A World Lit Only by Fire by William Manchester Read Free Book Online Page B

renegade, calling him
traidor
and
transfuga
—turncoat.
    One would expect the mightiest explorer in history to have been sensitive and proud, easily stung by such slurs. In fact he
was unoffended. By our lights, his character was knotted and intricate. It was more comprehensible to his contemporaries,
however, because the
capitán-general
of 1519–1521 was, to an exceptional degree, a creature of his time. His modesty arose from his faith. In the early sixteenth
century, pride in achievement was reserved for sovereigns, who were believed to be sheathed in divine glory. Being a lesser
mortal, and a pious one, Magellan assumed that the Madonna was responsible for his accomplishments.
    At the time he may have underrated them. That is more understandable. He was an explorer, a man whose destiny it was to venture
into the unknown; what he found, therefore, was new. He had some idea of its worth but lacked accurate standards by which
to measure it. Indeed, he couldn’t even be certain of what he was looking for until he had found it, and the fact that he
had no clear view of his target makes the fact that he hit it squarely all the more remarkable.
    His Spanish sponsors did not share his sense of mission. They sought profit, not adventure. His way around that obstacle seems
to have been to ignore it and mislead them. Sailing around the world was unmentioned during his royal audience with Carlos
I, sovereign of Spain, who, as the elected Holy Roman emperor Charles V, was to play a key (if largely unwitting) role in
the great religious revolution which split Christendom and signaled the end of the medieval world. Carlos’s commission to
Magellan was to journey westward, there to claim Spanish possession of an archipelago then in the hands of his Iberian rival,
Manuel I of Portugal. These were the Spice Islands—the Moluccas, lying between Celebes and New Guinea. Now an obscure part
of Indonesia, they are unshown on most maps, but then the isles were considered priceless. Officially, the capitán-general’s
incentive lay in the king’s pledge to him. Two of the islands would become Magellan’s personal fief and he would receive 5
percent of all profits from the archipelago, thus making his fortune.
    But as Timothy Joyner points out in his life of Magellan, this Moluccan plan was a disaster. Indeed, as the leader of the
expedition, Magellan was killed before he could even reach there. He had, however, landed in the Philippines. This was of
momentous importance, for eastbound Portuguese had reconnoitered the Spice Islands nine years earlier. Therefore, in overlapping
them, he had closed the nexus between the 123rd and 124th degrees of east longitude and thus completed the encirclement of
the earth.
    Yet his achievements were slighted. Death is always a misfortune, at least to the man who has to do the dying. In Magellan’s
case it was exceptionally so, however, for as a dead discoverer he was unhonored in his own time. Even Magellan’s discovery
of the strait which bears his name was belittled. Only a superb mariner, which he was, could have negotiated the foggy, treacherous,
350-mile-long Estrecho de Magallanes. In the years after his death, expedition after expedition tried to follow his lead.
They failed; all but one ended in shipwreck or turned homeward, and the exception met disaster in the Pacific. Frustrated
and defeated, skippers decided that Magellan’s exploit was impossible and declared it a myth. Nearly sixty years passed before
another great sailor, Sir Francis Drake, successfully guided
The Golden Hind
through the tortuous passage and survived to tell the tale.
    Had fortune and a viceregal role in the Moluccas been Magellan’s real inducement, he would have been a failure by his own
lights. But his original motives remain obscure. Desperately searching for sponsorship of his voyage, he may have feigned
interest in the Spice Islands. There is no proof of that, but it would have been in