Ferdinand Magellan

0350

0350f

Ferdinand Magellan

Ferdinand Magellan 

By 

E. F. BENSON 



LONDON 

JOHN LANE THE BODLET HEAD LTD 


First published in 1929 


Made and Printed in Great Britain 
T. and A. Constable Ltd , Printers, Edinburgh 



PREFACE 


ERDINAND MAGELLAN is one of 
those who, as Robert Browning says, are 
“ named and known by that moment’s 
feat,” and though that feat took three 
years in the doing, he is still a man of 
one achievement. Unlike some great 
general who has half a dozen victorious 
campaigns to justify his title to immortality, unlike some 
great painter who has a score of deathless canvases to 
his credit, unlike Newton who accomplished years of 
epoch-making work before he made his great discovery, 
unlike (in his own lin£). the English admiral, Francis 
Drake, who not only circumnavigated the world, but 
defeated the Spanish Armada, and carried through a 
dozen amazing adventures to the sore undoing of 
Spain, Magellan’s claim to immortality is based on 
one feat alone, but that was of a unique splendour, 
and carried out in the face of stupendous difficulties. 
Had it not been for that one voyage, we should never 
have heard of him. His very name would have been 
unknown except possibly to the industrious historian 
who, studying the campaigns of Almeida and Albu- 
querque in India, might conceivably have made mention 
in a footnote to one of his innumerable pages that one 
Ferdinand Magellan, seaman and subsequently captain 





vi FERDINAND MAGELLAN 

in the Portuguese navy four hundred and more years 
ago, behaved on two occasions with considerable 
gallantry. 

But an idea occurred to Magellan, and since, on 
his return from India, King Manuel of Portugal had 
no further use for his services, even as his predecessor, 
King John II, had no use for a certain Italian called 
Columbus, Magellan, like Columbus, took himself and 
his idea to Spain. And this idea was so prodigious, 
and the accomplishment of it so unparalleled in the 
history of exploration, that by virtue of it his deeds and 
his days generally seemed worth a little ferreting out and 
a trifle of study, in order to see whether this man, who is 
known to most people as a name, Spanish or Portuguese, 
rather than a human being, after whom, vaguely, an 
obsolete strait in the most remote part of South America 
was called, could not be shaped into a living personality. 
History, as a mere series of events, as a collected chronicle, 
is as dead as the bones in the vision-valley of Ezekiel (and, 
behold, they were very dry 1) unless it is animated by 
some human interest attaching to those who made it. 
But if it can be breathed upon by the spirit of the living 
folk who caused these things to happen so, it becomes 
winged with the romance that belongs to the great deeds 
of men. 

Magellan’s feat, in itself, was a supreme achievement : 
he was the first person in the world who demonstrated 
not by theory, but in terms of ships actually sailing on 
the sea, that this world is round (or thereabouts), and that 
by sailing out beyond the known ultimate of the West, 
a voyager will arrive at the known ultimate of the East. 



PREFACE vxi 

To us that is a commonplace, but it must be remembered 
that when Magellan was born no ship of the two great 
maritime Powers, Spain and Portugal, had ever sailed 
beyond the Atlantic. The Atlantic washed the shores 
of the known world, and not yet had Columbus found 
its further coast, nor had Bartholomew Diaz rounded 
the Cape of Good Hope, and though it was certain that 
there were lands and seas to the East of Africa, and islands 
fragrant with the spices brought to Europe by Moorish 
traders, no European eye had ever beheld them. For 
hundreds of years no substantial additions had been made 
to men’s knowledge of the surface of the world : it was 
indeed probably larger in the days of Alexander the 
Great than in a.d. 1480. Then suddenly, in the space 
of thirty-five years, the world was unrolled like some 
wondrous manuscript, and (out of the three explorers 
who spread it out) the last and longest section, stretching 
from the coasts of Brazil westwards to the Spice Islands 
of the East, was smoothed straight and pinned down by 
Magellan. Not for sixty years, so sown with peril and 
difficulty was the route, did any ship pass through his 
Strait again and traverse the Pacific. 

Singularly little is known of Magellan’s life until 
within a year or two of his leaving Seville on the voyage 
from which he never returned. We hear of his perform- 
ing two meritorious pieces of service in the East, but 
his earlier years are not so much mysterious as merely 
undistinguished : we do not yet feel that here is a great 
personality of whom we unfortunately know little. Then 
TCing Manuel, on his return, told him that he had no 
further employment for him, and immediately he becomes 



viii FERDINAND MAGELLAN 

significant. But as soon as he became significant, he 
became mysterious also : we know that there was a great 
force moving about, a will that drove its way through 
mutiny and a myriad obstacles towards the accomplish- 
ment of its aim, but we rarely get any information that 
puts us into touch with him personally. Yet from such 
hints as may be legitimately linked together, we find 
enough to enable us to realize a human image of the man, 
and by combination and inference arrive at a figure of 
great psychological interest, one who was lonely and 
formidable and self-sufficient, and at the end blazes out 
into a religious fanatic. If the attempt here made to do 
this attains any measure of success, it may help those who 
thought of the first circumnavigation of the world, and 
the discovery of the Strait of Magellan, to perceive that 
one definite human personality, of rather terrible steel, 
inspired that amazing achievement. 

I have found no new material to work upon : the 
Spanish historians, and the journals of those who accom- 
panied Magellan on his voyage, or supplied information 
on their return to Spain, have been my sources. I have 
constantly consulted Mr. F. H. H. Guillemard’s Life of 
Magellan , who has brought together all the historical 
books that bear on the subject, though sometimes I have 
disagreed with his conclusions : I have also freely quoted 
from Lord Stanley of Alderley’s admirable translation 
of the diaries of Pigafetta and others contained in his 
First V oyage by Magellan (Hakluyt Society, 1 8 74). But 
it soon became clear that if I gave references to these 
historians and diarists every time I used the information 
they supplied, these pages would largely consist of foot- 



PREFACE 


iz 

notes. In order therefore to avoid distracting the reader 
with a criss-cross of such (for a single sentence, in the 
narration of the mutiny, may contain facts derived from 
three or four of them), I have omitted footnotes altogether, 
except when these authorities, as sometimes happens, 
contradict each other, or are otherwise irreconcilable. 
In such cases, I have given a reference or a footnote to 
indicate the reason for the choice I have made. 

Finally, with regard to the spelling of certain names, 
Portuguese or Spanish, I have adopted the modern 
equivalent wherever possible. It seemed, for instance, 
too rich a sacrifice on the altar of pedantic accuracy to 
speak of my hero at one time as “ Fernao de Magalhaes,” 
and at another as “ Hernando de Magallanes.” 


E. F. BENSON. 




CONTENTS 


PAGE 

PREFACE v 

CHAP 

I GEOGRAPHICAL . i 

II MAGELLAN SEES THE EAST 18 

III KING MANUEL HAS NO USE FOR MAGELLAN 35 

IV MAGELLAN APPLIES TO SPAIN 55 

V KING CHARLES APPROVES 74 

VI. THE GREAT VOYAGE BEGINS 97 

VII MAGELLAN ARRIVES AT PORT ST. JULIAN m 

VIII THE MUTINY 125 

IX. THE FINDING OF THE STRAIT 140 

X THE TRAVERSE OF THE STRAIT 152 

XI THE PHILIPPINES 170 

XII THE DEATH OF MAGELLAN 199 

XIII THE SPICE ISLANDS 216 

XIV THE CAPTAIN-GENERAL . . 239 

APPENDIX ... .249 

INDEX 255 


M 




ILLUSTRATIONS 


Ferdinand Magellan 

From the engraving by Crtipin Van de "Passe 

Map of the World showing the Voyage of the 
“Victoria” 

Map of Magellan Strait (Canal de Todos los 
Santos) ........ 

From the Admiralty Chart. 


Frontispiece 

Facing page 68 

» 9j *54 




FERDINAND MAGELLAN 




CHAPTER I 
GEOGRAPHI CAL 


T is a legitimate and indeed a laudable 
curiosity that desires to know what 
signs and foreshadowings of genius 
glimmered like distant signals out of 
the dim and early years of those who 
have developed into the architects of 
the world’s history and the pioneers of 
its progress, and to trace in what can 
be learned about the environment of their boyhood the 
influences which determined their careers. But though 
this latter quest often brings interesting details to light, 
though we can often find in the circumstances that sur- 
round the boyhood of great men causes that strongly 
make for such predispositions, it is very easy to press too 
hard on this chase, and overlook the fact that of all 
qualities genius is the least liable to influence and that 
it makes but little response to encouragements from with- 
out, just as it is little deterred by external hindrances. 
It proceeds along the uncharted track of its destiny in a 
manner singularly independent of wayside beckonings. 

Such certainly was the case with Ferdinand Magellan, 
for that noble and solitary sea-bird, whose flight was 
over the great waters, and who found a path where foot- 
steps were not known, lived, till he reached the age of 
thirteen or thereabouts, in the stony uplands of the only 
province of Portugal which has no sea-board, and from 
which no possible glimpse can be obtained of the element 





2 FERDINAND MAGELLAN 

of which he was truly native. These earlier years of 
boyhood are, according to modern psychology, the most 
formative, but in his case, as far as the sea furnished 
suggestions in his development, we must write them 
down as wholly barren. Those therefore who confid- 
ently discover in the environment of his childhood the 
predisposing influences which drove him on, in the face, 
of greater difficulties, dangers and discouragements than 
ever fought against human enterprise, to wing his way 
round the world, must fall back on the reflection that the 
people of this mountainous province, far inland, were a 
grim and hardy race, whose life was a perpetual struggle 
with the inclemencies of nature. For the climate of 
Traz-os-Montes has been tersely summed up as consist- 
ing of nine months of winter and three of the fires of 
hell. What more apt nursery (these psychologists beg 
us to tell them) could be found for one whom adventure 
led through tropic seas and Antarctic winters ? Very 
likely that is so, but in turn we may remind them that 
this nursery would suit their theories more aptly if some 
sight of the sea could have been visible from its windows. 
Again, we do not find in the very sparse records of 
Magellan’s early years any hint that he had drunk of 
that seething ferment of exploration and discovery with 
which all Portugal was tipsy, till when, at the age of 
ttventy-five, which was decidedly mature for the appren- 
tice-adventurers of that day, he started on his first 
voyage as a volunteer seaman in Almeida’s expedition 
to India. No call from the sea, imperative and irresis- 
tible, haunted his boyhood, or, if it did,. he closed his ears 
to it ; while as for those who would seek to find in 
anecdotes of his youth the foreshadowings of his genius 
they must resign themselves to the entire absence of 
such, for we have no knowledge whatever of what 
manner of youngster he was. No doubt the boy was 
father .to the man, but he was a silent father, and kept 



GEOGRAPHICAL 


3 

his aspirations to himself. At any rate not a shred of 
them has come down to us. 

So much as is certain about his cradle and his race 
must be briefly recorded by way of introduction, though 
there emerges therefrom nothing vivid or personal : it 
serves but as a background to the figure we hope to 
portray. The year of his birth, though nowhere 
specifically stated, was probably 1480, and he was of 
noble birth, as is attested not only by two Portuguese 
genealogists, and by the Will which Magellan himself 
executed before leaving Lisbon on his first voyage to 
India, but by the fact that at the age of thirteen, or 
thereabouts, he left his highland home to be educated at 
the Royal Court, first as page to Queen Leonora, wife 
of King John II of Portugal, and on the accession of 
King Manuel in 1495 to serve in some similar capacity 
to him. These royal pages were, at this time, always 
the heirs of some noble family, and thus they received 
the liberal upbringing and education that should fit 
them for their future. Both these genealogists are agreed 
that his mother’s name was Alda de Mesquita Pimenta, 
but they differ as to his father’s name, the one calling 
him Gil, the other Ruy. We need not weigh the relia- 
bility of these authorities, for they both seem to have 
been in error, since there exists an acknowledgment of 
the payment of his salary at Court, dated 1512, and 
signed by Magellan himself, in which he describes 
himself as the son of Pedro. We must conclude that 
probably Magellan knew best. Though the elder of 
Pedro’s two sons, he had three sisters all of whom were 
senior to him. The eldest of these, Teresa, married 
John da Silva Telles, and Magellan in his first Will, 
dated 1504, and dealing with his inherited Portuguese 
property, names them jointly as his heirs with succession 
to their son Ijaiz. He enjoins also that his brother-in- 
law shall quarter with his own arms those of Magellan, 



4 FERDINAND MAGELLAN 

which, he says, belong to “ one of the most distinguished, 
best and oldest families in the kingdom.” At the date 
of this Will, Magellan, aged twenty-four, was un- 
married, and he adds the proviso that, if he himself 
should subsequently beget legitimate offspring, his pro- 
perty, “ the little property I have,” should pass to them. 
When he made his second Will, which he did on the eve of 
his departure for his last voyage in 1519, from which 
he never returned, he had married, had a son Rodrigo, 
and was expecting another child, but he had ceased to 
be a Portuguese subject, and had been naturalized as a 
Spaniard. To Rodrigo therefore, Spanish born, he 
bequeathed such property in Spain as might accrue to 
him as the results of his voyage, but he did not disturb 
the succession to his Portuguese property. Should 
Rodrigo die without legitimate issue, and should his own 
direct line fail, he named his younger brother, Diego de 
Sousa, as his heir as regards his Spanish property, sub- 
ject to the proviso that he should live in Spain, and marry 
a Spaniard ; failing him his sister, Isabella, was to suc- 
ceed, subject to the same conditions. The significance 
of this separate disposal of his Spanish and Portuguese 
property will appear later. 

From these two Wills then, with the help of the 
Portuguese genealogists, we can construct all we know, 
directly and inferentially, about the Magellans as they 
lived at Sabrosa in the inland province of Traz-os- 
Montes before Ferdinand went as a boy of thirteen to 
be educated at the Court at Lisbon. The eldest child 
of Pedro Magellan was Teresa ; the second Ginebra, of 
whom, apart from her husband’s name, we know nothing ; 
the third was Isabella, who was still unmarried at the date 
of her brother’s second Will in 1519. Then in order of 
birth came Ferdinand Magellan himself, and his younger 
brother, Diego. 

Except for Teresa and her line, which eventually sue- 



GEOGRAPHICAL 


5 

ceeded to the Portuguese property, and emerges some- 
what tragically out of the dimness, all is shadowy ; a 
matter of Wills and nomenclature. They lived, we must 
suppose, the life of countryfolk of gentle breeding, 
owning land, but no great estate, with its stock of horses 
and cattle and its exiguous harvest of grapes and corn. 
Pedro Magellan, the father of these five children, cer- 
tainly died while F erdinand was still young, for in 1 504, 
when he was twenty-four years old and made his first 
Will, he had come into his estate, since he had the dis- 
posal of it. But of him personally, and of his earlier 
boyhood, we know nothing whatever. Pictures have 
been made of this boy of strong character and country 
breeding, who pined for the mountains and the rain- 
storms, the snows and the grilling heats of Sabrosa, for 
the austere stone-built house with the arms of his ancestors 
on the gateway, when translated into the softer airs of 
the sea-coast, and for the quiet of that sequestered life 
when thrust into the gorgeous hive of the Court at 
Lisbon, buzzing eternally with news of fresh discoveries 
and un conjectured continents ; but such depiction is 
purely imaginative and highly improbable. From all 
we subsequently learn of that silent and adventurous 
soul, whose wings were never furled while there was a 
glimpse of the unknown within the straining compass of 
his vision, we should more reasonably figure him as a 
boy enraptured with the wider living and the tidings 
brought in by those who had pushed back the limits of 
oceans and lands as at present explored. There lay the 
sea to which his life was to be dedicate, and the sunsets 
that brought dawn to horizons yet unvisited. 

The discovery of new lands, and of the seas that were 
the highway that led to them, was at the time when 
Magellan came to Lisbon as page to Queen Leonora 
a passion that gripped the whole nation with the magic 
of its allurement : Portugal was the first maritime Power 



6 


FERDINAND MAGELLAN 


in the world, and her ships were continually beating up 
and advancing into the confines of the unknown. This 
fever for adventure has often been compared with the 
voyages of the great English sea-captains in the reign of 
Elizabeth, but there is a very radical difference between 
the two which must not be overlooked. Drake and 
Hawkins and the rest were not pioneers in geographical 
discovery to anything like the extent that the Portuguese 
were ■, their main objective was to wrest sea-power from 
Spain, and, going where she had gone, to capture from 
her, by exploits frankly piratical according to our modern 
codes, the freights of her golden argosies from the New 
World. But Portugal, though in rivalry with Spain, 
was not fighting her nor robbing her ; her penetration 
into unknown seas and lands, though in the service of 
imperial interests, was peaceful as far as other civilized 
nations were concerned ; she wanted to discover and to 
trade, and, when her expansion threatened to come into 
collision with the expansion of her neighbour, Papal 
arbitration was sought for. In 1490 there was room for 
them both ; east and west lay abundance of undiscovered 
lands rich in gold and spices, and Portugal was discover- 
ing (certainly to her great advantage) rather than appro- 
priating in the later Elizabethan manner. 

The wizard who had set this spell at work in the minds 
of his countrymen was Prince Henry of Portugal, the 
Navigator, who, though not a practical seaman, must be 
held to be the greatest of pioneers in cosmography. He 
was the younger son of King John I and was born in 
1394. After distinguished services against the Moors, 
he left his father’s Court, and devoted himself to geo- 
graphical study, and to the sending out of maritime 
adventurers to explore the vastnesses of the unknown 
world. He established himself on the south-western 
coast of Portugal at Cape Sagres, a few miles to the east 
of Cape St. Vincent, and built there what was known as 



GEOGRAPHICAL 


7 

the “ Infante’s Town ” with palace, church and obser- 
vatory, and at the base of the promontory founded a 
naval arsenal. There he lived, recluse from the world, 
but intensely occupied with the visits of the sea-captains 
of Portugal who brought him the news of their further 
nosings into ultimate seas, and of the lands that fringed 
them. There in his remote quarters, with the highway 
of the Atlantic washing the base of his promontory, and 
the setting sun striking an avenue of gold out into the 
west, he collected and collated and charted these glean- 
ings of knowledge so perilously won, and sent forth a 
succession of other labourers into the harvest-fields of the 
sea. Henry VI of England asked him to take command 
of his armies, and in 1443 made him a Knight of the 
Garter, but neither honours nor advancements lured him 
from his chosen work, and he remained at Sagres busy 
with his charts and maps till his death in 1460. He 
was the founder and preceptor of this school of Portu- 
guese adventurers. 

No huge discovery rewarded him in his lifetime : 
Portuguese ships had not yet passed the Equator at the 
time of his death, but he had mapped out the road for 
maritime expansion down the West Coast of Africa, and 
realized in theory its further projection. Some day, if 
his sea-captains pressed on, winning their way down that 
interminable continent, the land would come to an end, 
and there would be a sea-way open eastwards to the 
fabulous wealth of India and of the remoter Spice Islands, 
and of the furthest markets of Cathay. Hitherto these 
products of the Orient had reached Europe by way of 
the Mediterranean, and of some yet unexplored route by 
land from the seas beyond. This trade was in the hands 
of the Moors ; cinnamon and pepper, silks and porce- 
lain and jewels, all were brought west by the circumcised 
race which had once been lords of Portugal. But 
Prince Henry was convinced that there was a sea-route 



8 


FERDINAND MAGELLAN 


open along which his Captains might sail their ships from 
the Moluccas into the Tagus, and discharge there the 
spices and the treasures they had embarked at Oriental 
ports. But dearer to his heart than the riches of the 
unloading ships was the knowledge of the route that they 
should traverse, which presently became manifest, even 
as he had foreseen it, for Africa was found to be but finite, 
and from beyond its southernmost cape there lay the way 
to India. 

