The Longest Voyage

Circumnavigators in the Age of Discovery

Robert Silverberg

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780821440568
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

From the intense and brooding Magellan and the glamorous and dashing Sir Francis Drake; to Thomas Cavendish, who set off to plunder Spain's American gold and the Dutch circumnavigators, whose numbers included pirates as well as explorers and merchants, ?Robert Silverberg ?captures the adventures and seafaring exploits of a bygone era.

Over the course of a century, European circumnavigators in small ships charted the coast of the New World and explored the Pacific Ocean. Characterized by fierce nationalism, competitiveness, and bloodshed, The Longest Voyage: Circumnavigators in the Age of Discovery ?captures the drama, danger, and personalities in the colorful story of the first voyages around the world. These accounts begin with Magellan's unprecedented 1519–22 circumnavigation, providing an immediate, exciting, and intimate glimpse into that historic venture. The story includes frequent threats of mutiny; the nearly unendurable extremes of heat, cold, hunger, thirst, and fatigue; the fear, tedium, and moments of despair; the discoveries of exotic new peoples and strange new lands; and, finally, Magellan's own dramatic death during a fanatical attempt to convert native Philippine islanders to Christianity.

Capturing the total context of political climate and historical change that made the Age of Discovery one of excitement and drama, Silverberg brings a motley crew of early ocean explorers vividly to life.

1

THE ROUND WORLD’S IMAGINED CORNERS

AT ANCHOR IN A SPANISH RIVER, FIVE SHIPS, waiting. Old ships, patched, small, untrustworthy. Aboard them 948 cheeses, 1,512 pounds of honey, 3,200 pounds of raisins, much pickled pork, a two-year supply of biscuits. Wine, rice, lentils, flour, provisions for a long journey. A mingled crew, Spaniards, Italians, Frenchmen, Basques, Greeks, a Malayan, an Englishman. For a Spanish fleet, a Portuguese commander: Fernão de; Magalhães, called Hernando de Magallanes by the Spaniards, Ferdinand Magellan by posterity. Under harsh September sunlight Magellan readies his vessels for departure. The year is 1519. The destination is the Moluccas, the islands where spices are grown, a cluster of fragrant isles in a distant sea.

Grim, limping, austere Magellan expects it to be a long voyage. He goes westward into the Atlantic to seek the Spice Islands, though he knows they lie in other waters. The damnable massive continents of Columbus stand between Magellan and the Moluccas like high green walls cutting ocean from ocean. Never mind; he will find a sea route westward to the Indies, a strait to take him past those two slabs of land. He knows the strait is there, just as he knows that Jesus and the Virgin guide him, that the King of Portugal loathes him, and that the throbbing in his wounded leg will not leave him. For God, for Spain, and for his own private profit and glory, the little Portuguese will find that strait. And traverse it. And leave his body beyond it on the shores of a strange sea, though that is no part of his plan.

Sailing around the world is likewise no part of Magellan’s plan. He believes that the circumnavigation is possible, of course, or he would never lift anchor in the first place. But the homeward leg of that voyage, past the Spice Islands, would take him through waters where only Portuguese ships lawfully might sail. Magallanes is no longer Magalhães; a Spaniard now, he has no wish to trespass on the seas of his former country. That is the whole point of this enterprise: to reach the Moluccas without trespass, by a new route, to lead Spain to the source of spices and to return the way he came, snatching cloves and peppers away from Lisbon by brilliant geographical achievement. So this is not to be a world-girdling voyage—not as of September 1519.

Plans change. Men die. Most of those who wait here, at anchor by the mouth of the Guadalquivir river, will never see Spain again. Some will return in cowardice to their starting point, timidly resigning from the grandest maritime adventure in human history. The others, those who from stubbornness or foolishness or luck or greed see the mission to its end, will make the longest voyage of all, to the ends of the Earth and back. A trespass, a calamity, a circumnavigation—a miracle of seamanship.

The port of departure is Sanlúcar de Barrameda, 75 miles downriver from Seville. The castle of the Duke of Medina Sidonia guards the river’s mouth. The farewell parties there have been going on for weeks; the wives and mistresses of the officers gather in the castle, in the guest chambers of the monastery, in the inns; wine flows freely; there is laughter, gambling, talk of fortunes to be won in the Spice Islands. Now the month of final preparations ends. The voyagers kneel, accept the wafer and the wine, hear the Kyrie, the Credo, the Sanctus. Confession and communion behind them, they go to their ships; figures wave from shore; guns are sounded; sails are raised. Captain-General Magellan stands apart, a small and lonely figure. A commander must always create a distance between himself and his men, but for Magellan that is no task: this private man is accessible to few, alone even in the midst of his men. He is iron, jacketed in ice, and his sailors will follow him out of fear, not out of love. He has powerful enemies among the captains of his own fleet; there are whispers of mutiny even here at the moment of leave-taking.

