Mesquita ordered San Martín to undergo the most common punishment of the Inquisition, the ghastly strappado. The strappado was administered in five stages of increasing agony. In the first degree, the victim was stripped, his wrists were bound behind his back, and he was threatened until he confessed. If he refused, he was subjected to the second degree. In it, the victim’s arms were raised behind his back by a rope attached to a pulley secured overhead, and he was lifted off his feet for a brief period of time, and given another chance to confess. If he still refused, he faced the third degree of the strappado, in which he was suspended for a longer period of time, which dislocated his shoulders and broke his arms. Once again, he was given another chance to confess. If he still failed to make a satisfactory confession, he was subjected to the fourth degree: The victim was suspended and violently jerked, which inflicted excruciating pain. Few victims of a methodically administered strappado lasted beyond this point without confessing. In certain cases, there was a fifth degree, as well. In the final phase of the strappado, weights were attached to the victim’s feet, and they were
often heavy enough to tear the limbs from his tormented body. Andrés de San Martín suffered the full five stages of the strappado. In the last, most horrific stage of Magellan’s inquisition, several cannonballs were attached to San Martín’s feet, and the additional weight inflicted excruciating pain when he was suspended. Another early account of this inquisition describes the final stage of strappado, as it might have been experienced by San Martín: “The prisoner hath his hands bound behind his back, and weights tied to his feet, and then he is drawn up on high, till his head reaches the very pulley. He is kept hanging in this manner for some time, that by the greatness of the weight hanging at his feet, all his joints and limbs may be dreadfully stretched, and of a sudden he is let down with a jerk, by slacking the rope, but kept from coming quite to the ground.”
After enduring these torments, San Martín may have begged to be executed rather than be made to endure any more of the strappado, he may have fainted from the pain, but he survived the ordeal. In fact, he recovered sufficiently to return to his former position as astronomer-astrologer, but from then on, he remained wary of Magellan and the entire enterprise of the armada.
The punishment Mesquita and Magellan inflicted on Hernando Morales was even more severe than San Martín’s. Accounts of the proceedings say only that Morales’s limbs were “disjointed,” but the procedure to which he was subjected was so severe that the poor pilot later died from the wounds he received; the agonies he suffered at the hands of Mesquita and Magellan can only be imagined. He
might have undergone a variation of another common torture of the Inquisition era, the fiendish Wooden Horse, in which the victim was secured with metal bars to a hollowed-out bench, his feet higher than his head. “As he is lying in this posture,” runs an early account, “his arms, thighs, and shins are tied round with small cords or strings, which being drawn with screws at proper distances from each other, cut into his very bones, so as to no longer be discerned. Besides this, the torturer throws over his mouth and nostrils a thin cloth, so that he is scarce able to breathe through them, and in the meanwhile a small stream of water like a thread, not drop by drop, falls from on high upon the mouth of the person lying in this miserable condition, and so easily sinks down the thin cloth to the bottom of his throat so that there is no possibility of breathing, his mouth being stopped with water, and his nostrils with cloth, so that the poor wretch is in the same agony as persons ready to die, and breathing their last. When this cloth is drawn out of his throat, as it often is, that he may answer to the questions, it is all wet with water and blood, and is like pulling his bowels through this mouth.” After enduring this torture, what victim, no matter how innocent, would not willingly confess to spare himself more agony?
Both the strappado and the water ordeal were well-known “official” methods of torture used in the Inquisition, but there were also illegal methods, which were nearly as common, to which San Martín, Morales, and the priest might have been subjected. They might have been starved. They might have been subjected to sleeplessness. Or they might have had their feet bound and covered with the abundant natural salt found in the Port Saint Julian harbor. A goat licking the soles of the feet for a prolonged period of time was said to inflict excruciating agony, yet it left no damage to the victim’s body.
