Ferdinand Magellan E-Book

E.F. Benson

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

IT is a legitimate and indeed a laudable curiosity that desires to know what signs and foreshadowings of genius glimmered like distant signals out of the dim and early years of those who have developed into the architects of the world’s history and the pioneers of its progress, and to trace in what can be learned about the environment of their boyhood the influences which determined their careers. But though this latter quest often brings interesting details to light, though we can often find in the circumstances that surround the boyhood of great men causes that strongly make for such predispositions, it is very easy to press too hard on this chase, and overlook the fact that of all qualities genius is the least liable to influence and that it makes but little response to encouragements from without, just as it is little deterred by external hindrances. It proceeds along the uncharted track of its destiny in a manner singularly independent of wayside beckonings.

Leseprobe

MAGELLAN

Ferdinand Magellan

By

E. F. BENSON

© 2023 Librorium Editions

ISBN : 9782385744656

PREFACE

FERDINAND MAGELLAN is one of those who, as Robert Browning says, are “named and known by that moment’s feat,” and though that feat took three years in the doing, he is still a man of one achievement. Unlike some great general who has half a dozen victorious campaigns to justify his title to immortality, unlike some great painter who has a score of deathless canvases to his credit, unlike Newton who accomplished years of epoch-making work before he made his great discovery, unlike (in his own line) the English admiral, Francis Drake, who not only circumnavigated the world, but defeated the Spanish Armada, and carried through a dozen amazing adventures to the sore undoing of Spain, Magellan’s claim to immortality is based on one feat alone, but that was of a unique splendour, and carried out in the face of stupendous difficulties. Had it not been for that one voyage, we should never have heard of him. His very name would have been unknown except possibly to the industrious historian who, studying the campaigns of Almeida and Albuquerque in India, might conceivably have made mention in a footnote to one of his innumerable pages that one Ferdinand Magellan, seaman and subsequently captain in the Portuguese navy four hundred and more years ago, behaved on two occasions with considerable gallantry.

But an idea occurred to Magellan, and since, on his return from India, King Manuel of Portugal had no further use for his services, even as his predecessor, King John II, had no use for a certain Italian called Columbus, Magellan, like Columbus, took himself and his idea to Spain. And this idea was so prodigious, and the accomplishment of it so unparalleled in the history of exploration, that by virtue of it his deeds and his days generally seemed worth a little ferreting out and a trifle of study, in order to see whether this man, who is known to most people as a name, Spanish or Portuguese, rather than a human being, after whom, vaguely, an obsolete strait in the most remote part of South America was called, could not be shaped into a living personality. History, as a mere series of events, as a collected chronicle, is as dead as the bones in the vision-valley of Ezekiel (and, behold, they were very dry!) unless it is animated by some human interest attaching to those who made it. But if it can be breathed upon by the spirit of the living folk who caused these things to happen so, it becomes winged with the romance that belongs to the great deeds of men.

Magellan’s feat, in itself, was a supreme achievement: he was the first person in the world who demonstrated not by theory, but in terms of ships actually sailing on the sea, that this world is round (or thereabouts), and that by sailing out beyond the known ultimate of the West, a voyager will arrive at the known ultimate of the East. To us that is a commonplace, but it must be remembered that when Magellan was born no ship of the two great maritime Powers, Spain and Portugal, had ever sailed beyond the Atlantic. The Atlantic washed the shores of the known world, and not yet had Columbus found its further coast, nor had Bartholomew Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and though it was certain that there were lands and seas to the East of Africa, and islands fragrant with the spices brought to Europe by Moorish traders, no European eye had ever beheld them. For hundreds of years no substantial additions had been made to men’s knowledge of the surface of the world: it was indeed probably larger in the days of Alexander the Great than in A.D. 1480. Then suddenly, in the space of thirty-five years, the world was unrolled like some wondrous manuscript, and (out of the three explorers who spread it out) the last and longest section, stretching from the coasts of Brazil westwards to the Spice Islands of the East, was smoothed straight and pinned down by Magellan. Not for sixty years, so sown with peril and difficulty was the route, did any ship pass through his Strait again and traverse the Pacific.

