Chapter 14
Leather and Sawdust
The middle of the Pacific
More than three months without fresh food: biscuit turned to powder and full of worms, leather cut from the yards, sawdust, and rats at half a ducat each. Scurvy kills men one by one.
February 1521
What follows is the most famous passage Pigafetta ever wrote.
“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.”
When the biscuit is gone, they eat the leather. Oxhides had been wrapped around the mainyard to stop the ropes chafing, and after a year of sun, rain and wind they have grown as hard as wood. The men cut them down and soak them in the sea for four or five days, lay them on the embers for a few moments, and eat them. Often they eat sawdust.
Rats sell for half a ducat each, a fortune for a sailor, “and even then we could not get them.”
In the strait, Magellan is supposed to have said he would go on even if they had to eat the leather off the yards. Now they are eating it.
4 February 1521
On the 4th of February they sight a second island, at about nine degrees south by Pigafetta’s reckoning. Once again there is no anchorage. There are birds and trees and nothing else, and around it swim so many sharks that the sailors call it the Island of Sharks.
Pigafetta gives the two islands one name together: the Unfortunate Isles. He reckons them two hundred leagues apart. The ships pass them without landing and head on northwest.
Nobody knows for certain which islands these were. Most historians think the first was Puka-Puka, in the Tuamotus of French Polynesia, and the second Flint or Caroline Island, in what is now Kiribati. If so, the fleet threaded through the middle of the Pacific, past hundreds of inhabited islands, and saw only two empty ones, both with no place to land.
Few crossings in history have been so unlucky.
February 1521
Then the sickness comes. “The gums of both the lower and upper teeth of some of our men swelled,” Pigafetta writes, “so that they could not eat under any circumstances and therefore died.”
It is scurvy, though no one aboard knows the cause. Nineteen men die of it. With them die two of the fleet’s captives: an Indian from Brazil, and the Patagonian giant. Before he dies, the giant asks for the cross, kisses it many times, and asks to become a Christian. They baptise him Paulo. Twenty-five or thirty more fall ill with swellings in their arms, legs and other places, “so that but few remained well.”
“However, I, by the grace of God, suffered no sickness.” Pigafetta does not say why. It may have been luck. Some historians have guessed that he shared the quince preserves carried for the officers, which contain a little vitamin C.
13 February 1521
On the 13th of February the ships cross the equator. The North Star rises back into the sky for the first time since Brazil.
Magellan does not head straight for the Moluccas, which lie almost on the equator. He carries on north, to thirteen degrees, before turning west. Nobody knows exactly why. He may have wanted to reach land where the Portuguese would not be waiting for him. He may have hoped to find food before the Moluccas, on the coast of China, or near a cape called Gaticara that appeared on his maps. Pigafetta later observes that the cape “is not found where it is imagined to be.”
Pigafetta says they passed near two “exceedingly rich islands,” Cipangu and Sumbdit Pradit. Neither was where the maps put it. Cipangu was Japan, thousands of miles to the northwest, and Sumbdit Pradit did not exist at all.
The men are too weak to care. Every day more of them are unable to work, and every day the sails are handled by fewer hands.
Early March 1521
They have been at sea for more than three months. Pigafetta reckons they have sailed about four thousand leagues through open water. No European ship had ever gone so far without a landfall.
He is sure of one thing: they survived only because the weather was kind. “Had not God and His blessed mother given us so good weather,” he writes, “we would all have died of hunger in that exceeding vast sea.”
Then he adds a sentence that sums up the whole crossing:
“Of a verity I believe no such voyage will ever be made again.”
It is the voice of a man who has watched his shipmates die of hunger, one by one, while the sea stayed calm and blue and utterly empty. On the 6th of March, at dawn, the lookout calls land again. This time there are people on it.