A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [123]
Magellan encountered no rogues then—they would come later—but Seville was certainly chaotic, especially within the Casa de Contratación, the royal house of trade. It was there that merchants who were prepared to finance expeditions met captains eager to lead them, there that the two bargained under supervision of the king’s magistrates, and there that the Portuguese explorer headed. The hall was surrounded by taverns swarming with adventurers, pilots, and seasoned mariners, some of them men who had sailed with Columbus, Côrte-Real, or John and Sebastian Cabot, and all of them bearing maps and plans guaranteed to enrich their King Carlos, their sponsors, and, not incidentally, themselves. Magellan, in need of an ally, found one in Diego Barbosa, a fellow Portuguese expatriate well acquainted with the Magellan family. Diego had served the Spanish crown here for fourteen years. He took an instant liking to Magellan. So did his son Duarte, a mariner himself. Finally, Beatriz Barbosa, the daughter of the family, fell in love with Magellan, and, after a brief courtship, became his bride.
Backed by his new relatives, Magellan approached the Casa de Contratación and formally presented the proposition which he and Ruy Faleiro, a Portuguese astronomer, had drawn up in Lisbon. It envisaged a westward voyage halfway round the globe to the Moluccas, the expedition to be led by him and funded by the Spanish crown, whose possessions the islands would then become. A commission of three officials rejected the plan, but immediately after the hearing, one of the commissioners, Juan de Aranda, sent word that he wished to see the petitioner in private. Aranda—the Casa’s agente, or factor—wanted to question Magellan further. Being a man of business, he was intrigued by the possibility of wresting the Spice Islands from Portugal. After hearing further details he offered to sponsor Magellan’s application for royal support. In return he expected one-eighth of the enterprise’s profits. That winter he carried on delicate negotiations with the chancellor of Castile and enlisted the help of the monarch’s privy councillors. Meantime Magellan had written Faleiro, summoning him to Spain.
EARLY IN THE FOLLOWING YEAR King Carlos, with the approval of his privy council, received the partners at Valladolid. Magellan and Faleiro convinced him that the Moluccas, the remote Indo-Pacific archipelago then known as the Spice Islands, lay on Spain’s side of the papal line of demarcation. They also said that the Portuguese route there—through the Indian Ocean and the Sunda Sea—was needlessly long. The islands, they explained, could be reached by a much shorter route from the west. To be sure, this meant penetrating the American barrier from the south, but that could be done by sailing through a South American paso whose location was known to them alone. Persuaded, Carlos pledged his support of the partners from Lisbon. He put it in writing; then, after knighting Magellan, he appointed him capitán-general of what he christened the Armada de Molucca.
Thus the enterprise was launched—or so the record reads. Common sense, however, insists that there must have been more to it than that. The new admiral had been only one of hundreds of supplicants in the Casa that day. He had succeeded where the others had been turned away, not because he had charmed the Barbosas, Aranda, the king’s privy council, and the king himself —his charm, by all accounts, was slight—but because he had struck them as an exceptionally qualified Portuguese captain and navigator who knew precisely what he was doing.
His knowledge of the south seas was profound. Although he had never reached the Spice Islands, he had learned a great deal about them from a friend, one Francisco Serrão, a Portuguese skipper who had been so smitten with the islands that he had decided to spend