A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [111]
Crowned in 1558 at the age of twenty-five, Elizabeth I restored Protestantism, revived her father’s Act of Supremacy, and reigned over England for forty-five glorious years. In light of the tragic consequences of her parents’ sexual excesses, which had typified European nobility in their time—the promiscuity, the proliferation of bastards, the hasty coupling in palace antechambers—she was perhaps wise to live out her long life unaccompanied by a connubial consort, and to be remembered in history as the Virgin Queen.
III
ONE MAN ALONE
IN THE TEEMING Spanish seaport of Sanlúcar de Barrameda it is Monday, September 19, 1519.
Capitán-General Ferdinand Magellan, newly created a Knight Commander of the Order of Santiago, is supervising the final victualing of the five little vessels he means to lead around the globe: San Antonio, Trinidad, Concepción, Victoria, and Santiago. Here and in Seville, whence they sailed down the river Guadalquivir, Andalusians refer to them as el flota, or el escuadra: the fleet. However, their commander is a military man; to him they are an armada—officially, the Armada de Molucca. They are a battered, shabby lot, far less imposing than the flota Christopher Columbus led from this port twenty-one years ago, leaving Spain for his third crossing of the Atlantic.
Nevertheless the capitán-general’s armada is more seaworthy than it appears—he has seen to that. Now approaching his forties, the man who will become the greatest of the sixteenth-century explorers is a precise, even fastidious mariner. Every plank and rope has been personally tested by him; he has directed the replacement of all rotten timbers and overseen the installation of new shrouds and new sails of strong new linen, each stamped with the cross of St. James, patron saint of Spain. Each of the five requires a lot of looking after. The small ships—San Antonio, the largest, displaces only 120 tons—are actually naos, three-masted, square-rigged hybrid merchantmen derivative of fourteenth-century cogs and Arabian dhows. Unless carefully attended, all are potential shipwrecks. Therefore they have been repeatedly scoured and caulked from stem to stern. Now their grizzled commander is patiently checking the stores for a two-year expedition—never dreaming that the great voyage will take three years, and that he will not survive it.
Physically Magellan is unimpressive. He was born to one of the lower orders of Portuguese nobility, but his physique is that of a peasant—short, swart, with a low center of gravity. His skin is leathery, his black beard bushy, and his eyes large, sad, and brooding. Long ago his nose was broken in some forgotten brawl. He bears scars of battle and walks with a pronounced limp, the souvenir of a lance wound in Morocco. He had acted recklessly then (and will again, in the last hours of his life), but he is rarely impulsive. On the contrary; his reserve approaches the stoical. He is a man who lives within, saving the best of himself for himself, enjoying solitude. As a commander he can be ruthless—“tough, tough, tough,” in the words of a fellow captain. Subordinate officers dislike this dureza, though they concede his supreme competence and the quickness with which he rewards those who perform well—rare traits among commanders of the time. Because of this, he is popular among his crews.
Proud of his lineage, meticulous, fiercely ambitious, stubborn, driven, secretive, and iron-willed, the capitán-general, or admiral, is possessed by an inner vision which he shares with no one. There is a hidden side to this seasoned skipper which would astonish his men. He is imaginative, a dreamer; in a time of blackguards and