The Isles of Spice
THE latest volume of the Golden Hind series repeats the success of the first of these excellent biographies of great explorers. What Mr. Benson did for Drake, he accomplishes again in this portrayal of the far more difficult figure of Magellan, the little, lame, swarthy Portuguese whose indomit- able will drove his fleet through the storms of the Antarctic and made him one of the greatest of the world's explorers.
Magellan had much to contend against. He had no arts of pleasing, nor desire for human sympathy. He was small and ugly and limped from a wound in the knee received in India ; and although of the Portuguese nobility, he never won the slightest favour at the Court of Lisbon, where he was attached to King Manoel's person. At last he left that monarch, when Manoel refused, with various insults, to raise his pay by a shilling a month ; and became naturalized asi Spaniard.
There is, as Mr. Benson makes it clear, more than meets the eye in this request for a paltry increase of stipend ; probably Magellan, in his own secretive way, was even then planning the expedition which he claimed would bring the dominion of the Pacific to whomsoever sent it forth. As King Manoel refused, he went to Spain, and submitted his plans to King Charles's advisers, who also, however, rejected the grandiose projects of this alien adventurer. But Magellan was undaunted : "The wheels of that steel temperament indifferently ground up the grit of opposition which was pushed in to stay them, and left it behind in powdered dust." At last he interested a Senor Juan d'Aranca, who formed a syndicate which included two bishops (one of them had recently prophesied failure for Columbus, and was now eager to be up to date) and other great men, to lay the plans of Magellan and Co. before His Most Catholic Majesty of Spain. After long years of frustration (twelve, since he had sailed round the Cape of Good Hope with Albuquerque) events now moved quickly for our hero. King Charles was interested. If an all Spanish route could be found to the Pacific, the Sovereignty of the Spice Islands might belong to the crown of Castile. The sooner, therefore, that Magellan sailed from Seville, the better for Spain, and the less chance of giving offence to Portugal. King Manoel had made a most costly economy by denying Magellan that extra shilling a month.
On September 20th, 1519, Magellan saw the coast of Spain fade into the autumn night as the five ships of his fleet sailed west on their adventure. After leaving the Canary Islands, the first signs of discontent became apparent in the fleet ; but Magellan took no notice. He rarely spoke until he could act. A few weeks later, after a conference, the Captain- General saw his chance, and clapped one of his subordinates into irons, and degraded him to the rank of able seaman. After striking the Brazilian coast, the fleet steered south- wards to the River Plate, and then, hugging the coast as closely as it could, to the unknown waters beyond, looking always for the inlet which Magellan believed would bring him through to that ocean on which Balboa had looked. • And by the end of March, 1520, they had only reached the Bay of St. Julian in Patagonia. The Strait was undiscovered. The Arctic winter upon them. To make things worse, rations were cut down, for Magellan had discovered that instead of the two years' supply that the King's contractors had in- voiced to him at Seville, he had hardly a twelvemont h's store of wine and biscuits.
This shortage of provisions fanned the smoulder of discon- tent into open mutiny. There stood Magellan, on the night of Easter, an alien Admiral, with more than half his Spaniards in open revolt. Three of his five ships had gone over to the mutineers. "lie limped about the deck, staring with those wide, black eyes of his, with no word for any . . . Magellan thought : the thread of thought was running strong and clear from the spinning . . . With inconceivable quickness he planned and executed a lightning counter-attack on the enemy's flank." We have not space, however, to tell of how one mutinous captain was stabbed in the throat, another defeated on his ship during the night, and the third made prisoner at dawn ; nor of how one man was hung, and two marooned, and thirty-eight men imprisoned for defying the Captain-General. Thereafter, Magellan's men had so little taste to question his orders that he found it necessary on-'one occasion to admonish them to speak their minds frankly to him when their advice was asked, and not to fear him. But who could help fearing a man who said that he would push on into a trackless and terrible sea, even if he had to eat the leather off the main-yard ?
Yet with all his courage, and "drive," Magellan was in a sense a failure. Everything connected with him turned to tragedy. He converted the Philippine Islanders to Christianity, but they reverted to their boar-toothed idols within a few months. He discovered the Strait named after him, but it was of no practical importance. Only one of his five ships went round the world (another had deserted in Patagonia), and it returned with little treasure. Magellan himself had died in a very foolish affray in the Philippines. He "crushed opposition with the relentless strength of a machine," but little grist came out of his mill. He failed in many things, but he succeeded in driving his keels where Europeans had never sailed, and he died nobly, fighting to save his men, so that the world will always remember him.
There are no better introductions to a glorious epoch than these volumes of the Golden Hind Series, and Mr. Benson is to be congratulated on his contribution both to the biography of adventure, and to the literature of history.
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