262 



DISCOVERY 



The First Voyage Round 

 the World 



By R. T. Clark, M.A. 



Four hundred years ago, on September 6, a tiny ship 

 of eighty-five tons cast anchor outside Seville Bay. 

 She was much battered and damaged, her sails were 

 patched and her ensign torn ; but she could look do\vn 

 with pride upon the statelier galleons that passed her, 

 for she had accomplished what no other ship had 

 accomplished before her — the circumnavigation of the 

 globe. Partly because of a certain absence of that 

 dramatic element which surrounds the voyage of 

 Columbus, partly because, no adequate record of it 

 ha\'ing been preserved, no historian has thought it 

 worth while to make Magellan as famous as Columbus 

 or ^^asco di Gama, or even Cortez and Pizarro, and 

 partly on account of national jealousy and over- 

 patriotic historians, the man whose enterprise was, 

 in Lord Stanley's words, " the greatest ever under- 

 taken by any navigator "Ms almost the least known 

 of the great explorers. 



Magellan, or, to give him his full name, Fernao de 

 Magalhaes, was a Portuguese — the Spanish historians 

 have never forgiven him for it — and was originally 

 in Portuguese service in the Indies, where he greatly 

 distinguished himself for personal courage and resource 

 and was " always much wounded" ; but, venturing to 

 differ from the Governor, the imperious Albuquerque, 

 fell from favour, and was refused employment at sea. 

 On this he denationalised himself and became a Spanish 

 subject — the Portuguese historians have never forgiven 

 him for that — and succeeded in interesting Charles V 

 in a project to reach the El Dorado of the Indies from 

 the west to the great detriment of the Portuguese 

 and the greater glory of the King of Spain. The 

 royal interest was fruitful of result. On May 4, 1518, 

 Charles signed a contract with Magellan by which 

 fi\-e ships were placed at his disposal and an expedition 

 prepared despite the protests of the King of Portugal. 



On August 10, 1519, Magellan set sail with his little 

 fleet, the Conception (90 tons), the Victoria (85 tons), 

 the San Antonio (120 tons), the Trinity (no tons), 

 and the Santiago (75 tons). 



" The ships of Magellan's fleet, Sire," reported the 

 agent 2 of the Portuguese king to his anxious master, 

 " are five. . . . They are very old and patched up : 

 for I saw them when they were beached for repairs. 

 It is eleven months since they were repaired, and 

 they are now afloat and they are caulking them in 

 the water. I went on board of them a few times and 

 I assure your Highness that I should be ill inclined to 



1 Stanley (vide note on references at end of article). 



2 Ibid., p. 42. 



sail in them to the Canaries because their knees are of 

 touchwood. The artillery which they all carry are 

 eighty guns, of a very small size : only in the largest 

 ship, in which Magellan is, there are four very good 

 iron cannon. .\11 the crews they take, in aU the five 

 vessels, are 230 men, and they carry provisions for 

 two years." 



And so the King of Portugal was comforted, and 

 concluded that with such an armament there could be 

 no real threat to his possessions in the East. 



Magellan had no historian with him ; he was no 

 writer himself, and if it had not been that there 

 chanced to be on board two Italians, one anonymous 

 but commendably concise, the other the Chevalier 

 .\ntonio Pigafetta, gratefully loquacious, we should 

 know next to nothing of the epic voyage. But from 

 their narrati\'es and a few supplementary documents 

 it is possible to gather the events, if not the spirit, 

 of it with tolerable accuracy. Passing Teneriffe and 

 the Cape Verde Islands. Magellan struck south-west for 

 the Brazilian coast, which he reached in December in 

 the neighbourhood of Rio. Thence he proceeded 

 down the coast in search of the desired channel that 

 would take him to the East by way of the West. They 

 passed the La Plata, and baptised it the river of St. 

 Christopher and found delight — or rather the Vicenzan, 

 Pigafetta, did — in the sights and sounds of Patagonia 

 and its natives with their areca nut, their cannibal 

 habits, and their great god Setebos, who took Shake- 

 speare's 2 fancy as well as Pigafetta' s. They even 

 made friends with these tall savages and baptised 

 them, having special fondness for an immense gentle- 

 man " so tall that the tallest of us only came up to his 

 waist," whom they called John, and who " when he 

 leapt caused the earth to sink in a palm depth at the 

 place where his feet touched," and who " pronounced 

 the name of Jesus, the Pater Noster, Ave Maria, and 

 his name as clearly as we did ; but he had a terribly 

 strong and loud voice." * 



They were now in unfamiliar and hostile waters 

 made memorable and terrifying by previous disasters, 

 and daily penetrating farther into the unknown 

 Antarctic and the storms of the Horn. The strain 

 began inevitably to tell on the crews. Few of them 

 had any sense of loyalty to Magellan or sympathy with 

 his enterprise, for already off Teneriffe there had been 

 mutterings of mutiny. As Spaniards they disliked 

 being commanded by a Portuguese, and, as few of 

 them seem to have been of the stuff of which pioneers 

 are made, they disliked still more the idea of being 

 led to a miserable end in the frozen south. When they 

 reached the " port of St. Julian " on the verge of the 

 mvsterious Antarctic, matters came to a crisis. 

 Headed by three Spanish captains the malcontents 

 3 Ibid., p. 55. Cf. The Tempest. * Ibid., p. 52. 



