Aranda obtained a meeting for Magellan with the king’s Flemish ministers to consider a proposal to assemble an expedition for the Spice Islands. And Magellan came well armed for what would be the most important meeting of his life. To begin, he offered tantalizing letters from his friend Francisco Serrão, a Portuguese explorer, describing the riches of the Spice Islands.
Serrão’s odyssey began in 1511, when he assumed command of one of three ships, dispatched by the Portuguese viceroy of India and bound for the Spice Islands, using an easterly route. Surviving shipwrecks and pirates, Serrão and several companions arrived at Ternate, in the Spice Islands, the following year. In all likelihood, they were the first Europeans to visit these fabled islands. Serrão carefully cultivated Ternate’s small ruling class, especially its king, and tried to promote trade between Ternate and Portugal, but the brisk transoceanic trade that he expected was slow to materialize. Rather than giving up, Serrão stayed on. Surrounded by the scent of drying cloves, soothed by the attentions of his newly acquired island wife, he wrote beguiling letters to Magellan describing the extravagant beauty and wealth of the Spice Islands and inviting his friend to visit and see for himself. “I have found here a new world richer and greater than that of Vasco da Gama,” he wrote. “I beg you to join me here, that you may sample for yourself the delights that surround me.”
Magellan had every intention of visiting Serrão in the island paradise: “God willing, I will soon be seeing you, whether by way of Portugal or Castile, for that is the way my affairs have been leaning: you must wait for me there, because we already know it will be some time before we can expect things to get better for us.” And when Magellan made a promise, he did everything in his power to keep it.
Significantly, Serrão’s letters placed the Spice Islands far to the east of their true position; he located them squarely within the Spanish hemisphere, as defined in the Treaty of Tordesillas. This error might have been intentional, to disguise the Spice Islands’ location from outsiders, but in any event his geographical legerdemain alleviated Spain’s principal anxiety: Magellan’s expedition to the Spice Islands must not violate the treaty.
To dramatize his mission, Magellan then displayed his slave of long standing, Enrique, who was believed to be a native of the Spice Islands. (This was not quite accurate, but in any event, Enrique could act as an interpreter.) According to one account, Magellan also brought another slave from the Indies, an attractive female from Sumatra who spoke many languages.
After presenting the slaves, Magellan spoke excitedly of his intention to sail along the eastern coast of what is now called South America until the land ended and he would be able to turn west toward the Spice Islands; he invoked the seven years he had spent in the service of Portugal, administering its empire and flourishing spice trade; and, to clinch his argument, he displayed a map or a globe (the wording in the original documents is ambiguous) depicting the route he planned to take. A crucial part of the map was obscured, however: the part that showed a waterway extending through South America toward the Spice Islands. Although Magellan, in his zeal to persuade the king’s ministers to back the expedition, all but gave the strait’s location away, he remained fearful that someone would steal his map and his strategy and launch a rival expedition before he could organize his own.
“Magellan had a well-painted globe in which the entire world was depicted,” wrote Bartolomé de las Casas, a historian and missionary who took part in the meeting. “And on it he indicated the route he proposed to take.” Reliable information about trade routes was so sensitive and precious that governments zealously guarded all maps and charts, which were essential to national security, and for Magellan to display a map likely purloined from Portugal was the equivalent of selling nuclear secrets at the height of the Cold War.
Magellan’s conception of the world he planned to explore was fatally inaccurate. Like most explorers of the Age of Discovery, his ideas about the size of the globe, and location of landmasses, were inspired by Ptolemy. Had Magellan comprehended the size of the Pacific, its currents, storms, and reefs, it is unlikely that he would have dared to mount an expedition. But without the Pacific Ocean to inform his calculations, the estimated length of his route came to only half the actual distance. Magellan confidently predicted that it would take him at most two years to reach the Spice Islands and return to Spain with ships bulging with precious cargo. All he would have to do was find a way to get around or through South America, and he would be at the doorstep of the Indies. This was nearly the same mistake that Columbus had made over and over, during his four voyages. And it was a mistake that would be corrected only at the cost of great suffering and of many lives during the voyage Magellan now proposed.
After making his presentation to the ministers, Magellan was invited to discuss the proposed expedition in greater detail with Fonseca and Las Casas.
“I asked him what way he planned to take,” the historian wrote, “and he answered that he intended to go by Cape Saint Mary, which we call the Río de la Plata, and from thence to follow the coast until he hit the strait.”
Las Casas remained skeptical of Magellan’s belief in the strait. “But suppose you do not find any strait by which you can go into the other sea?” he asked. Magellan told him that if he could not locate the strait, he “would go the way the Portuguese took.” Although Magellan sounded ready to contravene the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas, the king and his advisers were too intrigued to turn him away. “This Ferdinand Magellan must have been a man of courage and valiant in his thoughts for undertaking great things,” Las Casas marveled, “although he was not of an imposing presence because he was small in stature and did not appear in himself to be much, so that people thought they could put it over him for want of prudence and courage.”
In Magellan’s case, appearances were deceiving. His ideas were big enough, and promised to be lucrative enough, to convince King Charles and his powerful advisers to back them.
Immediately after the meetings at Valladolid, the potential co-leaders of the expedition presented a list of demands to the crown; they were couched in respectful language, but they were demands nonetheless. They included an exclusive franchise on the Spice Islands for a full ten years, 5 percent of the rent and proceeds “of all such lands that we would discover,” and the privilege of trading for their own accounts, so long as they paid taxes to the king. They asked to keep any “islands” they discovered for themselves, if they discovered more than six, as well as permission to pass the newly discovered lands on to “our heirs and successors.”
Magellan’s insistence on a ten-year exclusive on voyages to the Spice Islands appeared preposterous in a fast-changing world, but he was concerned that Spain would send duplicate expeditions as soon as his was out of sight of land, expeditions guided by his theories and secrets, expeditions that might succeed if he failed. Magellan was right to insist on this point, although he was powerless to enforce it.