Abandoned, the Sabrosa estate fell into disrepair, and another house rose on the site. The stone that once held the Magellan escutcheon met with a special fate: It was covered with excrement.
Chapter III Neverlands
And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he
Was tyrannous and strong:
He struck with his o’ertaking wings,
And chased us south along.
On the tenth of August,” Antonio Pigafetta recorded in his diary, “the fleet, having been furnished with all that was necessary for it and having in the five ships people of divers nations to the number of two hundred and thirty-seven in all, was ready to depart from . . . Seville, and firing all the artillery we set sail with the staysail only.” Pigafetta’s head count probably omitted about twenty crew members also on board the ships. Only Magellan remained behind, making last-minute provisioning arrangements; he would join the fleet shortly before its final departure from Spain.
To reach the Atlantic, the five ships, their colors set, negotiated the sinuous Guadalquivir River, whose hazards immediately tested the pilots’ abilities. Fed by rainwater in winter and melting snows in spring and summer, the Guadalquivir empties into the Gulf of Cádiz. The last forty miles, traversing a seemingly endless stretch of tidal marches known as Las Marismas, presented special perils. Hidden sandbanks, the hulls of shipwrecks, and shallow areas lurked beneath the river’s turbid waters, and occasionally these obstacles visited disaster on an expedition even before it reached the open sea. Pigafetta, new to the problems of navigation, suddenly became alert to the dangers of the Guadalquivir. “There was a bridge over the river by which one went to Seville, which bridge was in ruins, although two columns remained at the bottom of the water. Wherefore you must have practiced and expert men of the country to point out the proper channel for passing safely between these two columns, for fear of striking on them.”
Although defeated and driven from Spain, the Moors had left their indelible marks on the Spanish psyche, landscape, and bloodlines. “Going by this river we passed a place named Gioan de Farax, where there was a great settlement of Moors,” Pigafetta noted of one encampment. The Guadalquivir derived its very name from the Arabic original, Wadi al-Kabir, meaning “great river,” as the Arab rulers of the region designated it. And, as everyone aboard these ships knew, Moorish pirates still patrolled the Spanish coast, looking for ships laden with precious resources and, most of all, with weapons—ships like those of the Armada de Molucca.
A week after leaving Seville, the fleet reached the snug coastal town of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, the final point of departure for the Ocean Sea. “You enter it on the west wind and depart from it on the east wind,” said Pigafetta, repeating the lore he recently learned. On arrival, the crew found a windswept seaport, seemingly poised on the edge of the world, and reverberating with a sense of adventure. Over the centuries, Sanlúcar de Barrameda had witnessed a succession of conquerors, from Roman to Arab to, most recently, King Alfonso X, who claimed it in 1264. In 1498, Christopher Columbus chose it as the departure point for his third voyage to the New World, and Magellan might have chosen the same port to announce that he planned to build on and outdo Columbus’s accomplishments.
Beyond the huddled town lay the churning waters of the Atlantic. To Magellan and his crew, the body of water was known simply as the Ocean Sea, believed to girdle the globe. At the sight of these seething green waters, every sailor’s pulse quickened; their lives depended on conquering this element. Many ships had departed from the Sanlúcar de Barrameda, and some had been fortunate enough to return from distant ports and newly discovered lands, but none had circumnavigated the entire world.
Magellan took command of his fleet just before departure, and made sure that his sailors led a pious existence during what might be their last days on land. “A few days after, the Captain General went along the said river in his boat and the masters of other ships with him,” wrote Pigafetta, “and we remained for some days at the port to hear mass on land at a church named Our Lady of Barrameda near Sanlúcar, where the Captain General ordered all those of the fleet to confess themselves before going farther. In which he showed the way to others. Moreover he would not allow any woman, whoever she might be, to come onto the fleet and to the ships, for many good reasons.”
Magellan’s autocratic style extended beyond religious observance. To stifle dissent, Pigafetta writes, Magellan concealed the ultimate goal of the expedition from his rank-and-file sailors. “He did not wholly declare the voyage that he wished to make, lest the people from astonishment and fear refuse to accompany him on so long a voyage as he had in mind to undertake, in view of the great and violent storms of the Ocean Sea whither he would go.” The assertion needs clarification. As a Portuguese mariner, Magellan was accustomed to secrecy when it came to voyages of discovery; that was the Portuguese way. Yet everyone realized the fleet was bound for the Spice Islands; it was even called the Armada de Molucca. Perhaps Pigafetta meant that Magellan wished to keep his plan to find a strait—a waterway leading to the East—to himself until it was too late for disloyal crew members to desert. Inevitably, the plan meant trouble, because once the fleet encountered storms, then uncharted waters, and finally a search for an unknown strait, the men whom he had hoodwinked into coming along were likely to rise up in rebellion against him.
In the pages of his diary, Pigafetta confided another and far more troubling reason for Magellan’s unusual secrecy: “The masters and captains of the other ships of his company loved him not. I do not know the reason, unless it be that he, the Captain General, was Portuguese, and they were Spaniards and Castilians, which peoples have long borne ill-will and malevolence toward one another.”
To assert his authority over his resentful and contentious captains, Magellan gave strict sailing orders designed to reinforce his unquestioned authority. They were “good and honorable regulations,” in Pigafetta’s words, and consistent with procedures followed by other fleets of the era. “First, the said Captain General desired that his ship should go before the other ships and that the others should follow him; and to this end he carried by night on the poop of his ship a torch or burning fagot of wood, which they called a farol, that his ships should not lose him from sight. Sometimes he put a lantern, at other times a thick cord of lighted rushes, called a trenche, which was made of rushes soaked in water and beaten, then dried by the sun or by smoke.” If the flagship, Trinidad, signaled, the others were to reply; that way, Magellan could tell if his fleet was following him. “And when he wished to change course because the weather changed, or the wind was contrary, or he wanted to reduce speed, he had two lights shown. And if he wanted others to haul in a bonnet (which is a part of the sail attached to the mainsail), he showed three lights. Thus by three lights, even if the weather was good for sailing faster, he meant that the said bonnet be brought in, so that the mainsail could be sooner and more easily struck and furled when bad weather came on suddenly.” Four lights on Trinidad signaled that the other ships should strike sail. If the watchman suddenly discovered land, or even a reef, Magellan would display lights or fire a mortar.