Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (30 page)

The rats commanded a premium because sailors believed that eating them might offer protection against the disease they all feared: scurvy.

S
curvy posed the single greatest danger to the health of the men during the entire voyage. There was no known cure, and if unchecked, it could claim the lives of them all. Magellan’s only defense against scurvy was an assortment of folk remedies. Once scurvy struck the crew, the voyage became a race against death itself.

One by one, the men began to suffer from the disease. In his diary, Pigafetta described its dreaded symptoms. “The gums of both the lower and upper teeth of some of our men swelled, so that they could not eat under any circumstances.” A sense of exhaustion gradually overtook the men, and their gums began to feel sore and spongy. When they pushed with their tongues, even gently, their teeth wobbled. As the disease progressed, their teeth began to fall out, and their gums bled uncontrollably and festered with exquisitely painful boils.

Even though they suffered terribly from scurvy, sailors were still expected to work. If they failed to appear on deck, the boatswain whipped them with the end of a rope and then dragged them up on deck, where the sunlight pitilessly revealed their deteriorated condition. Their skin seemed to be falling from their bones, and old scars and sores, long healed, reopened. Their bodies were literally falling apart.

As scurvy claimed one life after another, burials at sea became commonplace. Sailors, many of them suffering from the early stages of scurvy themselves and seeing their own deaths foretold, wrapped the body in a remnant of an old, tattered sail, secured it with rope, and tied cannonballs to the feet. A priest, and on occasion the captain, uttered a brief prayer; two sailors lifted the corpse onto a plank, tilted it, and committed their crewmate’s mortal remains to the hungry sea.

Pigafetta put the grim tally of those who died from scurvy at twenty-nine, in addition to the sole remaining Indian passenger they had captured. Many others suffered grievously. “Besides those who died, twenty-five or thirty fell sick of divers maladies, whether of the arms or of the legs or other parts of the body, so there remained very few healthy men.”

I
n Magellan’s day, scurvy was a disease new to Europe, a terrible by-product of the Age of Discovery. In 1498, Vasco da Gama’s crew, exploring the African coast for Portugal, suffered the first widely noted outbreak. Da Gama observed that his men developed the telltale swelling of hands, feet, and gums. He also wrote of Arab traders offering oranges to the afflicted sailors, and the men making a miraculous recovery thereafter; the clear implication is that the Arabs, more accustomed to long ocean voyages than their European counterparts, knew the affliction and its cure. During a three-month-long passage across the Indian Ocean, Vasco da Gama’s crew again fell victim to scurvy, and this time thirty men died. “In another two weeks there would have been no men at all to navigate the ships,” da Gama wrote. Deliverance came when they reached land and again feasted on life-giving oranges. Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, Vasco da Gama and other early European explorers believed that unhealthy air—not dietary deficiencies— caused scurvy.

The intense suffering experienced by da Gama’s men, and later by Magellan’s, could have been prevented by a daily dose of one spoonful of lemon juice, for that is the amount of vitamin C necessary to prevent scurvy. In the body, vitamin C, or ascorbic acid, helps to manufacture the enzyme prolyl hydroxylase, which in turn synthesizes a protein collagen used for connective tissues such as skin, ligaments, tendons, and bones, all of which give our bodies tensile strength. A vitamin C deficiency leads to the melting of the collagen fibers and a breakdown in the connective tissues, especially in bones and in dentin, the building block of teeth. Collagen acts as a glue binding connective tissues together, and when it disintegrates, the tissues separate and capillaries hemorrhage, creating black-andblue patches on the skin. (Curiously, Magellan’s men’s desperate hope that eating rats would avert scurvy had a basis in fact; unlike humans, rats synthesize and store vitamin C.)

Scurvy continued to afflict explorers for more than two hundred years. Often, the difficulty of obtaining oranges during voyages was to blame, but even the most dedicated investigators remained befuddled, while thousands died at sea. Finally, in 1746, James Lind, a Scottish naval surgeon, turned his attention to the problem of scurvy, then afflicting sailors in the Royal Navy. To determine the cause, he conducted the first modern clinical trials on record. He isolated a dozen sailors suffering from scurvy and fed them the same diet. Then he subjected each to different treatments, administered daily. Some received seawater, some nutmeg and other spices, some vinegar, and others two oranges and one lemon. “The consequence was that the most sudden and visible good effects were perceived from the use of the oranges and lemons,” Lind observed, “one of those who had taken them being at the end of six days fit for duty.”

