As their intellectual labors continued, Pigafetta’s queries moved from the concrete to the conceptual. What was the Patagonian word for the sun? he asked. Calex cheni. The stars? Settere. The sea: aro. Wind: oni. Storm: ohone. How does one say “Come here”? Haisi, replied the giant. To look? Conne. And to fight? Oamaghce.
Pigafetta also introduced his cooperative prisoner to Catholicism. “I made the sign of the cross,” Pigafetta recalled, “and kissed the cross, showing it to him. But at once he cried out Setebos, and he made signs to me that, if I made the sign of the cross again, it would enter my stomach and cause me to burst.” Setebos, Pigafetta learned, meant “the great devil,” the opposite of everything the cross represented in Christendom. The giant intuited that the cross represented a spiritual power, and eventually Pigafetta persuaded him that it symbolized a source of strength rather than danger.
At about that time, the Patagonian began to weaken and fall ill. No one could say what afflicted him; perhaps it was the change of diet, or a virus he caught from the Europeans. The sicker he became, the more he relied on the cross. Pigafetta gave him a real cross to hold, and, as instructed, the giant brought it to his lips, seeking its strength and healing power. But the illness worsened—Pigafetta does not supply any symptoms—and it became apparent that the giant was dying. Their conversations turned to religion, and Pigafetta persuaded the prisoner to convert to Christianity. He was baptized, and the giant, whose original name Pigafetta never mentioned, became known as Paul. He died shortly thereafter, a Patagonian Christian who met a unique and tragic fate. Pigafetta did not record what kind of funeral rites Father Valderrama accorded Paul, but presumably he was given a proper burial at sea.
About ninety years later, Pigafetta’s affecting account of the curtailed education and conversion of the Patagonian giant drew the attention of William Shakespeare, who read an English translation by Richard Eden of Pigafetta’s diary. Distinctive fingerprints in Shakespeare’s resulting play, The Tempest, first performed in 1611, could only have come from Pigafetta’s account.
In Shakespeare’s imagination, the humble details of Pigafetta’s encounter with the Patagonian giant are woven into an immense cosmological tapestry. The playwright sets the scene on an enchanted magical island ruled by Prospero, the duke of Milan, who, with his daughter Miranda, had been set adrift by his brother Antonio, a usurper. Shipwrecked, Prospero learns magic and manages to remain on good terms with spirits inhabiting the island, especially Ariel, a sprite whom Prospero had freed from an evil sorceress known as Sycorax. But Sycorax also has a son, Caliban, one of the most compelling yet enigmatic characters in the Shakespearean canon, and a character inspired in part by the Patagonian giant.
The clash between Prospero and Caliban offers a vivid image of the impact of European discovery and conquest on indigenous peoples throughout the world, and Shakespeare dramatizes the encounter with wit and a frisson of horror.
You taught me language; and my profit on’t
Is, I know how to curse: the red plague rid you,
For learning me your language!
Later, Caliban quotes Pigafetta’s account of the Patagonian giant:
I must obey: his art is of such power,
It would control my dam’s god, Setebos,
And make a vassal of him.
Although Shakespeare keeps the setting vague, this mystical play demonstrates, if nothing else, that the New World, with its splendor and barbarism, had taken up residence in the European consciousness.
Although the weather remained perfect, the winds strong and constant, the armada failed to encounter islands with the food and water needed to sustain life. The ships had passed east of the Juan Fernández Islands, then north of the Marshall Islands: Bikar, Bikini, and Eniwetok. Had their course varied by only a few degrees south, they would been able to explore Easter Island or, farther west, the Society Islands and Tahiti. Had their course varied by only a few degrees north, they might have eventually encountered the Marquesas or Christmas Island. At the same time, the ship also narrowly avoided marine hazards such as razor-sharp reefs that could have sliced their hulls. A roaring surf concealed subsurface coral towers. Magellan’s ships passed within a hundred miles of such hazards, and emerged unscathed.
To look at Magellan’s course through the Pacific, it may seem as though he deliberately avoided the islands, and the chance to seek supplies, but he had no such plan in mind. None of these islands appeared on maps in his day, and if Magellan or anyone else spied telltale signs of landmass—a faint soaring plume, or the water turning light green—no one left any record of it. The two most reliable accounts, Pigafetta’s diary and Albo’s log, are silent on the subject of avoiding islands. Even if Magellan had known of their existence, he would not have felt any special urgency to land on their shores, for he expected to reach the Spice Islands or some other point in Asia within days. Headed toward an illusory destination, the fleet remained isolated in the Pacific, three little ships suspended in an infinite cerulean sea.
Thirst and hunger tormented the crew. The seals they had butchered and salted in Patagonia turned putrid and became infested with maggots, which devoured the sails, rigging, and even the sailors’ clothing, rendering them all useless. Pigafetta chronicled the appalling deterioration in their food supply. “We were three months and twenty days without getting any kind of fresh food. We ate biscuit which was no longer biscuit, but powder of biscuits swarming with worms, for they had eaten the good. It stank strongly of the urine of rats. We drank yellow water that had been putrid for many days. We also ate some ox hides that covered the top of the mainyard to prevent the yard from chafing the shrouds, and which had become exceedingly hard because of the sun, rain, and wind. We left them in the sea for four or five days, and then placed them for a few moments on top of the embers, and so ate them; and often we ate sawdust from boards. Rats were sold for one-half ducado apiece, and even then we could not get them.”
The rats commanded a premium because sailors believed that eating them might offer protection against the disease they all feared: scurvy.
Scurvy posed the single greatest danger to the health of the men during the entire voyage. There was no known cure, and if unchecked, it could claim the lives of them all. Magellan’s only defense against scurvy was an assortment of folk remedies. Once scurvy struck the crew, the voyage became a race against death itself.
One by one, the men began to suffer from the disease. In his diary, Pigafetta described its dreaded symptoms. “The gums of both the lower and upper teeth of some of our men swelled, so that they could not eat under any circumstances.” A sense of exhaustion gradually overtook the men, and their gums began to feel sore and spongy. When they pushed with their tongues, even gently, their teeth wobbled. As the disease progressed, their teeth began to fall out, and their gums bled uncontrollably and festered with exquisitely painful boils.