Part I · The Ocean Sea
Chapter 1
The Gentleman from Vicenza
Barcelona and Seville, 1519
Antonio Pigafetta, a young gentleman from Vicenza, joins Magellan’s fleet in 1519 to see the ocean for himself and to write down everything he sees.
Spring 1519
In the spring of 1519, Antonio Pigafetta is in Barcelona. He is a gentleman from Vicenza, in the Venetian Republic, and he belongs to the household of Francesco Chieregato, the Pope’s envoy to the court of the young King Charles of Spain. Around the envoy’s table the talk keeps coming back to the Ocean Sea: the islands beyond it, the spices, and the new lands that Spain and Portugal are dividing between them. Pigafetta has read the books. Now he wants to see these things for himself.
He says so plainly at the start of his account. He went to satisfy himself, and “so that I might be able to gain some renown for later posterity.” It is an honest ambition, and it will cost him three years.
With the favour of the court and a bundle of letters of recommendation, he sails down the coast to Málaga and rides overland to Seville. There a fleet of five ships is being fitted out for a voyage nobody will fully explain. Its commander is a Portuguese nobleman, Fernão de Magalhães: Fernando de Magallanes to the Spaniards, Magellan to us. Magellan has persuaded the Spanish crown that the Spice Islands can be reached by sailing west.
Pigafetta is not a sailor, a soldier or an officer. He is a passenger who has asked to come along and watch. That will make him the most valuable man aboard.
Summer 1519
The fleet lies in the river below the walls of Seville. There are five ships, none of them large. The flagship Trinidad is about 110 tons. The San Antonio is the biggest. Then come the Concepción and the Victoria, and the little Santiago, a scout of about 75 tons. Into their holds go biscuit, wine, oil, cheese, salted meat and fish, beans, honey, dried fruit, and trade goods by the thousand: bells, mirrors, knives, scissors, fishhooks, glass beads and bolts of red cloth.
Magellan is about forty. He is short, and he limps from an old wound he took fighting in Morocco. He has sailed to India, and he was at the capture of Malacca, on the far side of the world. When his own king, Manuel of Portugal, refused to raise his pension by a single coin a month, he offered his services to Spain instead. His plan is bold. He believes the Moluccas, where the cloves grow, lie on Spain’s side of the line that divides the world between the two crowns. And he believes he can reach them by sailing west, through a passage in the New World that nobody has yet found.
The Spanish officers who command three of his ships do not trust him, and Pigafetta notices it at once. They “hated him exceedingly,” he writes, “I know not why, unless because he was a Portuguese, and they Spaniards.” For his part, Magellan tells no one exactly where he means to go.
August 1519
Before sailing, Magellan issues orders for keeping the fleet together. Pigafetta copies them down with a newcomer’s fascination. By day the ships follow the flagship. By night they follow fire.
At the Trinidad‘s stern burns a great torch of wood, the farol, and every other ship must keep it in sight. Other messages are spelled out with lanterns, or with slow wicks of esparto rope that has been beaten in water and dried in the sun. Two lights besides the farol mean change course. Three are orders about the bonnet, the extra strip of canvas laced below the mainsail. Four mean strike all sail. More than four, or a gun fired in the dark, mean land or shoals ahead. When the flagship shows a single light, every ship must answer with a light of its own. That way Magellan can count them in the dark and know that all five are still with him.
The men are split into three watches: the first at nightfall, the second at midnight, and the third towards dawn. They take turns under the captain or boatswain, the pilot or his mate, and the master.
This is the everyday machinery of a sea voyage, written down by a man who has never had to know it before. He wants his readers to understand how five small ships mean to stay together across an ocean nobody has measured.
Monday, 10 August 1519
On St. Lawrence’s day the ships fire their guns, set their foresails to the wind, and drop down the Guadalquivir. Pigafetta, who likes the old names, calls the river the Betis. There are 237 men aboard by his count, “counting those of every nationality”: Spaniards and Portuguese, Genoese and other Italians, Greeks, Frenchmen, Flemings and Germans, Africans, a Malay slave, and an Englishman from Bristol who serves as master gunner.
The river is shallow and dangerous for loaded ships. They pass the old Moorish town of San Juan de Aznalfarache. Two stone columns of a vanished bridge still stand there under the water, and only pilots who know exactly where they are can steer past them, at the top of the tide. They pass Coria and a string of riverside villages. Seventeen or twenty leagues from Seville they reach the Duke of Medina Sidonia’s castle at Sanlúcar de Barrameda, where the river meets the sea.
There they stop. The ships still need more supplies. Magellan and his captains come down the river afterwards in the ships’ boats. Every day Pigafetta goes ashore to hear Mass at the church of Our Lady of Barrameda. For now he is still close enough to Europe to walk to church.
Tuesday, 20 September 1519
Six weeks pass at Sanlúcar. Before they leave, Magellan orders every man to confess. He forbids any woman to sail with the fleet, “for the best of considerations,” Pigafetta notes drily.
On Tuesday, the 20th of September, the fleet finally weighs anchor, crosses the bar into the Atlantic and heads southwest. Behind them is everything they know. Ahead is an ocean they have been told little about, under a commander who has told them even less.
It is worth stopping here to ask what the men think they are doing. They have signed on for a trading voyage to the Moluccas, where a single good cargo of cloves can make a man rich. They do not know how far away those islands are. Neither, in truth, does Magellan. The best maps of 1519 make the world much smaller than it is. They show the ocean beyond the Americas, if they show it at all, as a narrow sea that could be crossed in a few weeks.
They will be gone for three years. Of the 237 men who sail past Sanlúcar this morning, eighteen will come home on the one ship that finishes the voyage.