In his reply to Barbosa, Magellan insisted he had accepted command of the fleet, come what may, but he promised that he would work closely with his captains for the good of the fleet and of Spain. Barbosa showed these conciliatory words to the Casa de Contratación, and Magellan won praise for gracious sentiments, at least in the short term. Despite this display of diplomacy, Magellan’s concern about the safety of his fleet, and his own life, could only have increased as he contemplated the Portuguese ships in hot pursuit. Unwilling to give his rebellious captains further cause for alarm, he kept both warnings to himself.
Under the circumstances, Magellan decided that the best course of action was to leave the Canaries immediately. If the Portuguese caravels caught up with Magellan, they would return him in shackles to the Portuguese court, where he would be convicted of treason, tortured, and perhaps executed. Poorly provisioned, but afraid for his life and the welfare of the fleet, Magellan gave the order to raise anchor and set sail at midnight, October 3.
We sailed on the course to the south,” Pigafetta wrote. “Engulfing ourselves in the Ocean Sea, we passed Cape Verde and sailed for many days along the coast of Guinea or Ethiopia, where there is a mountain called Sierra Leone, which is in eight degrees of latitude.”
Magellan ordered the fleet to sail both day and night, attempting to place as much distance as possible between his ships and the Portuguese caravels and to take evasive action by following an unexpected course. He led the fleet southwest, hugging the coast of Africa, rather than west across the Atlantic. From the deck of San Antonio, following closely behind the flagship, Cartagena immediately challenged Magellan’s orders. Why, he demanded, was Magellan following this unusual route?
Follow and do not ask questions, instructed the Captain General.
Cartagena continued to protest, insisting that Magellan should have consulted his captains and his pilots. Was he trying to get them all killed by following this dangerous course? Magellan did not attempt to explain; he simply reminded the other captains to follow, and that they did. The mutiny that he expected to break out any moment failed to materialize, and order reigned aboard the ships, at least for the time being.
For the next fifteen days, the Armada de Molucca ran before the wind; the favorable conditions placated the irritable captains and gave Magellan time to strategize about the best way to avoid his Portuguese pursuers. Although he had seen no evidence of them, he continued to follow the coast of Africa rather than head west. But as they worked their way farther south, the weather turned foul, the winds confused and contrary day after day. They had no reliable nautical charts, no indications of rocks or other hazards that might have been lying in wait, and no idea when their miserable weather would change. Cooking fires were extinguished, the men went without sleep, and life on board the battered vessels became exceedingly precarious. One slip, and a sailor could plunge into the sea without hope of rescue.
The changeable winds blew the ships sideways into the troughs between waves. As the ships were tossed about, their yardarms dipped into the seething water, a prelude to a possible shipwreck. To keep from being dragged under, the captains on several occasions came close to ordering their men to chop down the masts, a desperate measure that would have disabled the fleet once the weather began to clear. Instead, they cleared nearly all their sail, offering bare masts to the relentless wind. “Thus we sailed for sixty days of rain to the equinoctial line,” Pigafetta wrote. “Which was a thing very strange and uncommon, in the opinion of the old people and of those who had sailed there several times before.” They were buffeted “by squalls and by wind and currents that came head on to us so that we could not advance. And in order that our ships should not perish or broach to us (as often happens when squalls come together), we struck the sails. In this manner we did wander hither and yon on the sea.”
Throughout the ordeal, sharks constantly circled the ships, terrifying the crew. “They have terrible teeth,” Pigafetta wrote, plainly aghast at the sight, “and eat men when they find them alive or dead in the sea. And the said fish are caught with a hook of iron, with which some were taken by our people. But they are not good to eat when large. And even the small ones are not much good.”
After weeks of constant, life-threatening storms, several hissing, incandescent globes mysteriously appeared on the yardarms of Magellan’s ship, Trinidad. Saint Elmo’s fire!
Here was a natural phenomenon to rival any fanciful, supernatural apparition cataloged by Pliny or Sir John Mandeville. Saint Elmo’s fire is a dramatic electrical discharge that looks like a stream of fire as it trails from the mast of a ship; it can even play about someone’s head, causing an eerie tingling sensation. The superstitious sailors, always alert to omens, associated the phenomenon with Saint Peter Gonzalez, a Dominican priest who was considered the patron saint of mariners and who had acquired the name Saint Elmo; the “fire” was regarded as a sign of his protection.
This is how Saint Elmo’s fire first appeared to the terrified, storm-tossed crew: It assumed “the form of a lighted torch at the height of the maintop, and remained there more than two hours and a half, to the comfort of us all. For we were in tears, expecting only the hour of death. And when this holy light was about to leave us, it was so bright to the eyes of all that we were for more than a quarter of an hour as blind as men calling for mercy. For without any doubt, no man thought he would escape from that storm.” Once the apparition subsided, some crew members believed that supernatural powers had singled out the Captain General for a special destiny. But their deliverance from the perils of the sea proved brief, and their faith in Magellan’s ability to save them would soon be tested again.
For the moment, Magellan’s official chronicler, Antonio Pigafetta, enjoyed a rare moment of repose and pondered the mysteries of the sea. No monsters with flaming faces menaced the ships; instead, flying fish leaped from the water, and not just a few, but “so great a quantity together that it seemed an island in the sea.” The wonderful sight, half real, half illusion, mesmerized Pigafetta. In the sea below, as in the heavens above, there were marvels and perils beyond comprehension. This was not the world as described by the speculative historians of antiquity and the Middle Ages; it was stranger and richer, and even more dangerous.
Chapter IV “The Church of the Lawless”
There passed a weary time. Each throat
Was parched, and glazed each eye.
A weary time! a weary time!
How glazed each weary eye,
When looking westward, I beheld
A something in the sky.
Sixty days of furious storms left the ships of the Armada de Molucca in need of repair and ruined a good part of the precious food supply. Magellan found it necessary to reduce rations. Each man received only four pints of drinking water a day, and half that amount of wine. Hardtack, a staple of the sailors’ diet, was also reduced to a pound and a half a day. As with his other decisions, Magellan did not explain why he was reducing the amount of food and drink, and no other decision he could take was as likely to create resentment among the captains and the crew.
Once the gales abated, the battered black ships drifted into equatorial calms. As the sails luffed lamely amid rising temperatures, the ships rode helplessly in the water. The rebellious Spanish captains, with time on their hands, resumed plotting against the Captain General. They avoided overt violence on this occasion; rather, they displayed a pointed lack of regard for the status of a man they considered their social inferior.