After Prince Henry’s death the Infante’s Town 
became more generally known as Sagres Castle, and in 
1587 Sir Francis Drake, spying round the coast for a 
base for his ships that waylaid the treasure-bearing fleets 
of Spain that came from Nombre de Dios and Panama 
laden with gold for King Philip in his wars with England, 
seized the little bay at the foot of the promontory and 
stormed the castle on its summit. It was too strongly 
built to be taken by assault, and he piled firewood against 
its walls and burned the defenders out and razed the 
fortifications ; for he could not suffer a fort to command 
his anchorage. But many years before that Prince 
Henry’s charts and chronicles of exploration had been 
removed to the Royal Library at Lisbon, and even if 
they had been there they would have been already obso- 
lete. In Drake’s day they would be curiosities merely, 
like out-moded maps, for since then regular traffic had 
been established eastwards with the fabled Spice Islands, 
Columbus had found the New World, two navigators, 
Magellan and Drake himself, had noosed the globe in 
the wake of their ships, and a third, Cavendish, was on 
his way. Swiftly indeed had advanced the knowledge 
which the Prince-Navigator had devoted his life to gain, 
and it was from him and his researches, in the main, that 
the impetus had come. 

In 1481 there succeeded to the throne of Portugal 
King John II, who carried on the Navigator’s tradition. 



GEOGRAPHICAL 


9 


Cape by cape Portuguese ships pushed their way down 
the West Coast of Africa, following out Prince Henry’s 
scheme of penetrating southwards and further south 
till there lay to the east the open sea, while in the first 
year of his reign the new King had despatched two 
travellers, Pedro de Covilhao and Alfonso de Payva, to 
ferret out a land-route towards India and the mythical 
kingdom of the Christian King, Presbyter John. As 
early as the eleventh century the legend of this monarch, 
king and priest like Melchizedek, was widely credited 
in Europe ; but, by the fifteenth century, it was believed 
that his kingdom was situated somewhere in Abyssinia, 
and while the sea-route round Africa was being explored 
these travellers set forth to strike the trade-route of the 
Moors from the East, for it was known that the spices 
and silks and produce of the Orient came into Europe 
along the East Coast of Africa. They got to Abyssinia, 
and Covilhao seems to have reached Calicut by way of 
the Arab sea-route from Zanzibar. On his way home 
he was imprisoned in Abyssinia, but sent information 
to Portugal about his journey, saying that beyond the 
southern Cape of Africa was open sea. But that was 
already known, for in 1487 Bartholomew Diaz rounded 
the Cape of Good Hope, and thus credited to Portugal 
the first of the three great discoveries which were to 
revolutionize geography. 

The second of these great discoveries (as indeed also 
the third) would assuredly have been scored up to 
Portugal as well, had not in each case a piece of unwisdom 
and unkingliness caused them to be won under the flag 
of Spain. There had come to Portugal a Genoese sea- 
captain called Columbus : he was a skilled navigator, he 
was for ever studying charts, and he married a Portu- 
guese, Felipa Perestello, daughter of one of Prince 
Henry’s Captains. He had heard the story of how 
Martin Vincente had picked up at sea, four hundred 



IO FERDINAND MAGELLAN 

leagues west of Cape St. Vincent, a piece of strange wood, 
unknown to the forests of Europe, and this was to 
Columbus what the falling apple was to Newton. The 
ordinary man would have thought it curious, and the 
matter would have rested there, but the constructive mind, 
with the insight of genius, found in these two trivialities 
the keys to the discovery, in one case, of a continent and, 
the other, of a great natural law. Columbus did not 
himself realize what he had found, nor till the day of his 
death did the entire truth dawn on him, but now, on the 
accession of King John II, he entered the Portuguese 
maritime service, and put before the King his aim of 
reaching Asia, not by sailing eastwards but by sailing 
westwards. King John consulted his Council, who 
turned the scheme down as being chimerical, but he was 
not wholly satisfied with their rejection of it, and by a 
very shabby piece of work privately sent out ships to test 
Columbus’s proposition. They returned without having 
accomplished anything, and Columbus, rightly disgusted 
at this underhand manoeuvre, betook himself and his idea 
to Spain in 1484, much as Magellan did thirty-three 
years later. Both took with them the project which their 
genius had built on hints and obscure indications, and 
for which Portugal had no use. But Spain was of truer 
intuition and of wider enterprise, and in 1492 Columbus 
set out to discover the new world. Too late Portugal 
suspected what she had missed, and sent out ships to 
intercept him, just as she did when she tried to stop 
Magellan sailing westwards to the Spice Islands in 1519. 
So, about the year that Queen Leonora’s young page 
arrived, a country boy from Sabrosa, at the Court at 
Lisbon, Columbus returned to Barcelona with the news 
that he had discovered the western route to India. 
Thirty-six days of sailing westwards from the Canaries 
brought him within sight of those shores which he 
believed to be the Eastern Coast of Asia. The vast sea 



GEOGRAPHICAL 


ii 


beyond them had never yet been beheld by European 
eyes, nor was it seen by them till in 1513 Balboa stood 
on the peak in Darien. 

This discovery of America caused a fresh distribution 
of the kingdoms of the world to be proclaimed by Pope 
Alexander VI in the Bull promulgated on May 4th, 1493. 
Spain and Portugal were the favourite spiritual children 
of the Holy Father, who was himself a Spaniard by birth, 
and, now that both were pushing out east and west into 
the unknown with this amazing vigour, there was con- 
siderable danger (the world being round) that their 
claims would seriously come in conflict. The Holy 
Father therefore, appealed to by both parties, made a 
very honest attempt, considering that he was a Spaniard, 
to give an equitable decision. Spain had been exploring 
westwards, Columbus had discovered America for her ; 
Portugal had been exploring eastwards and Diaz had 
rounded the Cape of Good Hope. Therefore Holy 
Father very sensibly decided that the entire Western 
Hemisphere and all that was therein, known now or 
subsequently discovered, should belong to Spain, and 
all the Eastern Hemisphere to Portugal. Had King 
John not behaved in so shabby a manner to Columbus, 
and had Columbus discovered America under the Portu- 
guese flag, Holy Father would have been in a very 
difficult position, for Spain would certainly not have 
liked both hemispheres assigned to her neighbour. 
But, happily, such a situation did not arise ; and, once 
granting that the Pope had the right (concerning which 
neither he nor his spiritual children had any doubt what- 
ever) to apportion the world as he pleased, his arrange- 
ment seemed very tactful and suitable. 

The next point to settle was where, on the surface 
of the globe, East was to become West, and where, 
somewhere on the far side of it, West was to become 
East again. Through what seas or islands or conti- 



12 


FERDINAND MAGELLAN 


nents the more remote semicircle of that line of demar- 
cation would lie, nobody could possibly tell, because 
nobody had yet been there. But as regards the nearer 
semicircle of that line on this side of the world, Pope 
Alexander decided that it should lie due north and south 
of some spot in mid-Atlantic situated one hundred 
leagues west of the Azores and (not or) the Cape Verde 
Islands. Islands so remote as these, thought this some- 
what inaccurate Pontiff, might be regarded as one point 
for the purposes of measurement, and probably on the 
maps that he consulted they appeared to lie in the same 
longitude, which is very far from being the case. But 
King John of Portugal was very ill-satisfied with this 
disposition : a line drawn so near to Europe would 
almost certainly give Spain the whole of the newly dis- 
covered continent, which, had he not treated Columbus 
with so gross a shabbiness, would all have been Portu- 
guese. So he begged that this line of demarcation 
should be shifted three hundred leagues further to the 
west, which would give Portugal a better chance of secur- 
ing any parts of the new continent which should lie east- 
wards of the longitude of Columbus’s discovery. There 
was some bargaining over this, and next year, in 1494, 
the position of this line of demarcation between east and 
west, which constituted the boundaries between the 
kingdoms of Spain and Portugal, was, by the Tortesillas 
Capitulations, shifted two hundred and seventy leagues 
further west of Holy Father’s original assignment. 

Both beneficiaries set out with renewed vigour to 
explore the moieties of the world’s surface which had thus 
been bequeathed to them in sacula saculorum. The seas 
of the entire world, broad and narrow alike, were subse- 
quently granted to the same fortunate nations for their 
joint possession, and the unconscious humour of this 
enviable bequest remained undetected till Elizabeth’s 
sea-captains, notably Hawkins and Drake, took it upon 



GEOGRAPHICAL 


13 


themselves to point it out. At present this amended 
division of the world by the dividing line which no one 
was capable of drawing with the smallest approach to 
accuracy, or had the slightest idea where its remote 
bisection lay, gave satisfaction till the discovery of 
Brazil and subsequently the objective of Magellan’s 
voyage of circumnavigation, caused some highly dis- 
quieting complications to arise. Brazil, according to 
this amended demarcation, lay within the Portuguese 
hemisphere, and, so far as that went, that was highly 
satisfactory to Portugal. But she now became afraid 
that, by having caused the Spanish hemisphere to have 
been screwed round westwards, in order that she might 
secure just such eastern lands of America, she had also 
caused the Spice Islands, on the other side of the world, 
to come into the Spanish half-world. These compli- 
cations, and the adjustments thereof, scarcely belong to 
our story : it may, however, be mentioned that as a 
matter of fact the Spice Islands still remained in the 
Portuguese half-world. But the dividing line was 
difficult to fix, and King Charles continued to consider 
that they were his. Eventually, in 152,9, Portugal paid 
Spain 350,000 ducats for their indisputed possession. 

King John II died in 1495 > he had carried on with 
ability and success the traditions of the Prince-Navigator, 
and though he had made a very disastrous and costly 
mistake with regard to Columbus, which had lost 
Portugal the New World, his policy of expansion and 
discovery had been conceived on broad and progressive 
lines. He was succeeded by King Manuel ; and, 
under him, not discovery alone but conquest and con- 
solidation went forward with redoubled vigour. The 
new King was a true Empire-builder : he grabbed what- 
ever portions of the earth’s surface he could possibly lay 
hands on, and held them tight, not only by erecting forts 
for military occupation but by establishing others to 



H FERDINAND MAGELLAN 

guard the routes to his new acquisitions so that they 
remained, though remote, in some sort of touch with 
Portugal. Like Queen Elizabeth of England, he was 
served by men of conspicuous ability ; like her, he was 
cursed with a native strain of incredible parsimony. 
Under him Portugal penetrated into the fairy-land 
of the Orient towards which she had been feeling her 
way so long. In 1497 Vasco da Gama repeated Diaz’s 
voyage round the Cape of Good Hope, but, instead of 
then turning back, he went on up the hitherto unexplored 
East African Coast. On Christmas Day of that year 
he landed on those unknown shores, and in commemora- 
tion of the Birthday christened the territory by the name 
it still bears, Natal. Then coasting to Melinda, a little 
north of Mombasa, he found himself at the African end 
of the Arab trade-route to India, already traversed by 
Covilhao, and leaving the coast Gama struck eastwards 
across the Indian Ocean. He dropped anchor in the 
harbour of Calicut, and the jewel of India gleamed in 
the crown of Portugal. Within the space of eleven 
years, Diaz had rounded the Cape of Good Hope, 
Columbus had discovered America (though he thought 
he had found the East Coast of Asia), and Gama had 
landed in India. Magellan was seven years old and still 
in remote Sabrosa when Diaz made his voyage, but he 
must have gone to Lisbon just about the time when 
Columbus found a New World, and he was eighteen 
when Gama landed in India. We may safely assume 
that these events, which had intoxicated all Portugal with 
the noble wine of adventure, had set him bubbling with 
the heady ferment. 

Smaller confluents, some of which flowed from remote 
and significant table-lands, kept pouring into this widen- 
ing river of geographical knowledge ; they joined it 
chiefly from its western bank. South America was 
found to trend far eastwards from the point originally 



GEOGRAPHICAL 


discovered, by Columbus, and Pinzon, one of his captains, 
coasting southwards along Brazil, in 1500, arrived clearly 
within the hemisphere assigned to Portugal, for the 
eastern portion of Brazil and Pernambuco, which was 
the southern limit of his voyage, lay easily to the east of 
the line of demarcation as amended on the petition of 
King John II. That same year Cabral, a Portuguese 
Captain with a fleet en route for India, sailing wide of 
the West African Coast in order to take advantage of the 
trade-winds, was driven far out of his course by gales 
from the east and came within sight of the same coast. 
In 1501 and 1503 Gonzalo Coelho and Christopher 
Jacques pushed exploration further southward along 
the coast of Patagonia (then unnamed) and penetrated, 
as we shall find strong reason for believing, to the neigh- 
bourhood and probably the entrance of the Strait of 
Magellan itself. Columbus in a subsequent expedition 
had learned from natives that a vast sea lay beyond the 
narrow lands of Central America ; and, though till the 
day of his death he personally believed that he had 
discovered the eastern confines of Asia, it is clear that, 
even before Balboa saw the Pacific, it was generally 
believed that Columbus had found a continent hitherto 
unknown and separated by a thousand leagues of sea 
from the coast of Asia. North America was still un- 
explored ; it was believed to consist of a chain of islands, 
and how vague and erroneous generally was the imagined 
configuration of America can be gathered from the map 
made in 1515 by Leonardo da Vinci, who charts it as a 
long island stretching not north and south but east and 
west. To the north of it Leonardo delineates widely 
sundered islands, the chief of which is Florida ; its 
western cape lies in the same longitude as China, while 
its eastern portion, on which appears Cape St. Augustine 
and Brazil, approaches Africa. It is interesting, how- 
ever, to observe that Leonardo did not share the view 



x6 FERDINAND MAGELLAN 

that South America joined the Terra Australis Incognita 
of other cosmographers, but draws it as separated from 
that conjectured continent by a wide stretch of ocean. 
This was suspected, as we shall see, by Magellan, but 
not verified till Francis Drake in his Circumnavigation 
of the World, in 15785 was driven southwards after 
passing into the Pacific through the Strait of Magellan, 
and saw the Atlantic and Pacific meeting “ in a wide 
scope.” 

But Eastern exploration during these years was the 
main objective of Portuguese seamanship, for Portugal, 
as was natural, was pushing on into the Eastern Hemi- 
sphere assigned her by Pope Alexander. Cabral, it is 
true, had found Brazil, but his discovery was accidental ; 
he had been driven by easterly winds on a more westerly 
course than he had intended, and the object of his voyage 
was to pass round the Cape of Good Hope, and in these 
early years of the sixteenth century the maritime vigour 
and enterprise of Portugal were like the growth of 
springtime in her search for the lands of the further 
Orient. Vasco da Gama, now the heroic subject of odes 
and rhapsodies innumerable for his first exploit, left 
Lisbon again for India in 1502, and made himself exe- 
crable for the abominable cruelties and massacres he 
ordered at Calicut. Next year another fleet under 
Alfonso d’Albuquerque followed his tracks up the East 
Coast of Africa, and then north to the entrance of the 
Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, thus traversing another 
section of the Arab trade-route to Europe, and in 1 504 
three more Portuguese fleets rounded the Cape. But 
the actual annexation of India and the Spice Islands 
beyond was not attempted at present : India would not 
run away, and none but the ships and soldiers of Portugal 
had Holy Father’s privilege and protection in those 
waters. Unfortunately they teemed with Moorish ships 
whose Captains cared not a rap for the Vatican, and were 



GEOGRAPHICAL 


17 


glad to earn merit by disembowelling, in the name of 
Allah the all-merciful, every Christian they could lay 
hands on : it was therefore a preliminary task in the 
conquest of the East to get an effective grip on the route 
that led there. No conquest of Indian soil was worth 
anything if the invaders were isolated in the network of 
Moorish trade-routes : they would be no more than a 
fly entangled in the encompassing web. But by the 
autumn of 1504 King Manuel deemed that the time 
was ripe for an expedition of conquest, and Francisco 
d’Almeida was appointed Viceroy of India with orders 
to proceed there and hold it in the name of the King. 
His fleet was gathered in the Tagus, and among the 
volunteers who flocked to his flag was Ferdinand 
Magellan. He did not resign his appointment at 
Court, but obtained leave to enlist as a seaman. 



B 



CHAPTER II 

MAGELLAN SEES THE EAST 

4GELLAN had been enrolled as a 
seaman in the autumn of 1 504, and 
he made his Will in anticipation of 
a long and perilous service. It is 
dated December 1 7, 1 504, at Belem, 
the fort on the Tagus where, no 
doubt, having left the Court, he was 
then undergoing his training as a 
sailor. His father, as we have already noticed, must 
have died previously, for it was in his power to bequeath 
the family estates at Sabrosa to his sister, Teresa, wife 
of John da Silva Telles, and her heirs. He himself was 
unmarried at the time, but he provided that, if before his 
death he married and had legitimate offspring, these 
estates should pass to his son or daughter. In this Will 
we get for the first time into some sort of touch, light 
though that is, with the man himself. He alludes, with 
the pride of birth, to his family as being one of the oldest 
and most distinguished lines in the kingdom, but side 
by side with that we find a certain significant simplicity 
in his direction that, should he die during his service 
abroad, his funeral should be that of a common seaman. 
Equally characteristic of him we shall find to be his 
desire that the chaplain of his ship, to whom he bequeaths 
his clothes and his arms, shall say three requiem Masses 
for the peace of his soul ; characteristic, too, is the pro- 
vision that twelve Masses shall be said yearly in perpetuo 
in the church of San Salvador at Sabrosa. We get just 




MAGELLAN SEES THE EAST 


*9 

this authentic glimpse of a young man proud of his dis- 
tinguished lineage and with a sense of simplicity, of 
duty and of religion, and our view of him shuts down 
again. But that crossing of the bar of the Tagus was 
the marriage of Magellan to the sea, and faithful he was 
to his mistress. Not for seven years was he to behold 
the coasts of Portugal again, and he never returned, as 
far as we know, to the stone-built house among the hills 
at Sabrosa, with his arms carved on the gateway of his 
inheritance. It passed to the heirs of his sister, Teresa, 
but the arms, by order of the King, were defaced. 

