CHAPTER VI: CASTAWAYS
Morison (p. 374) quotes praise for Serrano’s industriousness. An account of Santiago’s ill-fated reconnaissance mission appears in Stanley (p. 250), presenting Correia, who appears to confuse Santiago’s final voyage with the crew’s subsequent journey over land. (Correia states that the ship returned “laden with the crew,” which was not the case.) For Charles Darwin’s description of the Santa Cruz region, plus many other detailed natural descriptions, see Voyage of the Beagle (p. 167).
Pigafetta’s sketchy description of Santiago’s crew efforts to survive the trek back to Port Saint Julian is ably supplemented by Guillemard and especially Herrera (pp. 17–18), who writes about the frozen fingers.
Concerning the first signs of Indians in Port Saint Julian, Pigafetta describes the unexpected appearance of a “giant” on the beach, but de Mafra more plausibly recalls the appearance of smoke prior to the giant’s arrival. Pigafetta’s account of these Indians and guanacos appear in Skelton’s translation (pp. 47–50), Guillemard (p. 183), and Herrera (p. 19).
Ginés de Mafra recalled that first encounter with the Indians of the region quite differently. In de Mafra’s unsentimental account, no friendly giant danced on the shore and pointed heavenward, no religious conversion occurred, and no banquet for the Indians took place aboard the flagship.
After two months in Port Saint Julian, he wrote, “One night the night watchman said there were fires on shore.” On hearing the news, Magellan sent a party ashore to find them and, if they were fortunate, a new source of food beyond their steady diet of salted sea elephant and shellfish. He forbade his men to harm the Indians, if they found any. When the men reached the fires, de Mafra recalled, they “found a hut that was like the small lean-to of a wine grower, covered with animal skins. Our men surrounded the lean-to so carefully that none of the seven people inside left.” The Europeans saw that the lean-to was divided into two sections, one for men, the other for women and children. Just outside the lean-to were “five sheep of a very good size and shape never seen before.” These were guanacos. The landing party camped near the lean-to, the sailors shivering under the borrowed skins and maintaining a vigil over the Indians in case they attacked in the dead of night, but the precaution was unnecessary because the Indians slept deeply and snored loudly until the morning.
The next day, the Europeans feasted on tough, stringy, and relatively tasteless guanaco meat with the Indians. Only drink was missing; the thirsty sailors craved wine, or even water, to chase the sinewy guanaco meat.
When the landing party returned to the flagship and told Magellan of their find, the Captain General sent them back ashore with orders to return with an Indian, but the crew members found the huts deserted, apparently on short notice. “Our men spotted the tracks in the abundant snows and followed them,” said de Mafra. “It was late when they found them in another hut erected in a different valley.” The Indians fled, the Europeans gave chase, and a skirmish ensued. “Our men tried to capture them, and when they rushed at them, the Indians wounded a certain Barassa”—an apprentice seaman aboard Victoria—“in his groin, as a result of which he later died. The Indians escaped, and our men could do nothing to prevent them.”
The crew members spent the night ashore, “Where they made a fire and roasted some of the meat that they had taken and drank melted snow from bowls, and with no protection other than their spears, they passed the night, even though it was very cold.” In the morning, they broke camp and returned to the waiting ships, where they made their report. Magellan “ordered thirty men to go ashore and kill whomever they found to avenge for the dead one, and since the first men had not buried him, to bury him.” As ordered, the war party went ashore and buried their fallen comrade, but they failed to find “anybody on whom to avenge their anger and rage.” After a fruitless search lasting eight days, they returned to the ships, exhausted and frustrated.
Joyner (p. 150) describes the plight of Cartagena and Pero Sánchez de la Reina, as does Morison (p. 375).
CHAPTER VII: DRAGON’S TAIL
The original details concerning the eclipse most likely came from the fleet’s astronomer, San Martín, whose records are described by Guillemard (p. 187). He draws on Herrera, who had access to the actual papers, which are lost.
Gallego’s remarks are from the Leiden Narrative, translated by the indefatigable Morison (p. 12) and Albo’s entry about the strait appears in Stanley (pp. 218–219). The “later explorer” is quoted by Morison (p. 380). For an analysis of Pigafetta’s use of the word carta, see Morison (p. 382), and for early misconceptions of the strait, see Parry, The Discovery of the Sea (p. 248) and Morison (pp. 382–383). Guillemard cites “terra ulterior incog.” on p. 192.
Although Magellan staked the success of the expedition on navigating the strait, he reluctantly revealed that he had an alternate plan. “Had we not discovered the Strait,” Pigafetta informs us, “the Captain General had determined to go as far as seventy-five degrees toward the Atlantic Pole. There in that latitude, during the summer season, there is no night, or if there is any night it is but short, and so in the winter with the day.”
Albo is quoted in Stanley (p. 219), and Francis Pretty in Charles William Eliot, ed., Voyages and Travels. Other descriptions of the strait are drawn from Morison (pp. 390–391), Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle (pp. 196–197, 203), and Herrera (chap. 14). Parr (pp. 317–318) relates a dramatic encounter between “a half dozen naked Indians” paddling a canoe and Magellan’s fleet. But none of the diarists mention it (Pigafetta, fascinated by indigenous tribes, surely would have); nor do other historians. In the absence of sources, this incident lacks a basis in fact.
Magellan’s desire to persist in the voyage is related by Denucé (p. 288) and by Herrera (chap. 15). Joyner (p. 276) discusses Gomes’s resentment. Denucé (pp. 287–288) provides details concerning the supposed placement of papers in the strait. Herrera says the mutineers killed Mesquita, but as numerous other accounts demonstrate, that was not the case.
Magellan’s and San Martín’s important missives appear in João de Barros’s Da Asia: Decada Terceira, translated for this book by Víctor Úbeda. See also Stanley (pp. 177–178). Barros retrieved the documents from the papers of San Martín, later seized by the Portuguese. In Barros’s words, “We do not deem it unfitting to include here the contents of such orders, as well as San Martín’s reply, so that it can be seen, not by our words, but by their own, the condition in which they found themselves, and also Magellan’s purpose with regard to the route that he planned to follow in case the way he wished to find should fail him.”
Pigafetta and Albo disagree on the precise date the armada sailed from the western mouth of the strait. Pigafetta gives the date as November 28, and Albo the twenty-sixth. The discrepancy could be explained in various ways; for example, Pigafetta and Albo could have selected different landmarks to mark the strait’s end. See Morison (pp. 400–401).
CHAPTER VIII: A RACE AGAINST DEATH
For more on Setebos in the English literary tradition, see Robert Browning’s long poem “Caliban upon Setebos or, Natural Theology in the Island” (1864), a philosophical rumination by Caliban on his plight.
Magellan’s failure to make a landfall in the Pacific before Guam has long prompted questions. One school of thought holds that he was actually farther north than his chroniclers indicated, and distant from all islands. Although all the eyewitnesses—Albo, Pigafetta, and de Mafra—agree that the armada headed west into the Pacific at the approximate latitude of Valparaiso, Chile, others have suggested that the diarists falsified their accounts to conceal the true location of the Spice Islands, in case they were found in the Portuguese part of the world rather than the Spanish. The assumption makes little sense because they wrote their accounts for different purposes; Pigafetta wrote to glorify Magellan and ingratiate himself with European nobility, Albo to keep track of their whereabouts, and de Mafra dictated his account years later, when the location of the Spice Islands was no longer controversial.