Singularly little is known of Magellan’s life until within a year or two of his leaving Seville on the voyage from which he never returned. We hear of his performing two meritorious pieces of service in the East, but his earlier years are not so much mysterious as merely undistinguished: we do not yet feel that here is a great personality of whom we unfortunately know little. Then King Manuel, on his return, told him that he had no further employment for him, and immediately he becomes significant. But as soon as he became significant, he became mysterious also: we know that there was a great force moving about, a will that drove its way through mutiny and a myriad obstacles towards the accomplishment of its aim, but we rarely get any information that puts us into touch with him personally. Yet from such hints as may be legitimately linked together, we find enough to enable us to realize a human image of the man, and by combination and inference arrive at a figure of great psychological interest, one who was lonely and formidable and self-sufficient, and at the end blazes out into a religious fanatic. If the attempt here made to do this attains any measure of success, it may help those who thought of the first circumnavigation of the world, and the discovery of the Strait of Magellan, to perceive that one definite human personality, of rather terrible steel, inspired that amazing achievement.

I have found no new material to work upon: the Spanish historians, and the journals of those who accompanied Magellan on his voyage, or supplied information on their return to Spain, have been my sources. I have constantly consulted Mr. F. H. H. Guillemard’s Life of Magellan, who has brought together all the historical books that bear on the subject, though sometimes I have disagreed with his conclusions: I have also freely quoted from Lord Stanley of Alderley’s admirable translation of the diaries of Pigafetta and others contained in his First Voyage by Magellan (Hakluyt Society, 1874). But it soon became clear that if I gave references to these historians and diarists every time I used the information they supplied, these pages would largely consist of footnotes. In order therefore to avoid distracting the reader with a criss-cross of such (for a single sentence, in the narration of the mutiny, may contain facts derived from three or four of them), I have omitted footnotes altogether, except when these authorities, as sometimes happens, contradict each other, or are otherwise irreconcilable. In such cases, I have given a reference or a footnote to indicate the reason for the choice I have made.

Finally, with regard to the spelling of certain names, Portuguese or Spanish, I have adopted the modern equivalent wherever possible. It seemed, for instance, too rich a sacrifice on the altar of pedantic accuracy to speak of my hero at one time as “Fernão de Magalhães,” and at another as “Hernando de Magallanes.”

E. F. BENSON.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

CHAPTER I GEOGRAPHICAL

CHAPTER II MAGELLAN SEES THE EAST

CHAPTER III KING MANUEL HAS NO USE FOR MAGELLAN

CHAPTER IV MAGELLAN APPLIES TO SPAIN

CHAPTER V KING CHARLES APPROVES

CHAPTER VI THE GREAT VOYAGE BEGINS

CHAPTER VII MAGELLAN ARRIVES AT PORT ST. JULIAN

CHAPTER VIII THE MUTINY

CHAPTER IX THE FINDING OF THE STRAIT

CHAPTER X THE TRAVERSE OF THE STRAIT

CHAPTER XI THE PHILIPPINES

CHAPTER XII THE DEATH OF MAGELLAN

CHAPTER XIII THE SPICE ISLANDS

CHAPTER XIV THE CAPTAIN-GENERAL

APPENDIX

INDEX

ILLUSTRATIONS

Ferdinand Magellan

From the engraving by Crispin Van de Passe.

Map of the World showing the Voyage of the “Victoria”

Map of Magellan Strait (Canal de Todos los Santos)

From the Admiralty Chart.

FERDINAND MAGELLAN

CHAPTER I GEOGRAPHICAL

IT is a legitimate and indeed a laudable curiosity that desires to know what signs and foreshadowings of genius glimmered like distant signals out of the dim and early years of those who have developed into the architects of the world’s history and the pioneers of its progress, and to trace in what can be learned about the environment of their boyhood the influences which determined their careers. But though this latter quest often brings interesting details to light, though we can often find in the circumstances that surround the boyhood of great men causes that strongly make for such predispositions, it is very easy to press too hard on this chase, and overlook the fact that of all qualities genius is the least liable to influence and that it makes but little response to encouragements from without, just as it is little deterred by external hindrances. It proceeds along the uncharted track of its destiny in a manner singularly independent of wayside beckonings.