By the spring of 1 505 the fleet was ready to sail ; the 
number of its ships was probably twenty, but they 
carried on board the finished timbers, ready to be put 
together, for several such vessels as Drake in his raids 
on the Spanish Main sixty years later called his “ dainty 
pinnaces.” These were not ocean-going vessels, but 
were set up when the passage of the high seas was accom- 
plished, and used for coasting-purposes, for attacks, and 
for general off-shore businesses. Fifteen hundred 
soldiers composed the fighting force, and among them 
were many young men of high birth who, like Magellan 
among the seamen, had enlisted for the sake of brave 
adventure ; the equipment of arms and ammunition, 
and the details of gunners and smiths and carpenters, 
were of the most comprehensive kind. Never yet in all 
the expeditions that had swarmed out of the hive of 
the Tagus had there been so important an occasion. 
Hitherto the ships had gone out in mufti for these pre- 
liminary scoutings : now, as was fit on this more official 
departure, a state-ceremony speeded them, for Portugal 
by virtue of her privilege was to take formal possession 
of her new dominions, and King Manuel to substantiate, 
in the person of Almeida, his title of King of Portugal 
and India which he had used since Vasco da Gama had 
returned from his first expedition there. The latter was 



20 


FERDINAND MAGELLAN 


now appointed Admiral of India, and Almeida, as ac- 
credited Viceroy, was to unfurl the Royal banner of 
Portugal on the walls of Cochim. 

So before sailing a solemn service of dedication was 
held in the Cathedral, attended by all who were going 
forth on the King’s service ; all made their confession 
and partook of the Mass and took their vows of loyalty 
to the King. From his hands Almeida received the 
newly consecrated banner, and the Royal heralds pro- 
claimed him Viceroy of India. That night the fleet 
anchored opposite the fort of Belem on the estuary of 
the Tagus, and next morning, March 2 5 , 1 505, King 
Manuel paid a state visit to his fleet and bade it God- 
speed. Then upon the high-tide and under sail and 
oar the ships slid over the bar, and stood out to sea. 

Interesting and picturesque, full of surprising adven- 
ture and monstrous with massacre, is the history of 
Almeida’s campaigns in India and of his Viceroyalty 
there, but any detailed account of it would be quite out 
of place in a Life of Magellan, for during the next four 
years he was merely a common seaman, and played no 
more part in these events than any other nameless man 
aboard. Indeed the sum of our information about him 
is that in 1506 he was on the ship commanded by Nufio 
Vaz Pereira which was sent back to the East Coast of 
Africa to establish forts there for the protection of the 
route to India, and that he was wounded in the naval 
battles of Cananor and of Diu. But, though any narra- 
tive of Almeida’s administration is alien to our purpose, 
it is necessary briefly to sketch the lines of Portuguese 
policy in the East, for it bears directly and crucially on 
the international situation which arose when, fourteen 
years later, Magellan, no longer an unknown seaman in 
the service of Portugal, but Commander-General of a 
Spanish fleet, set out on the voyage which resulted in the 
first circumnavigation of the world, and enthroned him 



MAGELLAN SEES THE EAST 


21 


in the hierarchy of explorers. Until then the only 
known route to the Orient, via the Cape of Good Hope, 
lay in the hemisphere assigned by Pope Alexander to 
Portugal : no Spanish ship could pass along it, for pur- 
poses of trade or conquest, without committing inter- 
national trespass, and India and the Spice Islands were 
entirely inaccessible to Spain. The Spanish sphere lay 
west of Europe, its eastern limit being in mid-Atlantic, 
and from that Portugal was similarly excluded. But 
little did Almeida or King Manuel suspect that, among 
the indistinguishable seamen of the fleet, was a dark and 
silent little fellow, now on leave from his duties at the 
Court of Lisbon, where his absence was as inconspicuous 
as was his presence on Pereira’s ship, whose destiny it 
was to arrive at the furthest East by sailing west. The 
most far-seeing cosmographer had not yet reckoned that 
as being among the practical possibilities of navigation, 
and thus there was no thought at present of Portuguese 
interests in the Orient ever coming into conflict with 
Spain at all. There were two races only there who 
would resist the establishment of Portuguese power in 
India, namely the native Indian states and the Moors ; 
the former because their territories and independence 
were thereby threatened, the latter because the trade with 
Europe which had hitherto been exclusively in their 
hands would thus be diverted into these European ships 
which passed round the lately discovered route by the 
Cape of Good Hope. 

Almeida’s programme then was to get a grip on India, 
and, by breaking the hold of the Moors over the trade- 
routes, to establish safe and regular communication by 
sea between Portugal and the East. The naval engage- 
ments at Cananor and Diu, followed in each case by the 
bloodiest of massacres, were the decisive actions in the 
period of Almeida’s Viceroyalty up to 1509. 

These two victories had completely broken the Moorish 



22 


FERDINAND MAGELLAN 


hold over the trade-routes and given Portugal a firm grip 
on India, and it was time to push further eastwards 
towards the limits of the hemisphere which Pope Alex- 
ander had assigned to Portugal. The next step during 
the consolidation of the new Indian kingdom, now free 
from any serious Moorish menace, was to get possession 
of the Strait of Malacca, through which passed the 
wealth of the islands beyond, cinnamon and cloves and 
pepper, worth their weight and more in silver, and all 
the merchandise from China, silks fine as mist, and 
sumptuous porcelain. Noble as was that fever for dis- 
covery which had raged in Portugal since the days of the 
Prince-Navigator, there always burned in it the lust for 
domination and for riches, and that, in the main, inspired 
this Easterly advance. The treasures of India itself, its 
Golcondas and Mysores conjectured but as yet unknown, 
would wait, and there was no fear of their being filched 
as long as the Portuguese maintained their grip on the 
coast. Not yet were they equipped for penetration 
inland : it was all they could do to maintain a firm seat 
on the route of communication with Europe. And 
India was only a wayside station, a point that must be 
held in order to pass on to these fabulous Spice Islands, 
the exact position of which, with regard to the Spanish 
and Portuguese spheres, was still undetermined. Spain 
had her eye on them ; it was doubtful (especially since 
nobody knew exactly where they were) whether that 
shifting of the line of demarcation, made at the instance 
of King John of Portugal, might not possibly have 
brought them within the Spanish sphere. It was of the 
highest importance, then, that Portugal should establish 
herself there, before any serious argument arose as to 
their position. 

Communication with Lisbon was now a regular ser- 
vice ; every autumn the laden ships from the Orient 
started on the wings of the north-easterly monsoon for 



MAGELLAN SEES THE EAST 


23 


the long passage from India round the Cape, which was 
now a familiar piece of navigation to Portuguese pilots : 
every spring there came out of Lisbon more ships and 
men for the conquest and the holding of the East. Up 
till 1509 Almeida, though already officially superseded 
as Viceroy by Albuquerque, had refused to give up the 
reins of government to his successor, and when in this 
year there came from Portugal a small squadron of three 
ships under a new commander, Diego Lopes de Sequeira, 
with orders to proceed to Malacca in order to secure 
command of the Strait, Almeida, judging that this squad- 
ron was not of sufficient strength to adventure itself in 
seas hitherto unknown, added to it a ship from the India 
fleet in command of Garcia de Susa ; and in it sailed 
Magellan and one Francisco Serrano. From this 
moment, Magellan, of whom hitherto we have only 
caught the most fleeting glimpses, begins to emerge, 
and it is in connection with Serrano, who soon became 
the most intimate if not the only friend whom Magellan 
ever had, that we first see him detaching himself from 
the background. 

Except for the bare fact that Sequeira’s squadron did 
get to Malacca, and that there the Portuguese first 
beheld the gate through which all the trade and merchan- 
dise from further East passed from the Pacific into the 
Indian Ocean, the expedition was a disastrous fiasco. 
Though the Italian, Luigi Vartema, had already been 
there, he had certainly gone there in Moorish guise, and 
the Sultan of Malacca had never consciously set eyes on 
Europeans before. But he had doubtless heard of their 
victories over the Moorish traders on the Indian coast, 
and of their capture of Moorish trade, and since all ships 
that passed through the Strait paid toll to his sovereignty, 
he had no wish to see Malacca pass into the control of 
the Portuguese. So, while he laid his private plans, 
which were not of the friendliest, he gave them the 



24 FERDINAND MAGELLAN 

warmest welcome ; the Portuguese sailors were bidden 
to make themselves at home on shore, and Captain 
Sequeira, unwilling to be behindhand in the cultivation 
of cordial relations, allowed the Malayans free access to 
his ships. A day or two passed thus, with sailors con- 
stantly in the bazaars, and the natives visiting the noble 
ships of King Manuel, and Sequeira sublimely ignorant 
that the Sultan had aught but the most amicable inten- 
tions towards him. Presently the plans of this most 
perfidious monarch were ripe, and when Sequeira, whose 
orders were that he should return after this friendly 
penetration into the gate of the Pacific, told him that it 
was time to be off, the Sultan said that the bales of pepper 
and spices which the Portuguese had traded in were all 
ready for them, and suggested that Sequeira should send 
his boats ashore with the crews to load up and transfer 
the precious stuff to the ships. The guileless Sequeira 
gave the order ; Francesco Serrano was put in charge of 
the shore-going boats, and off they went, leaving the 
ships nearly empty of sailors, but swarming with genial 
Malayans. This done, Sequeira sat down to play chess 
in his cabin, with eight natives admiring him. 

This fatuous confidence was luckily not shared by 
Captain de Susa, on whose ship Magellan was a seaman. 
He guessed that there was another game going on beside 
Sequeira’s chess, and with a sudden inspiration he drove 
the grinning crowd of natives from his ship and de- 
spatched Seaman Magellan to the flagship to tell the 
chess-player that there was surely treachery afoot. 
Presently, so he believed, and so ran his message by 
Magellan to Sequeira, some signal would be given by 
that pleasant Sultan, on which the party ashore would be 
attacked and surrounded by hordes of natives, while the 
Malayans, in swarms aboard the denuded ships, would 
easily overpower the few Portuguese who remained. 

Sequeira scarcely looked up from his game when 



MAGELLAN SEES THE EAST 25 

Magellan delivered the message ; maybe he thought 
light of it and cared more for his ivory men and their 
manoeuvres, but it is more likely that he realized that 
coolness alone could save a desperate situation, for eight 
Malayans were closely surrounding him. Pondering 
his move, he told Magellan to order a man aloft to see 
if all was well with the party ashore, and then to row 
back to his ship. The man climbed up to the crow’s- 
nest, and on the instant he saw a streamer of smoke 
ascending from the Sultan’s palace, and, simultaneously, 
Serrano and his party dashing back to the boats moored 
by the quay, pursued by a horde of Malayans. Captain 
de Susa had seen that too, and now into Magellan’s 
boat, as soon as he was alongside, there leaped Castel- 
branco, one of the officers, and the two rowed at top 
speed for the quay to the rescue of Serrano and his party, 
whose boat was already in the hands of the Malayans. 
They drove them off, and Serrano and his men tumbled 
in and escaped to their ship. The other parties ashore 
never reached the quay, but were all captured, and it 
was only through Magellan and Castelbranco, and their 
promptitude in making a dash for the shore, that his 
friend Serrano and those with him were saved. The 
rest were prisoners and were put to death. Sequeira’s 
expedition had ended in disaster : he had lost sixty men 
killed, and certainly one ship which had gone ashore, 
and was a-swarm with natives. He tried to arrange a 
ransom for the Portuguese who were in the enemy’s 
hands, but failed to effect anything, and set sail again for 
India with no spices aboard and short of men. 

Though the evidence is only inferential, it seems fairly 
certain that Magellan was at once promoted to the rank 
of an officer for his promptitude in averting what might 
have been a capital disaster. On the voyage back to 
Cochim, Sequeira’s squadron was attacked by armed 
Chinese junks and the assailants managed to board one 



36 


FERDINAND MAGELLAN 


of the Portuguese ships. Again Castelbranco and 
Magellan went to their assistance from Susa’s ship, 
and the phrase that they “ had only four sailors with 
them ” seemed rather to imply that the other two were 
officers. But this conjecture (for it is no more than 
that) receives solid support from the next mention we 
get of this elusive man, of whose life we have hitherto 
got only glimpses. On the arrival of Sequeira’s ships 
at Cochim, Albuquerque sent back to Portugal three 
ships with cargo of the Orient, following the first annual 
autumn detachment which had already sailed, and in 
one of these three ships was Magellan. His ship and 
another out of the three ran ashore at night on the Padua 
Bank of the Laccadive Islands, while the third, unaware 
that any accident had happened to them, continued her 
course to Portugal. These three ships, in fact, though 
forming a squadron, were in no sort of touch with each 
other, and this incident, as we shall see, struck root in 
Magellan’s mind. There was no use, thought he, in 
sending three ships together unless they stood by each 
other and afforded mutual support and succour in time 
of need, and he remembered that when he started on his 
last voyage, in which he circumnavigated the world. 

Now, when this grounding of two ships on the Padua 
Bank took place, it is quite clear that Magellan was a 
seaman no longer. They had run hard aground, and 
all efforts to float them again proved fruitless. Luckily 
there was a calm sea (for otherwise they must have been 
bumped and battered to bits), and the crews and the 
cargo were safely transferred in small boats to one of 
the islands. A council of officers was held next morn- 
ing, and it was decided to despatch the ships’ boats, with 
as many men as they would hold, back to Cochim : 
should they succeed in reaching it, they would bring 
back sea-going vessels to rescue the remainder. While 
they were gone there was no fear of starvation for the 



MAGELLAN SEES THE EAST 


27 


temporary castaways, for the ships had been provisioned 
for the voyage to Lisbon, and there was abundance of 
food. . . . And here we get a sudden glimpse, unex- 
pected and strangely illuminating, as to the workings of 
navies of that day. The boats would just hold the 
Captains and officers of these two ships but no more, and 
these prepared to go off themselves, leaving all the crew 
behind. To us now such a procedure is unthinkable : 
officers and men would be treated as units of equal worth, 
and lots would be drawn as to who should go, while the 
two Captains of the ships would most undoubtedly stop 
with their men. But in King Manuel’s day an officer 
was considered of higher individual value, when danger 
or death was in the hazard, than a seaman, and so the 
officers prepared to set out in the ships’ boats. Then 
something like a mutiny occurred : the men refused to 
let the boats start unless a due proportion of them were 
given places therein. And now it becomes clear that 
Magellan had become an officer, for he volunteered to 
stop behind with the seamen. Instantly the mutinous 
symptoms subsided : if Magellan stopped, the men 
were perfectly willing to let all the rest go, and we may 
certainly infer from this episode that he was not only an 
officer, but one whom the seamen trusted. As the rest 
of the officers now crowded into the boats, Magellan was 
busy there helping to stow provisions for their voyage, 
and one of the seamen, thinking that he repented of his 
offer, said to him, “ Sir, did you not promise to remain 
with us ? ” But he need have had no qualm : Magellan 
had no thought of leaving them. 

Here then on this Padua Bank, throwing in his lot 
with the seamen, just as in his Will made before he 
started for Lisbon he had enjoined that if he died on the 
voyage he should have the burial of one, we begin to get 
a more intimate sight of Magellan than his previous 
history has given us. And most interesting 01 all, for 



28 


FERDINAND MAGELLAN 


us who want to realize him as a human figure, is the 
reason given by one of the Portuguese historians for his 
thus volunteering : he had a friend, we are told, among 
those who were to be left behind, and that was Francesco 
Serrano, whose life Magellan had already saved at 
Malacca. While Serrano, a seaman, had to stay, 
Magellan would not leave him. Off went the boats, 
under promise that if they arrived safely at Cochim they 
would send a ship of rescue. This was done : a caravel 
instantly set out for the Padua Bank and picked up 
Magellan and the marooned crew. But the two ships 
which had run ashore were now wrecks, and instead of 
returning to Lisbon, Magellan went back to the Indian 
coast. 

During the spring of 1510 Albuquerque had taken 
Goa, but he had been unable to hold it, and in the ensuing 
autumn prepared for another attack on it. Previous to 
this expedition, he held a Council of all the Captains of 
the Portuguese ships, and we find that Magellan took 
part in it. It looks therefore as if his conduct on the 
Padua Bank had earned him further promotion, and 
indeed we find it spoken of in tones of the highest com- 
mendation even by those Portuguese historians who are 
most bitter against him for his subsequent naturalization 
as a Spaniard. The point on which AJbuquerque desired 
to know the opinion of his Captains was whether he 
should take with him to Goa, to help in the blockade of 
the place, the ships which were now due to start with 
cargoes of the East for Portugal. Magellan was against 
Albuquerque’s stopping the immediate despatch of this 
convoy, and spoke in that sense : if the start was delayed 
they would miss the north-easterly monsoon. The 
merchant-captains supported this view, and Albuquerque 
against his personal inclination decided that no ship out- 
side the regular fighting fleet need accompany him to 
Goa, unless its Captain wished to do so. It was settled 



MAGELLAN SEES THE EAST 


29 

thus, and without the merchant-ships he set out for 
Goa, which he took in the month of November. The 
incident in itself was trivial, but it holds a certain signi- 
ficance, for it shows that Magellan had now won a certain 
standing in the Portuguese Navy, and that he did not 
hesitate to express a view which he knew would be un- 
popular with his Admiral. 

With the taking of Goa a period of relative tran- 
quillity settled down on the Indian coast. But there 
was still Sequeira’s dismal failure to capture Malacca to 
be retrieved, and that was an affair of the first importance, 
for until the town and the strait which it commanded 
were in Portuguese possession no further progress could 
be made towards securing the trade from the Spice 
Islands and the Coasts of Cathay. That gate still stood 
firmly locked, and beyond it, not to be reached till it was 
flung open, lay those thrice precious treasuries. Desir- 
able they had always been, but since the Portuguese had 
occupied this Indian coast the fame, of these Spice Islands, 
the value of their produce, of their groves of incense- 
bearing trees, had become more fabulous yet, and with 
their spices was mingled some unique fragranceof romance 
that made of them a faery-land beyond the perilous seas. 
The Moorish ships that came through from beyond, the 
Chinese junks that strolled into the ports now held by 
Portugal, reeked of precious and tropical nards ; and that 
El Dorado lay somewhere beyond the gate that had been 
slammed in Sequeira’s face. Of that sea practically 
nothing was known, except that it washed the shores of 
China, and that the Spice Islands basked in it : it was 
just the Great South Sea, conjectured (but no more) to 
extend to the coasts of the new continent which Columbus 
had discovered. 

But this time there was to be no bungling ; and, in 
the summer of 151 1, Albuquerque, himself in command, 
set out with a fleet of nineteen ships again to attack the 



3 * 


FERDINAND MAGELLAN 


town that was the key to the further and richer Orient. 
It lay ranged for miles along the shore of that narrow 
strait, and every furlong of it was contested, for it was 
strongly garrisoned, it had abundance of artillery, and, 
as its Sultan knew, it was the last line of defence of the 
riches within : when once the Portuguese wolf had 
broken through, the flock of islands was at his mercy. 
For six weeks the struggle for it went on, but at the end 
it was in the hands of the western invaders, and the long 
eastward passage from Lisbon to the islands of the 
Pacific (not yet known as such) was open. Since Diaz, 
twenty-four years earlier, had rounded the Cape of Good 
Hope and thrown open a maritime route to India, no 
more important achievement had crowned Portuguese 
enterprise than this forcing of the final gate. They had 
broken their way into the richest treasury of the inheri- 
tance devised to Portugal by Pope Alexander VI : the 
Malay Archipelago, Java, the Moluccas, the Celebes, 
and the Philippine Islands were now unbarriered and 
the coasts of China. Whether the Moluccas lay so far 
east that they fell within the western or Spanish hemi- 
sphere or not, the only gate through which they could be 
reached was in possession of Portugal, and the control 
was hers. Spain might not trespass along that Eastern 
highway of the seas, but the insignificant Captain of one 
of these Portuguese ships was he who would show Spain 
another route into the Pacific through Spanish waters. 
He had already shown Albuquerque that he could form 
opinions of his own ; it was not many years before King 
Manuel would be using the utmost resources of his 
Royalty in fruitless opposition to that indomitable will. 

