Chapter 31
The Great Southern Sea
The Indian Ocean
To avoid the Portuguese, Elcano takes the Victoria far south across the Indian Ocean. It takes nine weeks to fight round the Cape of Good Hope, “the largest and most dangerous cape in the world.”
11 February 1522
On the night of Tuesday the 11th of February 1522, the Victoria leaves Timor and heads out into the open sea the Malays call Laut Chidol, the great southern sea.
Elcano steers west-southwest, far out into empty water. “We left the island of Zamatra,” Pigafetta writes, “to the north on our right hand, for fear of the king of Portoghala.” Sumatra, Pegu, Bengal, Calicut, Goa, Hormuz: all the rich coasts of India go by unseen, far to the north. Every one of them has Portuguese forts, Portuguese ships, and Portuguese orders to seize any Spanish vessel in these seas.
The Victoria cannot risk them. She has no friends between here and Spain. Her only chance is to disappear into the southern ocean and not come near land again until she is round Africa.
Nobody on board has sailed this route before. Only the Portuguese have, and always from ports where they could stop for food and water. The Victoria will make no such stops.
March 1522
The ship runs southwest for weeks, and the weather turns cold. To be sure of rounding the Cape of Good Hope, Elcano takes her down to forty-two degrees south, into the roaring westerlies.
The food goes bad. When they bought meat on Timor they had no salt to cure it, and now it rots in the casks. They throw it overboard. After that they have only rice and water.
The Victoria is leaking badly. The men are cold, underfed and sick, and there is nowhere to go. Behind them is Timor, weeks away against the wind. Ahead are the most dangerous waters in the world. Pigafetta’s entries shrink to almost nothing. He was never a man to dramatise, and there was nothing to describe but grey water and the pumps.
Men begin to die again. The same swollen gums, the same weakness, the same slow collapse. Nobody knows the cure.
April 1522
Now the argument comes that every long voyage reaches in the end. Some of the men, sick and well alike, want to turn north to Mozambique, a Portuguese settlement on the east coast of Africa. They could get food there. They would also be arrested, lose the cargo, and probably lose their lives in a Portuguese prison. But they would not starve at sea.
Others, Pigafetta writes, “more desirous of their honor than of their own life, determined to go to Spagnia living or dead.”
The second group wins. The Victoria keeps her course.
Then the Cape itself fights them. For nine weeks they struggle to get round it, with the sails taken in, because the wind blows from the west and northwest, straight at them, and a tremendous storm comes on. At some point in those weeks the foremast breaks. The ship has been at sea for two months since Timor. Every day spent beating against the wind is another day of rice and water, and more bodies over the side.
6 May 1522
On the 6th of May they finally round the Cape of Good Hope. They pass only five leagues off it. “Had we not approached so closely,” Pigafetta writes, “we could never have doubled it.”
He gives the Cape one sentence of respect: “It is the largest and most dangerous cape in the world.” He reckons it sixteen hundred leagues from the Cape of Malacca.
It is a strange milestone. Thirty-four years earlier, Bartolomeu Dias had rounded this cape sailing east, and opened the sea route to India for Portugal. Now a Spanish ship rounds it sailing west, on her way home from the other side of the world. For the first time in history, a ship has come from the Atlantic into the Pacific, crossed it, crossed the Indian Ocean, and is about to enter the Atlantic again.
The circle is almost closed. All that lies between the Victoria and Spain is the length of the Atlantic, some seven thousand miles.