Magalhães reaches the Cape of the Virgins: 21 October 1520

In the third week of October 1520, four ships were working south along the coast near the bottom of South America, at about 52 degrees south. They had spent almost two months in a river their crews called Santa Cruz and had put to sea again on 18 October. Before they sailed, the captain-general and all his men confessed and took communion.1 source

The captain-general was Fernão de Magalhães, a Portuguese nobleman in the pay of the king of Castile, known in English as Ferdinand Magellan. He had promised to find a sea route round America to the Spice Islands, and had told his captains he would follow the coast as far as 75 degrees south if he had to.1 source

On 21 October, the feast of the Eleven Thousand Virgins in the Church calendar, the fleet came to a headland with a wide opening behind it. Antonio Pigafetta, an Italian gentleman who kept a journal of the voyage, recorded the name they gave the headland: Capo de le Undici Millia Vergine, the Cape of the Eleven Thousand Virgins.1 source

Magalhães sent the San Antonio and the Concepción into the bay to look, and waited with the Trinidad and the Victoria. A storm blew all that night, and two days passed with no sign of the scouts. Then they came back with sails full and flags flying, fired their guns and cheered: they had found a channel that ran on into the land.1 source

The fleet spent more than five weeks in the strait that now carries his name and lost a ship there to desertion. The three that came out proved that a sea passage joined the Atlantic and the Pacific, against those who believed the land ran unbroken to the south.2 sources

Nobody knows exactly when or where Magalhães was born. The Torre do Tombo, Portugal's national archive, says around 1480 in the north, possibly in Porto; Sabrosa, Gaia and Ponte da Barca also claim him. The historian José Manuel Garcia argues for Porto: in 1518 Magalhães signed himself “vecino de la ciudad del Puerto”, and a Porto writer of 1549 named the city as his birthplace. The Sabrosa claim, Garcia says, rests on a document forged in 1796.2 sources

His family were minor nobles from the Minho without much money. In 1492 he went as a page to the court of Queen Leonor, where he lived for thirteen years. In 1505 he sailed for India in the fleet of Francisco de Almeida, the first Portuguese viceroy there, with his brother Diogo and Francisco Serrão, who became a close friend.1 source

He stayed eight years in the East, fought in the naval battle of Diu in 1509 and took part in Afonso de Albuquerque's conquests of Goa in 1510 and Malacca in 1511. Garcia argues that he also sailed with António de Abreu's ships to the Moluccas in 1512. Other historians dispute this, and the American editor James Robertson wrote in 1906 that Abreu's ships got no further than the Banda Islands. He was back in Lisbon in 1513.3 sources

Francisco Serrão, shipwrecked on Abreu's voyage, made his way to Ternate in the Moluccas, where he prospered at the court of its king. His letters, which reached Lisbon around 1515, urged Magalhães to join him. Magalhães replied in 1516 that he would come, by a Portuguese route or, failing that, a Castilian one.2 sources

Short of money, Magalhães joined the Duke of Bragança's expedition that took Azamor, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, in 1513. He lost a horse in the first fighting and was wounded in the leg. As quadrilheiro-mor, the officer in charge of the spoils, he was then accused of selling cattle in his care.2 sources

He went back to Azamor between July 1515 and March 1516 to clear his name, and brought home proof of his innocence. It did not change King Manuel I's mind. The king turned down at least two petitions for advancement between 1514 and 1516, and in 1517 refused him both a rise of 100 réis in his monthly allowance and leave to sail to the Moluccas. Magalhães publicly renounced his allegiance and reached Seville on 20 October 1517.2 sources

The prize was the Moluccas, a group of islands in the East Indies where cloves grew. Under the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, Portugal and Castile had divided the lands they might discover into a Portuguese half and a Castilian half, split by a meridian in the Atlantic. The treaty never fixed the matching line on the far side of the globe.2 sources

Magalhães argued, wrongly as it turned out, that the Moluccas lay in Castile's half. If they did, Castile could claim them and reach them by sailing west round the southern end of America, without touching Portugal's route round Africa. He backed the case with information from Serrão, from the cosmographers Rui and Francisco Faleiro and from the mapmakers Pedro and Jorge Reinel.2 sources

Charles I of Spain, the future Emperor Charles V, agreed. On 22 March 1518 at Valladolid the Crown signed a contract with Magalhães, described as “a knight native of the kingdom of Portugal”, and the astronomer Rui Faleiro. They were to explore within Castile's half and keep out of Portugal's. In return they would get a twentieth of the Crown's profits from any lands they found, the title of governor for themselves and their heirs, and ten years' protection from rival expeditions on their route.2 sources

Lisbon tried to stop the voyage. In September 1518 Álvaro da Costa reported to Manuel I on his attempts to talk Charles out of it, and in February 1519 Charles wrote to Manuel promising that the fleet would do nothing against Portuguese interests. Faleiro never sailed. In July 1519 the king ordered that Juan de Cartagena go in his place as Magalhães's “conjunct person”.3 sources

