Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
For Magellan's crews it was even worse, crammed as they were
by night into whatever sleeping places they could find on deck and
having little to do by day but gather in small groups and grumble
about their leaders. Nor was it only the men who were disaffected.
The Spanish captains of Magellan's ships were not happy serving un-
der a foreigner. They already carried mutiny in their hearts.
It would be hard to exaggerate the difficulties of command on
these early, pioneering voyages. The dangers and discomforts exper-
ienced by sailors were bad enough without the added fear of the
unknown into which their superiors were leading them. Small won-
der that ships were usually manned by the desperate and the reck-
less. Magellan's crews included a large proportion of criminals and
men who had gone to sea to escape creditors. At the other end of
the social scale were the gentleman adventurers who hoped to make
their fortunes in private trading and colonial exploitation of newly-
discovered lands. Such men, like the ships' captains, expected to be
consulted on all major decisions. But voyages of exploration can-
not be run by committees, and several circumnavigation attempts
came to grief because of a failure to grasp this basic fact (Fenton's ex-
pedition and Cavendish's second round-the-world bid, to name but
two; see below, pp. 47ff). There has to be someone in command,
someone with a clear vision, someone capable of sufficient enthusi-
asm, determination and, if necessary, ruthlessness to drive men bey-
ond the known limits of their endurance. Magellan was such a man.
He would prove it at Port St Julian.
His ships broke out of the Doldrums at last and made landfall
on the coast of Brazil on 29 November. This territory, added to the
discoverers' charts in 1501, was a no man's land. Although claimed
by Portugal, it remained unsettled and unexplored. On 13 December
the little fleet anchored in the wide bay of Rio de Janeiro and the next
two weeks were devoted to essential repairs and taking on fresh wa-
ter. This was the last accurately located place on Magellan's maps.
 
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