A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [124]
It was his certitude, however, which had impressed the Spanish court most. Other petitioners had speculated. Magellan said he knew, and his decisive manner confirmed him. He was absolutely positive that the Moluccas belonged to Spain, and Faleiro had brought a globe of his own design to back him up. Both men assured the court that they knew precisely where to find the paso, the legendary open sesame to Balboa’s ocean. When the king had asked why it wasn’t shown on the globe, Magellan had replied that the secret was too precious; they could not risk a leak.
His conviction was genuine, but it was built on quicksand. Faleiro’s globe was flawed. Due to compensating errors, his calculations of longitude were only four degrees off, but that was enough to discredit them. The islands were on Portugal’s side of the line, not Spain’s, and the more men learned about that part of the world the stronger Lisbon’s claim would become. And—far more important—the partners’ assurance that Magellan could find the strait linking the Atlantic and the Pacific was equally false. After five centuries their error is clear, though their sources seemed plausible at the time. The first was a map drawn by Martin Behaim, the Nuremberg geographer who had been royal cartographer to the Portuguese court; the second a globe produced by Johannes Schöner in 1515; and the third a report from the western Atlantic which reached Magellan either shortly before, or soon after, his move from Lisbon to Seville. The map and the globe showed a southern passage between the oceans. In the light of later evidence it is clear that Behaim and Schöner had put it in the wrong place, but they appeared to have been confirmed in 1516, when Juan Díaz de Solís, who had been sailing along the coast of South America under the illusion that he was near the Malayan Peninsula, came upon the gigantic funnel-shaped estuary leading to what is now Buenos Aires.
Although Díaz de Solís was killed by Indians, members of his expedition found their way home, and to Magellan their description of the Río de la Plata, as Sebastian Cabot later named it, must have seemed to be the final piece of the puzzle. Indeed, even today it is hard to believe that the estuary—actually the outlet of two enormous rivers—is not open sea. Its mouth is 140 miles wide, and its western shore is 170 miles inland. To Europeans accustomed to the Guadiana River of Spain and Portugal, the Tiber, or the Rhine, it must have resembled the great straits they knew—the Dardanelles or Gibraltar. They were wrong, and so was Magellan, misled by them. But persuasive errors have played key roles in history before. So it was here. Had the capitán-general known the truth, his confidence would have been eroded. Carlos and his privy council would have rejected the uncertain applicant. Even if they hadn’t, Magellan’s iron will, which was to become vital to the voyage, would have been weakened, probably fatally.
HOW MUCH Lisbon learned about the Valladolid audience is unknown. Probably very little. But it was enough: a seasoned Portuguese mariner, familiar with the Tesouraria’s holiest secrets, had been commissioned by the Castilian monarch to pry the Spice Islands loose from Portugal. His fleet was already forming up. It is a measure of Manuel’s alarm that he instructed his ambassador to Madrid, Álvaro da Costa, to sabotage the expedition. Fortunately for