan as disloyal to the king. The Casa de Contratación withheld his salary from his widow, Beatriz, and Archbishop Fonseca placed her under house arrest with their young son.

  The survivors who returned aboard the Victoria proved no kinder, many of them former mutineers from Saint Julian. When Charles summoned Elcano to Valladolid and invited two guests, the captain brought the sailors Francisco Albo and Hernándo de Bustamante, pointedly leaving out the chronicler. Under questioning they accused Magellan of refusing the king's orders and favoring his relatives over the Spanish captains.

  Antonio Pigafetta carried the truth home alone. Not invited to testify, he made his own way to Valladolid and handed Charles a hand-written copy of his notes. He traveled across Europe giving copies to John III of Portugal, Francis I of France, and Philippe Villiers de L'Isle-Adam. Back in Venice he published his diary, the Relazione del primo viaggio intorno al mondo, around 1524. Scholars now treat it as the most reliable account of the voyage, and it slowly answered the lies of Elcano and the other mutineers. Pigafetta wrote that the best proof of Magellan's genius was that he circumnavigated the world, none having preceded him.