After a long wait, the Spanish king consented to furnish five ships with two hundred and thirty-four officers and sailors, and to stock them with provisions to last through a two-year voyage. It was agreed also that Magellan and his partner should receive one-twentieth of the profits of their undertaking; and that they should be governors of the islands they discovered.
At last, after two long years of waiting, Magellan’s fleet was ready to sail. Crossing the Atlantic seemed an easy matter then—twenty-seven years after the first voyage of Columbus. The first land they reached was the mainland of South America. The natives along the northern coast were friendly and ready to exchange enough fish for ten men for a looking-glass, a bushel of sweet potatoes for a bell, and several fowls (or even one of their own children) for a butcher-knife. Those people lived in huts and went almost naked, except for aprons of parrots’ feathers. There were many birds of bright plumage and plenty of monkeys in those regions. Some of the natives were cannibals, cooking and eating the flesh of men they captured or killed in battle.
The little Spanish fleet coasted along toward the south. The wide mouth of the La Plata deceived them so that they sailed in until they found that it was only a river. As they drew nearer to the South Pole it grew intensely cold. The men on the ships begged Magellan to turn round and go home. Some of their number died of exposure and want, and the rest were afraid they could not live through such a winter. Not only did they suffer from the bitter cold, but their ships had been damaged by storms on the way down the coast.
They stayed several weeks at a port in the country now called Patagonia without seeing a person. But one day an Indian giant strode in upon them. He was so tall that the white men’s heads barely came up to his waist. His hair was dyed white, his face colored red, and he had painted wide yellow circles around his little, black eyes. When they let him see himself in a big steel mirror he was so astonished that he jumped backward and knocked down four of the Spaniards standing around him. When he understood that it was himself he saw in the looking-glass, he was pleased and they made him a present of a small metal mirror. They found the Patagonians to be savages of a very low and brutal type, who ate raw meat, and even rats, like beasts of prey. If they felt sick they stuck arrows down their throats, and gashed their foreheads with shell-knives when their heads ached.
Many of Magellan’s men now turned against him, planning to murder him and those who stood by him, and then to sail back to Spain. Though they were the larger number the energetic ship master beat them at their own game. He executed one ringleader, and sailed away leaving another rebel on the shore, where he was, no doubt, soon killed and eaten by the cannibals.
As July and August are the coldest months near the South Pole, the weather began to moderate in October, which is a spring month. January and February are the hot season in that climate. On the 21st of October, 1520, they “saw an opening like unto a bay,” and after sailing through its winding ways they found to their great joy, that it led out at the other end into a vast expanse of water. At last they had discovered the only natural passage from sea to sea through the American continents.
Some of their ships had been lost and their provisions were eaten. Most of the men begged to turn back, now that they could report that they had found a great ocean beyond South America. “No one knows,” they said, “how wide this open sea is, and we may all starve before we reach the Moluccas.”
But Ferdinand Magellan would not turn back. He accused them of having faint hearts, and said that even if they had to eat the leather on the ships’ yards he would still go on and discover what he had promised the King of Spain.
One dark night the commander of the largest ship deserted the others and went back to Spain with the greater part of their provisions. The other ships were thirty-eight days winding their way through the straits to which the great leader’s name was afterward given, the Straits of Magellan. They saw so many fires in the land away to the south of them that they named it Terra del Fuego—Land of Fire.
Brave Magellan’s threat had to be carried out. All their provisions had either been eaten or were wholly unfit to eat. So all they had to live on for a long time was the leather on the ships’ yards. They hung it over the sides of the ship to soak several days in the salt water as they sailed along. Then they cooked it over a coal fire. The wide sea they were now crossing was so free from storms that Magellan named it the Pacific Ocean.