This was, in short, a book of marvels. Despite all its improbabilities, Mandeville’s account was taken to be true. It was widely anthologized, and its most blatant inaccuracies excused on the basis that they must have been errors or corruptions of the original text committed by scribes and copyists over the years. His many borrowings from classical authors, rather than being seen as a form of plagiarism, added to his stature as a scholarly authority.
Mandeville argued that it was possible for people to circumnavigate the globe, but he warned, “There are so many routes, and countries, where a man can go wrong, except by special grace of God.” He proposed one man who had accomplished the trick. “He passed India and so many isles beyond India, where there are more than 5,000 isles, and traveled so far by land and sea, girdling the globe, that he found an isle where he heard his own language being spoken,” Mandeville wrote. “He marveled greatly, for he did not understand how that could be. But I conjecture that he had traveled so far over land and sea, circumnavigating the earth, that he had come to his own border; if he had gone a bit further, he would have come to his own district. But after he heard that marvel, he could not get transport any further, so he turned back the way he had come; so he had a long journey!”
Accounts of the natural world circulating throughout Europe were so terrifying and fantastic that François Rabelais, the French friar and physician turned popular author, enthusiastically satirized them in his comic epic Gargantua and Pantagruel, which appeared as a series of books beginning in 1532. Rabelais mocked the unreliable accounts by the revered figures of antiquity with his own farcical version of exotic lands and the strange creatures to be found there. Among his authorities on the world was a blind old hunchback called Hearsay, who possessed seven tongues, each divided into seven parts, and maintained a school. In Rabelais’s hands, this figure becomes a vicious parody of a cosmologist and his entourage of flunkies. “Around him I saw innumerable men and women listening to him attentively, and among the group I recognized several with very important looks, among them one who held a chart of the world and was explaining it to them succinctly. Thus they became clerks and scholars in no time, and spoke in choice language—having good memories—about a host of tremendous matters, which a man’s whole lifetime would not be enough for him to know a hundredth part of. They spoke about the Pyramids, the Nile, Babylon, the Troglodites, the Himantopodes, the Blemmyae, the Pygmies, the Cannibals, the Hyperborean Mountains, the Aegipans, and all the devils—and all from Hearsay.” Rabelais had a serious point to make; he was directing his readers back to the classical Greek concept of autopsis, seeing for one’s self (and the origin of our word “autopsy”). Autopsis stressed the value of firsthand reporting; the next best thing was obtaining a reliable account from an eyewitness with firsthand knowledge.
This was a revolutionary concept in the Age of Discovery, to go see for one’s self, to study the world as it was, not as myths and sacred texts suggested that it should be. And that was exactly what Magellan proposed to do; he would see for himself if there was a water route to the Spice Islands, he would find the strait leading to them if it existed, and then he would report back to King Charles on his findings. So Magellan stood on the knife-edge dividing the ancient and medieval worlds from the modern. His voyage would be a completely practical and empirical approach to discovery. He would go and see for himself: the first-ever global autopsis. That ambition alone made it a daring and significant endeavor. The time was ripe for Magellan and his armada to sweep away a thousand years of accumulated cobwebs. The reign of Hearsay was coming to an end.
Fair weather favored the Armada de Molucca, and gusts carried the black ships southwest to the Canary Islands, off the coast of the western Sahara. “We left Sanlúcar on Tuesday, September twentieth of the said year, laying a course by the southwest wind,” Pigafetta noted. “And on the twenty-sixth of the said month, we arrived at an island of the Grand Canary named Tenerife . . . where we remained three and a half days to take in provisions and other things which we needed.”
For centuries this group of seven volcanic islands (Grand Canary, Fuerteventura, Lanzarote, Tenerife, La Palma, Gomera, and Hierro) had served as a stopover for ships bound to and from the Iberian peninsula. They were known to Pliny, and classical historians may have been referring to the Canaries when they wrote of The Fortunate Islands. Later, a succession of Arab and European voyagers, carried by strong, favorable winds, frequently called on the Canaries to replenish their supplies, convert the islanders, or capture slaves; the islands began to appear on maps in 1341. At the time of Magellan’s arrival, in late September, the Canaries glistened in the waters of the Atlantic.
While there, Pigafetta confirmed an ancient story about the Canaries: “Know that among the other islands that belong to the said Grand Canary, there is one where no drop of water coming from spring or river is found, save that once a day at the hour of noon there descends from heaven a cloud which encompasses a great tree in the said island, then all its leaves fall from it, and from the leaves is distilled a great abundance of water that it seems a living fountain. And from this water the inhabitants of the said place are satisfied, and the animals both domestic and wild.” This observation marked the first time that Pigafetta tested his firsthand experiences against the claims of ancient writers, in this case Pliny, who wrote of a magical fountain in the Canaries with no source. It seemed to Pigafetta that there was a natural source of water, a rain cloud. Though hardly a revolutionary insight, the comment set Pigafetta apart from sages such as Pliny and Marco Polo, who relied on hearsay or the artful blending of hearsay with fact. If Pigafetta had any idea of emulating Polo, he gave up that notion now. Instead of embellishing timeworn legends about the world, he would present phenomena as he observed them with his own eyes. And he would test the legends against what he actually saw and experienced. With this entirely factual approach, Pigafetta broke with a tradition that reached back to antiquity.
During those brief days in the Canaries, Magellan busied himself with the final provisioning of his fleet. He worked quickly—too quickly, as he would later discover to his horror, for the merchants and chandlers of the Canaries, practiced in deception, swindled Magellan by falsifying their bills of lading. They vastly overstated the amount of supplies they sold to the fleet, and what they did sell was in poor condition. This type of cheating was common, and very dangerous to the expeditions whose lives depended on the food acquired in the Canaries. Although Magellan was normally meticulous in preparing the ships, this time he was too trusting of his suppliers.
After three busy days in one of Tenerife’s harbors, Pigafetta wrote, “We departed thence and came to a port called Monterose, where we remained two days to furnish ourselves with pitch, which is a thing very necessary for ships.” While there, Magellan heard disturbing news: The king of Portugal had dispatched not one but two fleets of caravels to arrest him—a drastic measure, but not without precedent. A generation earlier, Manuel’s father had sent ships to intercept Columbus. Magellan also received a secret communiqué from his father-in-law, Diogo Barbosa, warning that the Castilian captains in the Armada de Molucca planned to mutiny at the very first chance. They might even kill Magellan to attain their goal. “Keep a good watch,” Barbosa admonished. The ringleader’s name came as no surprise to Magellan: Juan de Cartagena, the Castilian with blood ties to Bishop Fonseca.