Part III · The Strait
Chapter 12
The Strait
The strait (now the Strait of Magellan)
Threading the strait takes more than a month. The San Antonio, carrying much of the fleet’s food, deserts and sails home, and on 28 November 1520 the other three ships come out into the Pacific.
Late October 1520
The strait is a world of its own. Through the first narrows the land is low and bare. Then the mountains rise on both sides, “very lofty mountains laden with snow,” Pigafetta writes. There is often no bottom for an anchor, and the crews have to moor the ships by lines tied to the shore, twenty-five or thirty fathoms away.
It is spring, and at this latitude the nights are only three hours long. In the brief darkness the sailors see fires burning on the land to the south, dozens of them, from people they never meet. That land will come to be called Tierra del Fuego, the Land of Fire.
Pigafetta is enchanted by the place. Every half league, he says, there is a safe harbour, with water, fine timber, fish, sardines and mussels. Wild celery grows around the springs, sweet and bitter kinds, and they eat it for many days, having nothing else fresh.
Early November 1520
Beyond the narrows, near what is now Cape Froward, the southernmost point of mainland America, the channel divides. One arm runs southeast, the other southwest. Magellan sends the San Antonio and the Concepción to explore the southeastern arm. He takes the Trinidad and the Victoria into the other.
Before they separate, according to other records, he holds a council. The San Antonio‘s pilot, Estêvão Gomes, argues that now the strait has been found, they should go back to Spain for more ships and supplies rather than risk everything on an unknown ocean with the food they have left. Magellan refuses. He is supposed to have said that he would go on even if they had to eat the leather off the ships’ yards.
It is the kind of thing a commander says to end an argument. He can have no idea how literally it will come true.
November 1520
The San Antonio does not wait for the Concepción. “It intended to flee and return to Spagnia,” Pigafetta writes, “which it did.”
He blames the pilot, Estêvão Gomes, who “hated the captain-general exceedingly.” Before the fleet was fitted out, the emperor had promised Gomes some caravels for a voyage of discovery of his own, then gave the ships to Magellan instead. Now Gomes and a group of Spaniards rise at night, wound their captain, Magellan’s cousin Álvaro de Mesquita, put him in irons, and turn the ship for home.
The San Antonio is the largest ship in the fleet, and she carries a big share of its food. With her go more than fifty men, and one of the two Patagonian captives, who will die when they reach the heat of the tropics. The Concepción cruises about, waiting for her, and never sees her again.
November 1520
The flagship and the Victoria push on northwest, into a narrower channel between high, snowy mountains. They anchor near a river they name the River of Sardines, for the fish swarming around its mouth, and wait there four days for the other two ships.
While they wait, Magellan sends a well-armed boat ahead to explore. It comes back within three days. The men have seen the cape at the end of the strait, and past it the open sea.
“The captain-general wept for joy,” Pigafetta writes, “and called that cape, Cape Dezeado, for we had been desiring it for a long time.”
It is the most human moment he ever records of Magellan: a hard, secretive, proud man in tears on the deck of his ship at the bottom of the world. He has been right all along. The passage exists.
November 1520
But there is still no sign of the San Antonio. They search every part of the strait for her, back as far as the opening where she vanished. Magellan sends the Victoria back to the entrance to look. If she does not find her, she is to plant a banner on the top of a small hill and bury a letter in a clay pot beside it, with the fleet’s intended course, as they had agreed to do if the ships were ever separated. Two such banners are planted, one on a hill in the first bay and one on an islet in the third, where sea lions and great birds live.
Magellan waits with the flagship near another river and sets up a cross on an islet, below mountains covered in snow. Slowly it becomes clear that the San Antonio is not lost. She has gone.
Pigafetta’s verdict on the strait, written years later, is simple: “I believe that there is not a more beautiful or better strait in the world than that one.”
Wednesday, 28 November 1520
On Wednesday, the 28th of November 1520, the Trinidad, the Victoria and the Concepción sail past Cape Deseado and out of the strait. They have been in it for thirty-eight days.
Ahead of them the ocean is enormous and calm. The swell rolls in from the west, from a horizon no European has seen from this side. Magellan believes the Spice Islands are a few weeks’ sail away. His charts, the best in the world, tell him so.
The men are thin and worn. They have biscuit, some wine and oil, salted meat, and the dried fish from Santa Cruz. They have lost a ship to the sea and a ship to mutiny, and nearly sixty men.
Pigafetta writes that “we debouched from that strait, engulfing ourselves in the Pacific Sea.” He could not have chosen a better word than engulfing.