The six enterprising seamen crept up on family groups of “sea wolves,” stunned them with clubs, and lugged as many as they could into the longboat. Before the landing party could return to the fleet, a severe storm sprang up. The strong offshore winds blew Magellan’s ships out to sea, stranding the six seamen on the little island. They passed a wretched night fearing that they would either be devoured by the “sea wolves” or die from exposure to the extreme cold.
In the morning, Magellan dispatched a rescue team. When they found only the abandoned longboat, they feared the worst. They carefully explored the island, calling out for their lost crewmates, but succeeded only in scaring the “sea wolves,” several of which they slaughtered. Approaching the creatures, the rescue party came upon the lost men huddled beneath the lifeless “sea wolves,” spattered with mud, exhausted, giving off a dreadful smell, but alive. They had settled next to the creatures to find shelter from the violent storm and enough warmth to sustain them through the night.
As if these men had not suffered enough, another storm blasted the island just as they attempted to return to the waiting fleet. They managed to make it back safely to the ships, but the squall was fierce enough that Trinidad’s mooring cables parted, one after the other.
Helpless in the storm, pitching wildly, hurling her crew this way and that, the flagship veered dangerously close to the rocks near the shore. Only one cable held fast, and if it gave, Trinidad and her men—Magellan included—would all be lost. The sailors prayed to the Virgin and to all the saints they knew. In their abject fear, they promised to make religious pilgrimages on their return to Spain if only they survived this ordeal.
Their prayers were answered when not one but three glorious instances of Saint Elmo’s fire danced on the ships’ yardarms, casting an unearthly light of hope and inspiration. “We ran a very great risk of perishing,” Pigafetta recorded. “But the three bodies of St. Anselm, St. Nicholas, and Saint Clare appeared to us, and forthwith the storm ceased.” The last deity was especially apt, for Saint Clare was considered the patron saint of the blind and was often represented holding a lantern; it was even believed that she could clear up fog and rain. To the religious sailors, the sudden manifestation of these signs was clear evidence that God still watched over them and protected them even in the remotest regions of the globe. As proof, the sole cable protecting them from disaster held until dawn, when the storm finally relented.
Battered by the storm, Magellan sought shelter in a cove, but the weather refused to cooperate. The wind disappeared, and the Armada de Molucca remained becalmed until midnight, when a third storm descended on them, the most destructive yet. The gale lasted three days and three nights, days and nights of freezing, of near starvation, of helplessness in the face of the elements. The fierce wind and seas tore away masts, castles, even poop decks. Through it all, the beleaguered sailors, trapped in disintegrating vessels that threatened to send them to their deaths at any moment, prayed for salvation with a fervor born of desperation.
Once again, their prayers were answered. The five ships rode out the great storm. The damage inflicted by the wind and waves, while serious, could be repaired. Incredibly, no lives were lost, despite all the hazards they had encountered on land and on sea. The Captain General gave the order, and the armada finally set sail.
Magellan resumed his search for a strait. Now that he had seen how quickly the offshore gales that raged in this region could maim or destroy his fleet, the need for an escape route became more urgent than ever. After several more days at sea, hope appeared in the form of another inviting cove. Magellan sailed into the protected waters, where he was disheartened not to find an inlet. This was merely a bay, but it would protect the fleet from severe storms—or so he thought. Six days later, another protracted tempest proved him wrong.
As before, the heavy weather stranded a landing party already ashore, this time with no “sea wolves” to provide shelter or warmth. Enduring bone-chilling cold, their skin and hair and beards soaked constantly with freezing rain, their fingers and toes numb, the men forced themselves to forage for shellfish in the freezing water. Their hands bleeding, they smashed the shells and survived on the raw flesh until, nearly a week later, they were able to return to the fleet.
