Read Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe for Free Online Page A

equivalent of selling nuclear secrets at the height of the Cold War.
    Magellan’s conception of the world he planned to explore was fatally inaccurate. Like most explorers of the Age of Discovery, his ideas about the size of the globe, and location of landmasses, were inspired by Ptolemy. Had Magellan comprehended the size of the Pacific, its currents, storms, and reefs, it is unlikely that he would have dared to mount an expedition. But without the Pacific Ocean to inform his calculations, the estimated length of his route came to only half the actual distance. Magellan confidently predicted that it would take him at most two years to reach the Spice Islands and return to Spain with ships bulging with precious cargo. All he would have to do was find a way to get around or through South America, and he would be at the doorstep of the Indies. This was nearly the same mistake that Columbus had made over and over, during his four voyages. And it was a mistake that would be corrected only at the cost of great suffering and of many lives during the voyage Magellan now proposed.
    After making his presentation to the ministers, Magellan was invited to discuss the proposed expedition in greater detail with Fonseca and Las Casas.
    “I asked him what way he planned to take,” the historian wrote, “and he answered that he intended to go by Cape Saint Mary, which we call the Río de la Plata, and from thence to follow the coast until he hit the strait.” Las Casas remained skeptical of Magellan’s belief in the strait. “But suppose you do not find any strait by which you can go into the other sea?” he asked. Magellan told him that if he could not locate the strait, he “would go the way the Portuguese took.” Although Magellan sounded ready to contravene the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas, the king and his advisers were too intrigued to turn him away. “This Ferdinand Magellan must have been a man of courage and valiant in his thoughts for undertaking great things,” Las Casas marveled, “although he was not of an imposing presence because he was small in stature and did not appear in himself to be much, so that people thought they could put it over him for want of prudence and courage.”
    In Magellan’s case, appearances were deceiving. His ideas were big enough, and promised to be lucrative enough, to convince King Charles and his powerful advisers to back them.
     
    I mmediately after the meetings at Valladolid, the potential coleaders of the expedition presented a list of demands to the crown; they were couched in respectful language, but they were demands nonetheless. They included an exclusive franchise on the Spice Islands for a full ten years, 5 percent of the rent and proceeds “of all such lands that we would discover,” and the privilege of trading for their own accounts, so long as they paid taxes to the king. They asked to keep any “islands” they discovered for themselves, if they discovered more than six, as well as permission to pass the newly discovered lands on to “our heirs and successors.”
    Magellan’s insistence on a ten-year exclusive on voyages to the Spice Islands appeared preposterous in a fast-changing world, but he was concerned that Spain would send duplicate expeditions as soon as his was out of sight of land, expeditions guided by his theories and secrets, expeditions that might succeed if he failed. Magellan was right to insist on this point, although he was powerless to enforce it.
     
    O n March 22, 1518, King Charles, from his royal seat in Valladolid, offered Magellan and Faleiro a contract “regarding the discovery of the Spice Islands.” The document was a charter to discover a new world on behalf of Spain. “Inasmuch much as you, Bachelor Ruy Faleiro and Ferdinand Magellan, gentlemen born in the Kingdom of Portugal, wishing to render us a distinguished service, oblige yourselves to find in the domains that belong to us and are ours in the area in the Ocean Sea,