On March 22, 1518, King Charles, from his royal seat in Valladolid, offered Magellan and Faleiro a contract “regarding the discovery of the Spice Islands.” The document was a charter to discover a new world on behalf of Spain. “Inasmuch much as you, Bachelor Ruy Faleiro and Ferdinand Magellan, gentlemen born in the Kingdom of Portugal, wishing to render us a distinguished service, oblige yourselves to find in the domains that belong to us and are ours in the area in the Ocean Sea, within the limits of our demarcation, islands, mainlands, rich spices,” it began, “we order that the following contract with you be recorded.”
In the first clause, King Charles appeared to accede to Magellan’s insistence on a ten-year exclusive: “Since it would be unjust that others should cross your path, and since you take the labors of this undertaking upon yourselves, it is therefore my wish and will, and I promise that, during the next ten years, I will give no one permission to go on discoveries along the same regions as yourselves.” Nevertheless, he did not honor this promise. Just as Magellan feared, King Charles dispatched a follow-up expedition to the Spice Islands only six years after Magellan’s departure from Spain. The Spice Islands were too valuable to entrust to the luck and skill of a single explorer.
King Charles enjoined Magellan and Faleiro to respect Portugal’s territorial rights under the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas: “You must so conduct this voyage of discovery that you do not encroach upon the demarcation and boundaries of the Most Serene King of Portugal, my very dear Uncle and Brother, or otherwise prejudice his interests, except within the limits of our demarcation.” He reminded Magellan of the delicate diplomatic and family situation complicating the rivalry of Spain and Portugal for mastery of the seas and of world trade. Portugal’s sovereign, King Manuel, had married not just one but two of Charles’s aunts, first Isabel and then María. And now he was planning to marry Charles’s sister, Leonor, within a matter of weeks. The family ties, with their complex web of sentiment and formality, kept Spain and Portugal from all-out war with each other, but they did not extinguish the intense rivalry between the two nations; they drove it underground or into the diplomatic realm, where it was no less fierce.
Charles I had every intention of overtaking the elderly king of Portugal. No matter what the language of the contract seemed to say, the impatient young king wished to bend the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas to Spain’s advantage by insisting that the Spice Islands lay within the Spanish hemisphere. And if it was impossible to prove this point, then it was equally impossible to disprove it. To succeed, Magellan’s expedition need only give Spain a reasonable argument for claiming the Spice Islands.
From Magellan’s standpoint, this was a remarkable contract because it gave him nearly everything he had wanted. The grant of lands, for instance, proved more generous than Magellan had any right to expect. “It is our wish and our will that of all the lands and islands that you shall discover, to grant to you . . . the twentieth part, and shall besides receive the title of Lieutenant and Governors of the said lands and islands for yourselves and your sons and heirs in freehold for all times, provided that the supreme [authority] shall remain with Us and with the Kings who come after Us.” Magellan would find his name all over the newly redrawn maps of the world, maps depicting lands that he not only discovered, but possessed: Magellan islands, Magellan lands, entire realms belonging to Ferdinand Magellan and his legitimate male heirs. The world, or at least a significant part of it, could be his.
From Fonseca’s point of view, this was hardly an advantageous contract, for it gave Magellan too much power over the expedition. It would take Fonseca months, but eventually he would have his revenge on Magellan, and exert the control over the expedition that had been denied him in the royal contract.
King Charles also promised Magellan five ships: “two each of 130 tons, two each of 90 tons, and one of sixty tons, equipped with crew, food, and artillery, to wit that the said ships are to go supplied for two years, and the other people necessary.” The fleet would be called the Armada de Molucca, after the Indonesian name for the Spice Islands.
The ships were mostly black—pitch black. They derived their blackness, and their ominous aura, from the tar covering the hull, masts, and rigging, practically every exposed surface of the ship except for the sails. Their sterns rose high out of the water, towering as much as thirty feet over the waves, so high that a man standing on the stern deck seemed to rule the sea itself. Their height exaggerated movement; even in relatively calm water, they tossed the men about like toy figures.
The ships were among the most complicated machines of their day, wonders of Renaissance technology, and the product of thousands of hours of labor by skilled artisans working at their specialized trades. They were relatively small, out of necessity. One of Seville’s limitations as a port was the shallowness of the Guadalquivir River; ships had to be sufficiently small and light to negotiate the narrow waterway to the Atlantic. Thus Magellan’s flagship, Trinidad, weighed 100 tons; San Antonio, which carried many of the provisions, weighed 120 tons; Concepción 90 tons, Victoria 85 tons; and Santiago, to be used for reconnaissance, weighed just 75 tons.
With the exception of Santiago, a caravel, the ships were all classified as naos, a term that simply meant ships. No illustrations of them have survived, so it is difficult to determine exactly how they were configured, but accounts from Magellan’s time mention their daunting stern castles, their multiple decks, and the profusion of obras muertas, or “dead wood,” to ornament the officers’ quarters. Each ship had three masts, one of which carried a lateen sail.
Although King Charles was supposed to pay for Magellan’s ships, according to the contract, he was deeply in debt. To cover the expedition’s cost, the Casa de Contratación turned to a familiar presence in financial circles, Cristóbal de Haro, who represented the House of Fugger, an influential banking dynasty based in Augsburg, Germany. Haro’s name derived from the city of Haro, in north central Spain. Haro (the city) flourished as a center of winemaking, and it also sheltered a community of Jewish goldsmiths and bankers until a civil war broke out in the fourteenth century and drove the Jews from their homes. Many of the persecuted Jews adapted by becoming conversos, adopting Christian-sounding names, Cristóbal de Haro’s ancestors among them.
For years, Haro served as the Fuggers’ man in Lisbon, trading in spices, lending money for secret Portuguese expeditions, and forging friendships with many of the great explorers of the era, including Bartolomeu Dias. His familiarity with secret Portuguese expeditions, or with tantalizing rumors about their findings, gave him privileged information concerning the existence of a strait leading through the American landmass to the Indies—the same possibility that animated Magellan’s furious desire to explore the East. Following a bitter dispute with King Manuel, Haro left Lisbon for Seville, where he renewed his acquaintanceship with Magellan, and combined their enthusiasm for a search for the strait.
For an explorer in need of financial backing, Cristóbal de Haro was the ideal friend; the House of Fugger, for which he worked, had enough money to finance ten expeditions, or more; indeed, it had more money than King Charles. By bringing in Haro, the king and his advisers would be giving up a significant amount of the profits. Given the hazards of the spice trade, and the uncertainty of long ocean voyages, financiers like Haro could be induced to risk their capital on such ventures for only one reason: the lure of extraordinary profits. If successful, or even partly successful, a fleet returning from the Indies could yield a profit of 400 percent; the more pragmatic Haro estimated that Magellan’s expedition could yield a profit of 250 percent. Meanwhile, he advanced money at an interest rate of 14 percent.