Chapter 3
Sixty Days of Rain
The coast of Guinea
Sailing south past the coast of Guinea, the fleet endures sixty days of continual rain, and in the worst of the storms the sailors see St. Elmo’s fire glowing on the mastheads.
October 1519
The pilots expect Magellan to strike southwest across the Atlantic. Instead he leads the fleet due south, down the coast of Africa. They pass between Cape Verde and its islands at fourteen and a half degrees north, then follow the coast of Guinea, which Pigafetta also calls Ethiopia. They pass a mountain called Sierra Leone, at eight degrees.
The course alarms and angers the Spanish captains. It is slow, it uses up water, and it takes them close to shores that Portugal treats as its own. Juan de Cartagena brings his ship alongside the flagship and demands to know where they are going. According to the chroniclers, Magellan tells him that his duty is to follow the flag by day and the lantern by night, and not to ask questions.
Historians still argue about why he chose this route. He may have wanted to avoid Portuguese squadrons sent to stop him on the open sea. He may simply have misjudged the winds. Whatever his reason, the sea soon punishes him for it.
October 1519
Off the coast of Guinea the winds give out. When the sun shines, there is not a breath of air. When the wind does come, it comes in furious squalls out of nowhere, with currents running against the ships. The crews strike every sail and let the ships drift “hither and yon” until the storms pass. Pigafetta counts sixty days of continual rain before they reach the equator.
The ancients taught that the tropics were scorched and dry. Pigafetta notes that it pours. Water goes bad in the casks. Clothes rot. The men sit in the heat and wait.
Big fish that the sailors call tiburoni circle the ships. They have terrible teeth, Pigafetta writes, and they eat any man they find in the sea. The crews catch many of them on iron hooks. He adds that they are not good to eat unless they are small, and even then they are not very good. It is the first of his many verdicts on food, and not the harshest.
November 1519
In the worst of the storms, something appears in the rigging. On an exceedingly dark night, a light like a blazing torch settles on the flagship’s maintop. It stays there for two hours or more.
The sailors know it as the holy body of St. Elmo, the patron saint of seamen, come to protect them. The men had been weeping with fear, and now they take comfort. When the light finally leaves, Pigafetta writes, it gives off such a dazzling flash that every man on deck is blinded for more than an eighth of an hour, crying out for mercy. And just when they believe they are dead men, the sea suddenly grows calm.
Pigafetta records this without a trace of doubt. The light will come back in nearly every great storm of the voyage. Sometimes it comes as three saints at once, St. Elmo, St. Nicholas and St. Clare, each standing on a different masthead. Every time, he reports that the storm eased soon afterwards.
November 1519
Between storms, Pigafetta watches the sea. He is not a trained naturalist, because in 1519 nobody is. But he has a gift for looking closely and writing down exactly what he thinks he sees.
He sees a bird that seems to have no anus, and another that has no feet and lives always on the sea. He is told that its female lays her eggs on the male’s back, and they hatch there. He watches a bird the sailors call the cagassela, a name too rude to translate politely. It lives, he says, entirely on the droppings of other birds. It chases them and harries them until they are forced to let go, then snatches the prize out of the air.
He sees flying fish by the hundred, and other fish packed so tightly together that they look like an island. Some of what he writes on these pages is accurate, some is sailors’ lore, and some is simply wrong. What is remarkable is that he is writing at all. The other men are here to sail, fight, trade or pray. Pigafetta is here to notice.
November 1519
Pigafetta says nothing about the quarrel between Magellan and the Spanish captains. Other records of the voyage fill the gap.
By custom, each ship must come up under the flagship’s stern every evening and salute the captain-general. Juan de Cartagena starts sending a common seaman to do it, and has him address Magellan simply as “captain.” It is a deliberate insult. Magellan says nothing, and waits.
His chance comes at a council of captains aboard the Trinidad. They have been called to try the master of the Victoria, Antonio Salamón, for sodomy with a ship’s boy, a crime punishable by death. In front of everyone, Cartagena declares that he will no longer take orders. Magellan grabs him by the front of his shirt and tells him he is under arrest. Cartagena calls on the others to help him. Nobody moves. The king’s inspector-general spends the night in the stocks. He is then handed over to Luis de Mendoza, captain of the Victoria, to be kept under guard.
Command of the San Antonio passes to Antonio de Coca, the fleet’s accountant. The mutiny has been put off, not prevented.
Late November 1519
At last a wind fills the sails, and the ships cross the equator. Soon the North Star sinks below the horizon behind them. For men who have steered by it all their lives, it is a strange and unsettling loss. They turn south-southwest.
They reach the coast of Brazil at the Cape of Santo Agostinho, eight degrees south of the equator. Pigafetta calls the whole country Verzin, after the red dyewood the Portuguese take from it. He notes that it is larger and richer than Spain, France and Italy put together, and that it belongs to the king of Portugal. That last fact makes Magellan cautious, and he keeps away from the Portuguese trading posts.
They sail south along the coast for two more weeks, and the heat only gets worse. By the time the sun stands straight overhead at noon, they are looking for a safe harbour where they can rest, eat, and repair the damage of the long crossing.