Word: magellans
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This is the second book on Magellan in two months. In Charles Ford's Death Sails With Magellan (TIME. Nov. 15) the ill-fated Portuguese navigator was portrayed as a cold-blooded martinet who double-crossed his best friends, intended to double-cross Spain and set up his own kingdom in the East Indies...
Certain to be welcomed by readers of Mutiny on the Bounty, which it resembles in its melodramatic plot and realistic detail, it will as certainly annoy those who feel that Magellan was the equal of Columbus, Marco Polo and Henry the Navigator. Author Ford melodramatizes the tiny, lame, yellow-skinned Portuguese explorer as a cold-blooded sadist whose only real genius lay in the grandiose scope of his malevolence...
...husky, sharp-witted Vigo fisherman Gonzalo, as to most other Spaniards, Magellan's reputation was ugly. When the rumor got out that his secretive expedition would carry only Portuguese seamen, Magellan tried to stop the angry clamor with bullets, finally took long three Spanish captains. Chosen for their politics rather than their seamanship, they gave him much less opposition than the Basque ship's master, Sebastian del Cano (who with 34 survivors with the only officer to get back to Spain) and del Cano's young protege Gonzalo. If these two, says Author Ford, had been listened...
...voyage resolved itself into a game of mutinous cat-&-mouse, with starvation, disease and storms putting in their savage claws. When the big mutiny broke out at Bay St. Julien. Magellan made a real killing. He drew and quartered one Spanish captain, decapitated the second, marooned the third. Eight seamen were hung, 40 others imprisoned without food. For their edification Magellan offered the chained exhibit of a big friendly savage who. before he starved to death three weeks later, had almost chewed himself out of his shackles. When Magellan's cruelty threatened to alienate even his own bodyguard...
...Ladrones (the Islands of the Thieves). Magellan christened the friendly but overcurious natives with a blood bath, burned their village. Gonzalo with three others had the bad luck to be ashore when the natives returned to attack the ship, which fled for good. Only one of the four to escape, he lived in a cave until his quick wit and civilized gadgets awed the natives into accepting him as a reborn god. From then on his Eden-like life was complicated by nothing more serious than the easily outwitted jealousy of a native chief and by the natives' insistence...