Such certainly was the case with Ferdinand Magellan, for that noble and solitary sea-bird, whose flight was over the great waters, and who found a path where footsteps were not known, lived, till he reached the age of thirteen or thereabouts, in the stony uplands of the only province of Portugal which has no sea-board, and from which no possible glimpse can be obtained of the element of which he was truly native. These earlier years of boyhood are, according to modern psychology, the most formative, but in his case, as far as the sea furnished suggestions in his development, we must write them down as wholly barren. Those therefore who confidently discover in the environment of his childhood the predisposing influences which drove him on, in the face of greater difficulties, dangers and discouragements than ever fought against human enterprise, to wing his way round the world, must fall back on the reflection that the people of this mountainous province, far inland, were a grim and hardy race, whose life was a perpetual struggle with the inclemencies of nature. For the climate of Traz-os-Montes has been tersely summed up as consisting of nine months of winter and three of the fires of hell. What more apt nursery (these psychologists beg us to tell them) could be found for one whom adventure led through tropic seas and Antarctic winters? Very likely that is so, but in turn we may remind them that this nursery would suit their theories more aptly if some sight of the sea could have been visible from its windows. Again, we do not find in the very sparse records of Magellan’s early years any hint that he had drunk of that seething ferment of exploration and discovery with which all Portugal was tipsy, till when, at the age of twenty-five, which was decidedly mature for the apprentice-adventurers of that day, he started on his first voyage as a volunteer seaman in Almeida’s expedition to India. No call from the sea, imperative and irresistible, haunted his boyhood, or, if it did, he closed his ears to it; while as for those who would seek to find in anecdotes of his youth the foreshadowings of his genius they must resign themselves to the entire absence of such, for we have no knowledge whatever of what manner of youngster he was. No doubt the boy was father to the man, but he was a silent father, and kept his aspirations to himself. At any rate not a shred of them has come down to us.

So much as is certain about his cradle and his race must be briefly recorded by way of introduction, though there emerges therefrom nothing vivid or personal: it serves but as a background to the figure we hope to portray. The year of his birth, though nowhere specifically stated, was probably 1480, and he was of noble birth, as is attested not only by two Portuguese genealogists, and by the Will which Magellan himself executed before leaving Lisbon on his first voyage to India, but by the fact that at the age of thirteen, or thereabouts, he left his highland home to be educated at the Royal Court, first as page to Queen Leonora, wife of King John II of Portugal, and on the accession of King Manuel in 1495 to serve in some similar capacity to him. These royal pages were, at this time, always the heirs of some noble family, and thus they received the liberal upbringing and education that should fit them for their future. Both these genealogists are agreed that his mother’s name was Alda de Mesquita Pimenta, but they differ as to his father’s name, the one calling him Gil, the other Ruy. We need not weigh the reliability of these authorities, for they both seem to have been in error, since there exists an acknowledgment of the payment of his salary at Court, dated 1512, and signed by Magellan himself, in which he describes himself as the son of Pedro. We must conclude that probably Magellan knew best. Though the elder of Pedro’s two sons, he had three sisters all of whom were senior to him. The eldest of these, Teresa, married John da Silva Telles, and Magellan in his first Will, dated 1504, and dealing with his inherited Portuguese property, names them jointly as his heirs with succession to their son Luiz. He enjoins also that his brother-in-law shall quarter with his own arms those of Magellan, which, he says, belong to “one of the most distinguished, best and oldest families in the kingdom.” At the date of this Will, Magellan, aged twenty-four, was unmarried, and he adds the proviso that, if he himself should subsequently beget legitimate offspring, his property, “the little property I have,” should pass to them. When he made his second Will, which he did on the eve of his departure for his last voyage in 1519, from which he never returned, he had married, had a son Rodrigo, and was expecting another child, but he had ceased to be a Portuguese subject, and had been naturalized as a Spaniard. To Rodrigo therefore, Spanish born, he bequeathed such property in Spain as might accrue to him as the results of his voyage, but he did not disturb the succession to his Portuguese property. Should Rodrigo die without legitimate issue, and should his own direct line fail, he named his younger brother, Diego de Sousa, as his heir as regards his Spanish property, subject to the proviso that he should live in Spain, and marry a Spaniard; failing him his sister, Isabella, was to succeed, subject to the same conditions. The significance of this separate disposal of his Spanish and Portuguese property will appear later.

