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.