Magellan’s skill in negotiating the entire length of the strait is acknowledged as the single greatest feat in the history of maritime exploration. It was, perhaps, an even greater accomplishment than Columbus’s discovery of the New World, because the Genoan, thinking he had arrived in China, remained befuddled to the end of his days about where he was, and what he had accomplished, and as a result he misled others. Magellan, in contrast, realized exactly what he had done; he had, at long last, begun to correct Columbus’s great navigational error.
When the fog receded and the sun broke through the low clouds, the Western Sea, as the Pacific was then called, turned from lifeless gray to seductive cobalt, its surface mottled with frothy whitecaps that melted into the frigid air. The water boiled menacingly and surged over the rocks and cliffs emerging from its inscrutable depths. Fearing shoals, Magellan adjusted his navigational technique; instead of gliding through deep fjords, he steered a course in rough water between two rocks later named, with a bitter irony best appreciated by wary sailors, The Evangelists and Good Hope. A cold miasma descended, blinding the pilots. “The western exit of the strait is very narrow and foggy, and there is no sign of it,” de Mafra wrote. “Having exited it and sailed three leagues into the sea, its mouth cannot be descried.”
Magellan set a northerly course along the coast of Chile. The strait they had just left seemed an enchanted refuge by comparison to the ocean they now faced. Darwin, on his journey, found the vista so horrifying that he was moved to comment: “One sight of such a coast is enough to make a landsman dream for a week of shipwreck, peril, and death.”
The men of the Armada de Molucca looked on the scene with the same foreboding. They knew the voyage was far from over; in a sense, it had only just begun. No matter how great the feat of navigating the strait from one ocean to another, it would have little value unless the armada reached the Spice Islands, wherever they were. No one aboard the fleet’s three remaining ships suspected they were about to traverse the largest body of water in the world to get there.
Chapter VIII A Race Against Death
The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.
The scale of the Pacific Ocean was past imagining to Magellan. It encompasses one-third of the earth’s surface, covers twice the area of the Atlantic Ocean, and contains more than twice as much water volume. It extends over a greater area than all the dry land on the planet, more than sixty-three million square miles. Lost in this immensity are twenty-five thousand islands, and concealed beneath its waters lurks the lowest point on earth, the Mariana Trench, buried in inky blackness thirty-six thousand feet beneath the shimmering surface. The Pacific had had the same appearance and character for tens of millions of years before Magellan and his men sailed across its surface, yet they knew nothing of these geological wonders. The men of the Armada de Molucca might as well have been sailing across the dark side of the moon.
Even today, the Pacific remains mysterious and alluring to scientists and oceanographers. Until recently, more was known about the surfaces of Mars or Venus than about the depths of the Pacific. Nor does the scientific community agree about the origin of the oceans. One hypothesis maintains that in the first billion or so years after the earth was formed, comets—space ice—continually crashed to the surface, and they melted to form our oceans. Another suggests that the most ancient building blocks of earth—asteroidal material in the solar nebula and space dust—began to accrete and to heat. The heavier material sank to the center of the planet, and the lighter material remained nearer the surface. When the earth’s crust was formed, water may have been released and formed oceans. As Magellan’s men journeyed across the Pacific, they slowly and painfully came to realize what everyone knows now: Oceans cover 70 percent of the earth’s surface. Our planet has been misnamed; it is the ocean planet.
Magellan anticipated a short cruise to the Spice Islands, followed by a longer but untroubled voyage home through familiar waters. He believed that his men had learned from their ordeals. The mutinies had weeded out the faint of heart and the uncooperative. The crew, once numbering 260 men and boys in five ships, was now less than 200 in three vessels: Trinidad, still the flagship of the fleet; Concepción, where Juan Serrano ruled; and Victoria, under Duarte Barbosa’s command. Still, he had no idea of the real challenge that lay ahead, not one of shoals or climate but of distance.
The fleet’s progress was rapid, but just how rapid is open to question. In his log, Albo noted, “On the morning of December 1, [1520,] we saw bits of land like hillocks.” The usually scrupulous pilot gives his latitude as 48 degrees south, but his calculations may have been off by as much as one degree south; thus the fleet might have traveled even farther and faster than he supposed. In a cryptic entry, Pigafetta noted in his diary: “Daily we made runs of 50, 60, or 70 leagues a la catena ho apopa”—a phrase generally taken to mean “at the stern.” Pigafetta might have been referring to Magellan’s method of dead reckoning—the time it took for a log or other object to pass from one end of the ship to the other—but he did not furnish enough details to explain the fleet’s exact speed or distance. For the crew, the days at sea went by in a trance throughout December and most of January 1521.
To while away the idle hours, Pigafetta turned his attention to birds that occasionally flew overhead. He was of the opinion that they were undiscovered species. Swooping and diving into the waters of the Pacific, the birds hunted for flying fish, which occasionally lifted themselves out of the sea and landed on the deck of the ships with a distinctive thud. Pigafetta called the flying fish colondrini, by which he probably meant the flying gurnard, also known as the Oriental helmet gurnard, whose fins can expand into an impressive display of fanlike wings tipped with bluish spines. An exotic, forbidding-looking creature, the gurnard served as a reliable supply of food for the crew.
“In the Ocean Sea one sees a very amusing fish hunt,” Pigafetta wrote. “The fish are of three sorts, and are a cubit or more in length, and are called dorado, albacore, and bonito. They follow and hunt another kind of fish that flies and is called colondrini, a foot or more in length and very good to eat. When the above three find any of those flying fish, the latter immediately leap from the water and fly as long as their wings are wet—more than a crossbow’s flight,” Pigafetta marveled. “While they are flying, the others run along back of them under the water following the shadow of the flying fish. The latter have no sooner fallen into the water than the others immediately seize and eat them. It is a very fine and amusing thing to watch.”
Life at sea—so uncertain during the Port Saint Julian mutiny and the intricate maneuvering through the strait—became routine. From the first light of dawn, the crew kept time with an hourglass; when it was turned over, the pages sang their familiar incantations. Each day at noon the pilot, Albo, shot the sun and determined latitude, generally with considerable accuracy. Every evening, the other two captains went on deck, drew close to Trinidad, and saluted Magellan: ¡Dios vos salve, señor capitán-general, y señor maestro y buena compaña!