From these two Wills then, with the help of the Portuguese genealogists, we can construct all we know, directly and inferentially, about the Magellans as they lived at Sabrosa in the inland province of Traz-os-Montes before Ferdinand went as a boy of thirteen to be educated at the Court at Lisbon. The eldest child of Pedro Magellan was Teresa; the second Ginebra, of whom, apart from her husband’s name, we know nothing; the third was Isabella, who was still unmarried at the date of her brother’s second Will in 1519. Then in order of birth came Ferdinand Magellan himself, and his younger brother, Diego.

Except for Teresa and her line, which eventually succeeded to the Portuguese property, and emerges somewhat tragically out of the dimness, all is shadowy; a matter of Wills and nomenclature. They lived, we must suppose, the life of countryfolk of gentle breeding, owning land, but no great estate, with its stock of horses and cattle and its exiguous harvest of grapes and corn. Pedro Magellan, the father of these five children, certainly died while Ferdinand was still young, for in 1504, when he was twenty-four years old and made his first Will, he had come into his estate, since he had the disposal of it. But of him personally, and of his earlier boyhood, we know nothing whatever. Pictures have been made of this boy of strong character and country breeding, who pined for the mountains and the rainstorms, the snows and the grilling heats of Sabrosa, for the austere stone-built house with the arms of his ancestors on the gateway, when translated into the softer airs of the sea-coast, and for the quiet of that sequestered life when thrust into the gorgeous hive of the Court at Lisbon, buzzing eternally with news of fresh discoveries and unconjectured continents; but such depiction is purely imaginative and highly improbable. From all we subsequently learn of that silent and adventurous soul, whose wings were never furled while there was a glimpse of the unknown within the straining compass of his vision, we should more reasonably figure him as a boy enraptured with the wider living and the tidings brought in by those who had pushed back the limits of oceans and lands as at present explored. There lay the sea to which his life was to be dedicate, and the sunsets that brought dawn to horizons yet unvisited.

The discovery of new lands, and of the seas that were the highway that led to them, was at the time when Magellan came to Lisbon as page to Queen Leonora a passion that gripped the whole nation with the magic of its allurement: Portugal was the first maritime Power in the world, and her ships were continually beating up and advancing into the confines of the unknown. This fever for adventure has often been compared with the voyages of the great English sea-captains in the reign of Elizabeth, but there is a very radical difference between the two which must not be overlooked. Drake and Hawkins and the rest were not pioneers in geographical discovery to anything like the extent that the Portuguese were; their main objective was to wrest sea-power from Spain, and, going where she had gone, to capture from her, by exploits frankly piratical according to our modern codes, the freights of her golden argosies from the New World. But Portugal, though in rivalry with Spain, was not fighting her nor robbing her; her penetration into unknown seas and lands, though in the service of imperial interests, was peaceful as far as other civilized nations were concerned; she wanted to discover and to trade, and, when her expansion threatened to come into collision with the expansion of her neighbour, Papal arbitration was sought for. In 1490 there was room for them both; east and west lay abundance of undiscovered lands rich in gold and spices, and Portugal was discovering (certainly to her great advantage) rather than appropriating in the later Elizabethan manner.