Despite the overwhelming evidence, Lind’s findings were not widely accepted. He persisted. After leaving the navy, Lind was elected a Fellow of Edinburgh’s Royal College of Physicians and subsequently published an exhaustive study entitled
A Treatise of the Scurvy Containing an Inquiry into the Nature, Causes and Cure of That Disease.
In the four-hundred-page treatise, Lind offered his own bizarre theory of the origins of scurvy; he claimed that a cold and wet climate clogged the pores and set the stage for the disease. This was nothing more than an updating of theories prevalent in Magellan’s era.

Not until 1795 did the British Royal Navy finally insist that sailors receive a daily ration of the juice of lemons or limes to combat scurvy, a practice leading to the term “limeys” to refer to British sailors. (At the time, a “lime” meant both lemons and limes.) This was an act of faith more than science because it was still not known why lemons, limes, oranges, and other fruits and vegetables prevented scurvy. Finally, in 1932, three medical researchers, W. A. Waugh, C. G. King, and Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, managed to isolate and synthesize ascorbic acid; they offered a scientific explanation of vitamin C’s effect on the body, and showed how a vitamin C deficiency leads to scurvy.

W
hile their men suffered and died around them, Magellan, Pigafetta, and several other officers remained mysteriously healthy. “By the grace of our Lord I had no illness,” Pigafetta marveled. Neither he nor anyone else knew why, but there was an outstanding reason why they had escaped scurvy. Throughout the ordeal, the officers regularly dipped into their supply of preserved quince, an applelike fruit, without realizing it was actually a potent antiscorbutic. Saved by this fluke, the good fortune seemingly conferred on Magellan by Saint Elmo appeared to hold, at least for the present.

Nothing in Pigafetta’s diary suggests that the officers conspired to keep their supply of quince to themselves at the cost of their men’s lives. Magellan and the others remained oblivious to its lifesustaining properties, and they continued to believe that their men suffered from a variety of afflictions, most of them caused by “bad air.” Since Magellan was known for personally ministering to his men when they became ill, he would likely have insisted they take daily rations of quince had he known of its benefits.

D
uring these three months and twenty days,” wrote Pigafetta, “we made a good four thousand leagues across the Pacific Sea, which was rightly so named. For during this time we had no storm, and we saw no land except two small uninhabited islands, where we found only birds and trees.” Their first landfall occurred on January 24, and very disappointing it proved to be: a simple atoll rising enigmatically from the ocean. Magellan named it San Pablo because the sighting occurred on the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul. (This tiny atoll was also the explorer Thor Heyerdahl’s first sighting of land during his transpacific crossing in 1947 aboard the balsa raft
Kon Tiki.
) The atoll proved useless to Magellan’s vessels; he saw neither evidence of human habitation nor a safe place to drop anchor. After sailing completely around the island, he signaled the fleet to proceed on its course. San Pablo could not come to their aid. Eleven days later, on February 4, 1521, Magellan spotted another islet—most likely Caroline Island, in Micronesia. The fleet approached, and once more tried to find an anchorage, but did not succeed. The water, complained Pigafetta, was so deep that “there is no place for anchoring because no bottom can be found.” De Mafra, writing long after the event, recalled an impenetrable reef that repelled the ships: “It seemed as if Nature had armed it against the sea.” And Albo’s log notes: “In this latitude we found an uninhabited island, where we caught many sharks, and therefore we gave it the name of Isla de los Tiburones”—Shark Island. Stunned from monotony and debilitated by illness, the crew watched the large, menacing creatures circle, apparitions in a scene of despair. Even Magellan, normally possessed of superhuman determination and indifference to hardship, became depressed and unstable as the transpacific crossing wore on. In a rage, he flung his useless maps overboard, crying, “With the pardon of the cartographers, the Moluccas are not to be found in their appointed place!”