The effect of the fall of Malacca was no less prodi- 
gious in the new world which Albuquerque had opened 
to Portugal than it was in the old world when the tidings 
of his exploit reached the Court at Lisbon. His prestige 
flamed high through the unbarriered East, Sultans and 



MAGELLAN SEES THE EAST 


3 * 


Kings of the islands beyond whose troops had fought to 
oppose him now hurried to make friends with a power 
they could not resist. With Malacca in his possession, 
Albuquerque lost no time in pushing forward again and 
securing the islands on which the soul of Portugal was 
set. He showed a wise statesmanship in the instructions 
he gave to the Captains of the three ships which he 
instantly despatched eastwards into the Pacific, bidding 
them adopt the most friendly and conciliatory attitude in 
all parts into which they penetrated. They took with 
them native pilots and interpreters, and their immediate 
mission was to establish peaceful trading, load up with 
spices and return. 

Antonio d’Abreu was appointed Admiral of these 
three ships which now went eastwards from Malacca : 
he sailed in the flagship, of which the name is unknown. 
Francisco Serrano, Magellan’s friend, and now a seaman 
no longer, was Captain of the second, and one historian, 
Argensola, specifically states that Magellan was Captain 
of the third. No other historian mentions him as having 
gone on this expedition ; and, though their silence does 
not, of course, prove that Argensola had made a mistake, 
the argument that Magellan did not, on this occasion, 
sail into the Pacific is based on premises which cannot 
be disputed. For this expedition started from Malacca 
in December, 1511, and we find that in the following 
June Magellan was indubitably back in Lisbon. We do 
not know exactly when this squadron, now sailing east- 
wards into the Pacific, returned from its exploration, and 
brought back to India the reports of those who had 
actually seen the fabled isles ; but it seems quite im- 
possible, considering that the prevailing winds in spring 
in the Indian Ocean are westerly (thus speeding the 
fleets that Portugal now annually sent out at that season), 
that Magellan should have sailed east from Malacca in 
mid-December, have made an extensive voyage in the 



32 FERDINAND MAGELLAN 

Pacific, and yet have been back in Lisbon during June. 
The importance of this as regards what we call “ records” 
is considerable, for in his circumnavigation of the world 
Magellan met his death, sailing westwards, in the 
Philippines. If then, as seems certain, he did not com- 
mand a ship in this expedition, he missed the complete 
circumnavigation by (roughly) some fifteen hundred 
miles. It need, perhaps, hardly be stated that this 
makes not the smallest difference to the splendour of the 
achievement which must always give him rank as the 
greatest navigator known, but technically he failed in 
person to accomplish the entire circuit. 

But, though Magellan cannot have sailed from 
Malacca with Antonio d’Abreu, the history of that 
exploration which revealed to Portugal her enchanted 
goal must be briefly touched on, for the destiny of his 
friend, Francisco Serrano, who certainly was in command 
of one of these three ships, had a vital bearing on his own. 
This squadron, now ploughing new seas with every 
favouring breeze, coasted along the northern shores of 
Sumatra and Java, and from there struck across the 
Banda Sea, making land again at Amboina, one of the 
southernmost of the Moluccas group. From there 
Abreu sailed to Banda, and found so great a store of 
spices that he gave up all idea of visiting the more 
northerly islands and turned homewards again. He 
had accomplished the object for which he had been sent, 
Amboina and Banda had received him in the friendliest 
manner, and his ships were laden with peppers and cloves 
and cinnamons to their full capacity. Some hundred 
and forty miles west from Banda on this return voyage 
Serrano’s vessel ran ashore, and lost touch of the others. 
But the magic of the East and this fragrant faery-land of 
the Spice Islands had taken hold on him ; and, when his 
ship was repaired again and floated, he set her course 
not for Malacca, but back to Amboina. The natives 



MAGELLAN SEES THE EAST 33 

there had already experienced the friendliness and fair 
dealing of the Portuguese, and they welcomed Serrano’s 
return. There was at that time a quarrel going on 
between the Kings of Ternate and Tidore, two of the 
most northerly islands of the group, and Serrano, seeing 
the possibility of an undreamed-of career opening before 
him, sailed from Amboina to Ternate, and offered his 
support and services to the King. He was most cor- 
dially received, for his service was a pledge of Portuguese 
support when next their ships came through the gate of 
the Pacific, and he became, like Joseph in Egypt, the 
Grand Vizier to the King of Ternate. By rights, of 
course, in performance of his duty as Captain of one of 
King Manuel’s ships, he should have followed Abreu 
back to India. Perhaps he thought that he would do 
the King more signal service by remaining here and 
making a Portuguese focus in the islands of his desire, 
or was it that the magic of the East was too strong for 
him and he could no longer tolerate the thought of life 
anywhere but in these isles of the Pacific ? Henceforth, 
at any rate, till the day of his death Ternate was his 
home, and from here he sent many letters to his friend, 
Magellan, saying that he had found a new world richer 
than India and that here he would live out his days. 
Without being unduly fanciful, we may guess that the 
thought of Serrano out there in Ternate, high in the 
favour of the King, became a magnet to Magellan and 
strengthened his resolve to make the Spice Islands the 
goal of his own ambitions. That stuck in his mind, it 
simmered and fermented there, and when a few years 
later Magellan had that interview with King Manuel 
which determined his destiny he wrote off at once to 
Serrano, as we shall see, to say that he would be with him 
soon, “ if not by way of Portugal then by way of Spain.” 

Rejecting then, for stern reasons of chronology, the 
idea that Magellan took part in this first European 

c 



34 FERDINAND MAGELLAN 

voyage in the Pacific, we must figure him as saying fare- 
well to Serrano at Malacca, and going back in December, 
i £n, with Albuquerque’s fleet to India. He must then 
have been ordered to return with some home-going 
squadron to Portugal and have arrived in Lisbon not later 
than the following June, for on the 1 2th of that month 
he signed in Lisbon a receipt for the monthly salary, paid 
partly in cash, partly in kind, of his post at Court. He 
had not, as already noticed, resigned this appointment, 
and though he had been absent for seven years, in the 
King’s service in the East, he now took it up again. 



CHAPTER III 


KING MANUEL HAS NO USE 
FOR MAGELLAN 

AGELLAN had left Lisbon as a sea- 
man, and he returned as Captain in 
the King’s navy. He had been 
wounded at least twice, and he had 
two very meritorious pieces of service 
to his credit : the one when by his 
quickness he had succeeded in rescu- 
ing Serrano’s party which had been 
attacked by the natives on the quay at Malacca on the 
occasion of Sequeira’s abortive expedition there ; the 
other when, by volunteering to remain with the wrecked 
seamen on the Padua Bank, he had averted a mutinous 
outbreak. It was no doubt in recognition of these, and 
of his long service, that his rank at Court was raised, 
together with the salary attached to it, and when next 
month, in July, he again gave a receipt (still extant) for 
his salary, he signed it with his new title of “ fidalgo 
escudeiro ” : in English parlance we should say that he 
had been given an “ order.” All officials attached to 
the Court at Lisbon appear to have had some such order 
(much as is the case in the entourage of Royalty to-day), 
and to each grade there was attached a certain fixed 
salary. Accordingly we find that in this July receipt 
Magellan (escudeiro) signs for a salary of 1850 reis 
instead of 1000. This actual enrichment was on no 
very opulent scale, for 1000 reis were equivalent to five 

ss 




FERDINAND MAGELLAN 


3<5 

shillings (though their purchasing power in the sixteenth 
century was from eight to ten times that of modern 
money), but his salary was thus nearly doubled. In- 
significant and unworthy of record as these details may 
seem, this question of Magellan’s pay at Court very 
soon crops up again laden with weighty issues ; for, 
with the implications involved in it, it directly contri- 
buted to the fact that the great exploit and adventure of 
his life was undertaken not by a Portuguese but by a 
Spaniard. 

He had been away then for seven years, and had taken 
a modest though highly creditable part under Almeida 
and Albuquerque in their magnificent intrusions into 
the unknown world of the Orient. He had been present 
when the gate into the Pacific had been thrown open, he 
had seen Serrano’s ship slide away into the great South 
Sea, which he himself before long was to christen Mare 
Pacifico, and now on his return from these years of con- 
quest and discovery in the East, he found that the West 
too had been yielding up fresh secrets of the round world 
to the explorers in the Spanish hemisphere. Columbus, 
before his death, had made four voyages to Central 
America, and there was not now much doubt that 
beyond it lay the great South Sea ; such, at any rate, was 
the belief of those who had studied his charts and log- 
books. It was also certain that southwards from the 
new regions of his voyage there stretched the shores of 
a gigantic continent : south and yet south it extended, 
and that could hardly be Asia. Christopher Jacques 
had returned from his voyage of 1503 with some sort of 
chart of the Brazilian coasts, and of the shores of Pata- 
gonia (not yet known as such) which lay beyond. There 
was also talk, fireside talk, tavern talk among sailors, 
about the existence of some strait far away to the south 
which might prove to be the western, American gate 
into the Pacific, much as Malacca was the eastern, 



KING MANUEL HAS NO USE FOR MAGELLAN 37 

Asiatic gate into the same sea. There were even said 
to exist maps made by one of those explorers which 
showed it. All was vague, but there seemed to be some 
foundation for such a conjecture. In any case this huge 
continent must surely come to an end some time, if an 
explorer pushed far enough south, even as Diaz had found 
that the corresponding continent of Africa, which had 
barred all voyaging to the East, terminated in the Cape 
round which now every year the navies of Portugal went 
forth and back between Lisbon and India. Others said 
that America stretched south till it joined the polar ice, 
or the conjectured Terra Australis ; but, since nobody 
had been there to see, nobody could yet pronounce on 
that subject. America might come to an end, and there 
would be open sea beyond, which was one with the 
Pacific ; or there might be that strait they talked of, and 
the navigator sailing into the ultimate west would find 
himself in the ultimate east. . . . Such talk was in the 
air, the uncondensed vapour of conjecture and argument, 
and it persistently hovered over Magellan’s mind when 
now, after seven years of Oriental adventure, he lived the 
tamed life again in the routine of the Court with its 
tediums and etiquettes and trivial ceremonies. And 
these uncondensed vapours began to liquefy and fall like 
dew on the cold steel of his mind. Surely there must be 
some passage for the navigator there ; and, if he went 
westwards still and ever westwards, he would on some 
remote evening see the sun setting behind those Spice 
Islands, which to the eyes of his friend, Francisco 
Serrano, had risen from the sea with the flames not of 
sunset but of sunrise behind them. It is difficult for 
us, to whom the globe is now a map for all to read, to put 
ourselves back to the times when far the greater part of 
it was undiscovered, but we must do that in order to 
understand that raging geographical fever that then 
heated men’s blood into so noble a delirium. 



38 FERDINAND MAGELLAN 

For the space of a year, until the summer of 1513, 
Magellan remained at the Court of Lisbon, always seek- 
ing out pilots and captains of ships who had returned 
from remote voyages, and diligently studying the 
theories of navigation. But this summer there was 
trouble in Morocco with Portugal’s hereditary enemies, 
the Moors. Azamor, a port of considerable size on the 
coast, refused to pay the tribute to which it was bound 
under its treaty with Lisbon. This was equivalent to 
revolt, and King Manuel, fearing that it might spread 
to other cities, resolved to deal out stern stuff to the 
Moors. He instantly commissioned a fleet and an army 
wholly disproportionate to the mere business of reduc- 
ing one coast-town, and a vast navy, ten times more 
numerous in ships than that with which Almeida had 
been sent to conquer India, with eighteen thousand 
soldiers on board, was despatched to reduce a town that 
did not contain as many inhabitants. Any resistance 
on the part of Azamor was, of course, quite out of the 
question; thetown surrendered, and the Duke ofBraganza, 
who was in command of this immense armada, returned 
to Portugal in triumph. As far as the ostensible object 
of the expedition was concerned, it was attained by this 
demonstration in force. 

But now the real purpose of King Manuel emerged, 
for General de Meneses, who took over the command, 
began overrunning the country, burning crops, raiding 
villages and capturing cattle. This might be supposed 
to serve as a deterrent to other Moorish tribes and cities 
who were disposed to follow the foolish example of 
Azamor, but no doubt King Manuel’s real object was 
to provoke the resistance of the more powerful Moorish 
chieftains, and with his large force to crush it, and thus 
have no more bother with the Moors of Morocco. Such 
indeed was the result of these harrying raids, in one of 
which Magellan’s name is first mentioned. He is not 



KING MANUEL HAS NO USE FOR MAGELLAN 39 

recorded in the lists of naval officers, but now he appears 
as serving among the troops. In some skirmish he was 
wounded in the knee, and from that time forth to the 
end of his life he was lame of a leg. In consequence of 
this wound he took no further part in active service on 
this campaign, but, with another officer, was put in 
charge of a camp at the base into which were herded the 
droves of cattle captured from the Moors. Meantime 
in the spring of 1514 news came to the Portuguese, who 
still occupied Azamor, that the Moors in large force were 
advancing on the town under the command of the King 
of Fez. They were heavily defeated in two actions by 
General de Meneses, and the campaign was over. King 
Manuel, according to plan, had provoked a general 
rising and crushed it. The Portuguese troops began 
to be drafted home. 

Magellan, lame from his wound, was still in charge 
of the stock of captured cattle and horses, and an accusa- 
tion was now brought against him that he had been sell- 
ing these to the Moors. He was neither arrested nor, 
it seems, formally charged ; but, instead of asking that 
the matter should be cleared up, he embarked among 
the returning troops without leave from his superior 
officer. The explanation of this amazing conduct, that 
he wished to prove his innocence to King Manuel, will 
not hold water, for on arrival at Lisbon he did nothing 
of the kind, but, seeking an audience with the King, he 
merely asked for an increase of salary, on account, we 
must suppose, of this crippling wound. In the mean- 
time the King had received despatches from the officer 
in command at Azamor, stating that he had not given 
Magellan leave to return home, and, further, that there 
was this charge against him of selling captured cattle. 
King Manuel therefore, with justice that, if anything, 
inclined to leniency, ordered Magellan to return to 
Azamor and stand his trial on this double charge. He 



40 


FERDINAND MAGELLAN 


refused to listen, as was perfectly proper, to anything 
that Magellan had to say. . . . So far the story seems 
scarcely credible : we should feel inclined to class it 
with those of that crop of defamations which sprang up 
about Magellan when, a few years later, he evoked the 
execration of all Portugal. The sequel, however, of the 
general accuracy of which there can be no doubt, possibly 
supplies the key. 

Now if Magellan had left Azamor, while discharging 
military duties there, without leave, he was guilty of 
the gravest sort of insubordination, and would have 
been lucky on his return there to have been dismissed 
the King’s service altogether and not have paid for it 
with his life ; if he had been proved guilty of selling 
captured cattle for his own profit, the consequences 
would have been hardly less serious. But on his pre- 
senting himself to Pedro de Susa, who had succeeded 
General de Meneses, neither of these charges was pro- 
ceeded with, and instead he was given some official 
certificate which exculpated him from both, and granted 
him permission to return to Lisbon again. It looks, 
then, as if in his absence this charge of having stolen 
captured booty and disposed of it to his own enrich- 
ment (which may have been no more than malicious 
gossip) had been investigated and proved to be without 
foundation. Otherwise it is impossible to see why he did 
not now have to answer it. But it is harder to explain 
why he was not court-martialled for leaving Azamor 
without leave ; for, if he had really done so, he could 
not possibly have escaped it. It is certain, however, 
that no proceedings of the sort were taken, and we are 
driven to suppose, not for the sake of excusing him, 
but of finding some sense in the whole story, that General 
de Meneses must have given orders that a certain draft 
should go home, forgetting that Magellan was in it, or 
that some similar misunderstanding, for which Magellan 



KING MANUEL HAS NO USE FOR MAGELLAN 41 

was not to blame, had occurred. The sequel, in fact, 
supplies a credible foundation for the whole story. With 
this second return of Magellan from Africa, he leaps 
into the foreground of our picture. 

He went back at once to Lisbon, now bringing with 
him the proofs of the correctness of his conduct as 
certified by his commanding officer ; and, with that 
quiet implacable determination which henceforth we see 
to be the very hall-mark of the man, asked for another 
audience with the King in order to prefer precisely the 
same request as before, namely an increase in his salary, 
all discussion with regard to which the King had broken 
off before, refusing to listen to one who was accused of 
theft and of desertion. The audience was granted him, 
and at the appointed hour Ferdinand Magellan, aged 
thirty-four, short of stature, burned brown from his long 
service in India, and going clumsily by reason of his 
crippled knee, limped up the hall where the King sat to 
hear petitioners. Manuel looked wryly on him, he 
always disliked him, and Magellan, making obeisance, 
presented the signed papers that exonerated him. 
King Manuel glanced at them and gave them back to 
him ; perhaps he said he was glad that this had been 
satisfactorily explained, but he understood that Captain 
Magellan had some request to make of him in seeking 
audience. So Magellan made his request, and it was 
that his salary at Court should be raised to the extent 
of one shilling a month. King Manuel gave an imme- 
diate refusal : he did not like Magellan and he disliked 
much more to be asked for money. And then Magellan 
asked if the King would let him go from Court and give 
him employment in his navy, and again the King re- 
fused. And then finally Magellan asked for the King’s 
leave “ to live with someone who would show him favour, 
where he might obtain more good fortune than with the 
King.” Manuel had a ready assent to this, for thus he 



42 FERDINAND MAGELLAN 

could show contempt of his petitioner, and he told him 
he might do just as he pleased about that. Then 
Magellan bent to kiss his hand, and King Manuel 
withdrew it, so that he did not get this privilege. ... So 
the audience was over and he limped away clumsily from 
the Presence, foot behind foot, not turning his back. 
And a snigger ran round the circle of the lords in waiting 
and the equerries and the ushers, for someone whispered 
that the lameness of the tawny little fellow was feigned 
in order to move the King’s compassion. Magellan 
heard that whisper and he flushed beneath his tan, for 
it stung him more shrewdly than the King’s curt 
monosyllables. 

So he went out from the Presence, leaving the Court 
sycophantically amused and gratified at the snub ad- 
ministered to him. Nothing could have been more 
contemptuous than the King’s manner to him : he had 
refused with one point-blank word the first two requests 
he had made, but even more wounding than that was 
Manuel’s willing assent that he might offer his service 
to whomsoever he pleased. And then he had refused 
to allow him to kiss his hand, as if, owing to this request 
which he had granted with such ready scorn, Magellan 
was no longer in his service. But the interview, brief, 
and to Magellan incredibly bitter, contains, like the first 
act of some subtly devised play, the whole foundation 
of the amazing drama that followed ; each word spoken 
dripped with destiny, and neither King nor petitioner 
can ever have forgotten those few minutes in the hall of 
audience. They need comment, out of all proportion, 
as it would at first seem, to their apparent significance. 