The wizard who had set this spell at work in the minds of his countrymen was Prince Henry of Portugal, the Navigator, who, though not a practical seaman, must be held to be the greatest of pioneers in cosmography. He was the younger son of King John I and was born in 1394. After distinguished services against the Moors, he left his father’s Court, and devoted himself to geographical study, and to the sending out of maritime adventurers to explore the vastnesses of the unknown world. He established himself on the south-western coast of Portugal at Cape Sagres, a few miles to the east of Cape St. Vincent, and built there what was known as the “Infante’s Town” with palace, church and observatory, and at the base of the promontory founded a naval arsenal. There he lived, recluse from the world, but intensely occupied with the visits of the sea-captains of Portugal who brought him the news of their further nosings into ultimate seas, and of the lands that fringed them. There in his remote quarters, with the highway of the Atlantic washing the base of his promontory, and the setting sun striking an avenue of gold out into the west, he collected and collated and charted these gleanings of knowledge so perilously won, and sent forth a succession of other labourers into the harvest-fields of the sea. Henry VI of England asked him to take command of his armies, and in 1443 made him a Knight of the Garter, but neither honours nor advancements lured him from his chosen work, and he remained at Sagres busy with his charts and maps till his death in 1460. He was the founder and preceptor of this school of Portuguese adventurers.

No huge discovery rewarded him in his lifetime: Portuguese ships had not yet passed the Equator at the time of his death, but he had mapped out the road for maritime expansion down the West Coast of Africa, and realized in theory its further projection. Some day, if his sea-captains pressed on, winning their way down that interminable continent, the land would come to an end, and there would be a sea-way open eastwards to the fabulous wealth of India and of the remoter Spice Islands, and of the furthest markets of Cathay. Hitherto these products of the Orient had reached Europe by way of the Mediterranean, and of some yet unexplored route by land from the seas beyond. This trade was in the hands of the Moors; cinnamon and pepper, silks and porcelain and jewels, all were brought west by the circumcised race which had once been lords of Portugal. But Prince Henry was convinced that there was a sea-route open along which his Captains might sail their ships from the Moluccas into the Tagus, and discharge there the spices and the treasures they had embarked at Oriental ports. But dearer to his heart than the riches of the unloading ships was the knowledge of the route that they should traverse, which presently became manifest, even as he had foreseen it, for Africa was found to be but finite, and from beyond its southernmost cape there lay the way to India.

After Prince Henry’s death the Infante’s Town became more generally known as Sagres Castle, and in 1587 Sir Francis Drake, spying round the coast for a base for his ships that waylaid the treasure-bearing fleets of Spain that came from Nombre de Dios and Panama laden with gold for King Philip in his wars with England, seized the little bay at the foot of the promontory and stormed the castle on its summit. It was too strongly built to be taken by assault, and he piled firewood against its walls and burned the defenders out and razed the fortifications; for he could not suffer a fort to command his anchorage. But many years before that Prince Henry’s charts and chronicles of exploration had been removed to the Royal Library at Lisbon, and even if they had been there they would have been already obsolete. In Drake’s day they would be curiosities merely, like out-moded maps, for since then regular traffic had been established eastwards with the fabled Spice Islands, Columbus had found the New World, two navigators, Magellan and Drake himself, had noosed the globe in the wake of their ships, and a third, Cavendish, was on his way. Swiftly indeed had advanced the knowledge which the Prince-Navigator had devoted his life to gain, and it was from him and his researches, in the main, that the impetus had come.

In 1481 there succeeded to the throne of Portugal King John II, who carried on the Navigator’s tradition. Cape by cape Portuguese ships pushed their way down the West Coast of Africa, following out Prince Henry’s scheme of penetrating southwards and further south till there lay to the east the open sea, while in the first year of his reign the new King had despatched two travellers, Pedro de Covilhão and Alfonso de Payva, to ferret out a land-route towards India and the mythical kingdom of the Christian King, Presbyter John. As early as the eleventh century the legend of this monarch, king and priest like Melchizedek, was widely credited in Europe; but, by the fifteenth century, it was believed that his kingdom was situated somewhere in Abyssinia, and while the sea-route round Africa was being explored these travellers set forth to strike the trade-route of the Moors from the East, for it was known that the spices and silks and produce of the Orient came into Europe along the East Coast of Africa. They got to Abyssinia, and Covilhão seems to have reached Calicut by way of the Arab sea-route from Zanzibar. On his way home he was imprisoned in Abyssinia, but sent information to Portugal about his journey, saying that beyond the southern Cape of Africa was open sea. But that was already known, for in 1487 Bartholomew Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and thus credited to Portugal the first of the three great discoveries which were to revolutionize geography.