The fleet left Seville on 10 August 1519, by Pigafetta's account, dropped down the Guadalquivir to Sanlúcar de Barrameda and put to sea on 20 September. Three of his four captains, Cartagena, Quesada and Mendoza, were Spaniards.3 sources

Nobody knows how many men sailed. The 1518 contract provided for 234, the number the Torre do Tombo gives, and a royal order of May 1519 capped the fleet at 235. Pigafetta counted 237. The Portuguese chroniclers Barros and Castanheda gave 250, the crew lists published by Martín Fernández de Navarrete add up to 265, and the historian Guillemard, combing the lawsuits that followed the voyage, found at least 268 and guessed the true total at 270 to 280.3 sources

At least 37 were Portuguese. Besides Spaniards there were thirty or more Italians, nineteen Frenchmen, Flemings, Germans, an Englishman, men from Corfu, Africans and Malays. Enrique, a man from Malacca whom Magalhães held as a slave, went as interpreter.1 source

During twenty days of calm off Africa, Juan de Cartagena, the king's inspector of the fleet and captain of the San Antonio, defied Magalhães at a meeting of captains and was put in the stocks. The fleet reached the bay of what is now Rio de Janeiro on 13 December 1519 and worked south.3 sources

On 31 March 1520, the eve of Palm Sunday, the ships put into a bay on the Patagonian coast that they named San Julián, to sit out the southern winter. Magalhães cut the rations. When the men begged him to turn back, he replied, by Navarrete's account from the documents, that he would either die or do what he had promised.1 source

On the night of 1 April, Gaspar de Quesada and Cartagena crossed to the San Antonio with about thirty armed men. The ship's master, Juan de Elorriaga, ordered them off in the king's name; Quesada stabbed him four times in the arm. With Mendoza's Victoria and Quesada's own Concepción, the rebels now held three of the five ships, and demanded that Magalhães follow the king's orders.2 sources

Magalhães answered with a trick. He sent his constable, Gonzalo Gómez de Espinosa, to the Victoria with a letter for Mendoza and six men with hidden weapons. While Mendoza read it, smiling, Espinosa stabbed him in the throat. A second boat under Duarte Barbosa took the ship. The next night the San Antonio dragged her anchor, drifted onto the flagship and surrendered.1 source

Mendoza's body was quartered on the shore, and on 7 April Quesada was beheaded and quartered by one of his own followers, Luis de Molino, who did it to escape hanging. Cartagena and a priest, Pedro Sánchez de la Reina, were marooned when the fleet sailed. More than forty other guilty men were pardoned, because the ships needed them.2 sources

In May the smallest ship, the Santiago, was wrecked while scouting the coast to the south. Her crew got ashore, and two men made their way back overland to raise the alarm; one man, João Serrão's slave, was lost. The four remaining ships left San Julián on 24 August.2 sources

Pigafetta reckoned the strait 110 leagues long and in places half a league wide, between mountains loaded with snow, with water too deep to anchor in. The October nights, he wrote, lasted three hours. He called it the strait of Patagonia and thought there was no more beautiful strait in the world.1 source

Magalhães took the south-western channel. A boat sent ahead came back within three days: its crew had seen the cape at the end and the open sea.1 source

The San Antonio, the largest ship in the fleet, never came back. Her pilot, the Portuguese Estêvão Gomes, had been promised ships for a voyage of his own before Magalhães arrived in Spain, and Pigafetta says he hated the captain-general. With some Spaniards he seized the captain, Magalhães's cousin Álvaro de Mesquita, wounded him, put him in irons and sailed for Spain.1 source

Magalhães searched the strait for her. He sent the Victoria back to the entrance, and her crew planted two banners, one on a hillock in the first bay and one on an islet, each with a letter in an earthen pot buried beside it, the signal the captains had agreed on for a lost ship. Then he went on with three.1 source

On Wednesday 28 November, in Pigafetta's words, they “debouched from that strait, engulfing ourselves in the Pacific Sea”. They went three months and twenty days without fresh food.1 source

They soaked the ox hides wrapped round the main yard and ate them, and paid half a ducat for a rat. Scurvy swelled the men's gums until they could not eat. Pigafetta says nineteen died of it, with a Patagonian the fleet had seized and a man from Brazil; a record in the Archive of the Indies used by Navarrete counts eleven scurvy deaths. There was not one storm, and Pigafetta thought the new ocean well named: “In truth it is very pacific.”2 sources

On 6 March 1521 they reached the islands now called the Marianas. Islanders swarmed aboard and took what they could, including the flagship's boat. Magalhães went ashore with forty armed men, burned forty or fifty houses and killed seven men, and Pigafetta named the group the Ladrones, the Thieves' Islands.2 sources

On 16 March they sighted Samar, in the archipelago later named the Philippines. At Cebu Magalhães made an alliance with its ruler, Rajah Humabon, who was baptised with his queen and, by Pigafetta's count, 800 of his people. Within the week, Pigafetta writes, they burned a village on a neighbouring island “because it refused to obey the king or us”.2 sources

