Magellan set a traditional system of watches, an essential precaution. There were to be three: “the first at the beginning of the night, the second at midnight, and the third toward daybreak. . . . And every night the said watches were changed, that is to say, he who had made the first watch made on the morrow the second, and he who had made the second then made the third. And after this manner they changed every night. Then the Captain [General] ordered that his regulations, both for signals and watches, be strictly observed, that their voyage be made with greater safety.”
Magellan’s strict procedures demanded discipline from an inexperienced crew lacking respect for the Captain General. The most innocuous aspect of his standing orders—the requirement that all ships report to Trinidad at dusk—rankled the most because it demonstrated that Magellan, and no one else, served as the leader of the Armada de Molucca.
Leaving the mouth of the Guadalquivir River on September 20, 1519, the five ships of the armada plunged into the Atlantic Ocean. Juan de Escalante de Mendoza, an experienced Spanish seaman, described the exhilaration and frenzy of sailing past Sanlúcar de Barrameda into the Atlantic. “When the hour had arrived in which they had to make sail,” he wrote, “the pilot ordered the men to raise all but one of the anchors and to attach the cable on the last anchor to the capstan . . . and with the yards and sails aloft, he ordered two apprentices to climb the foremast and stand ready to unfurl the sails when and as they were ordered and directed.” Amid the intricately choreographed flurry of activity aboard the ships, officers shouted orders, but their words at this crucial moment sounded more like prayers than commands. “And if the special pilot for the sandbar said that it was time to make sail, the ship’s pilot would call out the following to the two men aloft on the yard: ‘Ease the rope of the foresail, in the name of the Holy Trinity, Father, and Son, and Holy Spirit, three persons in one single true God, that they may be with us and give us good and safe voyage, and carry us and return us safely to our homes!’” With those words ringing in their ears, the sailors hauled the hemp ropes holding anchors, set the sails, and felt the breeze freshen against their faces. The ships picked up speed, and the coastline began to recede; there was no turning back now. It would sustain them all, or it would destroy them all. To reach his goal, Magellan would have to master both the great Ocean Sea and a sea of ignorance.
It was a dream as old as the imagination: a voyage to the ends of the earth. Yet until the Age of Discovery, it remained only a dream. At the time, Europe was deeply ignorant of the world at large. Magellan undertook his ambitious voyage in a world ruled by superstition, populated with strange and demonic creatures, and reverberating with a longing for religious redemption. To the average person, the world beyond Europe resembled the fantastic realms depicted in The Thousand and One Nights, a collection of tales including “The Seven Voyages of Sindbad the Sailor.” Going to sea was the most adventurous thing one could do, the Renaissance equivalent of becoming an astronaut, but the likelihood of death and disaster was far greater. These days, there are no undiscovered places on earth; in the age of the Global Positioning System, no one need get lost. But in the Age of Discovery, more than half the world was unexplored, unmapped, and misunderstood by Europeans. Mariners feared they could literally sail over the edge of world. They believed that sea monsters lurked in the briny depths, waiting to devour them. And when they crossed the equator, the ocean would boil and scald them to death.
Some of the most tenacious ideas about the world at large derived from Pliny the Elder, who died in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. His multivolume, encyclopedic Natural History, rediscovered and widely consulted in the Renaissance, sought to bring together everything that was known about the natural world: mountains, continents, flora and fauna.
Pliny’s chapters on humankind contained a potent mixture of fact and fantasy. He wrote of a tribe known as the Arimaspi, “a people known for having one eye in the middle of the forehead.” He confidently cited other classical authorities, such as Herodotus, who related tales of a “continual battle between the Arimaspi and griffins in the vicinity of the latter’s mines. The griffin is a type of wild beast with wings, as is commonly reported, which digs gold out of tunnels. The griffins guard the gold and the Arimaspi try to seize it, each with remarkable greed.” Pliny meant this vivid description literally, and while it might have generated some skepticism among naturalists of Magellan’s time, it was generally accepted as fact, as was Pliny’s curious description of “forest-dwellers who have their feet turned back behind their leg; they run with extraordinary speed and wander far and wide with the wild animals.” India offered particularly fertile ground for extraordinary creatures. Pliny evoked “men with dog’s heads who are covered with wild beasts’ skins; they bark instead of speaking and live by hunting and fowling, for which they use their nails.” At one time, says Pliny, over 120,000 of these hominids flourished throughout India.
Pliny assured his readers that wonders never ceased in the natural world; the result of his labors was a Ripley’s Believe-It-or-Not catalog tinged with the classics. “That women have changed into men is not a myth,” he wrote. “We find in historical records that . . . a girl at Casinum became a boy before her parents’ very eyes.” To emphasize his point, Pliny claimed to have firsthand knowledge of the phenomenon: “In Africa, I myself saw someone who became a man on his wedding-day.” There was more; he claimed that people in Eastern Europe had two sets of eyes, backward-facing heads, or no heads at all. In Africa, Pliny wrote, lived people who combined both sexes in one body, yet managed to reproduce; people who survived without eating; people with ears large enough to blanket their entire bodies; and people with equine feet. In India, he said, there were people with six hands. These marvelous accounts were subsequently retold by various respected chroniclers and widely credited up through Magellan’s time.
In the open waters of the ocean, lurked even more bizarre creatures, whales and sharks, six-foot-long lobsters and three-hundred-foot-long eels. Sailors had no way of telling which of Pliny’s descriptions were reliable, and which were fantasies.
They were just as ignorant about major landmasses. Only three continents were known to Europeans of the era—Europe, Asia, and Africa—although it was suspected that more would be discovered. The existence of an illusory island, Terra Australis, the South Land, was accepted as fact before and long after Magellan’s voyage. This landmass was said to lurk in the Southern Hemisphere, where its vast size supposedly counterbalanced the continents in the Northern Hemisphere. Highly schematic medieval maps depicted the three known continents as separated by two rivers, the Nile and the Don, as well as the Mediterranean, all of them surrounded by the great Ocean Sea, into which other seas and rivers flowed. This diagram resembled a T inside of an O, so medieval maps of this genre are referred as “T in O” maps. To remain consistent with religious traditions, T in O maps located Jerusalem at dead center, with Paradise floating vaguely at the top. To complicate matters, Asia occupied the Northern Hemisphere of this map, with Europe and Africa sharing the Southern. In some versions of the medieval map, the Ocean Sea flowed out into space. One could not navigate with such maps, or locate points of the compass on it, or plot realistic routes; they offered a conceptual model rather than an actual representation. As such, they were utterly useless to Magellan.