The second of these great discoveries (as indeed also the third) would assuredly have been scored up to Portugal as well, had not in each case a piece of unwisdom and unkingliness caused them to be won under the flag of Spain. There had come to Portugal a Genoese sea-captain called Columbus: he was a skilled navigator, he was for ever studying charts, and he married a Portuguese, Felipa Perestello, daughter of one of Prince Henry’s Captains. He had heard the story of how Martin Vincente had picked up at sea, four hundred leagues west of Cape St. Vincent, a piece of strange wood, unknown to the forests of Europe, and this was to Columbus what the falling apple was to Newton. The ordinary man would have thought it curious, and the matter would have rested there, but the constructive mind, with the insight of genius, found in these two trivialities the keys to the discovery, in one case, of a continent and, the other, of a great natural law. Columbus did not himself realize what he had found, nor till the day of his death did the entire truth dawn on him, but now, on the accession of King John II, he entered the Portuguese maritime service, and put before the King his aim of reaching Asia, not by sailing eastwards but by sailing westwards. King John consulted his Council, who turned the scheme down as being chimerical, but he was not wholly satisfied with their rejection of it, and by a very shabby piece of work privately sent out ships to test Columbus’s proposition. They returned without having accomplished anything, and Columbus, rightly disgusted at this underhand manœuvre, betook himself and his idea to Spain in 1484, much as Magellan did thirty-three years later. Both took with them the project which their genius had built on hints and obscure indications, and for which Portugal had no use. But Spain was of truer intuition and of wider enterprise, and in 1492 Columbus set out to discover the new world. Too late Portugal suspected what she had missed, and sent out ships to intercept him, just as she did when she tried to stop Magellan sailing westwards to the Spice Islands in 1519. So, about the year that Queen Leonora’s young page arrived, a country boy from Sabrosa, at the Court at Lisbon, Columbus returned to Barcelona with the news that he had discovered the western route to India. Thirty-six days of sailing westwards from the Canaries brought him within sight of those shores which he believed to be the Eastern Coast of Asia. The vast sea beyond them had never yet been beheld by European eyes, nor was it seen by them till in 1513 Balboa stood on the peak in Darien.

This discovery of America caused a fresh distribution of the kingdoms of the world to be proclaimed by Pope Alexander VI in the Bull promulgated on May 4th, 1493. Spain and Portugal were the favourite spiritual children of the Holy Father, who was himself a Spaniard by birth, and, now that both were pushing out east and west into the unknown with this amazing vigour, there was considerable danger (the world being round) that their claims would seriously come in conflict. The Holy Father therefore, appealed to by both parties, made a very honest attempt, considering that he was a Spaniard, to give an equitable decision. Spain had been exploring westwards, Columbus had discovered America for her; Portugal had been exploring eastwards and Diaz had rounded the Cape of Good Hope. Therefore Holy Father very sensibly decided that the entire Western Hemisphere and all that was therein, known now or subsequently discovered, should belong to Spain, and all the Eastern Hemisphere to Portugal. Had King John not behaved in so shabby a manner to Columbus, and had Columbus discovered America under the Portuguese flag, Holy Father would have been in a very difficult position, for Spain would certainly not have liked both hemispheres assigned to her neighbour. But, happily, such a situation did not arise; and, once granting that the Pope had the right (concerning which neither he nor his spiritual children had any doubt whatever) to apportion the world as he pleased, his arrangement seemed very tactful and suitable.

