Gomes received another blow when Magellan, perhaps sensitive to Gomes’s ultimate goal to supplant him, refused to appoint him captain of San Antonio after the mutiny in Port Saint Julian. Instead, Gomes had to suffer the ignominy of serving as a pilot under the inexperienced but well-placed Álvaro de Mesquita; this was, if anything, a lesser position than that of pilot major of the flagship. More experienced and better qualified, Gomes seethed with resentment at having been passed over, and he transmitted his sense of outrage to San Antonio’s sympathetic crew.
Every time Magellan dispatched San Antonio on a reconnaissance mission, Gomes, her pilot, became more alarmed by the hazards of the journey. Mesquita was so inexperienced that Gomes shouldered the responsibility for exploring these unknown waters. As a result, he knew the strait better than anyone else in the expedition, the Captain General included, and he was thoroughly unnerved by what he had seen. Gomes and his crew were, in Gallego’s assessment, “disgusted with that long and doubtful navigation.”
The dispute between Gomes and Magellan pitted two competing visions of the expedition against each other. Magellan saw it as a divinely sanctioned quest for new worlds, undertaken in the name of the king of Spain, to whom he was, if anything, even more devoted than he had been to the king of his native Portugal. If Magellan succeeded, it would be because God meant him to. This was discovery as revelation, as prophecy, as a high-risk collaboration between God and His favored nation, Spain. Magellan, in this scheme of things, was little more than God’s servant, doing His will. To Gomes, the rebellious rationalist, Magellan’s exhortations sounded like the words of a fanatic who would lead them all to certain death in the name of king and country. The only sane course, in his analysis, would be to return to Spain.
Gomes did not let the matter rest there.
Under Magellan’s command, Trinidad steadfastly continued the westward exploration of the strait. According to Albo’s log, on October 28, little more than a week after discovering the strait, they tied up at an island guarding the entrance to another bay; this was either Elizabeth Island or Dawson Island. Here the strait extended in two directions, Froward Reach and Magdalen Sound. To choose a course, Magellan dispatched two ships to reconnoiter. Concepción, under the direction of Serrano, sailed westward into Froward Reach to Sardine River. Given the paucity of navigational detail supplied by Pigafetta’s diary and Albo’s log, it is difficult to say for certain what the expedition meant by Sardine River; it might have been what is now called Andrews Bay.
Meanwhile, San Antonio entered Magdalen Sound. Magellan gave his ships four days to return with their reports, but even after six, San Antonio failed to reappear. “We came upon a river which we called the River of the Sardine because there were so many sardines near it,” said Pigafetta of this moment of doubt and confusion, “so we stayed there for days in order to await the two ships”—Concepción and San Antonio. “During that period we sent a well-equipped boat [Victoria] to explore the cape of the other sea. The men returned within three days and reported that they had seen the cape and the open sea.” Sighting the Pacific was itself a momentous event, but the excitement of this discovery was overshadowed by the mysterious failure of San Antonio to reappear at the appointed time and place. Magellan had no idea what had become of her. Perhaps she had foundered and lay at the bottom of one of the yawning fjords. Or perhaps she had deserted just when the expedition was on the verge of its great accomplishment.
At this critical moment, Magellan conferred with Andrés de San Martín, now aboard Trinidad. After consulting the position of the stars and planets, he concluded that San Antonio had indeed sailed for Spain, and worse, her captain, Mesquita, a Magellan loyalist, had been taken prisoner. His vision proved to be remarkably accurate. “The ship San Antonio would not await Concepción because she intended to flee and to return to Spain—which she did,” Pigafetta tersely reported. The long-frustrated mutiny had finally succeeded; even worse, it had taken place when Magellan least expected it. San Antonio, and all her crew, had vanished.
A board the renegade San Antonio, the situation was more even complicated than Magellan or his astrologer realized. Mesquita, the captain, had attempted to rendezvous with the rest of the fleet, but he failed to locate the other ships in the strait’s confusing network of estuaries. Gomes naturally offered little help in the endeavor. During a formal inquiry after the voyage, another usurper, Gerónimo Guerra, insisted that he had deposited papers for Magellan at the precise point where the ships were supposed to meet. These papers would serve as proof of that effort, but they were never found.
Guerra’s words sound self-serving, and perhaps they were. He had worked for Cristóbal de Haro, and was rumored to be related to the financier as well. He had shipped out on San Antonio as a mere clerk, but his remarkably high salary, 30,000 maravedís, twenty times greater than an ordinary seaman’s, signaled a much larger role. Guerra’s real mission was to look out for Haro’s interests; in other words, he was a spy. Had Magellan agreed to return to Spain, Gomes’s alliance with Guerra suggests that the Haro family would have supported the decision; after all, they would have gotten their ships back safe and sound. But King Charles was another matter. At the very least, he would have sent Magellan to jail.