Leaving the harbor, now named the Bay of Toil, the armada resumed its southerly course into even colder weather and the approaching subequatorial winter. The days grew shorter, and each unruly puff of wind darkened the sea and pummeled the sails, threatening to bloom into yet another squall. Finally, Magellan had had enough of exploration; he decided to suspend the search for the strait until the following spring. He turned his attention to finding a safe harbor where the fleet could ride out the approaching cold weather. On March 31, at a latitude of 49° 20', he found it. From his vantage point aboard Trinidad, it appeared to be an ideal haven: The harbor was sheltered, and abundant fish punctured the water’s surface, as if in welcome. It was named Port Saint Julian.
The entrance to the port was framed by impressive gray cliffs rising one hundred feet as the harbor quickly contracted into a channel about half a mile in width. Although it offered protection, the narrow inlet experienced tides of over twenty feet and currents of up to six knots; in these conditions, the ships had to anchor themselves carefully and, when necessary, run cables to the shore to secure their positions.
Magellan considered Port Saint Julian a landmark of sufficient importance that he wanted to determine its longitude. He asked his pilots if they could make use of his friend Ruy Faleiro’s techniques. Not possible, they told him. He consulted San Martín, his official astronomer, who tried to accommodate him; he took measurements, consulted with the pilots, and concluded that they might have strayed into Portuguese territory as defined by the Treaty of Tordesillas. The idea appalled Magellan, under orders from King Charles to avoid Portuguese waters and, at the same time, to demonstrate that the Spice Islands lay comfortably within the Spanish realm. Now it appeared the fleet had already sailed beyond the line of demarcation. Magellan realized he might be sailing halfway around the world only to demonstrate the opposite of what he had expected. The matter was potentially so serious, so damning to the entire enterprise, that the pilots deliberately obscured the location of Port Saint Julian on their charts.
Anticipating a long, grueling winter in Port Saint Julian, Magellan placed his crew on short rations, even though the ships groaned with the butchered meat of “geese” and “sea wolves,” and fish abounded in the harbor. After the unbroken succession of lifethreatening ordeals they had faced over the previous seven weeks, the seamen expected to be rewarded for their courage and perseverance, not punished. Outraged by the rationing, they turned insubordinate. Some insisted that they return to full rations, while others demanded that the fleet, or some part of it, sail back to Spain.
They did not believe the strait existed. They had tried again and again to find it, risking death while coming up against one dead end after another. If they kept going, they argued, they would eventually perish in one of the cataclysmic storms afflicting the region, or simply fall off the edge of the world when the coastline finally ended. Surely King Charles did not mean for them all to die in the attempt to find a water route to the Spice Islands. Surely human life had some value.
Magellan obstinately reminded them that they must obey their royal commission, and follow the coastline wherever it led. The king had ordered this voyage, and Magellan would persist until he reached land’s end, or found the strait. How astonished he was to see bold Spaniards so fainthearted, or so he said. As far as their provisions were concerned, they had plenty of wood here in Port Saint Julian, abundant fish, fresh water, and fowl; their ships still had adequate stores of biscuit and wine, if they observed rationing. Consider the Portuguese navigators, he exhorted them, who had passed twelve degrees beyond the Tropic of Capricorn without any difficulty, and here they were, two full degrees above it. What kind of sailors were they? Magellan insisted he would rather die th
an return to Spain in shame, and he urged them to wait patiently until winter was over. The more they suffered, the greater the reward they might expect from King Charles. They should not question the king, he advised, but discover a world not yet known, filled with gold and spices to enrich them all.
This eloquent speech to the vacillating crew members bought Magellan a few days’ respite, but only a few. His stern words had confirmed their worst fears about his behavior and his do-or-die fanaticism. On the most basic level, they believed he considered their lives expendable. In the following days, the men began to bicker; national prejudices suddenly flashed like well-oiled swords drawn from scabbards to cut and slash, usually at Magellan himself. Once again, the Castilians argued that Magellan’s insistence that he intended to find the strait or die was proof that he intended to subvert the entire expedition and get them all killed in the process. All this talk of glorifying King Charles, they felt, was merely a stratagem to trick them into going along with Magellan’s suicidal scheme. Anyone doubting Magellan’s intention to subvert the expedition had only to examine the course they had been following, southward, ever southward, into the eternal cold, whereas the Spice Islands and the Indies lay to the west, where it was warm and sunny, and where luxury surely abounded.
