Chapter 6
Geese and Sea-Wolves
The coast of Patagonia
On the coast of Patagonia the crews find “geese” that cannot fly, in one of the earliest European descriptions of penguins, and “sea-wolves”: South American sea lions.
Late February 1520
South of the great river the land changes. The green coast of Brazil gives way to low, bare country, brown and treeless and swept by wind from the west. The water turns cold. The days grow shorter. It is late summer in the southern hemisphere, and autumn is coming.
The fleet hugs the coast. Each time a bay opens up, the ships go in to see whether it runs through. None of them does. Each one closes into a beach or a marsh. The men begin to understand that they are sailing towards the bottom of the world, towards a winter no European has spent there, with nobody to trade with and no certainty that the passage exists at all.
Pigafetta records none of the grumbling. But it is there in other sources, and it grows louder with every empty bay. Magellan listens to none of it.
Late February 1520
At two small islands off this coast, the fleet finds more animals than anyone can count. There are “geese”: black, with all their feathers alike on body and wings, unable to fly, living on fish, with beaks like a crow’s. They are so fat that there is no point plucking them, so the sailors skin them instead. In a single hour the crews fill all five ships with them.
These are penguins, and this is one of the earliest European descriptions of them.
Alongside the geese live the “sea-wolves.” They are as big as a calf, with a calf’s head, small round ears and large teeth. They have no legs, only feet close to the body, like hands with small nails and webbing between the fingers, like the geese. “They would be very fierce if they could run,” Pigafetta observes. They swim, and they live on fish.
For men who have lived on salt meat and hard biscuit, the islands are a gift.
March 1520
The islands nearly cost them everything. While the ships lie at anchor there, a great storm comes down on them. Anchors drag and cables strain, and for a while it looks as if the ships will be driven onto the rocks.
Then, Pigafetta says, the “three holy bodies” appear to them many times in the rigging, St. Elmo, St. Nicholas and St. Clare, and the storm quickly dies away.
The fleet crawls south through worsening weather. It is March now, the equivalent of September in the north, and the days are getting noticeably shorter. The wind blows steadily from the west, off the land, and in the gusts the ships heel over hard. Somewhere ahead, Magellan tells his officers, there will be a harbour where they can wait out the winter.
On the last day of March, at 49 and a half degrees south, they find one.