That village, Bulaia, was on the small island of Mactan, opposite Cebu. Mactan had two chiefs, Zula and the man Pigafetta calls Cilapulapu, known in the Philippines today as Lapulapu. On 26 April Zula sent two goats and asked for help against his rival, who refused to obey the king of Spain. The log of a Genoese pilot in the fleet says Magalhães had demanded goats, pigs, rice and millet from Mactan by threes, and was offered them by twos.3 sources

Magalhães decided to fight, although his royal instructions told him not to go ashore himself where he might come to harm, and his men begged him not to go. Sixty men set out at midnight in three boats, with Humabon and twenty or thirty of his own craft. Magalhães sent word that if the islanders obeyed the king of Spain, accepted Humabon as their lord and paid tribute, he would be their friend. They answered that if he had lances, they had lances of bamboo and stakes hardened in fire.2 sources

At daybreak on Saturday 27 April, forty-nine of his men waded ashore through water up to their thighs. Pigafetta says more than 1,500 islanders were waiting in three groups; the Genoese pilot guessed three or four thousand. Half an hour of musket and crossbow fire from too far off did little harm, and when Magalhães had houses set alight the defenders pressed harder.1 source

Magalhães was hit in the right leg by a poisoned arrow and ordered a slow retreat. Most of his men ran; six or eight stayed with him, fighting in the shallows for more than an hour.1 source

Eight of his men died with him, Pigafetta says, and four Christian islanders were killed by fire from the boats; the people of Mactan lost fifteen. They refused to give up his body for any amount of goods, saying they would keep him as a memorial.1 source

The alliance at Cebu did not last. On the day of the battle Duarte Barbosa, one of the two commanders the crews chose to replace Magalhães, told Enrique that his master's death had not freed him and that he would still be a slave in Spain. Pigafetta says Enrique then plotted with Humabon; the chronicler Peter Martyr blamed the sailors' abuse of the island's women instead.1 source

On 1 May Humabon invited the visitors to a feast and his men killed them. Pigafetta says twenty-four went ashore; other accounts put the number between twelve and thirty-six, and Navarrete's list of those lost has twenty-seven names, Barbosa among them. The other commander, João Serrão, was brought to the beach bound and wounded, begging to be ransomed, and the ships sailed without him.2 sources

Too few men were left to sail three ships, so the Concepción was burned off Bohol, leaving between 108 and 180 men by the different counts.1 source

The Trinidad and the Victoria anchored at Tidore, in the Moluccas, on 8 November 1521 and loaded cloves. Francisco Serrão, Magalhães's friend, had died in the islands, probably poisoned, at about the time Magalhães was killed. In September the crews had chosen Juan Sebastián Elcano, a Basque from Getaria who had sailed as master of the Concepción, to command the Victoria. Pigafetta never mentions him.3 sources

Then the Trinidad sprang a leak. The Victoria would go home westward round Africa, through Portuguese waters, while the Trinidad, once repaired, would try to recross the Pacific to Panama. The Victoria sailed on 21 December with 47 Europeans and 13 islanders; 53 men stayed with the Trinidad. She failed to recross the Pacific and fell to the Portuguese in October 1522, and only four of her crew ever reached Spain.2 sources

Elcano kept clear of Sumatra and the Portuguese and spent nine weeks fighting the weather off the Cape of Good Hope, rounding it in May 1522. On 9 July, starving, the crew put into Santiago in the Cape Verde Islands with a story to hide where they had been. Ashore they learned it was Thursday; by Pigafetta's careful log it was Wednesday. Sailing always westward, they had lost a day.1 source

When the Portuguese found them out, they held thirteen men and the ship's boat, and the Victoria fled with 22 aboard, sick and well, by Albo's count. On Saturday 6 September 1522 she entered the bay of Sanlúcar “with only eighteen men and the majority of them sick, all that were left of the sixty men who left Malucho”. At Seville on 9 September the survivors walked barefoot in their shirts, carrying candles, to give thanks at two shrines.3 sources

The voyage did not settle who owned the Moluccas; the quarrel between the two crowns ran on until the Treaty of Zaragoza in 1529. It did open the way for Spain to colonise the Philippines and to run its own spice route across the Pacific.3 sources

The Portuguese documents about him, nearly all in the Torre do Tombo, deal mostly with his pay, a loan he struggled to recover and the efforts of Manuel I's agents to stop him sailing.1 source

Of the twenty-five early accounts of the voyage that survive, eleven were written by men who were there. Pigafetta's, first printed in Paris in 1525, is the fullest, and it holds word lists of four languages the crews met, from Guanabara Bay in Brazil, Patagonia, Cebu and the Malay world.1 source

The written accounts all come from the visitors' side. In the Philippines the man who stopped Magalhães is a national figure: in 1961 the town of Opon, on Mactan, was made the City of Lapu-Lapu, and in 2017 the government created a state decoration, the Order of Lapu-Lapu.3 sources