Mutiny With Magellan

DEATH SAILS WITH MAGELLAN -- Charles Ford--Random House ($2.50).

Off the Islands of the Kings (Guam) . . . we found a Gallegan whose name was Gonzalo of Vigo who said he had been left in those lands for seven years. . . . He stayed with the midnight watch and showed the pilot the course . . . was seen no more. Because of this some of the seamen grew afraid and said a ghost of one of Magellan's sailors had come aboard. . . .

This provocative passage, encountered ten years ago in .an obscure account of early voyages in the Pacific, set Author Ford, a New York adman, romancing, researching, buttonholing his friends. By last week he had salted his tale down on paper. An ingenious circumstantial account, running to 363 close-type pages, of how and why his hero landed on Guam, Death Sails With Magellan is about equally divided between Magellan's voyage and Gonzalo's castaway life among the handsome Chamorri tribesmen.

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.

To the 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 to, the voyage would have ended very differently. Suspicious of Magellan's behavior,, del Cano and Gonzalo discovered before long that Magellan's real aim was to sail secretly over the Portuguese route to the East Indies, seize a rich island kingdom, set up in the king business for himself.

The 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, he arranged to shipwreck the 40 mutineers on a reef, succeeded only in losing a ship. At the Strait of Magellan his food ship St. Anthony deserted, was never heard from again. Scurvy struck in the Pacific, rations shrank to leather ship fittings, sawdust, rats, dead comrades' giblets. After 98 days of this horror, having sighted only two barren islands, they reached fertile Guam. By this time his men had chalked 85 murders against Magellan. Out of the 540 days the voyage had lasted, only two weeks, when they feasted at St. Lucy's Bay on roast peccary, manioc bread, batata and native women, could have been called pleasant.

In the 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 that he take a beautiful 14-year-old girl as his mistress to prepare her, according to strict native custom, for her husband. Gonzalo balked for moral reasons (senseless abstractions to the tribesmen) and because he really wanted to marry her. In time, having won enough prestige to make his own law. he settled down happily with his "tawny Venus'' and raised a family. Nearly eight years later, when a Spanish vessel appeared, he engineered a trap to kill its crew. But in a sudden burst of homesickness for Spain he swam to the ship to identify himself. A few hours on board was enough. That night he slid over the side and struck out happily for shore.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.