Once the horror of the inquisitional catharsis subsided, Mesquita (with Magellan’s blessing) sentenced the other accused—in all, forty men—to death. A mass execution appeared to be in the making, but the expedition could not continue without the help of the con victed men. It was unlikely that Magellan, even in his cold wrath, would execute forty men, many of whom abandoned the mutiny soon after it began. His victory was, in this sense, all too complete, and he had to find a way out of the grim situation he had helped to create.
Magellan had succeeded in terrorizing all the men under his command, captains and commoners alike. In his letter of March 22, 1518, King Charles gave Magellan complete authority over everyone in the armada; this was the “power of rope and knife.” He had demonstrated that he had, as his orders indicated, the power of life and death over all those who served under him. As brutal as his conduct sounds, the Captain General was well within the rights granted to him by King Charles. But Magellan took his authoritarianism to an extreme, refusing to share power or even give the illusion of power to his captains, and they communicated their dissatisfaction down the chain of command to the ordinary seamen, making rebellion and its hideous aftermath—torture—inevitable. With his insistence on controlling every aspect of the expedition himself, and scorning any suggestions that threatened his master plan, Magellan made the captains who served under him feel impotent, and they directed their rage at him. Magellan insisted, but rarely troubled to persuade, and his continuous invocation of King Charles when they were thousands of miles from Spain and in great peril sounded hollow, especially coming from the lips of a Portuguese.
Believing that he had finally demonstrated his absolute authority, Magellan commuted all forty of the death sentences to hard labor. Among the forgiven was Elcano, the Basque shipmaster who would later have his revenge on the Captain General. Those who had been freed looked on the man who controlled their fate with decidedly mixed emotions. They were overjoyed, in the short run, to be spared a gruesome death by drawing and quartering or another form of torture, but as the prospect of a long winter in Port Saint Julian loomed, they realized they faced a life of daily hardship and danger. On shore, cannibals, only slightly more ruthless than the Captain General, might attack them and devour them; on the high seas, a storm might send their ships to the bottom. Desertion was impossible; no one could survive the harsh climate unaided. The only choice left to them was a slavish adherence to Magellan’s authority, even if it led over the edge of the world.
There were two important exceptions to the general clemency: Gaspar de Quesada, the leader and murderer of San Antonio’s master, and his servant, Luis de Molino. Magellan insisted that Quesada be executed. And he gave Molino a brutally simple choice: He could either be executed along with his master or spare his own life by beheading his master. If Molino did so, he would violate some of the most central tenets governing Spanish conduct and morality, codes of behavior going back to feudal times. As Magellan expected, Molino accepted the deal, as cruel as it was. In full view of the crew, Quesada knelt on the deck of Trinidad, and Molino stood over him, sword in hand. He asked his master for forgiveness, but received none. And then with one powerful blow, he severed Quesada’s head from his neck. As if that were not enough carnage for one day, Magellan ordered a detail to draw and quarter Quesada’s body. His remains were displayed as a grisly warning to the others, just as Mendoza’s body had been displayed several weeks before.
Days later, Magellan discovered that Cartagena, the sole surviving Spanish captain, was conspiring with a priest, Pero Sánchez de la Reina, to mount yet another mutiny
. Under his real name, Bernard de Calmette, the priest, who came from the south of France, served as chaplain aboard San Antonio; he adopted a Spanish name so that the crew would feel more comfortable with him. It was astonishing that Magellan’s nemesis would risk his life again, after all the carnage, this time with little hope that any of the seamen would follow, but Cartagena was almost as stubborn as Magellan.
The Captain General subjected the two conspirators to a fresh court-martial. His first instinct was to have both men executed; this was, after all, Cartagena’s third attempt at mutiny, but Magellan found himself in a difficult position. He could not bring himself to condemn a priest—even a disloyal priest—to death. And as for Cartagena, his blood ties to Archbishop Fonseca prevented Magellan from taking severe disciplinary action such as execution or torture. Instead, Magellan devised a much worse fate for Cartagena and the priest. He decided to leave them behind to fend for themselves in the wilderness of Port Saint Julian after the fleet’s departure.