Unable to make a landfall, they were carried by substantial trade winds over astounding distances. “We made each day fifty or sixty leagues or more,” Pigafetta wrote of their seemingly miraculous progress westward. “And if our Lord and the Virgin Mother had not aided us by giving good weather to refresh ourselves with provisions and other things we had died in this very great sea. And I believe that nevermore will any man undertake to make such a voyage.”

Their progress north was so rapid that they crossed the equator on February 13. Magellan was utterly confounded by this time. He had expected to reach the Spice Islands long before this point in the voyage; according to the maps he had studied, he had already covered the entire Pacific and should have been in Asia by now. Worse, he had entered Portuguese waters, as defined by the Treaty of Tordesillas; if he discovered that the Spice Islands lay squarely within Portuguese territory, the finding would defeat the purpose of the expedition, and he could not claim them for Spain. To add to the pressure, he was running out of water, and his men were dying of scurvy. He needed to find safe harbor soon, if he was to survive the ordeal of crossing the Pacific.

D
eliverance finally came ninety-eight days after the fleet left the strait. At about 6:00
A.M.
on March 6, 1521, two landmasses slowly rose from the sea; they appeared to be about twenty-five miles away. Eventually, a third mass came into view. From his perch in a crow’s nest sixty feet above deck, Lope Navarro,
Victoria’s
lookout, peered into the indistinct glow, trying to distinguish between these promising outlines and mere cloud formations. Throughout that anxious morning, the ships made directly for the shapes at a rate of about six knots.

When Navarro was convinced of their true nature, he announced from on high,
“¡Tierra!”

Tierra! Tierra!

The shrill cry tore through the silent morning.
Tierra!
“These sudden words made everyone happy,” de Mafra recalled of that miraculous sighting of land, “so much so that he who showed less signs of joy was taken for a mad man, as anyone who has found himself in such conditions would understand.”

C H A P T E R   I X
A Vanished Empire

The upper air burst into life!
And a hundred fire-flags sheen,
To and fro they were hurried about!
And to and fro, and in and out,
The wan stars danced between.

P
hysically and emotionally exhausted, Magellan climbed partway to the crow’s nest to see the prospect for himself. His men, many of them about to succumb to scurvy, starvation, and dehydration, their tongues swollen, breath foul, and eyes glassy, raised their shaggy heads to glimpse their salvation. As the islands grew more distinct in the morning light, the lookout shouted again,
“¡Tierra!”
and gestured to the south, where cliffs rose from the sea. Overjoyed, Magellan awarded the fortunate lookout a bonus of one hundred ducats. The first landmass Navarro had spotted was likely mountainous Rota. Thanks to the earth’s curvature and the angle from which the armada approached, it initially appeared to be two islands. Rota’s deceptive appearance confused Pigafetta, and has led to centuries of debate concerning which landmasses the lookout actually spotted. The other island, the one where the armada would eventually land, is now Guam, an unincorporated territory of the United States. About thirty miles long, covering 209 square miles, Guam is the largest of an archipelago of volcanic islands known as the Marianas, which lie about three thousand miles west of the Hawaiian Islands.

For Magellan, the landfall on Guam came as a mixed blessing. Although the island provided shelter from the misery he and his men had endured during their ninety-eight-day Pacific cruise, nothing about it suggested they were anywhere near their goal, the Spice Islands. Nevertheless, it was land. Since leaving the western mouth of the strait, Magellan had traveled more than seven thousand miles without interruption: the longest ocean voyage recorded until that time.

O
n Wednesday, the 6th of March, we discovered a small island in the north-west direction, and two others lying to the south-west,” Pigafetta wrote of the momentous event. “One of these islands was larger and higher than the other two. The Captain General wished to touch at the largest of these islands to get refreshments of provisions.” Pigafetta even sketched this sight for his diary, but the illustration, depicting three irregular blobs floating in a shimmering sea, is so crude that it has no value for navigation. Even more confusing, Pigafetta followed the practice of his time and placed north at the bottom of his maps and south at the top. The completed drawings suggest that after the journey’s conclusion he furnished a rough description to an illustrator, who turned Pigafetta’s sketch into a charming and colorful cartoon in which the ocean’s azure blue was accented with flecks of gold and the islands seemed to float on the surface like giant potatoes. Nevertheless, his images are the only surviving cartographic record of the voyage.