The next point to settle was where, on the surface of the globe, East was to become West, and where, somewhere on the far side of it, West was to become East again. Through what seas or islands or continents the more remote semicircle of that line of demarcation would lie, nobody could possibly tell, because nobody had yet been there. But as regards the nearer semicircle of that line on this side of the world, Pope Alexander decided that it should lie due north and south of some spot in mid-Atlantic situated one hundred leagues west of the Azores and (not or) the Cape Verde Islands. Islands so remote as these, thought this somewhat inaccurate Pontiff, might be regarded as one point for the purposes of measurement, and probably on the maps that he consulted they appeared to lie in the same longitude, which is very far from being the case. But King John of Portugal was very ill-satisfied with this disposition: a line drawn so near to Europe would almost certainly give Spain the whole of the newly discovered continent, which, had he not treated Columbus with so gross a shabbiness, would all have been Portuguese. So he begged that this line of demarcation should be shifted three hundred leagues further to the west, which would give Portugal a better chance of securing any parts of the new continent which should lie eastwards of the longitude of Columbus’s discovery. There was some bargaining over this, and next year, in 1494, the position of this line of demarcation between east and west, which constituted the boundaries between the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal, was, by the Tortesillas Capitulations, shifted two hundred and seventy leagues further west of Holy Father’s original assignment.

Both beneficiaries set out with renewed vigour to explore the moieties of the world’s surface which had thus been bequeathed to them in sæcula sæculorum. The seas of the entire world, broad and narrow alike, were subsequently granted to the same fortunate nations for their joint possession, and the unconscious humour of this enviable bequest remained undetected till Elizabeth’s sea-captains, notably Hawkins and Drake, took it upon themselves to point it out. At present this amended division of the world by the dividing line which no one was capable of drawing with the smallest approach to accuracy, or had the slightest idea where its remote bisection lay, gave satisfaction till the discovery of Brazil and subsequently the objective of Magellan’s voyage of circumnavigation, caused some highly disquieting complications to arise. Brazil, according to this amended demarcation, lay within the Portuguese hemisphere, and, so far as that went, that was highly satisfactory to Portugal. But she now became afraid that, by having caused the Spanish hemisphere to have been screwed round westwards, in order that she might secure just such eastern lands of America, she had also caused the Spice Islands, on the other side of the world, to come into the Spanish half-world. These complications, and the adjustments thereof, scarcely belong to our story: it may, however, be mentioned that as a matter of fact the Spice Islands still remained in the Portuguese half-world. But the dividing line was difficult to fix, and King Charles continued to consider that they were his. Eventually, in 1529, Portugal paid Spain 350,000 ducats for their indisputed possession.

King John II died in 1495; he had carried on with ability and success the traditions of the Prince-Navigator, and though he had made a very disastrous and costly mistake with regard to Columbus, which had lost Portugal the New World, his policy of expansion and discovery had been conceived on broad and progressive lines. He was succeeded by King Manuel; and, under him, not discovery alone but conquest and consolidation went forward with redoubled vigour. The new King was a true Empire-builder: he grabbed whatever portions of the earth’s surface he could possibly lay hands on, and held them tight, not only by erecting forts for military occupation but by establishing others to guard the routes to his new acquisitions so that they remained, though remote, in some sort of touch with Portugal. Like Queen Elizabeth of England, he was served by men of conspicuous ability; like her, he was cursed with a native strain of incredible parsimony. Under him Portugal penetrated into the fairy-land of the Orient towards which she had been feeling her way so long. In 1497 Vasco da Gama repeated Diaz’s voyage round the Cape of Good Hope, but, instead of then turning back, he went on up the hitherto unexplored East African Coast. On Christmas Day of that year he landed on those unknown shores, and in commemoration of the Birthday christened the territory by the name it still bears, Natal. Then coasting to Melinda, a little north of Mombasa, he found himself at the African end of the Arab trade-route to India, already traversed by Covilhão, and leaving the coast Gama struck eastwards across the Indian Ocean. He dropped anchor in the harbour of Calicut, and the jewel of India gleamed in the crown of Portugal. Within the space of eleven years, Diaz had rounded the Cape of Good Hope, Columbus had discovered America (though he thought he had found the East Coast of Asia), and Gama had landed in India. Magellan was seven years old and still in remote Sabrosa when Diaz made his voyage, but he must have gone to Lisbon just about the time when Columbus found a New World, and he was eighteen when Gama landed in India. We may safely assume that these events, which had intoxicated all Portugal with the noble wine of adventure, had set him bubbling with the heady ferment.