In all, Magellan’s conduct during the mutiny and its aftermath was worthy of Machiavelli—subtle and calculating when possible, but brutal when necessary. He had survived the testing, and emerged victorious.
Always a perfectionist about outfitting his ships, Magellan turned his attention to his neglected fleet. The ships were in a state of disrepair, their sails and rigging in disarray, their holds fetid, their hulls leaky. He ordered his men to empty the ships and give them a thorough cleaning. This exhausting chore meant removing all the provisions, even the stone ballast, which was cleansed by seawater. The forty mutineers, bound in chains, performed the most grueling labor; they operated the pumps, essential for keeping the ships afloat until the armada’s carpenters made them seaworthy again. Once they had emptied the ships, the seamen scoured the holds, washed down the wooden surfaces with vinegar to eradicate the ubiquitous stench, and returned the ballast.
So the wretched winter passed, day by day, hour by hour, the men working constantly and trying to keep themselves warm as best they could, enduring life in a prison so remote it needed no walls. Overseeing these projects, Magellan intended to keep his prisoners in chains until they left Port Saint Julian in the spring.
When the time came to load the provisions, they discovered more evidence that the dishonest chandlers in Seville and the Canary Islands had robbed them blind, and endangered their lives. Although their bills of lading showed enough supplies on board to last a year and a half, long enough to reach the Spice Islands, the ships’ holds actually carried only a third of that amount. This grim discovery cast the rest of the expedition in a different light because, as Magellan realized, they would likely run out of food well before they reached their goal. The men resumed hunting to make up the difference, but they were eating their way through their supplies almost as fast as they replenished them. The only way out of their predicament was to resume the voyage as soon as possible, storms or no storms.
C H A P T E R V I
Castaways
And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold:
And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
As green as emerald.
Finding the strait leading to the Spice Islands, always a priority for Magellan, reached the level of an obsession in late April. When the oppressive weather briefly lifted, he rashly sent out a reconnaissance mission to search for the elusive waterway. He selected Santiago, the soundest of the vessels, for the task, with Juan Rodríguez Serrano as her Castilian captain. “An industrious man, he never rested,” said one of the crew members of him. He was about to meet the ultimate challenge of his career.
Even if Serrano succeeded in finding the mouth of the strait, he would have to embark on an equally dangerous return journey to Port Saint Julian. Violent storms at sea or cannibals on land could spell disaster. And the temptation to mutiny and sail away—either east toward Spain or west through the strait—might be irresistible to Santiago’s crew. Magellan stifled thoughts of escape by keeping provisions on board to a minimum and offering Serrano a reward of one hundred ducats if the expedition located the strait; of course, he could collect only on his return.
Favored by calm weather, the mission began auspiciously enough. On May 3, about sixty miles south of Port Saint Julian, Serrano discovered a promising inlet, which on closer inspection revealed itself as the mouth of a river, which he named Santa Cruz. More than three hundred years later, in 1834, the youthful Charles Darwin visited the Santa Cruz River aboard HMS Beagle on her voyage of discovery, and found the same inviting prospect. The river, he wrote, “was generally from 300 to 400 yards broad, and in the middle about 17 feet deep. . . .T he water is of a fine blue colour, but with a slight milky tinge, and not so transparent as at first sight might have been expected.”
Santiago’s crew soon discovered that food was even more plentiful around the Santa Cruz River than at Port Saint Julian, and Serrano decided to linger for six days to fish and hunt for sea elephants. Given the urgency of finding the strait, his decision to tarry is peculiar. Perhaps neither he nor his men wished to return to Port Saint Julian and its grim reminders of the mutiny sooner than necessary; or perhaps they had no desire to risk their lives on the open water.
After the tranquil respite, Santiago. set sail and proceeded south in search of the strait. On May 22, the wind picked up and the seas began to churn, tossing the ship as if she were nothing more than an oversized piece of flotsam. The armada had encountered many violent squalls, but little Santiago. had stumbled into the most powerful storm her crew had ever experienced, and they would have to face it alone.