In the midst of this turmoil, the officers and crew observed the holiest day of the year, Easter Sunday, April 1. At that moment, Magellan had one paramount concern: Who was loyal to him, and who was not? With a sufficient number of loyal crew members, he would be able to withstand this latest, and most serious, challenge to his authority. Without them, he might be imprisoned, impaled on a halberd, or even hanged from a yardarm by hell-bent mutineers. To assess the extent of danger he faced, he carefully interviewed each member of the crew.
“With sweet words and big promises,” Ginés de Mafra recalled, “[Magellan] told them the other captains were plotting against him, and he asked them to advise him what to do. They replied that their only advice was that they were willing to do as he commanded. Magellan . . . openly told his crew that the conspirators had resolved to kill him on Easter Day while he attended mass ashore, but that he would feign ignorance and go to mass all the same. This he did and, secretly armed, went to a small sandy islet where a small house had been built to accommodate the ceremony.”
Magellan expected to see all four captains at Easter mass but only one, Luis de Mendoza, of Victoria, arrived. The air crackled with tension. “Both conversed,” de Mafra says, concealing their emotions under blank countenances, and attended mass together. At the end of the ceremony, Magellan pointedly asked Mendoza why the other captains had defied his orders and failed to attend. Mendoza replied, lamely, that perhaps the others were ill.
Still feigning bonhomie, Magellan invited Mendoza to dine at the Captain General’s table, a gesture that would force him to proclaim his loyalty to Magellan, but Mendoza coolly declined the request. Magellan appeared unfazed by Mendoza’s insubordination, but the Captain General now knew that Mendoza was a conspirator.
Mendoza returned to Victoria, where he and the other captains resumed plotting against Magellan, sending messages by longboat from one ship to another. After mass, only Magellan’s cousin, Álvaro de Mesquita, the recently appointed captain of San Antonio, came aboard Trinidad to dine at the Captain General’s table. Magellan realized that the empty chairs made for an ominous sign.
At the moment, Magellan capitalized on a piece of luck. The longboat belonging to Concepción’s captain, Gaspar de Quesada, lost its way in the strong current while ferrying conspiratorial messages between the rebel ships and, to the dismay of the men aboard, found itself drifting helplessly toward the flagship and Magellan himself, the one individual they did not want to encounter at that moment. To their surprise, the crew of Trinidad, at Magellan’s direction, rescued them from the runaway longboat. Even more amazing, Magellan welcomed them aboard the flagship and provided them with a lavish meal, which included plenty of wine.
At dinner, the band of would-be mutineers drank a great deal and decided that they had nothing to fear from the Captain General after all. They even revealed the existence of the plot to Magellan; they confided that if the plot succeded, he would be “captured and killed” that very night.
Hearing this, Magellan lost all interest in his visitors and busied himself readying the flagship against attack. Once again he questioned his crew to see who was loyal to him and who was not and, satisfied that Trinidad’s men would take his side when the mutiny inevitably erupted, awaited the inevitable assault.
Late that night, Concepción stirred with life. The captain, Quesada, lowered himself into a longboat and quietly made his way to San Antonio. He was joined there in the dark water lapping at the ship’s hull by Juan de Cartagena, former captain, bishop’s unacknowledged son, and frustrated mutineer; Juan Sebastián Elcano, a veteran Basque mariner who served as Concepción’s master; and a corps of thirty armed seamen.
Under cover of darkness, they boarded San Antonio and rushed to the captain’s cabin, entering with a flourish of steel, rousting the hapless Mesquita out of his bunk. This had once been Cartagena’s ship, and in his mind, it still was. Mesquita offered little resistance as the party of mutineers clapped him into irons and led him to the cabin of Gerónimo Guerra, where he was placed under guard.
