Chapter 34
The Book
Valladolid, and beyond
Pigafetta gives the emperor Charles V a book of the voyage written in his own hand. That book has never been found, but four manuscripts of his later account survive, one in Italian and three in French.
Autumn 1522
Pigafetta does not stay in Seville. He rides north to Valladolid, where the emperor is holding court, and there, he writes, he presented to Charles “neither gold nor silver, but things very highly esteemed by such a sovereign. Among other things I gave him a book, written by my hand, concerning all the matters that had occurred from day to day during our voyage.”
Then he goes to Portugal, to tell King João what he has seen. He crosses France and gives gifts from the other side of the world to the king’s mother, Louise of Savoy. He returns to Italy, meets the Pope, and settles down to write his story properly.
He dedicates it to Philippe Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes, who had asked him to write down everything he had “seen and suffered.” At the end he signs himself with a new title: Il Cavalier, the knight, Antonio Pigafetta.
The book he gave the emperor, the day-by-day record, has never been found.
After the voyage
And the others?
João Serrão, left on the beach at Cebu, and Enrique, the interpreter, simply vanish from history. Nobody knows whether Enrique ever saw his home again. The Trinidad‘s men were imprisoned by the Portuguese, and only four came home. The deserters of the San Antonio reached Spain nine days after Magellan died, and spent the next year blaming him. Juan de Cartagena and the priest were never found on the Patagonian shore.
Magellan’s wife Beatriz and their young son were dead by the time the Victoria came home. His body was never returned from Mactan.
Juan Sebastián Elcano, the condemned mutineer of San Julián who brought the Victoria home, went back to sea. In 1525 he sailed again for the Spice Islands, through the same strait, as second-in-command of a new fleet. He died of scurvy in the middle of the Pacific in 1526.
Almost nothing more is known of Pigafetta. He seems to have joined the Knights of Rhodes, as he had hoped. After the early 1530s he disappears from the record. We do not know when he died, or where, or how.
What he left was the book.
The book
Four manuscripts of it survive: one in Italian, now in the Ambrosian Library in Milan, and three in French. A shortened French edition was printed in Paris around 1525. Italian and English versions followed. Through one of them his Patagonian devil Setebos reached Shakespeare, and his lost day reached the scholars of Europe.
It is the only full eyewitness account of the first voyage around the world. Without it we would have a few logbooks, some legal depositions, and the chroniclers’ second-hand tales. We would not know about the king of diamonds for six chickens, or the giant frightened by his own face in a mirror, or the rats at half a ducat each. We would not know that Magellan wept at Cape Deseado, or that he turned back again and again in the shallows at Mactan to see whether his men had reached the boats. Nobody would have written down the words for “fishhook” and “star” and “good” in half a dozen languages, or kept a walking leaf in a box for nine days to see what it would do.
He went, he told us at the very beginning, to see these things for himself, and so that he might gain “some renown for later posterity.”
He did.
Finis