The gums of both the lower and upper teeth of some of our men swelled, so that they could not eat and therefore died.

Transcription

1 20 September 1519 Magellan Sets Sail for South America The First Circumnavigation of the Globe The gums of both the lower and upper teeth of some of our men swelled, so that they could not eat and therefore died. Antonio Pigafetta (c c. 1534), a survivor In 1519 the extent of the Pacific Ocean and the precise location of the East Indies Spice Islands were still unknown. If, as some still thought, the Asian continent stretched far to the east then the western coastline of Spain s South American colonies would be near the East Indies. The Spaniards now needed to discover whether the valuable Spice Islands were on the western side of the meridian line which (under the Treaty of Tordesillas) separated their East Indies territories from those of the Portuguese to the east of the line. To resolve this issue they turned to Ferdinand Magellan who, having fallen out of favour at the court of his native Portugal, was prepared to sail halfway round the world to assert Spain s claim to its new Asian territories. The five ships that left Spain were poorly equipped and the 250 crew were an international collection of adventurers including Portuguese, Italians, French, Greeks and an Englishman. A risky venture under a foreigner held few attractions for Spanish sailors. Having reached the coast of Brazil, Magellan guided his ships south along the coast of South America looking for an opening into the newly discovered Pacific. Vasco Núñez de Balboa had become the first European to sight the Pacific (which he named the Mar del Sur or Sea of the South) on 25 September 1513 after he crossed the Panama Isthmus. But Magellan, travelling further south, was advancing into the unknown. By March 1520 the southern winter had arrived and Magellan decided to winter on the Patagonian coast rather than return to the tropics as his crew demanded. Three of his five ships now mutinied but he managed to overcome the mutiny by conciliation and executed only one ringleader. In October 1520 he resumed the southward exploration and on 21 October he sailed into the bay leading to the Strait which bears his name. Far from being, as he had hoped, a narrow but direct seaway leading directly to Japan and the Malay peninsula, the Magellan Strait proved to be a tortuous maze

2 opening out into the world s largest sea. It took Magellan thirty-eight days to sail the Strait s 334 miles. The smallest of his ships, the San Julian, had already been wrecked and now the pilot of his biggest ship, the San Antonio, mutinied, put his captain in irons and sailed back to Spain. On 28 November 1520 Magellan s remaining three ships sailed into the Pacific and for the next three months and twenty days they travelled for 12,000 miles in unusually calm weather which led them to decide that this new ocean should be called Pacific. Deprived of fresh food, Magellan s sailors were reduced to eating sawdust, biscuits that had turned into powder after being eaten first by worms, as many rats as they could find, as well as the oxhides intended as a protective cover for ship equipment and which they tried to make edible by warming them over embers. The intense privations were recorded by one of Magellan s men, Antonio Pigafetta, in his Primo Viaggio Intorno al Mondo a journal which is one of the great accounts of human fortitude. After sailing north, Magellan anchored at Guam in March 1521 to pick up supplies and then headed for the Philippines, where he arrived a week later. He was killed on the island of Mactan by tribal warriors on 27 April 1521 while covering his men s retreat to their boats. Just one ship of the original five, the Victoria, arrived in Seville in September 1522 with eighteen men, having rounded the Cape of Good Hope. The earth had been circumnavigated. Magellan represented the culmination of the skill and ambition displayed for almost a century before him by his fellow Portuguese on their global explorations. Fifteenth-century Portugal, unlike Spain and England, France and Italy, was united and at peace after establishing (with English help) its independence of Castile at the battle of Aljubarrota (August 1385). The naval enterprise, celebrated in the Lusiads of the national poet Camões, reflected a national consensus and an aptitude for longterm planning. Prince Henry the Navigator ( ) conceived of a systematic exploration of the western coast of Africa, after the Portuguese victory in 1415 over the Muslim stronghold of Ceuta on the North African coast revealed the extent of the treasure that had arrived there from Saharan Africa to the south and from the Indies to the east. Sagres, Henry s base on the far southern coast of Portugal, became a centre for intelligence gathering, map-making, navigational skills and ship-building. The caravel, a light and easily manoeuvrable ship with its slanting and triangular sails (adapted from the Arab ships seen on the Mediterranean), was a Portuguese invention. Its ability to sail fast and close into the wind made it the most popular ship among European sailors.