Now at first sight Magellan’s request that the King 
should raise his salary to the figure of an extra shilling 
a month strikes us as purely ludicrous, and not less ludi- 
crous was the King’s refusal to do so. But if we look 



KING MANUEL HAS NO USE FOR MAGELLAN 43 

away from the face-value of this most exiguous boon, 
and regard instead what was the implication contained 
in it, the ridiculous side of it fades out altogether. The 
King (as well as his petitioner) knew that this was a 
serious and solid request, which had a real meaning 
behind it, and he subsequently gave as a justification for 
his refusal the reason that if he had granted this boon 
“ he feared an entrance should be opened to ambitious 
persons.” The ambitions of such were not really con- 
cerned with an additional shilling a month of pocket- 
money, nor were Magellan’s, and the King knew that 
as well as anybody. For fifty years ago, officials of the 
Court at Lisbon received their salary entirely in kind, 
board and lodging of various grades of dignity was 
given them, but when in the reign of King John II the 
personnel of the Court grew more numerous this pay- 
ment in kind was commuted into a monetary salary (just 
as the butt of sherry which had previously been the re- 
muneration of the English Laureate was commuted in 
the poetic reign of Pye into an annual payment of ^23) 
and the standing and dignity of the officials of the Court 
was estimated on the basis of their incomes. Magellan’s 
request therefore was not just for a nonsensical shilling 
a month, but that which the shilling symbolized, and 
Bishop Osorius, who can find no words strong enough 
to express his condemnation of Magellan’s subsequent 
naturalization as a Spaniard, admits that there was here 
“ a slight offence ” on the part of the King, in refusing 
Magellan’s request. He had served in the African 
campaign and had been wounded there, and for this he 
deserved recognition. Osorius goes on to make the 
whole matter quite plain : “ And as the Portuguese ” 
(he says) “ think that the thing most to be desired is to 
be enrolled amongst the King’s household, so they con- 
sider the greatest honour to consist in an increase of 
this stipend. For, as there are various ranks of King’s 



FERDINAND MAGELLAN 


44 

servants, so the sum of money is assigned to each servant 
according to the dignity of his rank. The highest class 
is that of noblemen, but as there are distinctions of 
nobility, so an equal salary is not given to all. Thus it 
happens that the nobility of each is estimated according 
to the importance of this stipend, and each one is held to 
he more noble in proportion to the more ample stipend which 
he receives” 

Now this very explicit passage causes the farcical 
aspect of this Royal audience in which a noble of Portugal 
asked his King for a rise of a shilling a month in his 
salary, and was told by the King he could not have it, to 
vanish altogether. What Magellan was asking for was 
a recognition, in a rise in rank, of his services to the 
King. Looked at in this light, his second request, 
when the first was refused, to be given further employ- 
ment in the King’s navy, follows reasonably and logically. 
It amounted to this : “If your Majesty will not recog- 
nize my previous service, give me, at any rate, the 
opportunity to serve you further,” and this was a very 
proper expression of his loyalty and devotion. Indeed 
Magellan had very good cause to seek such an assur- 
ance, for Vasco da Gama, who had discovered India, 
had for years been put on the shelf by King Manuel, 
who was always jealous of those who had done their 
country most signal service, and Gama’s title of Admiral 
of India had been a sheer emptiness, fine-sounding but 
signifying nothing. Almeida, too, had suffered from this 
engrained ingratitude, for after five years of incessant 
struggle in India and the most creditable administra- 
tion of the Viceroyalty he had been superseded by Albu- 
querque. But the King would give no such promise ; 
Magellan might look forward to dangling about the 
Court till the sap and dazzle of adventure had died out 
of his veins. 

We may picture him pausing when the King thus 



KING MANUEL HAS NO USE FOR MAGELLAN 45 

denied him not only promotion but any further chance 
of earning it. And then came his third request, also 
a logical inquiry resulting from the answer he had just 
received. As the King had no further use for his 
services, might he offer them elsewhere ? To that 
came an affirmative more stingingly contemptuous than 
either of the refusals had been : he was perfectly at 
liberty to do so. It is most improbable that at this 
moment King Manuel definitely understood Magellan 
to mean that he asked leave to be done with Portugal 
altogether, and seek employment from the King of 
Spain, because when Magellan did so, and the nature 
of that employment was known, it was a most unpleasant 
surprise to King Manuel, and he did his best to get 
Magellan back, and, failing that, to prevent him making 
the great voyage. He disliked the man ; he would not 
recognize his previous services, or give him the oppor- 
tunity to serve him further, and as a final and complete 
snub, to show his total indifference as to what he did, 
or where he betook himself, he gave his Royal permission 
to him to do exactly what he liked. His final gesture, 
in withdrawing his hand from the obeisance of one who 
had served him, man and boy, for over twenty years, 
was a calculated and unkingly insult. Thereafter King 
Manuel was to get in a state of high agitation for his 
lamentable manners, and, even more, for his entire lack 
of judgment in appreciating Magellan’s qualities. That 
he was socially unpopular there is no doubt ; a charge 
of stealing from the stores of an army, resting on no real 
foundation, is not brought against a popular officer, 
nor are innuendoes made that his honourable lameness 
is feigned per misericordiam. And the King disliked 
him too, and was pleased to show that he did not want 
to have anything more to do with him. 

It was not then, as Bishop Osorius states. King 
Manuel’s refusal to grant Magellan this rise of salary, 



4 6 FERDINAND MAGELLAN 

with its corresponding rise of rank, that led to, his de- 
naturalizing himself, but the King’s contemptuous 
refusal to hold out any hopes of a future career in his 
service, and his permission to let him do what he liked 
with himself : he had given Magellan his conge . , and he 
might kiss somebody else’s hand, but not King Manuel’s. 
Whether, as has been suggested, he had ever told the 
King of the project that was now taking shape in his 
mind, which he had hoped to attempt under the flag of 
Portugal, even as Columbus had hoped to find the New 
World in the same service, is quite unknown. There 
is, in any case, no record of his having stated that the 
project was to seek the Spice Islands by a westerly route, 
and subsequent developments seem to point to the fact 
that he had not. We must not therefore suppose that 
King Manuel pooh-poohed Magellan’s scheme ; indeed 
that would have been uncharacteristic of one who through- 
out his reign always encouraged any scheme which he 
thought could advance discovery. King Manuel merely 
thought that Magellan was of no use, and signified that 
in the most unmistakable manner. 

Fresh from this public and deliberate humiliation, 
Magellan bethought him of his friend, Francisco 
Serrano, who four years ago had vanished into the dawn 
eastwards from Malacca, and who continued to write 
to him of the wonders of those islands which Magellan 
had never seen, and of the King of Ternate whose minister 
he was ; Portuguese ships came there regularly now, by 
way of India. And now Magellan wrote back to 
Serrano, bidding him wait for him, for he would be with 
him soon “ if not by way of Portugal, then by way of 
Spain.” This phrase, simple as it sounds, is ambiguous, 
and capable of two interpretations. The most obvious 
is that he intended, as he was soon to do, to denaturalize 
himself and offer his services to Spain. Possibly that 
is the signification of it, but there is another which more 



KING MANUEL HAS NO USE FOR MAGELLAN 47 

commends itself, namely that “ by way of Spain ” meant 
by way of America, which in Pope Alexander’s disposi- 
tion was Spanish. That certainly was also Magellan’s 
intention, and for the remainder of his days in Portugal 
he set himself, now free from any duties to his sovereign, 
to work out that scheme in order to present it, no tenta- 
tive sketch nor vague adumbration of an idea, but a 
design, feasible and finished, with himself ready to 
expound it, for the consideration of his new master. 
This motive seems to account for what is otherwise 
rather puzzling, namely that he did not, on his demission 
by King Manuel, at once leave Portugal for Castile. 
But here he was working among the pilots and ship- 
masters whom he knew, and from whom he could glean 
information about the Brazilian coast and something 
about the land that lay south of it. Here too, in Lisbon, 
there was undoubtedly something known about a strait 
that lay further south yet, the entry of which at most 
had been seen, but nothing more. By now the exist- 
ence of the Pacific, the great South Sea, was no longer 
a matter of mere probability, for in 1513 the Spanish 
Captain Vasco Nunez de Balboa had climbed the peak 
in Darien (an exploit poetically attributed by Keats to 
stout Cortez) and not only had seen it, but had crossed 
the Isthmus of Panama and gone down to the shore 
where, sword in hand and fully accoutred, he had waded 
into it and, in the best Hohenzollern style, had claimed 
it and all that therein was, and all the islands that swam 
in it, for his master the King of Spain. That strait then, 
thought Magellan to himself, opens into the Great 
South Sea, and in that sea there swim the Spice Islands. 
It seems now to have occurred to him that perhaps after 
all, though Portugal had claimed them, and the only 
access to them at present was through Portuguese waters, 
they lay not in the Portuguese sphere of dominion, 
as devised to her by Pope Alexander, but in the sphere 



FERDINAND MAGELLAN 


48 

of Spain, and that access to them could be found through 
Spanish waters. Hence his letter to Serrano. But the 
strait, if it existed, was the key that opened the door into 
the Pacific, and it seems clear that there was now some- 
thing known, or rumoured, about it, and the source 
from which that rumour sprang was Lisbon. 

For in the year 1515, very shortly after King Manuel 
found that he had no use for Magellan, Johann Schoner 
of Nuremberg manufactured a globe on which the strait 
subsequently known as the Strait of Magellan was 
definitely marked. It was not correctly placed ; it was 
not correctly drawn (for no one had been through it), 
but it was there, a corridor from the far-South Atlantic 
into the Pacific. 1 The information which he thus em- 
bodied on his globe was derived from a German pamphlet 
which had been translated from the Portuguese. This 
document described the discoveries made on the east 
coast of South America by a Portuguese expedition 
which was privately financed by Christopher de Haro 
and others. This expedition must have been that of 
Coelho, which went out in 1501, or that of Christopher 
Jacques in 1 503, for, as far as is known, no other Portu- 
guese expedition explored the coasts of Brazil and 
southwards, and we may therefore assume that the 
Portuguese document on which (translated into German) 
Schoner founded the globe which marks the strait was 
an account of one of these voyages. Since the days of 
Prince Henry the Navigator, maps and narratives of 
such voyages were preserved in the library at Lisbon, 
and it is at least highly probable that the narratives of 
Coelho and Jacques were preserved there. It is sug- 
gested therefore that what kept Magellan in Lisbon 
after his dismissal by the King was to get all possible 
information about the strait before taking his scheme to 

1 For a full account of Schonei’s globes see Life ef Magellan, 
Guillemard, p. 192, etc. 



KING MANUEL HAS NO USE FOR MAGELLAN 49 

the King of Spain. The material on which he worked 
was here, and we cannot doubt that, if King Manuel 
had given him promise of employment or had taken 
the least interest in him, the project that was soon to 
be offered to Charles of Spain would have been sub- 
mitted to him. Brazil, according to the ecclesiastical 
allotment of the world, was in King Manuel’s parish ; 
a Portuguese expedition sailing to Brazil would not have 
trespassed outside it, and thereafter its course, though 
lying in Spanish waters, was where no sail, Portuguese 
or Spanish, had ever come. Without doubt King 
Manuel could have been patron of Magellan’s voyage 
(even as King John II, his predecessor, could have 
sent forth Columbus, and by right of discovery have 
claimed dominion over the New World), had he not come 
to the unfortunate conclusion that Magellan was of no 
use to anybody. 

Here for the present then in Lisbon, ill-looked on by 
reason of the King’s disfavour, Magellan remained, for 
he was darkly busy with learning what could not be 
learned elsewhere, before he took himself and his know- 
ledge to one who might be less contemptuous of him. 
He had no position now at Court, for the King had dis- 
pensed with his services, and he could spend his time 
with mariners and geographers, and delve into such 
observations of noon and night and the wheeling stars 
as bore on practical seamanship. Associated with him 
now, and soon to be more closely knit in the study of 
such things as applied to the voyage which he con- 
templated, was a strange and rather sinister figure, one 
typical of the age. This was Ruy Faleiro, a scholar 
and a student, highly skilled in the theory of navigation 
though no practical sailor, and a notable astronomer. It 
was whispered that he was a dealer in black arts and was 
tutored by a demon who both taught and obeyed him, 
and told him secrets about the stars which invariably 



5 ° 


FERDINAND MAGELLAN 


proved to be true, so that, if Faleiro said that at midnight 
on such a day a great planet would rise over Africa, such 
information might be considered trustworthy. In those 
days astronomers were astrologists as well ; the man 
who could point to the heavens, and show Jupiter to be 
dominant there and notably shining in a favourable 
quarter, would affirm that the celestial signs looked 
kindly on some contemplated adventure, and prophesy 
a fortunate issue for the consultant. Such divination 
was not held to be Satanic in origin ; kings and captains 
consulted the stars through the medium of those learned 
in them, for they held that these celestial signs were set 
in the heavens by Divine ordinance for the guidance of 
mankind, and Magellan himself shared that view, for 
he took with him on his voyage an astrologist skilled in 
the interpretation of the stars. Faleiro’s profession, in 
short, was perfectly respectable, and his reputation as 
being leagued with the powers of darkness was not 
due to that, but probably to his black and venomous 
temper, bordering on the insane, which in a few years 
was to develop into madness. 

But though Magellan, like everyone else of his day, 
believed that the stars were, if not the arbiters of a man’s 
destiny, the signs, for those who could read their lan- 
guage, of the fate that was appointed for him, it was not 
Faleiro’s knowledge of the baleful or beneficent regard 
of the planets towards adventurers on the earth that he 
desired, but the astronomer’s skill in using these celestial 
lamps to guide the path of those who sought to traverse 
the unknown seas, and by their aid determine into what 
longitude the uncharted tides and winds had borne him . 
They might also have their bearing on destiny ; an 
astrologer could divine the future from their contem- 
plation, but Magellan’s business with Faleiro was in 
nis capacity of astronomer rather than astrologer. 
Faleiro had made a terrestrial globe with lines of longi- 



KING MANUEL HAS NO USE FOR MAGELLAN 51 

tude from pole to pole, and it was mounted on fine points 
and turned easily on those pivots, slowly circling. Lisbon 
was zero, and on the surface were sketched the shapes of 
continents and islands as at present verified by explora- 
tion, and further afield, east and west, were fainter out- 
lines as conjectured. In the Royal library at Lisbon 
before he had fallen from favour, Magellan had seen a 
chart that marked a long coast-line south of Brazil, 
and the entry of a strait, and perhaps Faleiro recorded 
these in tentative dotted lines. Again, Magellan had 
letters from his friend Serrano in the Spice Islands ; he 
knew how long it had taken him to sail there from 
Malacca ; a rough calculation might be made as to how 
far eastwards of the gate of the great South Sea Ternate 
lay, and the general position of the Spice Islands could 
be indicated. Then Faleiro lit the lantern hanging 
from the ceiling in his cabinet of astronomical apparatus, 
and set the globe so that this lantern which signified the 
sun was poised above Lisbon, and so it was noon in 
Lisbon. When the globe was adjusted like that, India 
was somewhere on the vague edge of the circle of shadow, 
and America, more conjecturally, situated on the edge 
of the shadow opposite. “ It is evening in India,” said 
Faleiro, “ and noon in Lisbon and dawn in America. 
Then I turn the globe and night falls in India, and 
America comes out into full day. And now the shadow 
of evening is falling over Lisbon and noon is blazing 
over America and in India it is midnight. Then India 
revolves through the night and the ray of dawn falls on 
it again, but it has long been day in your Spice Islands. 

. . .” And then Magellan put out his brown, lean 
finger and stopped that smooth revolution of Faleiro’s 
globe. “ Turn it back again,” he cried, “ and let it 
be full noon over the line that Holy Father drew across 
the Atlantic, to make the boundaries of Portugal and 
Spain. Now look into the shadow and see on which 



5 2 


FERDINAND MAGELLAN 


side of midnight the Spice Islands are lying. ... It is 
as I thought ! It is after midnight with them : they lie 
in the Spanish half of the world. . . .” Again and again 
they went into this, and more and more Magellan became 
convinced that Serrano was waiting for him not in the 
Spice Islands of Portugal but in the Spice Islands of Spain. 

Faleiro cared as much for the pure science of the stars as 
for any application of it to a useful end ; their actual 
movements were as fascinating to him as their bearing 
on human destiny and their aid to navigators. But it 
was the applied science which concerned Magellan, 
and, skilled navigator as he already was, this queer friend 
of his, who had never steered a ship in his life nor furled 
a sail, gave him data for the taking of many observations 
which were at present matters of approximate guess-work 
rather than exact calculation. But as their joint studies 
progressed, and their acquaintanceship ripened into 
scientific intimacy rather than human friendship, Faleiro 
began to take a keener interest in the practical side of 
this abstract knowledge of his, and it was not long before 
Magellan told him the whole of that project which pos- 
sessed his brain, and which should place him for ever 
at the head of the world’s great explorers. Faleiro had 
long been employed on a treatise on methods of ascertain- 
ing longitude by the sun and the stars, and now he 
devoted his vast erudition to the working out of this 
project of a passage to the Spice Islands by sailing west ; 
the two became partners in it. Faleiro was a cross- 
grained fellow, jealous and suspicious of others ; and 
this suited Magellan very well, for he did not want his 
scheme spoken of, and he was grim and taciturn himself. 
The passionate search for knowledge on the one side, and 
on the other the passionate desire for adventure that 
would put it to the proof, was a link between them ; then, 
too, they were both ill-looked on in Lisbon. But King 
Manuel, for them both, was creeping into the shadow 



KING MANUEL HAS NO USE FOR MAGELLAN 53 

much as India did when Faleiro set his globe slowly 
revolving eastwards. 

Underneath their study there grew the thought of 
what they would do with their scheme when study had 
ripened it to full fruit. There was as little chance for 
Faleiro to become Astronomer Royal to His Majesty of 
Portugal as for Magellan to be entrusted with a new 
command now that the King had bid him take himself 
and his service where he pleased, and as the project 
approached completion they talked over the idea of 
bettering themselves under the rays of a less malignant 
star. Already Magellan had long contemplated such 
a step, and now it was settled between them, in the 
autumn of 1517, that Magellan should at once leave 
Portugal and cross the frontier into Spain, carrying the 
full statement of the joint scheme with him. From 
Seville he wrote to Faleiro the news of his friendly and 
encouraging reception, and a few weeks later Faleiro 
followed him. In Lisbon nobody cared, probably 
nobody knew, for the two were lonely men and they 
had kept the scope and purpose of their work to them- 
selves : the flitting of a shady and morose astrologer 
and of a naval officer for whose services the King had no 
further use was a matter of total unconcern to any but 
themselves. It was not until news trickled through to 
Lisbon that the King of Spain had a mind to employ 
this man of whom his Brother of Portugal thought so 
contemptuously that the name of Magellan was men- 
tioned again at Court. And, when it was known what 
the work was, the wind began to whistle and soon there 
burst forth a tempest of malediction that is without 
parallel in the pages of history. But not until Portugal 
was afraid that she had lost the services and the genius 
of a man who was, after all, a capable fellow (or so 
King Charles of Spain accounted him) did King Manuel 
care a jot whether he acted on the permission given him 



54 


FERDINAND MAGELLAN 


with such sincere scorn, and naturalized himself a 
Spaniard. Thereafter the King must have considered 
his conduct of that interview again, and presently he 
began to wonder whether he had not made the mistake 
of his life. It would have been cheaper to have given 
him an extra shilling a month than, possibly, to forfeit 
the revenues from the Spice Islands. 





