soon as practicable, in December 1511, Albuquerque despatched Antonio
d'Abreu in search of the precious islands. A Spanish historian of the
next century affirms that Magellan accompanied d'Abreu in command of
one of the ships, but this can hardly be true. [8] Francisco Serrão,
however, one of the Portuguese captains, was a friend of Magellan's and
during his sojourn of several years in the Moluccas wrote to him of a
world larger and richer than that discovered by Vasco da Gama. It is
probable, as the historian Barros, who saw some of this correspondence,
sugguests, that Serrão somewhat exaggerated the distance from Malacca
to the Moluccas, and so planted the seed which bore such fruit in
Magellan's mind. [9]

The year after the Portuguese actually attained the Spice Islands,
Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, first of Europeans (1513), set eyes upon the
great South Sea. It soon became only too certain that the Portuguese
had won in the race for the land of cloves, pepper, and nutmegs. But,
in the absence of knowledge of the true dimensions of the earth and
with an underestimate of its size generally prevailing, the information
that the Spice Islands lay far to the east of India revived in the
mind of Magellan the original project of Columbus to seek the land
of spices by the westward route. That he laid this plan before the
King of Portugal, there seems good reason to believe, but when he saw
no prospect for its realization, like Columbus, he left Portugal for
Spain. It is now that the idea is evolved that, as the Moluccas lie so
far east of India, they are probably in the Spanish half of the world,
and, if approached from the west, may be won after all for the Catholic
king. No appeal for patronage and support could be more effective,
and how much reliance Magellan and his financial backer Christopher
Haro placed upon it in their petition to King Charles appears clearly
in the account by Maximilianus Transylvanus of Magellan's presentation