Thus a hundred years later than Orellana, the great river still flowed with a story of fearful hazards and treachery.
CHAPTER IX.
MAGELLAN’S DISCOVERY.
BY REV. EDWARD E. HALE, D.D.
FERNANDO DA MAGALHAENS, or Magalhâes, whom the French and English call Magellan, was a Portuguese gentleman of good family. He was educated, as well as his time knew how to educate men, for the business which he followed through his life,—that of a navigator and a discoverer. He was a child when Columbus first came home successful from the West Indies; and as a boy and young man he grew up, in the Court of King John the Second of Portugal, among people all alive to the exciting novelties of new adventure. As early as 1505 he went to the East Indies, where he served the Portuguese Government several years. He was in the expedition which first discovered the Spice Islands of Banda, Amboyna, Ternate, and Tidor. Well acquainted with the geography of the East as far as the Portuguese adventurers had gone, he returned to Portugal.
King Emmanuel was then upon the throne. Spain owes it to an unjust slight which Magellan received at the Portuguese Court, that, under her banner, this greatest of seamen sailed round the world and solved the problem of ages in reaching the east by way of the west. Magellan was in the service of the King in Morocco in a war which the Portuguese had on hand there. He received a slight wound in his knee, which made him lame for the rest of his life. Returning to Portugal, on some occasion when he was pressing a claim for an allowance customary to men of his rank, he was refused, and charged with pretending to an injury which was really cured. Enraged at this insult, he abandoned his country. He did this in the lordly style which seems in keeping with a Portuguese grandee of his time. He published a formal act of renunciation of Portugal. He went to Spain and took letters of naturalization there. In the most formal way he announced that he was a subject of the King of Spain, and should give service and life to that monarch, if he would use them.
Magellan had a companion in his exile; this was Ruy Faleiro, a gentleman of Lisbon, who had also fallen into disgrace at Court. Faleiro,[1590] like Magellan, was a thorough geographer; and the two had persuaded themselves that the shortest route to the Spice Islands of the East was to be found in crossing the Western Ocean. We know now, that in this conviction they were wrong. Any ordinary map of the eastern hemisphere includes the Spice Islands or Moluccas, as well as Portugal, because the distance in longitude east from Lisbon is less than that of the longitude measured west. It has been proved, also, that the continent of America extends farther south than that of Africa. This, Magellan and Faleiro did not know; but they were willing to take the risk of it. Spain has always held the Philippines,—the prize which she won as the reward of Magellan’s great discovery,—under the treaty of 1494, which gave to her half the world beyond the meridian of three hundred and seventy leagues west from Ferro. She has held it because Magellan sailed west, and so struck the Philippines; but, in fact, those islands lie within the half of the world which the same treaty gave to Portugal.