Exactly when San Antonio tried to rejoin the rest of the fleet—if she ever did—is open to question. The ships’ officers later testified at the inquiry that they returned well before they were expected. If so, why had Magellan failed to locate the missing ship? There were two possibilities. Either she had gotten lost in the strait’s endless estuaries, or the mutineers had seized the ship, sought refuge in a concealed bay or fjord, and slipped out of the strait under cover of darkness for Spain.
No matter what the intentions of Gomes and Guerra actually were, discontent aboard San Antonio increased. Mesquita sent smoke signals and fired cannon to try to raise the rest of the fleet, but these signs went unseen and unheard. Mesquita stubbornly insisted on continuing his search for Magellan, but the growing uncertainty convinced Guerra, Gomes and a few like-minded sailors that the time had come to seize the wayward ship. They swiftly overpowered Mesquita, a deed for which they could pay with their lives. Once the mutiny was in progress, there was no stopping it; the mutineers had to succeed or, as they well knew, they would be drawn and quartered and displayed as so many pieces of freshly butchered meat.
Desperate, Gomes flourished a dagger and stabbed Mesquita in the leg. Battling the wound’s throbbing pain, Mesquita snatched the dagger from Gomes and stabbed the attacker in the hand. Gomes howled as the iron entered his flesh, and his cries attracted reinforcements. They overwhelmed and shackled Mesquita, who was held prisoner in Guerra’s cabin. Now Mesquita would receive his bitter payback for the court-martial and suffering he had overseen in Port Saint Julian. As San Antonio set a course for Spain, the mutineers planned to torture him into signing a confession that Magellan had tortured Spanish officers.
The thought of San Antonio slipping away from the rest of the fleet filled Magellan with dread. The Captain General feared that the would-be mutineers had finally found the perfect occasion for their revenge on Mesquita. Even without the prompting of his astrologer, Magellan suspected that Gomes would sail for Spain, and, once there, attempt to tarnish Magellan’s name with a biased account of the tragic events at Port Saint Julian. Gomes could twist the truth to claim that his mutiny had actually been an act of heroic resistance in the face of Magellan’s disloyalty. In this scenario, none other than Estêvão Gomes would be Captain General for the next expedition to the Moluccas, while Magellan would hear about it from the obscurity of a Spanish prison.
San Antonio was the largest ship in the fleet, and she carried many of the fleet’s provisions in her hold, so the loss instantly put the other sailors’ food supplies—indeed their very lives—in jeopardy. The rebels also carried off another prize, an affable Patagonian giant whom they had captured several months before. Magellan had to decide whether to pursue the mutineers
or hope that his cousin would regain control of the ship. He elected to resume searching for the missing San Antonio. “We turned back to look for the two ships,
but we found only Concepción,” Pigafetta wrote. “Upon asking them where the other was, Juan Serrano, who was captain and pilot of the former ship (and also of that ship that had been wrecked), replied that he did not know, and that he had never seen it after it had entered the opening.” Magellan launched a search mission to recapture the missing ship, a virtual impossibility in this watery labyrinth. “We sought it in all parts of the Strait,” Pigafetta recorded, “as far as that opening whence it had fled, and the Captain General sent the ship Victoria back to the entrance of the Strait to ascertain whether the ship was there.”
In his actions, Magellan strictly followed his royal instructions of May 8, 1519, governing ships that had gone astray, to establish prominent indicators. Pigafetta described the lengths to which Magellan went: “Orders were given, if they did not find it, to plant a banner on the summit of some small hill with a letter in an earthen pot buried . . . near the banner, so that if the banner were seen the letter might be found, and the ship might learn the course we were sailing. For this was the arrangement made between us in case we went astray one from the other. Two banners were planted with their letters—one on a little eminence in the first bay, and the other in an islet in the third bay, where there were many sea wolves and large birds.”
Although Pigafetta provides scant clues, this was likely Santa Magdalena Island, a massive, windswept dune rising from the frigid waters. At that time of year, it was overrun with thousands of penguins, the “large birds” mentioned by Pigafetta, mating, burrowing, and most of all fouling the entire islet with their droppings, whose penetrating stench not even the brisk, salty air could mask. Denuded of vegetation, and located in open water, the islet made an excellent place for a marker to remain visible to a passing vessel.