CHAPTER IV 


MAGELLAN APPLIES TO SPAIN 

O in October, 1517, there came to 
Seville this swarthy little fellow, 
thirty-seven years old, and lame of 
the right leg, and he had in his 
pocket the plan of a voyage through 
an untraversed, if not wholly un- 
discovered, strait, which he believed 
would lead into an untraversed sea 
of unknown dimensions, at the far end of which was a 
group of islands from which to-day Portugal derived a 
prodigious revenue. But when this small lame man 
arrived there by way of Spain, he would take his obser- 
vations and see whether he was not in Spain still. From 
there he would return to the country of his adoption by 
way of the Indian Seas and the Cape of Diaz, and so 
he would have circumnavigated the round world. Of 
all the projects of Portuguese or Spanish adventurers, 
from the days when Prince Henry the Navigator sat in 
his castle at Sagres and foresaw that some day his 
Captains would find open sea beyond the South Cape 
of Africa, this was the hugest conception that ever man 
had attempted to realize : no greater indeed could be 
imagined, for the longest road in all the world was that 
which encircled it. All had been thought out now, 
and the scheme was ready to be put before anyone who 
would finance and further it. 

At present no definite exposition of the voyage was 
to be laid even before the King of Spain, for Magellan 

55 





56 FERDINAND MAGELLAN 

had a partner who was still in Portugal, and the partners 
were pledged to a mutual secrecy : they must consult 
together before the entire scheme was divulged, and 
jointly arrange what share (equal as between themselves) 
in the profits of the voyage was to be assigned to them. 
Magellan, as a practical navigator, had gone on ahead 
of his partner to establish relations in Seville with those 
interested in maritime adventure, and generally to pre- 
pare the ground. The record of a man who had been 
round the Cape of Good Hope with Almeida twelve 
years before, who had fought at Calicut and Goa, who 
had been in charge of a wrecked crew on the Laccadives, 
who had twice sailed to the eastern gate of the Pacific 
at Malacca, and who in these honourable services had 
thrice been wounded, was an introduction likely to com- 
mand the attention of the maritime committees at 
Seville, even though King Manuel had said that the 
bearer of it was not worth his salt. Indeed, that might 
be taken as something of a recommendation, for had not 
His late Majesty of Portugal and his advisers said the 
same about the great Columbus ? It was rather pro- 
mising, in fact, that King Manuel thought so little of 
him. Besides his chart and detailed plan of the route, 
which he was pledged not to disclose in its entirety till 
Faleiro’s arrival, Magellan had with him, by way of 
establishing the genuineness of his record, the letters 
that Francisco Serrano had written to him from Ternate, 
and a black slave, Enrique, whom he had brought back 
to Portugal with him from Malacca, and who had 
become a Christian. Unlikely though this picturesque 
Enrique would seem to be, he was nevertheless quite 
authentic, for by his Will, executed before Magellan set 
forth on the great voyage, he bequeathed Enrique his 
manumission on the grounds of his having become a 
Christian, and a sum of money for his support. And 
he had a globe, perhaps that which had spun slowly in 



MAGELLAN APPLIES TO SPAIN 


57 

Faleiro’s cabinet of astronomy, and on it, very enticingly, 
were marked the Spice Islands within the hemisphere of 
Spanish dominion. ... 

Among these seamen and naval experts of Seville were 
many men of Portuguese birth who, like Magellan, had 
left their native land to seek in Spain the opportunities 
which they could not find in Lisbon ; we learn, indeed, 
that there came with him from Portugal many such 
sailors and sea-captains. But the implication that it 
was he who had induced them to come with hopes of 
partaking in some great adventure is extremely im- 
probable, for secrecy had been of the essence of his 
business, and till he got to Spain the very last thing 
that he would have done would have been to hint at it 
in the hearing of Portuguese ears. Immediately on his 
arrival at Seville he attracted the attention of a com- 
patriot, Diego Barbosa, who had come to Spain for pre- 
cisely the same reasons as he, namely that he could not 
get employment at Lisbon, and had now for fourteen 
years filled an important post as Superintendent of the 
Arsenal. Barbosa had seen service under King Manuel 
before his naturalization as a Spaniard, and his son, 
Duarte, had made several voyages in the Indian Seas, 
and had written a description of his adventures, which 
he had lately completed. It is probable that the Barbosas 
were related to Magellan, though the degree of kinship 
is uncertain, but that some near tie of blood existed is 
likely on credible grounds, and explains why, immediately 
on Magellan’s arrival at Seville, Diego Barbosa welcomed 
him as a permanent inmate of his house. 

The key to the whole of the scheme was, of course, 
the traverse of the strait which Magellan believed to 
provide the gate into the Pacific from the Atlantic, and 
this was the secret which Magellan had promised not 
to disclose till he had consulted with Faleiro. But he 
had gone to Seville in order to get support for the voyage ; 



58 FERDINAND MAGELLAN 

and, as soon as he arrived and was welcomed by Barbosa, 
he told him enough to arouse his keen interest, and to 
procure for Magellan an audience with the Board of the 
India House at Seville in order to lay his project before 
them. India House (so named not from Eastern and 
Portuguese India, but from the West Indies) was a 
bureau of information with regard to commerce and 
navigation, and its activities were mainly concerned with 
America, for Spain was concentrating all her maritime 
energies on her dominions in the New World. Magellan 
laid his proposition before the Board ; in it he offered 
to demonstrate the shortest route to the Spice Islands, 
and prove by the calculations he had made with Faleiro 
that they lay in the Spanish sphere. But, as covenanted 
with his partner, he gave them no precise information 
as to what was the key of the route. India House was 
glad to collect information as well as to furnish it to 
mariners ; it was part of its business to finance schemes 
of exploration which seemed to promise fresh revenue 
for Spain from her new dominions ; and we may safely 
say that there had never been submitted to the con- 
sideration of its very capable Board so startling a dossier. 
For the very cream and crown of the contents of the 
Portuguese Hemisphere, as at present accepted, was 
exactly that group of remote islands, dripping with 
fragrant wealth, which everyone knew must lie some- 
where very close to the slicing stroke of the Pontifical 
knife that had cut in two the orange of the world, of 
which one half belonged to Spain and the other to her 
neighbour. And now this rather grave young man, 
lately arrived from Portugal, short of stature and limp- 
ing, but with something certainly striking and compel- 
ling about him, told them that he could find a Spanish 
route to this El Dorado, and prove it to be Spanish terri- 
tory. He had a very good record of naval service, he 
had gone far East, and produced for their inspection 



MAGELLAN APPLIES TO SPAIN 


59 

some very interesting letters from a friend of his who 
had resided in the Spice Islands for seven years, and a 
black slave whom he had brought from Malacca. These 
all looked genuine ; moreover, Superintendent Diego 
Barbosa, a most respected official of the Arsenal, recom- 
mended this cousin of his to their notice, and that was 
in his favour. But when it came to a disclosure of his 
route he would not tell them how he proposed to reach 
the great South Sea from the Atlantic, and they could 
not judge of the feasibility of the scheme without know- 
ing that. There were three of them on the Board, and 
they talked the matter over, and came to the conclusion 
that they would not touch it. They had many wild and 
hare-brained schemes laid before them, all seeking to 
be financed, and this seemed one of them. They were 
busy, too, with providing ships and guns and money 
for missions the success of which was already assured, 
for nothing could be more satisfactorily real than the 
gold of America, and convoys must be arranged for its 
conveyance to the Spanish exchequer. Perhaps, too, 
as has been most acutely suggested, they were shy of a 
scheme which, if it had anything solid in it, would most 
certainly embroil the Spanish Government with Portugal, 
for Portugal had assumed that the Spice Islands were 
hers, with no protest from Spain, and would not lightly 
see her rights questioned. In other words, if Magellan’s 
scheme was fantastic it stood self-condemned ; while 
if it was sound it was perilous. But apart from that, 
his refusal to disclose where this new route lay must 
have irritated a Board whose speciality was geography. 

But there was one member of this Board who, though 
he acquiesced in its decision, which was based in the 
main on incredulity, was far more impressed than the 
others by the applicant : the parallel of Hans Sachs 
among the Mastersingers of Nuremberg, when they 
had blackballed Walther, suggests itself. Hans Sachs, 



6o 


FERDINAND MAGELLAN 


it -will be remembered, had heard in the song of the re- 
jected candidate for the Guild something new, something 
that revolutionized the accepted school of harmony, and 
as he mused on it he knew that a master of music had 
arisen. Just so did Juan d’ Aranda ponder over what 
this Portuguese sea-captain had told them, as being 
something far ahead of all that the pundits of India 
House knew about geography. All they knew was 
that the Spice Islands lay remotely east from Malacca, 
and that to Malacca there was no route but round the 
Cape of Good Hope, which was now the highway for 
Portuguese ships. But Magellan did not mean that : 
his route lay through Spanish waters. It could only 
be round the southern point of America, or through 
some passage there. . . . 

Magellan had gone back from the interview with the 
Board at India House to Barbosa, reporting failure. 
They had been civil, but otherwise he had prospered no 
more than he had done at his audience with King Manuel, 
which had driven him to Spain. Spain had no more 
use for him than Portugal, though he had held out for 
them such a lure as was not meet to show Manuel. But 
now he was back where he was before ; this great 
chance had come to nothing, he was unbelieved in, 
unwanted, and undaunted. And then there came a 
messenger from Seflor Juan d’ Aranda to say that he 
would like to see Captain Magellan. 

At this interview Aranda hinted, and made broad his 
hint, that he guessed where or whereabouts Magellan’s 
projected route lay. Otherwise Magellan, who had 
just refused to divulge the secret to the Board whom 
it was vital for him to interest in it, would not have 
divulged it, as he now did, to one of the men who had 
turned down his scheme. Aranda had thought it over 
and had guessed ; and, thus confronted with the secret 
which he had withheld from the Board, Magellan acknow- 



MAGELLAN APPLIES TO SPAIN 61 

ledged it. He also said that he had refused to answer 
the direct question put to him at India House because 
he was pledged to secrecy with his partner, Faleiro, whom 
he presently expected to join him from Lisbon. It is 
difficult to know what else he could have done : it was 
no use denying the truth of Aranda’s conjecture, for then 
Aranda would have been possessed of an idea of his own, 
which he could use as he pleased. Magellan would 
then, too, have repudiated the project on which, with 
Faleiro, he had spent years of work. His only chance 
of keeping his ownership of it was to admit Aranda into 
the secret, and this he did. “ Very proper,” said Aranda, 
“you did quite right, and your secret is safe with 
me.” 

Safe indeed it was, for Aranda had seen that here was 
something that might prove as colossally remunerative 
as the voyage of Columbus, and he had not the smallest 
intention of disseminating it. But with equal propriety, 
Aranda wrote to friends of his at Lisbon, making general 
inquiries about Magellan and his partner. Magellan 
had represented himself as being a master-navigator in 
practice, and claimed for his partner a knowledge of 
cosmography, of methods of taking solar and stellar 
observations, of the courses of the stars, which was 
unequalled by any man alive. 

At this critical juncture of cross-currents Faleiro 
arrived from Lisbon, and found that his partner’s applica- 
tion to India House had been unsuccessful. Magellan 
said nothing to him about Aranda’s having guessed the 
secret, and he did not know that inquiries were being 
made about them both in Lisbon. But Faleiro found 
that his partner had been more fortunate in the pursuit 
of romance than of finding backers. Magellan was 
already affianced to Beatriz Barbosa, daughter of his 
host, and the marriage took place before the year was 
out : that Barbosa, a man of standing, should consent to 



6 2 


FERDINAND MAGELLAN 


the marriage of his daughter with a penniless cousin was 
not, as we shall see, so surprising as it at first appears. 
But Faleiro, crusty and bachelor of habit, must have 
wondered whether those years of work were to be 
rewarded by his being asked to stand godfather. 

Aranda’s friends were prompt in answering his 
private inquiries, and their replies were satisfactory : 
Magellan’s record, as represented by him, was quite 
correct ; he had seen long and honourable service in the 
East, and had a thorough practical knowledge of naviga- 
tion ; Faleiro was a student of high reputation for his 
learning. Not a word was said of the iniquity and base- 
ness of those men in leaving their country and seeking 
employment in Spain, for, as has been already stated, 
not a soul in Portugal from King Manuel downwards 
cared a penny piece what they did with themselves : 
it was only when it became likely that Magellan’s 
abilities had been worth retaining that he became a 
master of villainy in leaving a country where he had been 
explicitly informed that he was not wanted. So, on the 
receipt of these testimonials, Aranda, highly excited, 
went to the partners and promised to do all he could to 
obtain the favour and support of the King of Spain 
himself for their voyage. Aranda, in fact, became their 
impressario, and they could not have had a better. 

It was now for the first time that Faleiro learned that 
Magellan, though sworn to secrecy, had told Aranda 
(or that Aranda had guessed) that the route by which 
they intended to reach the Spice Islands was westwards 
through the untraversed strait which they both believed 
to exist. He now gave a touch of his quality, and flew 
into a violent passion, accusing his partner of having 
violated his promise. It did not matter to him that the 
effect of this breach of faith had been to secure exactly 
what they both wanted, namely a powerful friend who 
would open an approach for them to the King, and he gave 



MAGELLAN APPLIES TO SPAIN 


63 

Magellan the rough side of a lunatic’s tongue. That 
Magellan had broken faith with him, though with so 
admirable a result, is indisputable, and it is impossible 
not to have some sympathy with Faleiro, especially since 
Magellan had not told him, on his arrival at Seville, what 
he had done. 

The quarrels between the partners were no concern 
of Aranda’s, and he at once wrote to Sauvage, Chancellor 
of Castile, asking him if he might bring Magellan, late 
of the Portuguese Navy, to see him with regard to an 
expedition which might prove of high profit to the King. 
Even before the answer arrived they all set off for Valla- 
dolid, where was King Charles, lately come from the 
Netherlands ; but Faleiro, still sulky and resentful, 
would not travel with Aranda, who went on ahead. He 
seems, however, to have acquiesced in Aranda’s paying 
all expenses. 

To what extent Aranda had disclosed the project to 
Chancellor Sauvage is nowhere recorded, but we may be 
quite certain that he withheld the information that His 
Majesty’s India House would not touch it. He had, 
however, said enough to interest that extremely astute 
and powerful person, whose reply, when it came, was 
favourable : he would like to know more about it. An 
enormous step was gained, the Chancellor was willing to 
listen to the scheme of these unknown refugees from 
Portugal, and this was entirely the work of Aranda. He 
therefore began to consider where he was to come in. 
After Magellan’s rebuff at India House, he and Faleiro had 
no more chance unaided of securing official recommenda- 
tion to the King, or of obtaining an influential audience for 
their scheme, than of reaching the moon : the moon was 
not less accessible than the Spice Islands. It was only 
reasonable that if, through Aranda’s agency, the scheme 
was taken up, and the partners and originators of it, as 
was the custom of the day, received a share in the eventual 



64 FERDINAND MAGELLAN 

profits of the voyage, he should get a slice of it. He 
was spending time, money and trouble on a speculative 
venture ; should he fail in getting it through, or should 
it prove unremunerative, his pains would be thrown 
away, and it was only just that if owing to his services 
it materialized he should have a share in the profits 
of the partners, Magellan and Faleiro. These, it is 
hardly necessary to state, might possibly be colossal. 
For if the voyage was successful, and Magellan pene- 
trated into the Pacific, all new islands he discovered there 
would be fresh jewels in the Crown of Spain, and would 
pay revenues to the King. Magellan & Co. would 
doubtless receive some percentage on such revenues 
should the King finance the scheme, and it was that on 
which Aranda staked. As a business man, he thought 
that this had better be settled now. 

So Aranda waited for the arrival of Magellan and 
Magellan’s wife and Faleiro at an inn within a day’s ride 
of Valladolid, and after dinner intimated that nothing 
had yet been settled about what he should receive (should 
there be any receipts) for his services. He proposed as 
a basis for discussion that if the Spanish Government 
financed the scheme, and paid Magellan & Co. a 
percentage on the profits of the voyage, he should 
receive one-fifth of that percentage. If, however, 
Magellan & Co., with merely the sanction of the 
Government, raised the money by private subscription 
from merchants or bankers, Aranda asked for nothing ; 
but in this case he intended to subscribe to the syndicate 
himself. Faleiro thereupon showed the consistency of 
his character by again flying into a violent passion, and 
swore, that he would not agree to Aranda’s receiving 
anything whatever : apparently it was to be considered 
sufficient reward for him to have had the privilege of 
helping Faleiro. Aranda’s estimate of the value of his 
services seems rather excessive : probably, according to 



MAGELLAN APPLIES TO SPAIN 6$ 

Spanish custom, he expected to be bargained with, and 
Magellan, totally disregarding Faleiro’s ridiculous out- 
burst, duly proposed that Aranda should receive one- 
tenth instead of one-fifth of their profits. So there were 
the two limits defined within which bargaining would 
take place. That was enough for the present ; and 
Aranda, following correct etiquette in these matters, said 
that if Magellan & Co. did not wish to give him anything 
he would still do his utmost to advance their cause, since 
he was thus serving the interests of the King. No one, 
of course, took that seriously : it only meant that Aranda 
wanted more than one-tenth. Accordingly he left the 
partners to talk it over, and rode on to Valladolid alone. 
Magellan & Co. joined him next day, and offered him 
one-eighth of their profits : he instantly accepted this 
(it was about half-way between the two limits) and drew 
up a formal agreement to confirm it. After this piece of 
refreshing comedy they all shook hands and got to 
business, Aranda continuing to pay expenses. 

Aranda had therefore become a subsidiary partner in 
the firm, and it was his business, serving his interests and 
theirs, to get hold of high and influential personages to 
whom the scheme was to be submitted, in order that 
they in turn might obtain the support of the boy-King 
Charles, who after a youth passed in his Netherlana 
dominions was now newly come to his Spanish realm. 
The first of these, from whom Aranda had already 
received an encouraging answer, was the Lord Chan- 
cellor of the Kingdom. The second, who might, if 
favourably impressed, be expected to exercise a private 
and domestic influence on the King, was Guillaume de 
Croy, His Majesty’s late tutor, to whose advice the 
King was accustomed to listen with docility. Both of 
these were from the Netherlands, and it was important 
to impress on them, a thing which one of the members 
of the Board of India House was well qualified to doj 

£ 



66 


FERDINAND MAGELLAN 


the vast enrichments that would accrue to His Majesty’s 
Spanish realm should undiscovered islands of the 
Pacific be added to it ; of the value of the possible 
acquisition of the Spice Islands it was hardly needful to 
speak. These two choices then were very sensible, but 
Aranda’s choice of the third patron for his company was 
more than sensible : it was a stroke of sheer genius. 
The third was the Most Noble Bishop Fonseca of Burgos, 
and Aranda brought the project of Magellan & Co. to 
his notice because when Columbus had offered his 
services to Spain, after Portugal had refused them, with 
his programme of finding a new world across the Atlantic, 
Bishop Fonseca, instead of supporting it, had pooh- 
poohed so delirious a design, declaring it to be the fan- 
tastic dream of a lunatic Italian. But the Italian had 
turned out not to be so lunatic, and now the fruits of his 
delirious design were pouring into Spain in the gold-laden 
ships from Nombre de Dios. Bishop Fonseca therefore, 
recalling his own unfortunate pronouncement and the 
sequel to it, would be the least likely of all Spanish 
magnates to err in that direction again. He was all for 
exploration now, and was indeed the Chairman of the 
Board of India House ; so Aranda came to him, as 
a member of that Board, feeling sure of an attentive hear- 
ing, and like a wise man he said nothing to the Bishop 
about Magellan’s scheme having been already turned 
down by his colleagues. 

