Chapter 5
The River of Solís
Río de la Plata
At the mouth of the Río de la Plata, a gap in the coast seventeen leagues wide, the fleet hopes it has found the passage west. Then someone notices that the water is fresh.
January 1520
The coast turns southwest, and then it opens up into something enormous. At about 34 degrees south, past a headland called the Cape of Santa Maria, the land drops away to the west, leaving a mouth of water seventeen leagues wide.
Many people think this is the passage, the gap in the New World that leads to the South Sea. The maps suggest it. So did the Spanish captain Juan de Solís, who came here four years earlier looking for exactly that. Magellan’s pilots take soundings, and the ships feel their way in.
It is a hopeful moment, and a dangerous one. The water is shallow and the channels shift. The fleet anchors near seven islands in the river. Pigafetta hears that precious stones are found on the largest of them. Then someone notices something odd. The water alongside the ships is fresh.
January 1520
Pigafetta calls the people who live along this river Canibali. One of them, “in stature almost a giant,” paddles out to the flagship alone to show that his friends mean no harm, and talks to the crew in a voice like a bull’s. While he keeps the strangers busy, the rest of his people quietly carry everything they own away from their village into the interior.
When the Europeans see what is happening, a hundred men go ashore to talk to them, or, Pigafetta admits, to seize one of them by force. The people run. They run with such long strides that the Europeans, sprinting after them, cannot gain a single step.
The fleet has reason to be careful here. It was in this river, Pigafetta writes, that Juan de Solís and sixty of his men, explorers like themselves, were killed and eaten, “because of too great confidence.” Everyone takes the point: this is not the strait, and the people here do not want visitors.
Early February 1520
Magellan does not give up on the river easily. According to other accounts, he sends the little Santiago west to scout under João Serrão and explores the southern shore himself. The soundings all tell the same story. The water is fresh and shallow, and the land closes in on both sides. This is not a strait. It is the mouth of a huge river, the one we now call the Río de la Plata.
Pigafetta tells it briefly. People once thought you could pass from here into the South Sea, he says, “but nothing further was ever discovered. Now the name is not given to a cape, but to a river.”
For the men it is a heavy disappointment. For Magellan it is worse, because the passage he promised the emperor is not where anyone expected it to be. In early February the fleet turns south again, into colder water, to search the coast bay by bay. Somewhere down there, he insists, the land must end or break open.