A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [132]
It was good advice. Magellan chose to ignore it. They would push on, he said; no doubt there would be hardships, but even if they had to eat the leather on the ships’ yards, he would keep his promise to King Carlos, trusting to God to help them and provide them with good fortune (“de pasar adelante y descubrir lo que había prometido”). The captains were enjoined, on pain of death, from telling their men of the supply shortage. Gomes was unconvinced, however; the prospect of sailing onward frightened him even more than Magellan’s threat of death and mutilation for mutineers. He decided to quit the armada with his ship. During the scouting of the southeastern channel, San Antonio, with Mesquita in command, showed Serrano’s Concepción its heels. Serrano did not know precisely what had happened, but since desertion by the capitán-general’s cousin was impossible, he inferred that the pilot had led a successful revolt against the captain. Magellan had to face the hard fact that his biggest ship, with the bulk of his stores, was headed homeward. He was now down to three bottoms, and the supply situation, bad as it had been, was now worse. Yet he never considered altering his course. In an order issued “in the Channel of Todos los Santos, off the mouth of the Rio del Isleo, on November 21, fifty-three degrees south of the equator,” he declared that as “capitán-general of this armada” he had taken the “grave decision to continue the voyage.”
His resolution was strengthened when another pinnace, sent ahead, reappeared on the third day with the electrifying news that Balboa’s Mar del Sur had been found. Hurrying there, the admiral looked out on the prize Columbus, Cabot, Vespucci, and Pinzón had sought in vain: the mightiest of oceans, stretching to all horizons, deep and blue and vast with promise. Its peaceful, pacífico appearance inspired his name for it, though that came later. In that first rapturous moment he could not speak. Perhaps for the first time in his adult life, he was overcome by emotion, and his reserve broke. Don Antonio writes that “il capitano-generale lacrimó per allegrezza”—Magellan had burst into tears.
THE LITTLE armada’s 12,600-mile crossing of the Pacific, the greatest physical unit on earth, is one of history’s imperishable tales of the sea, and like so many of the others it is a story of extraordinary human suffering, of agony so excruciating that only those who have been pushed to the extremes of human endurance can even comprehend it. Lacking maps, adequate navigational instruments, or the remotest idea of where they were, they sailed onward for over three months, from November to March, moving northwestward under frayed rigging, rotting sails, and a pitiless sun.
Even for the age of discovery, Magellan’s situation was unique. Previous explorers had known that if all else failed, they could always return to Europe. That option was closed to him. Ignorant of South America—having started from the mouth of a strait known only to him—he had no base to fall back upon. Once he had left the eastern horizon behind, he had to sail on—and on, and on.
He had no way of knowing the true width of the Pacific. All the information available to him vastly underestimated its extent.
In Europe it was assumed that everything depended upon the location of Ptolemy’s Terra Australis Incognita, a necessary balance for a spherical world, without which the entire planet would topple over. But some assumptions had been made, and Magellan was acting upon them. In fact they were all wrong. Had he been told the