A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [122]
The pontiff therefore awarded the Portuguese all non-Christian lands east, and Spain all those west, of an imaginary north-south line drawn 100 leagues west of the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands. This had infuriated England’s Henry VII, who, refusing to recognize papal jurisdiction, vowed to build his own empire and designated Cabot as its first builder. For various reasons Lisbon and Valladolid * had also been dissatisfied. War between them appeared imminent. Then they negotiated the Treaty of Tordesillas, redrawing the line 270 leagues farther west. The pope’s decision was accepted as valid for discoveries until then, but in the future the Spaniards could claim whatever they could reach by sailing westward and the Portuguese what they could find sailing to the east. But this, too, was unsatisfactory. The negotiators had overlooked the fact that the world was round. Eventually explorers from the two countries would meet. Thus the Moluccas—the Spice Islands—fell in a gray area. Portugal had occupied them and claimed them, but Spain sulked. And everyone wanted them. To Ferdinand Magellan, the dilemma represented opportunity.
Balboa claims the Pacific, 1513
DURING THESE YEARS of high excitement in the Americas, Magellan was a Portuguese soldier on the other side of the world, where Lisbon’s trade was flourishing and men-at-arms like him were fighting to expand King Manuel’s colonial territories. Beginning in 1505 he served there seven years, variously stationed in Africa, India, Malacca, and Mozambique. This was when Portugal broke Muslim power in the Indian Ocean. By all accounts, Magellan repeatedly distinguished himself in combat and at sea.
In his idle hours, spent on the docks, he talked to Asian pilots and navigators from as far away as Okinawa, asking about tides, winds, magnetic compass readings—the kind of information which, if they had kept records, would have been in their rutters. Through this method he became as well informed about the Indonesian archipelago as any European seaman. But he was equally interested in reports from the New World, particularly accounts of Balboa’s discovery. Like all European mariners, he believed that the new sea west of Panama must be very small. The great question was how it could be reached by water — where one could find what the Portuguese called o braço do mar and Spaniards el paso—a strait through which ships could pass from the Atlantic to El Mar del Sur beyond.
Repeated testing of the hemispheric land barrier had proved discouraging. The narrowness of the Panamanian isthmus was unmatched elsewhere. From Labrador, at the sixtieth degree of north latitude, to at least lower Brazil, at the thirtieth degree of south latitude, the Americas presented a solid, intimidating front of earth and stone. In the north the thousands of islands and inlets above what is now the Canadian mainland raised hopes for a northwest passage, and in some breasts these hopes endured for four centuries, until the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen threaded the countless straits between 1906 and 1909, only to find that the freezing of sea lanes and other arctic conditions made the route impractical. Most navigators had written off the north four centuries earlier, however. It was generally agreed that the break in the landmass, if there was one, must be in the south. Yet searchers there had also been frustrated. Some early cartographers showed the southern continent extending all the way to Antarctica.
That was more or less the situation on October 20, 1517, when the approximately forty-year-old Magellan, having renounced his Portuguese nationality, arrived in Seville accompanied by several pilots and his Malayan slave Enrique. He had come to offer his services to the Spanish crown. What befell him there resembles one of those Victorian morality tales in which Ragged