Your nation’s glories to your view has given.
What ensigns, blazing to the morn, pursue
The path of heroes, opened first by you!
Still be it your’s the first in fame to shine:
Thus shall your brides[20] new chaplets still entwine,
With laurels ever new your brows enfold,
And braid your wavy locks with radiant gold.”[21]
The poet of the Lusiad, who had said that the Muses sang of Gama unwillingly, here concludes his praises of Magellan with a promise to the Portuguese of ever renewed praise—a promise which will be fulfilled by posterity whenever the character and enterprise of Magellan are compared with those of his contemporaries; for whilst the cruelty and violence of Gama, and the difficulty his companions had in restraining him, were very serious defects in his character, Magellan gave many noble examples of the opposite virtues and of other qualities of a very high order. His conduct on the occasion of the shipwreck near the Maldive Islands has been already described; the clemency with which he tempered justice when he put down the mutiny in Port St. Julian—a mutiny which Sebastian Alvarez, the King of Portugal’s agent, would appear to have been privy to, if indeed he did not prepare it, shows great self-restraint, and the whole of his conduct in the islands of Sebu and Matan, where he fell, defending the retreat of his companions, is more like that of the knights errant of an earlier date, than that of his contemporaries. Pigafetta, who was with him at his death, was deeply affected by it, and recounts his many virtues and qualities in an appeal to the Grand Master of Rhodes not to allow Magellan’s memory to be lost.
Most of the captains of ships at this time, and long afterwards, were soldiers put into naval commands; but Magellan, besides being a military officer, was also an experienced and learned navigator, and Pigafetta’s Treatise of Navigation may be taken as the result of Magellan’s instruction in that art.[22] The voyage of Columbus, which employed only thirty-three days out and twenty-eight homeward-bound, cannot be compared with that of Magellan, and if Columbus was as good a seaman and navigator as Magellan, yet a certain superiority must be allowed to the latter on account of his numerous military exploits in India and Africa.
I have not been able to ascertain who was Juan Serrano, who remained in the hands of the Sebu islanders after the massacre of Duarte Barbosa and his companions, and in Navarrete he is sometimes spoken of as an inhabitant of Seville and sometimes as a Portuguese. Pigafetta speaks of him as a Spaniard, but the despatch of Sebastian Alvarez leaves no doubt as to his being Portuguese, which otherwise might have been inferred from his being a compadre of Joan Carvalho. It is probable that he was a relation of Francisco Serrano, the friend and correspondent of Magellan, who died in Ternate about eight months before the arrival at Tidore of Magellan’s ships: it is also probable that he was the same Juan Serrano whose voyage with Francisco Serrano in 1512 from Malacca to the Java Seas is related in the book of Duarte Barbosa on the coasts of East Africa and Malabar (Hakluyt Society).