Tuesday, September 20, 1519. The sails fill with breeze. The wives weep and contemplate their likely widowhood. The Atlantic swallows Magellan’s vessels. The round world awaits its conqueror. He will reveal to man the nature of man’s planet; he will perish; he will live forever.

2

Only a spherical planet can be circumnavigated. But that medieval aberration, the concept of a flat Earth, had long since gone into the discard heap. Columbus, we like to say, proved that the world was round, though all he did was scratch a short track over a small part of its circumference. It was Magellan’s fearful voyage, and not Columbus’ swift five-week cruise, that confirmed the obvious and made the world unarguably a globe.

Primitive man, seeing the ground flat beneath his feet, extended that datum to the horizon and imagined the world as a flat disk with edges over which unwary travelers might tumble. But such an image suits only the very simple and the very sophisticated, such as cloistered scholastics. Early man, though he depended on common sense, did not have the wit to comprehend the implications of what he saw; scholastics of any period do not bother to see at all, but spin theories to suit prior concepts. Neither the Neanderthal nor the absentminded professor could properly evaluate the shape of his planet, but almost any fisherman or sailor of antiquity was capable of deciding that the thing must be a sphere.

Babylonian court theologians taught that the Earth was a hollow mountain, floating on the waters of the deep. Egyptian priests saw it as the floor of a box, with a goddess—the sky—bending over it and supporting herself on elbows and knees. Neither Egyptians nor Babylonians were known as seafarers, and doubtless those who did go to sea had other ideas. They knew that when they stood in harbor and observed a ship approaching shore from far out at sea, the top of the mast appeared first, then the upper part of the sails, then the hull of the ship, as though the vessel were moving along a curved surface. The Mycenaeans and Minoans who sailed the Mediterranean before 1200 B.C. did not show much fear of falling off the world’s edge; and their successors, the Greeks of post-Homeric times, argued clearly and convincingly against the flat-Earth theory.

True, the first Greek philosopher whose name we know—Thales of Miletus, who lived in the sixth century B.C.—seems to have believed that the world was a flat disk floating on water. Thales was a clever man, but he lived in a time when speculative theorists were often too fertile with ideas. After him came Anaximander, who said that the Earth had the shape of a cylinder, with a height one-third its diameter. That at least accounted for the obvious curvature of the surface. Two generations later, Pythagoras of Samos, having studied the mysteries of Egypt and Babylonia, announced that the world was a sphere. Though he had traveled abroad, Pythagoras was no empiricist; searching for underlying mathematical laws to explain the universe, he worked from mystical premises and gave the Earth that shape because a sphere, a perfect geometrical figure, was the only form the Earth deserved to have. Following the same notion of the necessity of a perfect universe, he put the planets into circular orbits. Pythagoras was more nearly right than anyone before him, but for the wrong reasons.

Plato, another mystic, accepted Pythagoras’ theories. He regarded cosmological questions of this sort as far less important than such matters as the search for truth and justice, but he did speak of a spherical Earth. At least, Plato said, in an ideal universe the world could have no other shape. His pupil Aristotle, a man of tauter mind, gave reasons for the sphericity of the planet. He observed that the Earth cast a circular shadow on the moon during an eclipse, and cited the experience of travelers to prove the impossibility of the Earth’s flatness. By the third century B.C., matters had advanced to the point where Eratosthenes, a member of the brilliant Hellenistic band of scientists in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, was able to compute the circumference of the Earth with impressive success. Eratosthenes measured the height of the noontime sun at Alexandria and at Aswan, figured the distance between those two points, and, with two angles and a known base, achieved a figure of 25,000 miles for the entire sphere of which he had surveyed an arc. That was extraordinarily close to the truth; but, unfortunately for Columbus and Magellan, later Alexandrian mathematicians revised Eratosthenes’ figures to make the world seem much smaller than it really is.

The size and shape of the world thus were revealed by a progression of clever men. By 300 B.C. no educated person seriously doubted the sphericity of the Earth. Finding out what that Earth contained, though, was a different matter. One could, like Aristotle or Eratosthenes, perform wonders of intellection without leaving home; but to know what lay beyond the horizon, one had to go and look. The Greeks spoke of their familiar Mediterranean world as the oikoumene, by which they meant the known or inhabited part of the Earth. (Our word “ecumenical,” meaning “universal,” is derived from this.) Though the limits of the oikoumene were unknown, it was assumed that a single world-girdling ocean bounded it.