3 From 1434 onwards Henry s sailors advanced by stages along the western coast of Africa. In 1444 the explorer Gil Eanes brought back from Guinea the first genuinely commercial cargo: 200 Africans who were sold in Portugal as slaves. By the mid-seventeenth century, and from Angola alone, the Portuguese had seized 1.3 million slaves. Other imports gave their names to the various parts of the West African coast facing the Gulf of Guinea: the Ivory Coast, the Gold Coast and the Grain Coast, which produced pepper. The explorations of the Portuguese also now benefited from their neighbour s obscurantism since Jewish astronomers and mathematicians fleeing persecution, among them Joseph Vizinho, moved from Spain to Portugal. Vizinho left the University of Salamanca in the 1480s and his southern voyage of 1485 led him to discover how to determine latitude according to the declination of the sun along the coast of Guinea. Previously, mariners could not progress below the equator since from that point on they could no longer see the North Star which was their point of reference for measuring latitude in the northern hemisphere. New measurements and tables therefore guided the Portuguese explorers ever further south. Bartholomeu Diaz, on a typically well-organized and efficient Portuguese expedition of four ships equipped with three years supplies, passed the southern tip of Africa at the Cape of Good Hope on his voyage of and entered the Indian Ocean. Ever since the midfifteenth century maps, based on rumour, had been produced illustrating Africa as a free-standing peninsula and the Indian Ocean as an open sea. Diaz confirmed the rumours and prepared the way for the achievement of Vasco da Gama, who, in his expedition, rounded the Cape and then travelled along the east coast of Africa visiting the Muslim territories of Mozambique, Mombasa and Malindi and encountering their hostile rulers. He then crossed the Arabian Sea and arrived on the southwest coast of India. On his return voyage of 1502 to the Malabar coast of western India, Diaz headed for Calicut, where he demanded the expulsion of all Muslims before turning the city into a Portuguese colony and then establishing the first permanent European navy in the Asian seas. The new Portuguese viceroyalty of India oversaw the destruction of the Muslim fleet in Ormuz, which guarded the entrance to the Persian Gulf, was seized in 1507 and so was Malacca in In 1510 the west-coast town of Goa became the capital of the new colony in India and, as effective controllers of the Indian Ocean, the Portuguese established new maritime routes with Siam, China and the Spice Islands (or Moluccas). Trade was deflected away from the Persian Gulf Red Sea Levant route and towards the Cape on its way to western Europe. This also hit Venice and Genoa very hard since their wealth was based on their entrepôt

4 status for eastern goods moving from the Levant towards the west. Egyptian Venetian trade collapsed almost immediately after da Gama s conquests and by 1503 the price of pepper in Lisbon was a fifth of what it was in Venice. The Iberian powers were establishing a global dominance over the circumnavigated earth in the first half of the sixteenth century and the Ottoman Turks were their sole significant enemies outside Europe. Arab Muslims, having always been a predominantly land-based power and civilization, failed to mount a naval challenge in a world where power came to those who could dominate the seas. Individual Arabs had navigated the Indian Ocean for centuries and mastered the shifting direction of its monsoon winds in order fill the lateen sails that would be adapted by the Portuguese. Arab mariners had invented the stern rudder and Al-Biruni, a geographer of genius, corrected Ptolemy in the eleventh century and wrote that the Indian Ocean was linked to another sea south of Africa. But the Arabian peninsula could not produce the wood, resin, iron and textiles needed to build ships. The territories the Arabs acquired after their expansion from the peninsula could almost all be reached by land and, content with the riches of their existence, they saw no need to develop the naval capacity which might have pushed them to explore beyond the Indian Ocean. Further east the explorers were lucky in south-east Asia as well, for they sailed into seas abandoned by the Chinese. In the early fifteenth century the Chinese navy with its main fleet of 400 warships was a powerful arm of the Chinese state and its multi-storey ships were larger than any western equivalents. Between 1405 and 1433 a series of Grand Treasure Fleets sailed from China to the countries bordering the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean as a demonstration of the new Ming dynasty s magnificence and authority. The countries visited became tributary states and, intent on showing their luxuriant self-sufficiency, it was the Chinese who gave the gifts. This pacific and maritime expression of foreign policy was the reverse of western colonial rapacity but the expense led to its abandonment and self-sufficiency turned into isolationism. The 1,000-mile-long canal linking Tientsin in the north with Hangchow in the south, a 2,000-year project, was finished and replaced ships for the transportation of goods and foods. A consciously anti-maritime policy led to the disintegration of the navy and by 1500 the crime of building a junk with more than two masts was punishable by death. The continuing threat of barbarian incursion led China to concentrate on the protection of its northern boundaries, to rebuild and extend its Great Wall

5 ( ), and to move its capital northward from Nanking to Peking. But the greater foe to the Chinese proved to be the European masters of the age of sail who had arrived in the southern seas.