Serrano had no time to reef the sails. Fierce seas pounded the ship mercilessly, terrifying her crew. Serrano attempted to head into the wind and ride out the storm, but overpowering gusts tore the sails, and the seas battered the rudder until the device failed to respond. Santiago. was now out of control, caught in the middle of a storm that was still building in power, her men beyond the hope of rescue. The situation was desperate.
At that moment, the storm gathered force, and the winds pushed the helpless ship toward the rocky coast and the prospect of certain death for her crew. Serrano faced every captain’s nightmare as razorsharp rocks sawed into her hull, and she began taking on water. Luck was with her crew, since Santiago. washed ashore before breaking up.
One by one, her crew of thirty-seven crawled to the end of the jib boom and jumped to a rocky beach. As soon as they had abandoned ship, Santiago. broke up, and the storm carried away all her lifesustaining provisions—wine, hardtack, and water, to say nothing of the freshly caught sea elephants. Incredibly, all the men aboard ship survived, but once they had given thanks to the Lord for sparing their lives, they grasped the desperate situation they now faced. The storm had stranded the castaways about seventy miles from the rest of the fleet, without food or wood or fresh water, in freezing weather. They were cold and exhausted; soon they would be starving. There was no way to get word of their plight to the Captain General. Their land route back to Port Saint Julian presented seemingly overwhelming obstacles: snow-covered mountains and the Santa Cruz River, three miles wide.
The castaways spent eight days in more or less the same area, disoriented, dispirited, waiting for pieces of the wreck, possibly even food, to drift onto the pebbly beach, but the sea yielded only a few planks broken off from Santiago’s hull. Subsisting on a diet of local vegetation and whatever shellfish they could catch, the castaways evolved a plan. They would drag the planks over the mountains until they reached the river and there, on its banks, build a raft to cross it. The river lay many miles to the north, and the task proved daunting to the crew. They left most of the planks behind, and after four wretched days of marching overland, the exhausted crew finally reached the broad expanse of the river. The weather had relented, and fish, as they knew from their first visit to the river, were plentiful. It seemed they would not starve, after all.
Lacking planks to build a raft large enough to car
ry all the men, the castaways split into two groups. The larger group— thirty-five men—set up camp at the river’s edge, while two strong men, whose names were not recorded, set out on the tiny raft. They intended to cross the river and walk the rest of the way back to Port Saint Julian to seek help. It was an exceedingly risky undertaking. Successfully crossing the three-mile expanse of river required a combination of daring and luck, and when they reached the other side, they faced an arduous march in freezing weather, living off the land.
The two crew members in the vanguard succeeded in mastering the river’s breadth in their rudimentary raft, and once they had landed on the far side, they set out in the direction of Port Saint Julian. At first, they followed the coast, where they could be reasonably certain to find shellfish, but vast swamps barred their progress, and they had to walk inland, over hills and mountains, eating only ferns and roots, and suffering greatly in the freezing weather. The trek lasted eleven harrowing days, and when they reached Port Saint Julian, ravaged and gaunt from their ordeal, even those who knew the survivors barely recognized them.
Once the castaways revived, they described the desperate situation of their shipmates on the far side of the Santa Cruz River.
Magellan had no choice but to attempt to rescue the other thirty-five crew members of Santiago. Afraid to risk the loss of another ship to a storm, he sent a rescue squad of twenty-four men, carrying wine and hardtack, along the overland trail that the two survivors had blazed through the harsh wilderness. “The way there was long, twenty-four leagues, and the path was very rough and full of thorns,” said Pigafetta of their grim progress. “The men were four days on the road, sleeping at night in the bushes. They found no drinking water, but only ice, which caused them great hardship.” Failing to find a river or spring, they resorted to melting snow. Finally, in a drastically weakened condition from their days in the wild, they reached the desperate castaways, who had been camping out along the banks of the Santa Cruz River. A pathetic reunion ensued: exhausted men at the end of the world, suffering intensely, expecting to die at any time, united only in the cause of survival, as unlikely as the prospect seemed.
Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe Page 16