The fourth of this new Board of Aranda’s forming, 
which he hoped would reverse the judgment of India 
House, was His Eminence Cardinal Adrian of Utrecht : 
he also was a Netherlander, and had had a hand in the 
young King’s education, and it seems clear that Aranda 
was getting private and personal influence to bear on 
the King, in case India House protested against the 
scheme they had already disapproved. But, with the 
Chancellor, Bishop Fonseca and the personal advisers 



MAGELLAN APPLIES TO SPAIN 


67 

of the King in support of it, India House might be con- 
sidered harmless. Again without attributing super- 
human sagacity to Aranda, he probably weighed the fact 
that Cardinal Adrian was a likely candidate for the 
Papacy (he eventually wore the tiara as that most in- 
conspicuous Pontiff, Adrian VI) and that if, as Magellan 
believed, the Spice Islands rightly belonged to Spain 
it would be useful, should trouble arise with Portugal, 
to have a Pope who would be inclined ex cathedra to 
support Spanish interests. Not a single one of these 
most eminent personages knew anything whatever about 
geography, but it was impossible to make a wiser choice 
(could their support be secured) of men who would have 
the ear of the King. The only one of them who had 
pronounced on geographical questions was the Bishop 
of Burgos and, since he had been so lamentably at fault 
in turning down the ideas of the last explorer who had 
been brought to his notice, it was almost certain that he 
would vote for backing up the next. Of the four he 
was the only one of Spanish birth, and his advocacy on 
such an affair, as Chairman of India House, would carry 
immense weight with the King. Aranda was certainly 
doing his very best to render his eighth share in the 
profits of the firm a valuable property. 

To all of these in turn the admirable Aranda took his 
two Portuguese, and to each of them Magellan expounded 
his scheme of sailing west to arrive at the East, and 
Enrique said a few words in Malayan, and Faleiro twirled 
the globe to show how far east of Spain the Spice Islands 
lay, so far east indeed that in truth they could more 
accurately be described as lying west of Spain, and that 
made a great impression : poor geographers as these 
great magnates were, they could see what that meant. 
But even now the strait was not shown on that globe ; 
though the strait was mentioned, it was more prudent 
not to mark it, for fear that one of these high lords might 



68 FERDINAND MAGELLAN 

take it into his head to equip an expedition himself and 
leave Magellan & Co. out in the cold, even as the per- 
fidious King John II of Portugal had turned down 
Columbus’s project and then fitted out three ships him- 
self to look into it. For at present the position of the 
strait (and that only conjecturally) was known to those 
alone who had studied the story and chart of the voyage 
of Christopher Jacques, which was deposited in the 
library at Lisbon ; and it was news to the Spanish that 
such a corridor into the great South Sea existed at all. 
But granted the existence of such a means of access, the 
prospect opened for Spanish expansion in the west of 
America and in the ocean beyond was almost limitless. 
Already Spain had contemplated the digging of a canal 
through the Isthmus of Panama in order to reach the 
coasts and islands beyond, but the survey of it had shown 
how immense that undertaking would be. But, if 
Nature had already provided this access, there would be 
passage for Spanish ships to the huge uncharted lands 
and seas that lay in her dominion, and crowning all these 
expansions came Magellan’s assertion, as demonstrated 
on the globe, that the Spice Islands were anchored in it. 
Moreover, the route lay in Spanish waters : their ships 
might explore westwards without giving Portugal the 
smallest justification for remonstrance, whereas the only 
known route at present to that coveted and fragrant 
group lay eastwards, and any attempt of Spain to reach 
them through the passage by Malacca would at once 
arouse a proper opposition. As soon as they had 
heard Magellan’s exposition, each of Aranda's selected 
audience, Sauvage, Croy, the Cardinal and the Bishop 
of Burgos, gave the scheme their support and promised 
to recommend it without delay to His Majesty’s Govern- 
ment and to the King himself. But far the most valuable 
of these allies was the Bishop of Burgos. He was a man 
of grinding force, he was the Chairman of India House, 







MAGELLAN APPLIES TO SPAIN 69 

and he was not going to repeat the error he had made 
with regard to Columbus. 

By the prestige and the energy of Aranda so much 
was accomplished within a day or two of the arrival of 
Magellan & Co. at Valladolid, and it is said that he 
immediately obtained an audience for Magellan with 
the King. But this is not very probable, for the whole 
object of these diplomacies, which were proceeding so 
admirably, was to get the scheme put before the King by 
just such weighty counsellors as Aranda had selected, 
and by his Government. The next step, then, was that 
these counsellors and the Government should jointly 
hear about the project, and Magellan and Faleiro were 
summoned to appear before this combined committee. 
So, still without disclosing the supposed position of the 
strait, Magellan repeated the arguments which had 
already proved so convincing, and added that even if he 
found no strait he would sail on till the continent of 
America came to an end, even as Africa had proved to 
do, and pass by open sea into the Pacific : he would be 
the Diaz of America. Then came that lure to which 
no Spaniard could fail to flutter, namely the rightful 
ownership of the Spice Islands. To colour his sketch 
he read the letters from his friend, Serrano, about the 
wealth that exceeded that of India, and produced Christian 
Enrique, who had returned with him from Malacca. 

The Government debated on the scheme, and once 
more Aranda’s sagacity in getting hold of the Bishop of 
Burgos was justified. Largely owing to his insistence 
it was resolved to recommend it to the King as meriting 
his favour and support. Magellan and Faleiro were 
recalled and ordered to draw up a statement in writing, 
such as they had just delivered, to be laid before him. 
It began to look as if King Manuel would have good 
reason to regret that he had been quite so contemptu- 
ously ready to allow the first navigator of the world to 



7 © 


FERDINAND MAGELLAN 


take his goods to another market rather than give him 
another shilling a month. There is nothing so expensive 
as economy. 

In these preliminary steps for getting the Royal assent 
and support for this gigantic scheme of two penniless 
Portuguese adventurers, there is nothing more surpris- 
ing than the speed with which the affair was bustled 
along. Two of its sponsors, Aranda and the Bishop of 
Burgos, were certainly possessed of that indefinable 
quality called “ drive,” which compels others to work 
for them, but to get a job of this kind through the various 
rings of officialdom which surrounded His Spanish 
Majesty it was usually necessary to bribe heavily and 
repeatedly, in order to secure any progress at all. Yet, 
though Magellan and Faleiro had not left Seville till 
towards the end of January, 1518, with a scheme that 
had failed to secure the favour of India House, February 
was not yet over before they were drawing up a pro- 
position regarding the voyage which the Government 
had pledged themselves to recommend to the King. 
This briskness is the more remarkable when we remember 
that Magellan had produced no evidence to prove or 
even render probable the existence of the strait : he had 
not disclosed where he believed it to lie ; his mere 
assertion that it would furnish a short cut, and that 
through Spanish waters, into the ocean beyond, where 
lay the undiscovered treasure-grounds of the Spanish 
Hemisphere, was sufficient to set the wheels of the 
Government turning for him without stay or stoppages. 
We may reasonably infer that he, and perhaps the irritable 
astronomer as well, had the gift of inspiring confidence 
which marks off the men who lead from those who follow. 

Though the sponsors of the scheme whom Aranda 
had manipulated so successfully knew nothing of geo- 
graphy, there came to Valladolid during February, while 
Magellan & Co. were employed in drawing up the 



MAGELLAN APPLIES TO SPAIN 


7 * 


dossier for the King, a man who of all others in the world 
could most convincingly endorse Magellan’s assertion 
about the existence of the strait ; his arrival, in fact, 
just then was one of those strokes of luck which always 
seem reserved for the strong and the competent. This 
was Christopher de Haro, who sixteen years before 
had been a member of the syndicate which financed the 
Portuguese expedition under Christopher Jacques to 
the coasts of South America. That expedition, as we 
have already noticed, had gone far south along the 
shores of Brazil and beyond, and the account of its 
exploration, translated from the Portuguese into German, 
had caused Johann Schoner of Nuremberg to mark on 
his globe a strait leading from the Atlantic into 
the Pacific. As one of the syndicate which furnished 
this expedition, Haro must certainly have known that 
Jacques had conjectured or claimed to have found this 
strait. Nothing therefore could have been more fortu- 
nate for Magellan than the arrival at Valladolid just now 
of this very solid and respectable Spanish trader who 
believed in the strait as firmly as Magellan, and whose 
opinion, for these reasons, was bound to carry weight. 
He also considered it certain that the Spice Islands lay 
in the Spanish Hemisphere, and at the interview which he 
and Magellan were given by the King told His Majesty 
that he thought it quite possible that Malacca might 
prove to belong to him also. The notion of Portugal 
being deprived of the richest of her possessions and 
the Eastern gate to it must have been very entertaining 
and pleasant to Haro ; for, like many others who did 
business with King Manuel, he had lately suffered from 
the King’s intolerable meanness over money matters, 
and had been treated by him in the scurviest manner 
over some trading contract. Like Magellan, who had 
similarly suffered, he had left Portugal and sought fairer 
treatment in Spain, and thus his support of Magellan 



72 FERDINAND MAGELLAN 

fitted in most conveniently with his desire to get even 
with King Manuel. 

But the chief stimulus which hurried on the official 
Spanish authorization of the voyage without delays and 
payments at every official toll-gate was the immensity 
of the prospect which the scheme disclosed, and the 
urgent necessity of getting it put through and on its 
way before Portugal could get wind of it and raise the 
opposition which would inevitably ensue. The Govern- 
ment were the first to appreciate the paramount import- 
ance of haste, and for once a petition passed through 
the avenues of Royal approach without paying black- 
mail to the crowd of noble middlemen who surrounded 
the King. For if maritime access to the islands and 
coasts of the Pacific, and, to crown all, the sovereignty 
over the Spice Islands, depended on the plans of Magellan 
& Co., the sooner they set sail from Seville the better. 
When once they had found their proposed route there 
by Spanish waters, and verified their claim, there would 
be pickings for everybody. Swarms of officials at suitable 
salaries would be needed, the Government would see 
that these gentlemen (largely themselves) who had re- 
commended the scheme to the King, and opened for 
Spain the door into so vast an El Dorado, should not 
lack the due recognition of their services, and the sooner 
these just claims were registered for settlement, the 
more quickly would come to them their reward. Besides, 
there was the duty of patriots to urge them on : at 
present Portugal was reaping huge revenues from the 
Spice Islands which belonged by right, in virtue of the 
Papal disposition of the world, to Spain. He would 
be a traitor to his country who, for the sake of an imme- 
diate aggrandizement, kept Spain out of the patrimonies 
bequeathed her by Holy Father. It was amusing, too, 
to reflect that the paltry greed of poor King John of 
Portugal had caused the line of demarcation through the 



MAGELLAN APPLIES TO SPAIN 


73 


Atlantic, as originally defined by the Pope, to be shifted 
further west, for it was that very alteration which, though 
it gave Portugal a larger slice of Brazil, might prove 
to have put the Spice Islands out of her hemisphere. 
That was humorous, though no one would expect King 
Manuel to appreciate it. For all these reasons, and 
especially because Portugal would certainly put every 
obstacle in the way of the expedition sailing at all, as 
soon as she got wind of it, every facility was given to the 
petition reaching the King as soon as possible, and every 
support in its favour when it got there. Let Captain 
Magellan and his partner make it ready with all speed. 




CHAPTER V 


KING CHARLES APPROVES 

IE proposals which Magellan & Co. 
had been enjoined by the Govern- 
ment to draw up for the King’s con- 
sideration stated the object of the 
expedition as already defined, and 
comprised two alternative schemes 
for its execution. The first was that 
the King should equip the expedi- 
tion, furnishing all the costs of it, and grant the origi- 
nators of it certain royalties or percentages on its fruits ; 
the second that it should be privately financed, and that 
the King should grant the syndicate a ten years’ lease of 
the countries and islands discovered by it and lying in 
the Spanish sphere, and that in return for the granting 
of this privilege he should receive a fifth part of the 
revenues derived from them. At the end of ten years 
these dominions would become Crown property. This 
second proposal, which had been out of the question 
when first Magellan brought his scheme before the 
Board of India House, was possible now, because 
wealthy and influential men in Spain, and especially 
Haro, who was at the head of an enormous trading- 
business, believed in it and were ready to back it. 
Monarchs of the sixteenth century, when so much of 
the surface and the wealth of the world were in process 
of discovery, were accustomed to extend their terri- 
tories and finance their treasuries by either of these 
systems of contract, and Magellan & Co, in submitting 

74 





KING CHARLES APPROVES 


75 

these alternatives to His Majesty were following the 
ordinary course of procedure. It was at the King’s 
pleasure to adopt whichever he preferred. He chose 
to equip the expedition himself, and on March 22nd, 
1 5 1 8, a courier arrived from the Palace bearing a packet 
for Captain Magellan, now naturalized a Spaniard, and 
the King’s most loyal servant. It contained the con- 
tract as between King Charles of Spain and Magellan & 
Co. in the matter of this voyage, and it bore the signature 
of the King. 

Considering the strong support the scheme had re- 
ceived, the King’s choice was a most natural one. For 
his Government believed that the expedition would 
prove colossally remunerative, that it would result in the 
addition of countless islands and square miles of terri- 
tory, and would bring into the Spanish Exchequer the 
immense revenues which Portugal now derived from 
the Spice Islands. It was therefore far more to the 
advantage of the Crown to equip the expedition itself, 
and after paying certain royalties, generous in their terms, 
to Magellan & Co., to reap the whole of the harvest. 
For, should the expenses of the voyage be furnished 
by private subscribers, they would naturally be entitled 
to the bulk of the profits, and the Crown only receive 
percentages. The King would doubtless have been 
advised to adopt this latter alternative had his Council 
thought that the expedition was likely to yield only 
moderate profits, or if they believed that its success was 
highly speculative, for in this case the King would not 
have been put to any expense in the matter, nor have 
lost the money he had spent on it, if it proved to be a 
failure. 

Again the King’s choice, as approved by his Council, 
to equip the expedition himself, shows that the fear of 
its leading to an embroilment with Portugal, which un- 
doubtedly existed and had possibly been one of the 



76 FERDINAND MAGELLAN 

reasons why India House had turned it down, was now 
considered not to be so very serious, especially if the 
expedition could be started quietly and speedily. For, 
when the Council looked into this further, there really 
did not seem any reason to anticipate trouble until the 
expedition got back with the most welcome news that 
the Spice Islands really belonged to Spain. For Magellan 
was about to sail west through Spanish waters, and 
being now a Spaniard he had every right, should the 
King of Spain entrust him with a few ships, to sail to 
America and do his business there, and the King had 
every right to send him there. If he came back with 
the hoped-for news, then indeed Portugal might raise an 
outcry, but the Spice Islands were well worth a little un- 
pleasantness with a neighbour. And yet even then the 
position of the Spice Islands was not the fault of Spain : 
Spain had not put them there ; and, if anyone was to 
blame for their proving to belong to her, it was greedy 
King John II, who had been so urgent that Pope 
Alexander’s line of demarcation should be shifted 
further west on this side of the globe and therefore east 
on the other. 

This view, as outlined above, on the status of Royal 
and private expeditions of discovery and annexation, 
and on the reasons why King Charles decided to send 
Magellan out as on the service of Spain, is well illus- 
trated by comparison with English expeditions sent out 
under the auspices (or not) of Queen Elizabeth. Many 
of these, like Francis Drake’s voyage to Nombre de 
Dios, were frankly piratical, their object being to lay 
hands on gold-bearing Spanish convoys from Panama, 
or on treasure-ships returning with their cargoes. They 
were exceedingly likely to give rise to trouble with 
Spain, and therefore Elizabeth did not send them out as 
national ventures, nor did she officially equip them. She 
was thus able to state to the Spanish Ambassador at the 



KING CHARLES APPROVES 


77 


Court of St. James’s that she was in no way responsible 
for them. Drake’s voyage round the world which re- 
sulted in such amazing loot was another of these private 
ventures, and when, before his return, reports came of 
the Spanish ships he had sunk in the Pacific, and of the 
gold he had taken from them, Elizabeth declared again 
and again that she had nothing to do with that monster. 
Officially that was true, but actually it was very far from 
being the case, for though as Queen of England she had 
granted him no charter, and had not commissioned the 
“ Golden Hind,” as Miss Elizabeth Tudor she was a 
member, and an extremely greedy one, of the syndicate 
that had financed him. She even sailed nearer the line 
between Queen and private shareholder than that, for she 
leased him rather antiquated ships of her navy in lieu of 
cash, with which, like King Manuel, she was always loath 
to part, and valued them at an outrageously high figure, 
as her private subscription. These expeditions, more- 
over, which would certainly have caused international 
trouble between England and Spain if she had officially 
equipped them, could not possibly lead to such stupen- 
dous profits as the Spanish Government of King Charles 
expected to result from Magellan’s voyage : no rich 
slice of the world’s surface would be added to English 
territory, and so, both to avoid foreign complications 
and because there was no colossal enrichment of the 
realm in view, Elizabeth dissociated herself from them, 
though she extended a feverish shareholder’s hand when 
they came back laden with King Philip II’s gold. But 
Magellan’s project promised territories and perpetual 
revenues, it was in no way piratical, and its ultimate 
object was to take careful observations as to the longitude 
of the Spice Islands. So King Charles openly god- 
fathered it, and financed it out of his Royal exchequer ; 
but, though his conscience may have been quite clear, 
it must be admitted that he soon exhibited the greatest 



78 


FERDINAND MAGELLAN 


impatience to get it safely away, before Portugal had 
grasped the import of its destination. That very 
natural wish was not fated to be realized. 

