Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
honour due to men who have given faithful and spectacular service,
heard them tell their tales of strange lands and peoples. He followed
closely the plans being made to exploit da Gama's discoveries. And
when, in 1505, Captain Francisco d'Almeida was sent with a fleet of
twenty armed ships to batter Arab trading posts into submission,
Ferdinand Magellan was among the young adventurers who served
in his expedition.
From the young soldier's point of view the events of the next
seven years must have been thrilling and satisfying beyond measure.
Almeida, and his successor, Alfonso de Albuquerques, fell upon the
Arab and Indian coast towns with unbridled brutality. Mozambique
and Sofala were captured. Kilwa was burned. Mombasa was des-
troyed. Off Diu a hastily-assembled Gujerati-Egyptian fleet was
shattered. The vital entrepoôt of Goa was seized and soon supplanted
Calicut as the pivotal point of Indian Ocean trade. By 1511 irresist-
ible Portuguese power had reached distant Malacca. Magellan was
present at many of the major battles of this
blitzkrieg.
He familiar-
ised himself with the eastern seas and became an expert navigator.
During these campaigns Magellan sailed as far east as Malacca, and
may have travelled on to the tiny, all-important Spice Islands (the
Moluccas) of Ternate and Tidore.
*
When Magellan returned home in 1512 he had a better under-
standing than most men living of eastern seas and islands and of
the Arab, Indian, Indonesian and Chinese mercantile fleets that were
now forced to share with those of Portugal the luxury trade of the
Orient. Though he spent the next few years in Europe and North
Africa, he could not escape the spell the East had cast upon him.
From friends such as Francisco Serrao he received first-hand ac-
counts of the destruction of a Javanese war fleet in 1513 which laid
the Spice Islands open to direct Portuguese trade. He received news
of the people and the Muslim courts of those islands. Other friends
