Success across the frontier was not long in coming. Freed from the encumbrances of Portuguese court politics, Magellan joined forces with Cristóbal de Haro, the Portuguese agent of the Fuggers, the German banking dynasty that had provided the Portuguese crown with capital for the early spice fleets. Like Magellan, de Haro had also abandoned Portugal in search of a more cooperative royal client, his relationship with Manuel having soured, perhaps as a result of the king’s clumsy efforts at price fixing and insistence on a royal monopoly on all trade in spices. Between the two of them, the exiles from Portugal had the capital and the requisite expertise. By 1519, over increasingly shrill protests from the court in Lisbon, they secured the third element necessary for success, in the form of the backing of the Spanish crown.*
Of all the great voyages of the age of discovery, Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe has good claim to be the greatest, whether in terms of the privations endured or the sheer audacity of the enterprise. Five black ships sailed from the port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda on 20 September 1519, with a complement of about 270 men. Ambitious as it was in conception, the journey was hugely complicated by its commander’s innocence. There were volumes of speculation, but as yet no one knew where or for that matter whether the American continent ended, nor, if there was one, where the purported passage was to be found. Magellan may have imagined that the River Plate fitted the bill, but sailing upstream they soon found the water turning sweet and their way blocked. Exploring dozens of bays and inlets, each time they were forced to turn back in disappointment. The expedition was racked by fear, ennui and fatigue. Tensions between Magellan and his Spanish captains culminated in a mutiny at midnight on Easter day, suppressed by the execution of one of the mutineers; another was left to the tender mercies of the natives. Only as winter lifted, after yet more fruitless searches up every inlet, did Magellan finally lead the survivors through the maze of sea and islands at the southern tip of the continent, passing through a desolate fire-bearing country – Tierra del Fuego, as he dubbed it – then through 325 miles of icy squalls, mists and fogs in the straits that now bear his name. This was, already, an astonishing achievement, but it came at a price. When they entered the Pacific on 28 November 1520, only three of the original five ships remained.
The survivors found the new ocean calm, whence ‘Pacific’. Its tranquillity, however, was deceptive. Like Columbus before him, Magellan had premised his plan on a mistaken assumption of the earth’s circumference, but in this case almost catastrophically so, with the upshot that he had no inkling of the vast expanse of ocean still ahead of him. For fourteen weeks the survivors inched north and west, tormented by fickle winds and consumed by doubts, their food and water all but gone, forever imagining that the Moluccas were just over the horizon. (As it was, they were extremely lucky to have taken a course assisted by a westward current – an oceanic conveyer belt. Had they sailed a little further to the north or south they would almost certainly have perished.) When supplies ran out early in the crossing, the crew was reduced to a diet of ship’s biscuits softened in rancid water; when the biscuits were gone they mixed sawdust with rat droppings and chewed on the leather of the yard arms with teeth that rattled in their blackened, scurvy-ridden gums. When land was finally sighted on 6 March 1521, the crew had been still further reduced by malnutrition, sheer exhaustion and despair. They had survived no fewer than ninety-nine days without fresh food or water.
Next came the absurd and ignominious anti-climax. Soon after arriving in the territory of the modern Philippines, Magellan threw away his life in a pointless skirmish with what the chronicler of the expedition calls ‘an almost naked barbaric nation’. It was an utterly ludicrous death, the result of trying to impress a local chieftain with the power of Christian arms, the more ironic for coming at the end of such a hellish crossing. ‘Thus did this brave Portuguese, Magellan, satisfy his craving for spices.’
Even now, however, the survivors still had much sailing ahead of them. With no clear idea of where they were or where to look they visited ‘an infinity of islands, always searching for the Moluccas’. Finally, Magellan’s Malay slave (a relic of his time in the Indies) identified the unmistakable twin cones of Ternate and Tidore rising above the horizon. While the small Portuguese garrison on Ternate looked on in astonishment and dismay, the crew fired their cannons in joy and proceeded to neighbouring Tidore, where they bought cloves ‘like mad’. The narrator’s relief is palpable: ‘It is no wonder that we should be so joyful, for we had suffered travail and perils for the space of twenty-five months less two days in the search for Molucca.’
After a brief stop for rest and resupply, the shrinking band of survivors made plans for home. At this point Magellan’s flagship, the Trinidad, sprang a serious leak in its worm-eaten bottom. The crew repaired the hull as best they could and made an unsuccessful attempt to sail back across the Pacific to Mexico, but after a fruitless battle against adverse winds and currents they were compelled to return to the Moluccas, whereupon ship and crew were promptly captured by the Portuguese. Only four crewmembers would ever see Spain again.
Meanwhile the other surviving vessel, the Victoria, headed west.* There were still another nine months of hard sailing before the ship rounded the Cape of Good Hope and turned north, passing along the entire western length of Africa and across the Straits of Gibraltar, to Spain. On 6 September 1522 the Victoria limped into its home harbour of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, fourteen days short of three years since leaving. Of the expedition’s original complement of over 270 only eighteen had survived. A harbourside observer commented that the ship was ‘more full of holes than the best sieve, and these eighteen men more fatigued than the most exhausted horses’.
By his premature death, Magellan had forfeited the fortune and glory for which he had abandoned his country; as a Portuguese in the service of Spain he won only the opprobrium of his motherland and the suspicions of his adopted country. (Had he lived to return to Spain he would, almost certainly, have fallen foul of court intrigue.) The honours went to the survivor who piloted the Victoria back into Sanlúcar, a native of Guetaria by the name of Juan Sebastián de Elcano, one of the participants in the mutiny against Magellan at Port St Julián. But to the survivor went the spoils. Elcano was rewarded with a coat of arms with the device of a globe set above two cinnamon sticks, twelve cloves and three nutmegs, flanked by two Malay kings grasping branches of a spice tree, blazoned with the motto ‘Primus circumdedisti me’ – ‘You were the first to encompass me’.
As the durable Spaniard had outlasted his Portuguese commander, so it seemed on the larger stage of diplomacy. When the Victoria limped back into harbour the tables appeared to have been turned. With a claim staked on Tidore, the Spanish crown now had a physical presence to back up its theoretical claim to sovereignty over the Moluccas. Yet even now there were more twists and turns in store. The border town of Badajoz was the scene of fierce debates between Spanish and Portuguese diplomats, the key issue the still unanswerable question of the Moluccas’ exact longitude. (As a matter of fact, they were indeed in the Portuguese zone, though that could not be confirmed for many years yet.) The Spanish pointed to their presence on Tidore; the Portuguese called them trespassers; the Spanish flung back the same insult. Talks ground on, one futile deposition succeeding another. In the end, a settlement came not from the diplomats but from the accountants of