Chapter 2
Islands of Cloud
Tenerife, Canary Islands
The fleet takes on meat, water and firewood at Tenerife, and Pigafetta hears of the Garoé, a holy tree on El Hierro that gave the islanders water from the clouds.
26 September 1519
Six days out, the fleet reaches the Canary Islands. It anchors at Tenerife, in 28 degrees of latitude, to take on meat, water and firewood. They stay three and a half days. Then they move along the coast to a place Pigafetta calls Monte Rosso, the Red Mountain, to load pitch for caulking. That takes two more days.
This is the last Spanish soil the fleet will touch, and later chroniclers say it brought Magellan bad news. A fast caravel arrived from Spain with a private message from his father-in-law, Diogo Barbosa. The Spanish captains had been heard saying that if Magellan gave them any trouble, they would kill him. The ringleader, the message said, was Juan de Cartagena, captain of the San Antonio and the king’s inspector-general of the fleet.
Magellan is said to have sent back a calm reply. He would do his duty in the king’s service, whatever the risk. He kept the warning to himself.
Pigafetta knew nothing of this. He spent his time ashore collecting stories.
Early October 1519
The best of the stories is about a tree. Pigafetta is told that on one of the Canary Islands there is no spring or stream at all, not a single drop of water that rises from the ground. Instead, every day at noon, a cloud comes down from the sky and wraps itself around one great tree. Water drips from its leaves and branches into a trench dug around its roots, as if into a spring. Every person on the island, and every animal, wild and tame, drinks from it and from nowhere else.
It sounds like a traveller’s tale, the first of many Pigafetta will write down. But this one is true. The tree stood on El Hierro, the westernmost of the islands. The islanders called it Garoé, and the Spanish called it the holy tree. Damp trade winds hit the island’s heights, the moisture condenses on the leaves of the forest there, and for centuries people collected the water in pits cut into the rock.
At midnight on Monday, the 3rd of October, the sails are set for the south and the fleet heads out into the open sea.