Straits by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

Author:Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520383364
Publisher: University of California Press

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The voyage was already an irremediable failure. The strait was too far from Spain. The way was too long and arduous, the weather too cold, the available food too scarce and unnourishing, the winds too adverse, the coasts too hazardous. Magellan’s route, even if it eventually led to the Spicery, would never be able to compete with the faster passage the Portuguese already followed.

The narrative of disasters is all too easy to reconstruct, but the course and chronology of the voyage through the strait are elusive, partly, as usual, because of the mutual contradictions of the sources, and partly because of the deficiency of data at crucial moments. It helps to have an idea of the setting—the trend of sea and shore, the enormities of the environment, the monstrosity of the task.

Pigafetta, Magellan’s avowed apologist, praised the beauty of the strait. It has, indeed, a terrible beauty, under dazzling mountains from which glaciers seep into the sea. To the south, Tierra del Fuego looks as if it has been wrenched and clawed from the heel of South America, strewing the strait with islands like scraps of flesh or blood clots from a Procrustean bed. The result is a maze of confusing channels and bewilderingly variable soundings, with rocks and shoals threatening to rip or strand passing vessels. Though there are mild meadows toward the eastern end, for much of the way forbidding cliffs rise precipitously from the shoreline. There are nearly 350 miles of hard going to traverse. The weather lurches unpredictably. Fogs descend and vanish like traps flung and flicked by an evil retiarius. In any case, beauty, as most love stories attest, does not “live with kindness” or necessarily induce calm or placate rival appetites. Even though it was high summer when Magellan sailed here, the weather was almost unbearable; for the strait is a kind of wind tunnel, where the howling westerlies of the Southern Ocean drive back vessels that try to force their way along it—the very experience San Antonio endured, the very winds that made Trinidad and Victoria scurry for shelter. It is not uncommon for sailing ships to be ejected like pellets from a popgun, flung back almost as far as the Falklands.

Nowadays, loungers at the rails of cruise ships can go to the strait to escape the northern winter at their ease, as they contemplate with equanimity features that struck horror into the hearts of sailors in the age of sail. Sailing directions, before the nineteenth century, make tense reading: summons to constant vigilance, untouched by romantic sensibilities or rhapsodical reactions to the sublimities of nature. Where, as they approach the strait, voyagers now see the gentle slope of the land toward Cabo de las Vírgenes and the white cliffs of Tierra del Fuego to the south, navigators in Magellan’s wake saw barren shores, with no wood or fresh water, and a long barrier of treacherous sands barring the route. In today’s comfortably powered and balanced vessels, passengers hardly notice the racing tides and frighteningly inconsistent soundings.

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