Unable to make a landfall, they were carried by substantial trade winds over astounding distances. “We made each day fifty or sixty leagues or more,” Pigafetta wrote of their seemingly miraculous progress westward. “And if our Lord and the Virgin Mother had not aided us by giving good weather to refresh ourselves with provisions and other things we had died in this very great sea. And I believe that nevermore will any man undertake to make such a voyage.”
Their progress north was so rapid that they crossed the equator on February 13. Magellan was utterly confounded by this time. He had expected to reach the Spice Islands long before this point in the voyage; according to the maps he had studied, he had already covered the entire Pacific and should have been in Asia by now. Worse, he had entered Portuguese waters, as defined by the Treaty of Tordesillas; if he discovered that the Spice Islands lay squarely within Portuguese territory, the finding would defeat the purpose of the expedition, and he could not claim them for Spain. To add to the pressure, he was running out of water, and his men were dying of scurvy. He needed to find safe harbor soon, if he was to survive the ordeal of crossing the Pacific.
Deliverance finally came ninety-eight days after the fleet left the strait. At about 6:00 A.M. on March 6, 1521, two landmasses slowly rose from the sea; they appeared to be about twenty-five miles away. Eventually, a third mass came into view. From his perch in a crow’s nest sixty feet above deck, Lope Navarro, Victoria’s lookout, peered into the indistinct glow, trying to distinguish between these promising outlines and mere cloud formations. Throughout that anxious morning, the ships made directly for the shapes at a rate of about six knots.
When Navarro was convinced of their true nature, he announced from on high, “¡Tierra!”
Tierra! Tierra!
The shrill cry tore through the silent morning. Tierra!
“These sudden words made everyone happy,” de Mafra recalled of that miraculous sighting of land, “so much so that he who showed less signs of joy was taken for a mad man, as anyone who has found himself in such conditions would understand.”
Chapter IX A Vanished Empire
The upper air burst into life!
And a hundred fire-flags sheen,
To and fro they were hurried about!
And to and fro, and in and out,
The wan stars danced between.
Physically and emotionally exhausted, Magellan climbed partway to the crow’s nest to see the prospect for himself. His men, many of them about to succumb to scurvy, starvation, and dehydration, their tongues swollen, breath foul, and eyes glassy, raised their shaggy heads to glimpse their salvation. As the islands grew more distinct in the morning light, the lookout shouted again, “¡Tierra!” and gestured to the south, where cliffs rose from the sea. Overjoyed, Magellan awarded the fortunate lookout a bonus of one hundred ducats.
The first landmass Navarro had spotted was likely mountainous Rota. Thanks to the earth’s curvature and the angle from which the armada approached, it initially appeared to be two islands. Rota’s deceptive appearance confused Pigafetta, and has led to centuries of debate concerning which landmasses the lookout actually spotted. The other island, the one where the armada would eventually land, is now Guam, an unincorporated territory of the United States. About thirty miles long, covering 209 square miles, Guam is the largest of an archipelago of volcanic islands known as the Marianas, which lie about three thousand miles west of the Hawaiian Islands.
For Magellan, the landfall on Guam came as a mixed blessing. Although the island provided shelter from the misery he and his men had endured during their ninety-eight-day Pacific cruise, nothing about it suggested they were anywhere near their goal, the Spice Islands. Nevertheless, it was land. Since leaving the western mouth of the strait, Magellan had traveled more than seven thousand miles without interruption: the longest ocean voyage recorded until that time.
On Wednesday, the 6th of March, we discovered a small island in the north-west direction, and two others lying to the south-west,” Pigafetta wrote of the momentous event. “One of these islands was larger and higher than the other two. The Captain General wished to touch at the largest of these islands to get refreshments of provisions.” Pigafetta even sketched this sight for his diary, but the illustration, depicting three irregular blobs floating in a shimmering sea, is so crude that it has no value for navigation. Even more confusing, Pigafetta followed the practice of his time and placed north at the bottom of his maps and south at the top. The completed drawings suggest that after the journey’s conclusion he furnished a rough description to an illustrator, who turned Pigafetta’s sketch into a charming and colorful cartoon in which the ocean’s azure blue was accented with flecks of gold and the islands seemed to float on the surface like giant potatoes. Nevertheless, his images are the only surviving cartographic record of the voyage.
Albo’s log for the same day includes a slightly different and more scrupulous account of their discovery. “On this day we saw land and went to it, and there were two islands, which were not very large, and when we came between them we headed to the southwest, and we left one to the northwest.” And he adds, ominously, “We saw many small sailboats approaching us, and they were going so fast they seemed to fly.” The secret of their astonishing velocity was the unusual design of their sails, which caught Albo’s attention. “They had mat sails of a triangular shape, and they went both ways, for they made of the poop the prow, and of the prow the poop, as they wished, and they came many times to us.”
Albo was getting his first good look at the highly maneuverable outrigger canoe known as a proa, and often called a “flying proa,” because it was able to attain speeds of up to twenty knots and seemed to fly over the water’s surface, exactly as Albo recorded. The proa’s secret of speed derived from its unusual design. Unlike European sailing vessels, its prow and stern were identical, but its sides were different: the windward side was rounded for maximum aerodynamic efficiency, and the leeward side was flat. The interchangeability of the stern and prow, combined with a maneuverable lateen sail, meant it could head into the wind without strain, and coast from one island to another without having to come about.
The proas approaching Magellan’s fleet were manned by a Polynesian tribe now known as the Chamorros, although this was not the name by which it was known in Magellan’s day. Initially, Magellan’s crew referred to all the tribes they encountered in the Pacific as Indios, Indians, in the mistaken belief that the Indies must be nearby. Succeeding generations of Spanish visitors gave the indigenous people of Guam the name “Chamurres,” which derived from the local name for the upper caste; later, they were called Chamorros, the old Spanish word for “bald,” or in Portuguese, “clean-shaven,” possibly in reference to the Chamorran men’s habit of shaving their heads.