Once again, foul weather bedeviled the ships, but it was not quite severe enough to drive them back. After two difficult days without any progress, the direction of the wind changed; now it came from the north, and the four ships plunged before the wind, leaving sharp, bubbling wakes and making rapid progress along a south-by-southwest course. Increasingly desperate to find the strait, Magellan scrutinized every inlet, hoping it might contain a hidden channel leading inland, but in each instance he was disappointed and continued his southerly course. Finally, he noticed a significant spit of land extending into open waters: a cape. As he approached, he made out a broad sandbank strewn with the skeletons of whales—a suggestion that he had come across a migration route, perhaps leading from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The gray water churned angrily where competing tides vied with one another, but the opening was wide, a league or more.
Vasquito Gallego, an apprentice Portuguese seaman aboard Victoria and the son of her pilot, recalled the gradual realization that the gaping break in the land might be more than a mere bay. “As the way became narrower, they thought it was a river,” he recalled, and then, with mounting excitement, recorded that the wide mouth turned into a narrows farther ahead. “Continuing that way, they found deep salt water and strong currents, appearing to be a strait and the mouth of a big gulf that might be discharging into it.” Magellan ordered his ships to sail into the gulf, and when they were well within its embrace, he saw it: the outlet leading west, just as he prayed it would.
Magellan had finally found his strait.
On October 21, Albo, the pilot, recorded the great event in his log: “We saw an opening like a bay, and it has at the entrance, on the right hand, a very long spit of sand, and the cape which we discovered before this spit is called the Cape of the [Eleven Thousand] Virgins, and the spit of sand is in 52 degrees latitude, 521⁄2 longitude, and from the spit of sand to the other part there may be a matter of five leagues,” he observed. This is what he saw: a series of mounds, covered with tufts of grass, rising approximately 130 feet from the water. A later explorer described the cape as “three great mountains of sand that look like islands but are not.” There was no mistaking the strait for a bay or an inlet; a broad waterway cut deep into the impenetrable landmass along which the fleet had been sailing for months.
Pigafetta exulted at the sighting of the waterway. “After going and setting course to the fifty-second degree toward the said Antarctic Pole,” he wrote, “on the Festival of the Eleven Thousand Virgins, we found by miracle a strait which we called the Cape of the Eleven Thousand Virgins.” After all the ordeals suffered by the armada, the discovery of the strait did lay claim to being a miracle.
The Cape of the Eleven Thousand Virgins marks the entrance to the strait that Magellan had sought for more than two years. Precisely how he divined its existence has been the subject of debate ever since. He might have been aware of Lisboa’s expedition, which claimed to have found the strait, and he was certainly aware of maps depicting the mythical strait. According to Pigafetta, Magellan, while still in Portugal, had seen a map depicting or suggesting a strait cutting through South America, but what map had Magellan seen? “He knew where to sail to find a well-hidden strait,” Pigafetta declares, “which he saw depicted on a map in the treasury of Portugal, made by that excellent man, Martin de Boemia”—who was of course, Martin Behaim, who had created a state-of-the-art globe in 1492. (The earliest Pigafetta manuscripts employ the word carta, which could mean either a globe, a map, or a chart.)
It is often assumed that Behaim’s “well-painted globe,” which Magellan had displayed to King Charles and his advisers to persuade them to back his voyage, showed the strait; in fact, Behaim’s globe, or map, did no such thing. Instead, it showed a waterway cutting through eastern Asia and the island of “Seilan.” To add to the cartographic confusion, it positioned other Asian islands to the east of the strait. It is unlikely that Magellan would have employed this fanciful, wildly inaccurate representation to persuade King Charles of the existence of a strait cutting through the American continent; indeed, it is unlikely that Magellan ever saw the Behaim globe, despite the linkage of their names.
Pigafetta was inadvertently responsible for the case of mistaken identity; in all likelihood, he confused Behaim’s rendition with that of another Nuremberg mapmaker, Johannes Schöner, a professor of mathematics who produced two maps, one in 1515 and the other in 1520, close to the time Magellan was displaying a map to King Charles. To the nonspecialist, Schöner’s maps closely resembled Behaim’s, and Pigafetta could easily have mistaken one for the other, especially because Schöner did not sign his productions.
Schöner’s globe depicted a strait cutting through the American continent in the approximate location of the Isthmus of Panama—several thousand miles north of the actual strait. There is no conclusive evidence that Magellan saw this map, either, but it does demonstrate that cartographers were starting to include some sort of strait in South America, however poorly it was understood. If this was the map Magellan had in mind, it would have been nearly useless in trying to find the strait. Even the daring Schöner hesitated to depict the western coast of South America; it was, as he termed it, terra ulterior incog.—in other words, “the land that has been hitherto unknown.”
Everything to the west was also unknown. Schöner, like other cartographers of his era, shrank the immense Pacific into an enticingly small and apparently navigable gulf, a misunderstanding that resulted in Magellan’s conviction that he could reach the Spice Islands within weeks, if not days, after exiting the strait. And like other maps of the era, it placed China in close proximity to the American continent. Finally, Schöner’s globe placed the Spice Islands well within Spanish territory as defined by the line of demarcation, and this feature—again, wildly inaccurate—might have accounted for Magellan’s conviction that the Spice Islands legitimately belonged to Spain rather than Portugal.
Magellan knew better than to take maps at face value, but he was deeply susceptible to their influence. They were idealized projections of what the world might be like. Instead of the dragons and magnetic islands of older maps, these contained a new marvel, one that was possibly just as mythicaclass="underline" a strait. They were calls to adventure rather than a set of directions, hypotheses rather than conclusions, provocative geographical cartoons that fed the fantasy of empire.
Now that Magellan had finally found the strait, he faced three hundred miles of nautical nightmare. Navigating the waterway would prove as daunting a challenge as simply finding it had been. Tides in the strait run as much as twenty-four feet, making it difficult to anchor ships securely, and currents are strong. Beds of kelp lurking below the water’s surface threatened to foul lines, keels, and rudders. But if Magellan could overcome the obstacles presented by the strait, and keep his mutinous crew intact, he would pioneer a new route to the Indies, to a new understanding of the continents and of the globe itself.
The ships turned west, braved the swirling tides, and entered the inland waterway. The first thing the pilots noticed was the extreme depth of the strait. “In this place it was not possible to anchor,” Pigafetta observed, “because no bottom was found. Wherefore it was necessary to put cables ashore of twenty-five or thirty cubits in length.”