San Martín’s position was reasonable and well argued, but cautious.
Continuing nearer the Austral Pole than we presently are, as you instructed the captains at the river of Santa Cruz, I do not think it feasible, due to the terrible and stormy weather, because if at this latitude sailing proves so hazardous and painful, what shall it be like when we find ourselves at sixty or seventy-five degrees or more, as your lordship said he must go in search of the Moluccas by way of the Eastern and East-Northeastern routes, rounding the Cape of Good Hope? By the time we should arrive there it would already be winter, as your lordship well knows, and also the crew is thin and lacking in strength; moreover, if there are now sufficient provisions, they are not many nor enough to regain energies and enable too much working without the crew’s health suffering it, and I also have noticed how it takes the ill ones long to recover.
On the positive side of the ledger, San Martín reminded Magellan that the three remaining ships of the fleet were still seaworthy, but, he warned, their reduced provisions would not be sufficient to last them all the way to the Moluccas. “Even though your lordship’s ships are good and well equipped (praise be God), some ropes are missing, especially in Victoria, and besides, the crew is thin and weak, and the provisions are not enough to reach the Moluccas by the aforesaid route, and then return to Spain.”
And he had a final word of advice for the Captain Generaclass="underline"
I also believe that your lordship should not sail along these coasts at night, both because of the ships’ safety and the crew’s need to rest a little; since there are seventeen hours of daylight, let your lordship have the ships lie at anchor for the four or five nightly hours so that, as I said, the people can rest instead of having to bustle about the ships with the rigging; and, most importantly, in order to spare ourselves the blows that an untoward fate could inflict on us, may Heaven forbid it. For, if such blows befall us when things can be seen and observed, it should not be unfitting to fear them when nothing can be seen or known or well watched, so let your lordship have the ships anchor one hour before sunset rather than continue forward at night to cover two leagues. I have said as I feel and understand in order to serve both God and your lordship with what I believe is best for the Armada and your lordship; your lordship shall do as your lordship sees fit and as God shall guide your lordship. Please He that your lordship’s life and condition be successful, as it is my wish.
San Martín dared to express what nearly everyone on the voyage whispered: There was great danger ahead, and chances were they would not make it to the Spice Islands, wherever they were; their maps had long since proved to be useless. Give it until January, he advised, and if they had not reached their goal by then, return to Spain, and try again.
Magellan considered these carefully thought-out admonitions, but he was nevertheless inclined to proceed, no matter how long it took to reach the Spice Islands. They had at least three months’ provisions, by his reckoning. More important, he believed that God would assist them in achieving their goal; after all, He had permitted them to discover the strait, and He would guide them to their final goal.
The next day, Magellan gave the order to weigh anchor. The ships fired a salvo of cannon that reverberated among the splendid dark green mountains, gray ravines, and azure glaciers of the strait, and the armada set sail once again, heading west, always west.
At last, the churning, metallic waters of the Pacific came into view, and they realized they had reached the end of the strait. Magellan had done it; he had found the waterway, just as he had promised King Charles. Now that the armada had accomplished this feat, all the arguments for turning back by mid-January were never again discussed. “Everyone thought himself fortunate to be where none had been before,” Ginés de Mafra exulted.
Magellan was overwhelmed to have completed his navigation of the strait, at last. Pigafetta records that the Captain General “wept for joy.” When he recovered, he named the just-discovered Pacific cape “Cape Desire, for we had been desiring it for a long time.”
As the armada approached the Pacific, the seas turned gray and rough. It was late in the day, and the dull skies were fading to darkness as the three ships put the western mouth of the strait to stern. “Wednesday, November 28, 1520, we debouched from that strait, engulfing ourselves in the Pacific sea,” noted Pigafetta with quiet satisfaction. Even with the mutiny of the San Antonio, and the time spent trying to recover the ship, not to mention the ubiquitous dead ends the strait presented and at least one fierce williwaw, Magellan needed only thirty-eight days and nights to travel from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific.
For Magellan and his crew, it had been a remarkable rite of passage. As they sailed beyond the strait into the open water, how could they doubt that their expedition was indeed blessed by the Almighty? Although Magellan and his crew appeared vulnerable to the elements, to starvation, to the local tribes they encountered, and most of all to each other, this was not how they saw themselves. They all believed that a supernatural power looked after them and conferred on them the unique status of global travelers.
But how much of this accomplishment of navigating the strait derived from Magellan’s skill, and how much could be attributed to plain good luck? Magellan was fortunate that the weather was relatively mild; after the intense williwaw that had menaced his ships, no other squalls surprised them, no glaciers collapsed on them, and the temperature, fluctuating as it does at that time of year between 35 degrees and 50 degrees Fahrenheit, remained within normal bounds, so the men were spared the intense cold they had suffered at Port Saint Julian. Their scouting excursions, as well as the addition of fresh vegetables to their diet, boosted both their spirits and their health. The passage through the strait, while strenuous, was far healthier than being at sea for long stretches, within the unsanitary confines of the ships, subsisting on a diet of salty, spoiled food and wine.
Although the armada enjoyed reasonably good fortune, Magellan’s extraordinary skill as a strategist proved to be the decisive factor in negotiating the entire length of the Dragon’s Tail. He ordered lookouts scrambling to the highest perch on the ships, where they could see the waterways and obstacles that lay ahead. In addition, he regularly sent small scouting parties in the longboats. “They would go on and come back with news of the findings, and then the rest of the armada would follow. This is the way the armada operated for the whole passage of the strait,” Ginés de Mafra recalled. The information they brought back helped Magellan plot his next move; they warned him against rocky shoals, bays that deceptively resembled a continuation of the strait, and other dead ends that would have delayed his passage. Magellan even relied on the taste of seawater to guide the fleet. As the water became fresher, he knew he was traveling inland, and once it turned salty, he realized he was approaching the Pacific on the western side of the strait.
This array of tactics saved tedious days of wandering up and down dead-end channels and harbors. If one approach failed, he always had others on which to fall back. Not even the loss of his best pilot, Estêvão Gomes, and his biggest ship, San Antonio, defeated him; the more the fleet shrank, the more nimble it became. His sophisticated approach to navigating uncharted waters went far beyond technical ability in boat handling and direction finding; it revealed an ability to deploy novel tactics to overcome one of the great challenges of the Age of Discovery: namely, how to guide a fleet of ships through hundreds of miles of unmapped archipelagos in rough weather.