By this time, word of the uprising had spread throughout the ship, and the crew sprang to life. Juan de Elorriaga, the ship’s master, and a Basque, valiantly tried to dismiss Quesada from San Antonio before any blood was shed, but Quesada refused to stand down, whereupon Elorriaga turned to his boatswain, Diego Hernández, to order the crew to restrain Quesada and quash the mutiny. “We cannot be foiled in our work by this fool,” Quesada shouted, knowing that there could be no turning back. And he ran Elorriaga through with a dagger, again and again, four times in all, until Elorriaga, bleeding profusely, collapsed. Quesada assumed Elorriaga was dead, but the loyal master was still alive, though perhaps he would have been better off if he had died on the spot; instead, he lingered for three and a half months until he finally died from the wounds he received that night at Quesada’s hand.
As the two struggled, Quesada’s guard took Hernández hostage, and suddenly the ship was without officers. The bewildered crew, without anyone to give them orders and fearing for their lives, gave up their arms to the mutineers. One of their number, Antonio de Coca, the fleet’s accountant, actually joined the insurgents, who stored the confiscated weapons in his cabin. The first phase of the mutiny had gone off as planned.
Pigafetta, normally a thorough chronicler of the voyage, offers little guidance to the mutiny. In this case, he was close, too close, to Magellan to be helpful. As a Magellan loyalist, he resisted the temptation to hear or repeat any ill concerning his beloved captain. He eloquently presented the Magellanic myth of the great and wise explorer, but at the same time he turned a blind eye to the scandals and mutinies surrounding Magellan throughout the voyage. In his one cursory mention of the drama at Port Saint Julian, Pigafetta even confuses the names of the principal actors. The chronicler, who could be extremely precise when he wished, likely got around to mentioning the mutiny only after the voyage, when he felt safe enough to discuss the bloody deeds happening all around him.
The mutineers in control of San Antonio swiftly converted her into a battleship. Elcano, the Basque mariner, took command and immediately ordered the imprisonment of two Portuguese who appeared loyal to Magellan, Antonio Fernandes and Gonçalo Rodrigues, as well as a Castilian, Diego Díaz. The mutineers, led by Antonio de Coca and Luis de Molino, Quesada’s servant, raided the ship’s stores, filling their hungry bellies with bread and wine, anything they could lay their hands on, and they endeared themselves to their followers by allowing them to partake of the forbidden food. Father Valderrama, preoccupied with administering last rites to Elorriaga, watched all and vowed to report the evil deeds to Magellan, if he ever got the chance. Meanwhile, Elcano ordered firearms to be prepared; the arquebuse
s and crossbows—powerful, state-of-the-art weapons—were broken out. Anyone attempting to approach the renegade ship would face a barrage of lethal arrows and muzzles belching fire.
Within hours the mutiny spread like a contagion to two other ships, Victoria, whose captain, Luis de Mendoza, had resented Magellan from the day they left Sanlúcar de Barrameda, and to Concepción. It was only a matter of time until Cartagena, Quesada, and their supporters came after Magellan himself. Only Santiago, under the command of Juan Serrano, a Castilian, remained neutral. Quesada, for the moment, decided to leave Santiago. alone; it was a decision that would later haunt the mutineers.
The sun rose over Port Saint Julian on April 2 to reveal a scene deceptive calm. The five ships of the Armada de Molucca rode quietly at anchor, their crew members sleeping off the previous night’s excesses. For the moment, the Captain General remained secure in his stronghold, Trinidad. As a test of loyalty, he dispatched a longboat to San Antonio, where Quesada and Elcano held sway, to bring sailors ashore to fetch fresh water. As Trinidad’s longboat approached, the mutineers waved the sailors away and declared that San Antonio was no longer under the command of Mesquita or Magellan. She now belonged to the mutineer Gaspar Quesada. When the longboat brought this disturbing news back to Magellan, he realized he faced a grave problem, but he remained oblivious to the full extent of the mutiny. He believed he had to contend with only one rebellious ship, not three, until he sent the longboat to poll the other ships and determine their loyalty. From his stronghold aboard San Antonio, Quesada replied, “For the King and for myself,” and Victoria and Concepción followed suit.
Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe Page 14