We sometimes tend to think of discovery as something that began with Columbus, but the Greeks were considerable explorers and gradually pushed the borders of the oikoumene outward, as did their commercial rivals, the Carthaginians, who lived on the North African coast. For Homer, writing perhaps in 800 B.C., the world began somewhere in the hazy east, beyond Egypt, beyond Assyria, and ended in the misty west, at the Pillars of Hercules, which we call the Straits of Gibraltar. Nothing of Africa was known but its northern coast; Europe north of Greece was a wild forest; everything was surrounded by the “girdling river of Ocean.” Then the world widened. A Carthaginian captain named Himilco may have passed through the Pillars of Hercules about 500 B.C., spending four months on a reconnaissance that took him to Brittany and perhaps to Cornwall. More reliably documented is the voyage of his brother Hanno down the western coast of Africa, far enough south to have had a glimpse of gorillas in Guinea or the Cameroons. If we can believe Herodotus, a Phoenician expedition a century before Hanno actually circumnavigated Africa from east to west. This was done, so we are told, at the instigation of Necho, Pharaoh of Egypt from 610 to 594 B.C. Looking for a maritime link between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, Necho hired a fleet of Phoenicians and sent them south, thinking that all they need do was go around Libya to find a route. To their surprise they found that Africa extended vastly beyond all expectations. Herodotus relates that “the Phoenicians took their departure from Egypt by way of the Red Sea, and so sailed into the southern ocean. When autumn came, they went ashore, wherever they might happen to be, and having sown a tract of land with corn, waited until the grain was fit to cut. Having reaped it, they again set sail; and thus it came to pass that two whole years went by, and it was not till the third year that they doubled the Pillars of Hercules, and made good their voyage home. On their return they declared—I for my part do not believe them, but perhaps others may—that in sailing around Libya they had the sun upon their right hand.”

The story is vague, but that last detail rings true. Libya here means the whole of Africa; and what Herodotus is saying is that the Phoenicians, as they proceeded southward and then westward beyond the equator, noticed the sun always in the north. This would be contrary to the experience of Mediterranean peoples, but it is what would be expected in navigation of the southern hemisphere. Possibly rumor or even guesswork could have led the Egyptians to the correct picture, but it is much more likely that an actual venture below the equator yielded this knowledge. The sun indeed would stand on the right hand as voyagers from Egypt rounded Africa.

It was a journey of some 13,500 miles—taken unhurriedly, with long spells ashore for rest and reprovisioning. Unhappily, the great fact it yielded—that Africa was a gigantic peninsula surrounded by water to the south—was lost soon after Herodotus’ time. Ultimately, geographers decided that Africa stretched off infinitely to the south, connected to an unknown southern land, Terra Australis Incognita. It remained for Portuguese navigators twenty centuries later to repeat the work of the Phoenicians, coming around this time from west to east, and restore the knowledge that Necho’s sailors had won so dearly.

Herodotus, who was a fair traveler himself—leaving his home in Asia Minor to visit Egypt, fallen Babylon, the Phoenician cities, all of the Greek world, and even the Scythian barbarians north of the Black Sea—tells of another expedition sent out by the Persian ruler Darius about 510 B.C., commanded by a Greek named Scylax. Wishing to know where the Indus river flowed to the sea, Darius sent Scylax eastward from Persia to enter the Indus via the Kabul river, follow it along its course to the sea, and return by coasting the shores westward around Arabia to Egypt. Thus India became part of the oikoumene.

Another of the ancient voyagers was Pytheas, a Greek born in the Greek colony of Massilia, now Marseilles, about 360 B.C. Carthage then controlled the Straits of Gibraltar and monopolized such traffic as there was between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic; but while Carthage was temporarily preoccupied with a war against the Sicilian city of Syracuse about 320 B.C., the merchants of Massilia sent Pytheas through the straits and into the North Atlantic to blaze a sea route linking them to the chief sources of those valuable commodities, amber and tin. He coasted western Spain and Portugal, took regular observations of latitude, reached the tin mines of Cornwall, and evidently circumnavigated Britain. His latitudes were expressed in the Greek fashion, in terms of a calculation of how long the longest day of the year would be at a given distance from the equator. In the northernmost part of Britain, he said, the longest day has eighteen hours, which corresponds to a latitude of 57°58'N. in Scotland. He sailed at least as far north as a place where the longest day was nineteen hours long; this would be at 61°N. at the northernmost of the Shetland Islands. Here he heard about a land called Thule, six days’ sail to the north: the northern termination of the world, beyond which no man could go. The narrative of his voyage is ambiguous, but some modern partisans of Pytheas, notably the explorers Fridtjof Nansen and Vilhjalmur Stefansson, feel that he actually went in quest of Thule, entering the frozen sea above the Arctic Circle.

