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6 First Intrusion On Wednesday, March 6, 1521, as the sun began to rise over the western Pacific Ocean, a tired and hungry seaman on the dawn watch of Magellan’s flagship Trinidad saw a silent blue shore materialize out of the dark haze on the northwestern horizon off the ship’s starboard bow. It appeared to be a high island. Then a smaller dark bump loomed above the rim of the sea just to the south of the first shape. The seaman, who was in the ship’s crow’s nest nearly sixty feet above water level, waited anxiously , staring hard to make sure that the shapes were not clouds. Convinced they were land, the lookout finally raised the cry that would reverberate down through history, “¡Tierra! ¡Tierra!” Below him on the main deck, the mixed crew of Spaniards, Basques, Italians, Portuguese, Frenchmen , Greeks, and even an Englishman scrambled to the starboard rail, some thanking God, others laughing through gums swollen and cracked by scurvy. Aft on the high poop deck, Captain General Ferdinand Magellan, a lame, heavily bearded, and implacably determined man, limped to the rail and squinted at the horizon to the northwest. Quickly several men gathered beside him; they were his officers and pilots and one extroverted young Italian nobleman, Antonio Pigafetta, who was personal gentleman-in-waiting to Magellan and unofficial chronicler of the voyage. The men on the decks of the ships could see two mesa-like shapes, one small, the other large, approximately twenty miles off their starboard bows, but the low peninsula that connected the shapes remained hidden below the horizon, so the land to the northwest looked like two islands to everyone on the decks. Suddenly, the Trinidad’s lookout yelled again and pointed to the southwest. There an oblong shoreline of steep brown cliffs glistened low on the sunlit horizon about twenty miles off the port bow of the Trinidad. Although not as high as the first land sighted, the island to the southwest was broader. Magellan studied the islands with the sharp eyes of a master mariner as the trade winds rose briskly behind his ships in the tropical sun’s heat. The daytime winds pushed his three small square-rigged naos (which would evolve into galleons; naos derived from carracks used in Mediterranean trade) up to eight knots per hour in the heavy white-capped swells of the Pacific Ocean. Sails had not been reset for weeks because of the reliable winds out of the northeast, brisas to the Spaniards, and because of the weak state of the crews. The brisas and the north equatorial current had kept the flotilla steady on a westward course along the 14° to 15° N latitudes . After sighting land, Magellan did not immediately alter course; the flotilla sailed on for another hour or so until the ships were between the islands. CHAPTER 1 Aliens 1521–1638 Aliens 1521–1638 7 The larger island to the southwest was downwind . Magellan could see that it would be safer to land on its leeward side than to tack to the island to the northwest. One of the Victoria’s pilots, a Greek from Rhodes named Francisco Albo, later wrote in his log, probably after talking to his ship’s lookout as was customary, “And on this day we saw land and we went to it, and there were two islands, which were not very large, and when we came between them we headed to the southwest, and we left one to the northwest.” Although unknown to Magellan and his men, the island first sighted was Rota, which initially appears as two islands when seen from the southeast. The larger island to the southwest toward which they turned was Guam. Years later in Europe, when Pigafetta wrote his vivid chronicle of Magellan’s voyage, he recalled only the two peaks of Rota and the one island of Guam. He thus described that historic first landfall as three islands, not two, as Albo and other pilots recorded. Pigafetta also reversed the north-south directions of the islands, as was sometimes done on maps at that time. The errors by Pigafetta or by the scribes who copied and translated various versions of his chronicle puzzled historians for centuries . They conjectured several alternative landfalls in the Marianas, such as Saipan, Tinian, and Rota, in order to conform to Pigafetta’s account. Albo’s log and the sparse accounts of Magellan’s other pilots , notably that of an anonymous Genoese...

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