The crucial document which was delivered to Magellan 
at Valladolid on March 22nd, 1518, was prefaced by a 
short preamble defining in the most prudent and un- 
exceptional manner the general object of the expedition 
to which the King now gave his assent and support, and 
may be detailed in full, since it gives evidence as to the 
imperial importance which Spain attached to the voyage, 
ana to the correctness of the King’s conduct in financing 
it. He was not going to make any trespass on the 
dominions assigned to his Brother of Portugal, and was 
only proposing innocently to explore in his own. The 
fact that the acquisition of the Spice Islands was the 
main objective of the voyage therefore need not be men- 
tioned, for, if Magellan succeeded in proving that they 
were in the Spanish sphere, no trespass would have been 
committed on the territories of Portugal. . . . We may 
picture the Bishop of Burgos assuming his most pre- 
latical and fatherly expression as he worded this clause, 
and Cardinal Adrian of Utrecht agreeing that it was 
very well put. The preamble ran thus : 

The King : 

Since you, Fernando de Magellanes, a Knight native 
of the Kingdom of Portugal, and the bachelor Ruy 
Faleiro, also a native of that kingdom, wish to render 
Us a great service in the limits which belong to Us in 
the ocean of Our demarcation, We order the follow- 
ing Capitulation to be established with you for that 
purpose. 

The Capitulation (or contract) then follows ; it is 
rather an involved document, and for the sake of clearness 
may be split up into heads : 



KING CHARLES APPROVES 


79 

(i) Magellan & Co. are hereby empowered to make 
discoveries in the ocean (Pacific) belonging to the 
King of Spain. Since they are undertaking the 
labours of this voyage, the King covenants that 
he will not authorize any other person to proceed 
on a voyage of discovery by the same route for 
a period of ten years, without first giving 
Magellan & Co. the option of fitting out another 
such expedition themselves. But Spanish ex- 
plorers will have the right to sail in the same 
direction (south-west) by way of lands already 
discovered. 

(ii) Magellan & Co. shall not pursue their discoveries 

or otherwise operate within the demarcation and 
limits of the most serene King of Portugal to his 
prejudice. 

(iii) The King grants to Magellan & Co., in con- 

sideration of their services, five per cent, of the 
net revenues (after all expenses have been paid) 
derived from lands discovered by them. He 
also grants them the title of Adelantados or 
Governors of such lands. These titles are to 
be hereditary and borne by their heirs for ever 
so long as such heirs are of Spanish nationality, 
and marry Spanish wives. The patent will be 
executed and sent to them. 

(iv) Magellan & Co. shall have the right to purchase 

at cost price, every year, a thousand ducats’ 
worth of Spanish goods to sell in these islands 
and countries, and may bring back the produce 
(spices, &c.) which they purchase with them, 
without paying any duty beyond five per cent, 
of their value. This article shall not be held 
to apply to their first voyage. 

(v) Should Magellan & Co. discover more tha n 

six islands, they shall have the privilege after 



uu 


rnKUjuNAJND MAGELLAN 


assigning these six islands to the King, to choose 
for themselves any other two of the remainder, 
and appropriate from these one-fifteenth part net 
of all revenues and duties derived therefrom. 

(vi) The King assigns to Magellan & Co. twenty per 

cent, of all profits resulting from this first voyage, 
after expenses have been paid. 

(vii) For this first voyage of Magellan & Co., the King 

undertakes to equip five ships, two of one 
hundred and thirty tons, two of ninety tons and 
one of sixty tons. He will furnish these with 
paid crews amounting in all to two hundred and 
thirty-four persons : he will provide them with 
victuals for two years, and with artillery and all 
other gear needful. The King will order his 
India House at Seville to carry out this clause, 
(viii) If either of the members of the firm Magellan & 
Co. shall die, the surviving partner shall carry 
out all the enactments contained in this Capitu- 
lation. 

(ix) Accounts of all expenses shall be kept by persons 
appointed for that purpose. 

A further Royal order bearing the same date, and 
signed by the King, the Chancellor and the Bishop of 
Burgos, conferred on Magellan the power of executing 
summary justice by sea and land. This gave him power 
of life and death over all his officers and crews. Magellan 
and Faleiro were also given the titles of Captains-General 
of the fleet at an annual salary. 

Now this contract must certainly be considered not 
only fair but generous, and so it doubtless seemed to 
Magellan, Instead of being dumped down at Lisbon 
at the age of thirty-eight, under a master who in spite 
of his long and honourable services had refused to give 
him further employment, and had snubbed him with 



KING CHARLES APPROVES 81 

the utmost of unkingly contempt, he found himself, 
within six months of the day when he had left Portugal 
in search of service with Spain, entrusted with the 
supreme command of five ships, and with the King’s 
charter authorizing him to set forth on an adventure as 
“ brave and new ” as that on which Bartholomew Diaz 
h ad started more than forty years ago from Lisbon. 
Indeed the scope of the two was somewhat similar, for 
just as Diaz set forth to find the way round Africa into 
the East and the Indian seas, so now Magellan was to 
sail round the unknown South of America, or through 
the strait which he believed existed there, to find a way 
westwards into the sea beyond ; but, whereas Diaz’s 
voyage was over when once he proved there was a way 
round the Cape of Good Hope, this passage into the 
Pacific was no more than the first stage in Magellan’s 
far vaster undertaking. So now, instead of mildewing 
his manhood away in idleness, he was in charge of an 
adventure far greater than could have been offered him 
in Portugal, even though he had enjoyed the highest 
favour of the King, for Portugal had penetrated to the 
easternmost limit of her assigned dominion, and had, so 
Magellan was convinced, gone far beyond it, and no 
conundrum of navigation in Portuguese waters could 
approach in magnitude and importance the task which 
he had been entrusted to execute for Spain. Instead, 
too, of being denied the paltriest of increases in a clerk’s 
wage, he was promoted to a handsomely paid post as 
Captain-General in the career he loved, with the prospect 
of hereditary titles and immense dividends to be earned 
if he succeeded ; as for the rise in rank which King 
Manuel had scornfully refused him, King Charles 
dubbed him Knight of the Order of St. James. He had 
married the only daughter of a man of place and position 
in Seville, a countryman of his own, who, like him, had 
despaired of making a career under the niggardly and 

F 



82 


FERDINAND MAGELLAN 


suspicious Manuel, and already he expected a child who 
should inherit the honours he hoped to gain. Indeed, 
fate had looked on him luminously since the day when, 
stung to the quick with the whispered gibes of King 
Manuel’s Court, he had limped out of the Presence dis- 
carded and despised : now the King of this country of 
his adoption received him with great honour, and gave 
him posts and emoluments and promises of which the 
brightness dazzled. 

As well as being generous towards the partners, the 
contract showed considerable shrewdness, for though 
Magellan and his heirs were granted perpetual revenues 
from such islands as he might discover, and a hereditary 
Governorship over them, it was stipulated that those to 
whom these honours and emoluments might descend 
should be of Spanish birth, and marry Spanish wives. 
The condition was very reasonable, for otherwise a son 
or a remoter descendant of Magellan might revert to the 
original nationality of his family and thus draw revenues, 
and those perhaps of enormous size, from the Spanish 
exchequer. As we shall see from the Will which 
Magellan executed before setting out on this voyage, 
being then the father of a son by Beatriz Barbosa, and 
expecting another child, he devised all estates and 
honours that might come to him from this voyage in 
accordance with the Capitulation, providing also for 
such future contingencies as the death of his children, 
in accordance with its spirit. This clause perhaps 
throws some light on Magellan’s marriage ; for, 
though one of his biographers tells us that it was a love- 
affair of passion and splendour, our complete absence of 
information about it must make us cautious in affirming 
that. But now we see that this voyage was considered 
to be pregnant with immense wealth for its promoter ; 
a second Columbus had possibly arisen, and we can 
understand that Barbosa, who from the first believed in 



KING CHARLES APPROVES 


83 

Magellan’s project, was not averse from his daughter 
marrying a man who, though for the moment a penniless 
Portuguese refugee, might easily turn out to be a very 
prince among possible sons-in-law. Again, on Magellan’s 
side it was essential that he should marry a Spanish 
woman if his heirs were to enjoy such emoluments ; and 
thus the marriage was a very sensible one, and we can 
see the sense in it. It may, of course, have been a 
passionate love-affair as well. 

Shrewd, also, was the framing of the clause that 
Magellan & Co. should not operate in Portuguese 
waters to the prejudice of King Manuel ; for, though 
the most lucrative object of the expedition was the 
acquisition of the most valuable of the Portuguese 
islands, the basic idea was to prove that they lay within 
the Spanish Hemisphere, and therefore no operations 
would be taking place in Portuguese waters at all, 
though nothing could possibly be more prejudicial to 
Portugal than what the King so fervently hoped would 
take place in Spanish waters. But, in a further docu- 
ment signed by the King on April 9th, he abandoned 
the discretion he had shown in the wording of his Capitu- 
lation and in its preamble, and gave specific instructions 
to his two new Captains-General that they should make 
those coveted islands of the Moluccas, the Spice Islands 
themselves, their first and foremost goal, to be reached 
without loss of time. For secrecy was no longer possible : 
Magellan, as ordered, had presented to the India House 
at Seville the Capitulation which charged it to equip 
the fleet, of which the King had appointed Sir Ferdinand 
Magellan and Sir Ruy Faleiro Captains-General, with 
all speed. The matter of the approaching voyage thus 
became public knowledge in Seville and in Valladolid, 
and Alvaro da Costa, Portuguese Ambassador to King 
Charles of Spain, instantly informed King Manuel what 
was on foot. Possibly His Majesty might remember a 



S 4 


FERDINAND MAGELLAN 


halting little man named Ferdinand Magellan whom, 
nearly three years ago, he had dismissed from his service : 
it was less likely that he should ever have heard of one 
Ruy Faleiro, a shady astrologer. But these two obscure 
personages were now in the employment of the King of 
Castile, and were commissioned to command a fleet of 
five ships, and sail it by some westward route into the 
Great South Sea. Their eventual destination was the 
Spice Islands. Faleiro — Sir Ruy Faleiro of the Order 
of St. James — was a mere student, though learned in the 
sciences of the stars. The person who mattered was 
Magellan. 

Now King Manuel, it must be once more repeated, 
had told Magellan, with every circumstance of con- 
tempt, that he had no thought of giving him promotion 
or employment, that he had no use for his services and 
that he might take himself and them wherever he pleased. 
But when, in sequel to this permission, it appeared that 
his Brother of Spain was glad to avail himself of these 
services, and was intending to employ them on a very 
novel and important mission, the possible value of them 
seemed to change. At first when King Manuel heard 
that the course of this proposed expedition was to steer 
south-west from Seville, and that its goal was undoubtedly 
the Spice Islands, he pooh-poohed the possibility of its 
reaching the Pacific at all : the only route to the Pacific 
was eastwards through Portuguese waters, the Indian 
seas and through the gate of Malacca. But presently 
there began to dawn on him a most unpleasant uneasi- 
ness on the subject, based on some half-forgotten memory 
that there had once been some talk of a strait in the re- 
motest parts of South America which was supposed to 
lead into the great South Sea. Perhaps he had search 
made among the records of voyages in the Library at 
Lisbon, and there was the Portuguese pamphlet describ- 
ing the voyage of Christopher Jacques, and the chart on 



KING CHARLES APPROVES 85 

which was marked the mouth of a strait. It is certain, 
at any rate, that at first King Manuel laughed at the 
idea of Magellan finding a strait there, and that soon he 
laughed no more, but took it very seriously, and did all 
that he could to stop the voyage. That the rediscovery 
of this pamphlet was the actual cause of his change of 
attitude is only conjecture, but it seems to fit the case. 
He gave instructions to Alvaro da Costa to seek audience 
with King Charles, and represent King Manuel’s mind 
on the subject with great firmness. These instructions 
are not extant, but we can infer from Costa’s report what 
they were. They certainly included an intimation that 
he should remind King Charles that a marriage between 
his sister, the Infanta Leonora, and King Manuel had 
only just been arranged and ratified. It would be a 
pity to bring discord into so happy and harmonious an 
alliance. 

Costa accordingly had his interview with King Charles, 
and in a letter to his master dated the twenty-eighth of 
September, 1518, he reported what had occurred at it, 
and the sequel. He had spoken very firmly to the King, 
telling him that it was most unseemly for him to receive 
the subjects of another King who was his friend and who 
very much objected to his doing so. This was a peculiarly 
ungracious thing to do when His Majesty of Portugal 
was about to cement their ties of friendship by marrying 
his sister. He therefore begged King Charles not to 
employ these discontented refugees from Portugal whom 
King Manuel (who knew them) suspected would only 
do him a disservice. Neither Magellan nor Faleiro (so 
said Costa) wanted to serve King Charles, but asked 
leave to return to Portugal. Costa therefore begged the 
King to let them go. 

Now these two statements, that King Manuel sus- 
pected that Magellan would do King Charles a dis- 
service, and that Magellan and Faleiro had both asked 



86 


FERDINAND MAGELLAN 


leave to return to Portugal, were really remarkable lies. 
What King Manuel suspected was not that Magellan 
& Co. would do his Brother a disservice, but a service 
of the most immense value. As for Magellan desiring 
to return to Portugal, there was nothing in the world 
that he desired less, though King Manuel would have 
been very glad to get him there. The object of these 
two magnificent falsehoods, however, is clear enough, 
and was certainly clear to King Charles. Costa wanted 
to discredit Magellan with the King, and probably this 
pleasing device for so doing had been agreed upon between 
him and King Manuel. But it grievously failed in pro- 
ducing the desired effect, for (as Costa goes on to tell 
King Manuel) the King seemed so much surprised that 
he was astonished. He said that he wished on no 
account to annoy King Manuel, and was very polite, but 
he now closed the interview by referring Costa to Cardinal 
Adrian. The King, in fact, did not believe a word Costa 
said. 

This interview then was not very successful : it 
handicaps a diplomatist, should he wish to tell the truth, 
to have been detected telling lies, for the chances are 
now against his credibility. But Costa hoped to fare 
better with Cardinal Adrian, for he had already talked 
matters over with him, and knew he was not very keen 
on this voyage : for this reason Costa informs King 
Manuel that the Cardinal “ is the best thing here.” 
Unfortunately for the interests of Portugal, the Bishop 
of Burgos was called in to confer, and that forcible 
prelate was in his most domineering mood. He went 
straight off to the King when he heard Costa’s business, 
and came back to say that His Majesty was behaving 
perfectly correctly. He was only sending out this ex- 
pedition to operate within his own assigned dominions, 
and Manuel ought not to take it ill that he made use 
of two of his vassals, “ men of little substance,” while he 



KING CHARLES APPROVES 87 

himself employed many natives of Castile. Out he went 
again, and the faint-hearted Cardinal confessed that it 
was really no use. The King was completely under the 
thumb of these energetic people, who were in favour of 
the voyage. 

Costa’s letter cannot have brought much encourage- 
ment to King Manuel. He concludes by recommend- 
ing him to get hold of Magellan somehow. ..." That 
would be a great buffet to these people.” Faleiro, he 
says, does not matter, he is next door to a lunatic : the 
man who matters is Magellan. . . . This depressing 
report was debated on by King Manuel’s Council, and 
they decided that efforts should be made to bribe Magellan 
to return to Lisbon, as Costa suggested. Failing that, 
the best thing would be to get him assassinated. The 
Bishop of Lamego moved this pious resolution : he 
was a sensible, practical man, and was presently promoted 
to the Archbishopric of Lisbon. 

Magellan and Faleiro meantime, after the signing of 
the Capitulation in March, and the delivery of the King’s 
instructions to India House to prepare the equipment 
of the fleet, had been in attendance on the King for 
further conference and consultation. But India House, 
the Board of which had already rejected the scheme, was 
not being very zealous over the matter, and in July, 1518, 
the two left the Court, and went to Seville to superintend 
and hurry on the preparations. They carried with them 
an autograph letter from the King, which ordered that 
the instructions of his Captains-General, who delivered 
it, were to be carried out with precision and despatch. 
It mattered not at all to His Majesty what the honour- 
able Board thought about it : they were to do what 
Magellan told them. This reminder was a well- 
merited rap over the knuckles, for the Board of India 
House, as we have seen, had disapproved of this expedi- 
tion when Magellan submitted it to them on his first 



88 


FERDINAND MAGELLAN 


arrival, only a few months ago, at Seville, and this re- 
versal of their decision by the King and the Ministers 
of the Crown, to whom a fuller exposition of it had been 
submitted, had been taken as a pointed and unfavour- 
able comment on their judgment. So, though in March 
orders had been sent to them that preparations for the 
voyage should be put in hand at once, their zeal had 
been of the most tepid sort, and nothing particular had 
been done except to send minutes and queries to the 
Government. But the King’s letter and the arrival of 
Magellan, that silent driver of men, briskened them up, 
for the King, no less than he, was in a hurry to get the 
expedition under sail as soon as possible, so that, in 
answer to the growing Portuguese remonstrances, he 
might reply with polite regrets that the voyagers were 
already on the high seas. 

By the terms of the Capitulation (Clause vii) the King 
had promised his Captains-General five ships, and now, 
without further delay from India House, Aranda pur- 
chased them, and the necessary repairs and equipment 
of them began. These ships were the “ Santo Antonio ” 
of 120 tons, the “ Trinidad ” of x 10 tons, the “ Concep- 
cion ” of 90 tons, the “ Victoria ” of 85 tons and the 
“ Santiago ” of 75 tons. Though not quite coming up 
to the tonnage stipulated for in the Capitulation, they 
approached it very nearly, and Magellan selected as 
his flagship not the “ Santo Antonio ” which was the 
largest, but the “ Trinidad,” as being a handier and 
more seaworthy vessel. They were all old ships much 
patched up, and were at once beached for repairs. But 
it must be presumed that they seemed good enough to 
Magellan. All therefore appeared to promise well : the 
authorities of India House, wholesomely stimulated by 
the peremptory letter from the King, were now doing 
their best to speed departure, but not till their five ships 
finally cleared the bar of the river fourteen months later, 



KING CHARLES APPROVES 89 

in September, 1519, did a day pass on which some 
obstruction had not to be crushed or circumvented by 
Magellan. The storms and hazards which he encoun- 
tered on the great adventure were not more difficult to 
weather than those which assailed him in his preparations 
to meet them. 

The most menacing and dangerous of these were the 
gales that came bellowing out of Portugal. All this 
summer, ever since the destination of Magellan’s voyage 
was known, King Manuel’s Ambassador had been using 
the utmost arts of diplomacy and the falsehoods which 
were its usual weapons to dissuade the King of Spain 
from bestowing his patronage on Magellan, but these, 
the ill-success of which, as we have seen, was recorded 
in Costa’s letter to King Manuel, were not the only 
means employed to procure the abortion of this expedi- 
tion, which month by month ripened towards its birth. 
The direct appeal, however, to King Charles, which had 
failed, did not result in any rupture between the Kings, 
for in November of this year, 1518, King Manuel 
married the Infanta Leonora, a girl of twenty, and thirty 
years his junior, making her the third official partner of 
his bed, and the nuptials were celebrated with pompous 
cordiality. But King Manuel, who was notorious for 
never trusting anybody, did not see in this new tie with 
Spain any guarantee of her friendly relations, and he 
was as determined to stop this expedition as was his 
brother-in-law to proceed with it. Though he had laid 
down in Costa’s representations to King Charles that it 
yras a very villainous thing for a friendly monarch to 
'employ the services of a denaturalized subject of his 
Brother, that had proved a fruitless argument. It was 
also quite unsound, for Portuguese were often naturalized 
as Spaniards, and Spaniards as Portuguese : the practice 
was quite common. King Manuel therefore began to 
work with methods less direct, and so more dangerous, 



9