Through these and other journeys, most of them unrecorded for reasons of commercial security, the Greeks and their contemporaries extended the oikoumene from Gibraltar to the Ganges, from the Baltic to the southern reaches of Africa. All this comprised a single continuous land mass attainable by coastal sailing. They did not often venture into the open sea—at any rate, most of those who went beyond sight of land did not return to tell the tale—but their caution stemmed from deficiencies in their ships and their navigational abilities, not from any dread of sailing over the world’s edge. The existence of some other oikoumene across the ocean had to remain a matter for speculative thinking, no more.

There were many theories. Aristotle argued for a single oikoumene, bordered by ocean. He allowed for the possibility of huge extensions of the land in the directions of Africa and India, but insisted that there was only one continent. On a spherical Earth, then, the western and eastern shores of the one oikoumene must converge, and Aristotle did not think they would be separated by an ocean of any great size. His authority was invoked much later to show that it would be an easy matter to reach India by sailing westward from Spain.

In the second century B.C., Crates of Mallus postulated four continents, separated by two river-like oceans, one running from east to west, the other from north to south, crossing at right angles. Though the symmetry of this system, with its neatly balanced northern and southern hemispheres separated by water and an impassable zone of fire, had a certain appeal to the Greeks, only one aspect of it had any lasting geographical significance: the suggestion that below the equator lay the antipodes, a continent or continents that balanced the known land of the north.

Greek theorists also divided the world into varying climatic zones, usually five in number. At each of the two poles was a frigid zone, eternally icebound, everlastingly dead. Round the middle of the world lay the blazing tropics, a torrid zone of terrible heat. Between the frigid and the torrid were two temperate zones, a northern and a southern one. The northern temperate zone included the familiar Mediterranean oikoumene; its southern counterpart might well be equally favorable to human life, but no one in the north would ever know, for it was impossible to survive a crossing of the frightful equatorial zone. (That mariners had penetrated the tropics as early as 600 B.C. was somehow overlooked in these hypotheses.)

The climactic figure of Greek geography was Ptolemy of Alexandria, who lived in the second century after Christ. What journals of explorers were available to him in Alexandria’s vanished library we cannot even guess, but Ptolemy had only to walk down to his city’s flourishing docks to talk to men who had seen distant wonders. Alexandria was a great nexus of seaborne trade; in its harbor Ptolemy could find sailors who had gone via the Red Sea to Arabia, and on to the Persian Gulf and the coasts of India. Certainly there was traffic in Ptolemy’s time from Egypt to the Indian Ocean ports of Africa—possibly even to Zanzibar, five degrees south of the equator. From these seafarers and his own studies and intuitions, Ptolemy derived a picture of the world superior in detail to anything previously conceived.

On home grounds he was superb. His maps of the Mediterranean area were accurate for latitudes and even for longitudes, which were less easy to calculate. Europe, Asia, and Africa were well portrayed; but when he got beyond his knowledge, he simply invented. It was Ptolemy who concocted Terra Australis Incognita, tacking that mythical southern continent to the lower part of Africa and carrying it far to the east, where it joined Asia. This converted the Indian Ocean into a wholly enclosed sea similar to the Mediterranean and made unthinkable any hope of circumnavigating Africa. Reaching the great southern continent was impossible because of the intervening zone of burning tropics. Terra Australis was Ptolemy’s only major geographical blunder, but it was a cruel heritage to leave.

3

After him came darkness. Rome, which had swallowed Greece, was devoured by barbarians, and out of the chaos arose Christianity to make a cult out of sacred ignorance. The early Christians, with justifiable pessimism, believed that their crumbling world was soon to pass away and that it was futile and even blasphemous to probe its secrets; the proper occupation of men was to prepare their souls for the coming City of God. Three centuries after Ptolemy, St. Augustine was warning against the “mere itch to experience and find out,” and protesting that “men proceed to investigate the phenomena of nature—the part of nature external to us—though the knowledge is of no value to them; for they wish to know simply for the sake of knowing.” Augustine gave thanks to God, who had freed him from the sin of curiosity! “What concern is it to me whether the heavens as a sphere enclose the Earth in the middle of the universe or overhang it on either side?”

In this era of deliberate rejection of knowledge, Greek learning was jettisoned and Biblical texts became the foundation of all theory. On the first page of Genesis was a statement borrowed from the Babylonians and now thrust forth as unassailable doctrine: “And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament.” A flat terrestrial disk, sandwiched between water and water. If there had to be a description of the world at all, said the churchly fathers, this was quite good enough; but most shared the attitude of St. Basil, who asked in the fourth century, “Of what importance is it to know whether the Earth is a sphere, a cylinder, a disk, or a concave surface? What is of importance is to know how I should conduct myself towards m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• 1. The Round World’s Imagined Corners
• 2. Magellan
• 3. The Longest Voyage
• 4. Drake
• 5. In the Wake of the Golden Hind
• 6. The Dutch in the Orient
• 7. The World Encompassed
• Bibliography
• Index