Typical is his description of the attractions of Brazil: “reputed longevity, abundant food, generous sexual hospitality, and women with insatiable sexual appetites”. The logs of Andrés de San Martin and the man who has come down to us as the “Genoese pilot” are drier, but more reliable. Fernàndez-Armesto interrogates them all, correcting chronologies and sifting out impossibilities and contradictions in the accounts. “We are,” he asserts, “lucky to have so many sources.”
The ride is thrilling. As Magellan’s fleet ventures further south into cold climates and tempestuous seas, running out of food and water and guided only by the “divine prophecy” of navigation and unfamiliar skies, the paranoia grows and Magellan “bares his teeth”. Men are executed and marooned, though never so many as would harm the ability to carry on, even when a vessel, the Santiago, was wrecked off the coast of Patagonia.
Commercially, Magellan’s voyage was already an irremediable failure. The strait in southern Chile which now bears his name, and took 36 days to navigate, was too far from Spain, too cold, wholly uneconomic. Like Columbus before him, he had grossly underestimated the girth of the globe. The vast emptiness of the Pacific, the “unexpected sea”, lay ahead, where he found a new sense of religious exaltation, evident in his conversion of locals to Christianity in what is now the Philippines, where he was to die. The surviving members of the expedition completed the first circumnavigation when they returned to Spain in 1522.
It was a death crafted, Fernàndez-Armesto contends, as a “great career move”, which absolved him of the failure of the voyage and recriminations back home. Ever since, he has been feted for something that did not concern him – the circumnavigation of the world – while his greatest achievement, as Fernàndez-Armesto demonstrates, was to reveal the Pacific to Europe.
Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan by Felipe Fernàndez-Armesto is published by Bloomsbury at £25. To order your copy for £19.99, call 0844 871 1514 or Telegraph Books
