In 1506, Ferdinand of Aragon and Philip I of Castile commissioned two explorers, Juan de Solis and Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, to undertake an expedition to determine the position of the line of demarcation and to find a strait to the Indies. Like Magellan, Solis was a skilled and ambitious Portuguese mariner who found a receptive patron in Spain, but quite unlike Magellan, he was a fugitive from justice who had fled to Spain after murdering his wife. The Solis-Pinzón expedition, which embarked in 1508, discovered nothing, and when the expedition’s two ships returned to Spain, an enraged and disappointed King Ferdinand clapped Solis in jail.
Two years later, in 1512, Solis, deftly manipulating the levers of influence, rehabilitated himself, and King Ferdinand made him pilot major; he then received an ambitious new commission to claim the Spice Islands for Spain. When King Manuel of Portugal protested, Ferdinand, shading the truth a bit, explained that Solis’s task was simply to find the line of demarcation, and nothing more. Soon after, Ferdinand canceled the expedition, but he sent word to his representatives in the Caribbean to look for any sign of a strait and to arrest any Portuguese ships that might be searching for the same thing. Sure enough, the authorities in that distant outpost of the Spanish empire found a Portuguese caravel that had wandered into the Caribbean. She turned out to be a ship filled with secrets.
In 1511, Cristóbal de Haro had backed a covert Portuguese expedition to Brazil. The fleet consisted of two caravels commanded by Estêvão Froes and João de Lisboa. The Spanish knew nothing of the expedition until Froes’s ship arrived in the Caribbean for repairs before heading northeast across the Atlantic to Portugal. The Spanish authorities seized the crew and threw them into jail. Meanwhile, the other ship returned to Spain, where Lisboa revealed his discoveries to an agent of his financiers, the Fuggers of Germany. After that, Lisboa’s secrets gradually became public knowledge.
In 1514, a published account of Lisboa’s exploits surfaced in Germany. Newen Zeytung auss Presillg Landt, or “News from the Land of Brazil,” as the broadsheet was called, indicated that Lisboa had ventured seven hundred miles farther south than any prior expedition. According to this account, the expedition came to a strait, entered it, and sailed west until violent storms forced the ships to turn back. Lisboa might even have navigated the strait all the way to the Pacific. Although incomplete, the description of Lisboa’s clandestine voyage was consistent with the strait that Magellan eventually explored. In Spain and Portugal, mariners and cosmographers alike seized on this remarkable document.
At the same time, a report circulated throughout Spain that Vasco Núñez de Balboa had glimpsed the vast ocean to the west: the Pacific. Within months of hearing the news, King Ferdinand once again sent Juan de Solis to find the strait, or, as El Rey put it, “to discover the back parts of Golden Castile.” The strait, according to the best information of the day, ran through what is now Panama. The expedition, consisting of three ships and seventy men, embarked on October 8, 1515. Solis reached South America, sailed along its coast, and spotted a tribe that seemed friendly, at least from a distance. In good spirits, he went ashore with a landing party of seven men to greet them.
The best record of what befell the explorers comes from the pen of Peter Martyr, writing close to the time of the events. Martyr’s account, in Latin, was translated into English in 1555 by Richard Eden, a Cambridge-educated scholar, in his best-known work, The Decades of the Newe Worlde or West India, Conteyning the Navigations and Conquestes of the Spanyards, with the Particular Description of the most Rych and Large Landes and Islandes lately Founde in the West Ocean. In this popular work, he recorded the appalling turn of events in robust language:
Sodenly a great multitude of the inhabitants burst forth upon them, and slue them every man with clubbes, even in the sight of their fellows, not one escaping. Their furie not thus satisfied, they cut the slayne men in peeces, even upon the shore, where their fellows might behold this horrible spectacle from the sea. But they being stricken with feare through this example, durst not come forth of their shippes, or devise how to revenge the death of their Captayne and companions. They departed therefore from these unfortunate coastes, and . . . returned home agayne with losse, and heavie cheare.
It became part of the lore of the expedition that the unfortunate Europeans had not merely been killed but devoured as their shipmates looked on helplessly.
Magellan’s crew displayed considerable courage, even foolhardiness, when they confronted Indians in the region where Solis had met disaster. Magellan dispatched not one but three longboats. The men were armed, which gave them an advantage, but otherwise at the mercy of the indigenous people of the river basin. No sooner had the boats landed than the men jumped into the surf and chased the Indians observing them. Rather than standing and fighting, the Indians simply outran them. “They made such enormous strides that with all our running and jumping we could not overtake them,” Pigafetta noted.
That night, a large canoe left the shore and approached the Trinidad. Standing upright in the middle of the vessel was an Indian covered with animal skins, apparently a chief. As the canoe drew close, the men aboard the flagship noticed that he exhibited no sign of fear. He indicated that he wished to come aboard, and Magellan agreed.
When they were face to face, Magellan offered the Indian two gifts, a shirt and a jersey. The Captain General then displayed a piece of metal, hoping to learn if the Indian was familiar with it. Recognizing the object, the Indian indicated that his tribe possessed some form of metal. Assuming the Indian would leap at the chance to obtain more, Magellan expected to barter metal objects such as bells and scissors for food and scouting assistance, but after the Indian left Trinidad, he never returned. The fleeting encounter with the indifferent tribal leader baffled Magellan and his officers. If they were received well, the sailors were ready for orgies, and the priests for conversions; if they were attacked, they were ready for battle. But they were not prepared to be ignored.
During the fleet’s layover, Magellan constantly sounded the depths of the Río de la Plata, hoping that the water would swallow the lead, indicating that he had found the strait, but the stream remained precariously shallow. A channel or a strait would be deeper, he reasoned, and its current would run faster.
Unwilling to commit the entire fleet to the river, he dispatched Santiago, the smallest ship, and the one with the shallowest draught, to explore its murky and seductive reaches. Santiago spent two days sailing upstream, constantly sounding the river, trying to avoid running aground.
Magellan meanwhile temporarily abandoned the flagship, Trinidad, to explore the waterway for himself aboard Santiago. At no point was the river deeper than three fathoms, too shallow for the ships to pass safely, and too shallow to suggest that it was a strait running all the way to Asia and the Spice Islands. Despite the many indications that they had found nothing but a large river, the other captains held fast to the belief that the Río de la Plata would lead them to the Indies, and they urged Magellan not to abandon his reconnaissance. But he had made up his mind to turn back, and once Magellan decided on a course of action, nothing could deter him. By the end of January, Magellan gave up and reversed direction, now facing directly into winds that made his return to the coast slow and erratic.