Smaller confluents, some of which flowed from remote and significant table-lands, kept pouring into this widening river of geographical knowledge; they joined it chiefly from its western bank. South America was found to trend far eastwards from the point originally discovered by Columbus, and Pinzon, one of his captains, coasting southwards along Brazil, in 1500, arrived clearly within the hemisphere assigned to Portugal, for the eastern portion of Brazil and Pernambuco, which was the southern limit of his voyage, lay easily to the east of the line of demarcation as amended on the petition of King John II. That same year Cabral, a Portuguese Captain with a fleet en route for India, sailing wide of the West African Coast in order to take advantage of the trade-winds, was driven far out of his course by gales from the east and came within sight of the same coast. In 1501 and 1503 Gonzalo Coelho and Christopher Jacques pushed exploration further southward along the coast of Patagonia (then unnamed) and penetrated, as we shall find strong reason for believing, to the neighbourhood and probably the entrance of the Strait of Magellan itself. Columbus in a subsequent expedition had learned from natives that a vast sea lay beyond the narrow lands of Central America; and, though till the day of his death he personally believed that he had discovered the eastern confines of Asia, it is clear that, even before Balboa saw the Pacific, it was generally believed that Columbus had found a continent hitherto unknown and separated by a thousand leagues of sea from the coast of Asia. North America was still unexplored; it was believed to consist of a chain of islands, and how vague and erroneous generally was the imagined configuration of America can be gathered from the map made in 1515 by Leonardo da Vinci, who charts it as a long island stretching not north and south but east and west. To the north of it Leonardo delineates widely sundered islands, the chief of which is Florida; its western cape lies in the same longitude as China, while its eastern portion, on which appears Cape St. Augustine and Brazil, approaches Africa. It is interesting, however, to observe that Leonardo did not share the view that South America joined the Terra Australis Incognita of other cosmographers, but draws it as separated from that conjectured continent by a wide stretch of ocean. This was suspected, as we shall see, by Magellan, but not verified till Francis Drake in his Circumnavigation of the World, in 1578, was driven southwards after passing into the Pacific through the Strait of Magellan, and saw the Atlantic and Pacific meeting “in a wide scope.”

But Eastern exploration during these years was the main objective of Portuguese seamanship, for Portugal, as was natural, was pushing on into the Eastern Hemisphere assigned her by Pope Alexander. Cabral, it is true, had found Brazil, but his discovery was accidental; he had been driven by easterly winds on a more westerly course than he had intended, and the object of his voyage was to pass round the Cape of Good Hope, and in these early years of the sixteenth century the maritime vigour and enterprise of Portugal were like the growth of springtime in her search for the lands of the further Orient. Vasco da Gama, now the heroic subject of odes and rhapsodies innumerable for his first exploit, left Lisbon again for India in 1502, and made himself execrable for the abominable cruelties and massacres he ordered at Calicut. Next year another fleet under Alfonso d’Albuquerque followed his tracks up the East Coast of Africa, and then north to the entrance of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, thus traversing another section of the Arab trade-route to Europe, and in 1504 three more Portuguese fleets rounded the Cape. But the actual annexation of India and the Spice Islands beyond was not attempted at present: India would not run away, and none but the ships and soldiers of Portugal had Holy Father’s privilege and protection in those waters. Unfortunately they teemed with Moorish ships whose Captains cared not a rap for the Vatican, and were glad to earn merit by disembowelling, in the name of Allah the all-merciful, every Christian they could lay hands on: it was therefore a preliminary task in the conquest of the East to get an effective grip on the route that led there. No conquest of Indian soil was worth anything if the invaders were isolated in the network of Moorish trade-routes: they would be no more than a fly entangled in the encompassing web. But by the autumn of 1504 King Manuel deemed that the time was ripe for an expedition of conquest, and Francisco d’Almeida was appointed Viceroy of India with orders to proceed there and hold it in the name of the King. His fleet was gathered in the Tagus, and among the volunteers who flocked to his flag was Ferdinand Magellan. He did not resign his appointment at Court, but obtained leave to enlist as a seaman.