Magellan waited for the errant San Antonio to return. “He had a cross set up in an islet”—in all likelihood, one of the Charles Islands—“near that river which flowed between high mountains covered with snow and emptied into the sea near the River of Sardines.” The precautions were taken in vain, lonely signals at the end of the world for a phantom ship. San Antonio never reappeared.
Once Magellan became resigned to the loss of the ship, the three remaining vessels of the Armada de Molucca pressed on. After the hardships they had endured at bleak Port Saint Julian, the crew came to welcome the variety and natural majesty the strait afforded them. As they plied its fjords, they marveled at the dolphins that swam beside their ships and jumped in agile arcs. Sailors’ lore had it that when dolphins jumped straight ahead, good weather was approaching, and when they jumped to one side or the other, the weather would turn foul.
The marvelous but hazardous strait still lacked a name. At first, the men called it simply the strait. Pigafetta took to referring to the waterway as the Patagonian Strait, while San Martín, the astrologerpilot, preferred the name Strait of All Saints. Still others referred to it as Victoria Strait, after the first ship to enter its waters. By 1527, six years after the expedition’s conclusion, the waterway had earned the name by which it is now known, the Strait of Magellan. For all his pride, Magellan never dared to name the strait after himself; the names he did confer during his journey were either descriptive (Patagonia) or religiously inspired (Cape of the Eleven Thousand Virgins). As one mountainous prospect gave way to another, Pigafetta wrote glowingly of the strait’s natural splendor and sustaining food. “One finds the safest of ports every half league in it, water, the finest of wood (but not of cedar), fish, sardines, and missiglioni, while smallage, a sweet herb (although there is also some that is bitter) grows around the springs. We ate of it for many days as we had nothing else.” Although the men did not realize it, their diet replenished their depleted bodies. The wild herbs they consumed contained vitamin C, which protected them against the depredations of scurvy, at least for a while.
All things considered, Pigafetta judged, “I believe there is not a more beautiful or better strait than this one.”
While Pigafetta took satisfaction in the armada’s accomplishment, Magellan succumbed to a rare moment of self-doubt, and sought the advice of his officers about whether to proceed with the expedition or return to Spain, just as Gomes had urged him to do. His uncharacteristic wavering suggests he dreaded the rumors that the rebellious crew of San Antonio would spread about his conduct if they ever reached Spain.
Magellan dictated a lengthy missive to Duarte Barbosa, Victoria’s captain, an indication that relations had become so strained that the Captain General feared that simply bringing them together would lead to yet another mutiny. The document reveals his urgent need to build a consensus: “I, Ferdinand Magellan, Knight of the Order of Santiago, and Captain General of this Armada which His Majesty sends to the discovery of the Isles of the Spices, etc., hereby inform you, Duarte Barbosa, captain of Victoria, and its pilots and boatswains, that I am aware of your deeming it a very grievous thing that I shall be determined to continue onwards, because you think that time is short to accomplish our journey,” he said.
And since I am a man who never despised the advice and opinion from others, on the contrary, all of my decisions are taken jointly with everyone and notified to one and all, without my offending anyone; and because of what happened in San Julian with the deaths of Luis de Mendoza and Gaspar de Quesada, and the banishment of Luis de Cartagena and Pero Sánchez de la Reina, priest, you out of fear refrain from telling me and advising me on everything you believe to be useful to His Majesty and the Armada’s well-being, but if you do not tell me so, you are going against the service of the Emperor-King, our lord, and against the oath and homage you took with me; therefore I ask you on behalf of the said lord, and I myself beg you and order you to write down your opinions, each one individually, stating the reasons why we should continue onwards or else turn back, and all this showing no respect for anything that may prevent you from telling the truth. . . . Being aware of those reasons and opinions, I will then say mine and my willingness to conclude what should be done.
—Written in the Canal de Todos los Santos, opposite the Río de la Isleta, on the 21st of November, Thursday, at fifty-three degrees, of 1520. Ordered by Captain General Ferdinand Magellan.
This remarkable document—Magellan’s longest statement to have survived—reveals the suspicion and mistrust running rampant at what should have been one of their most harmonious and triumphant intervals. The normally resolute Magellan sounds as though he is about to apologize for the protracted trial and cruel executions he ordered at Port Saint Julian, and he clearly realizes that as a result of his severe (though legally sanctioned) disciplinary measures, he has alienated his officers, even those closest to him. Afraid of losing still more of his ships to mutiny, Magellan’s isolation at this moment was nearly complete.
Thrust into an unaccustomed position of authority, Andrés de San Martín, the fleet’s astronomer, urged that they continue the expedition at least through mid-January, although he remained skeptical that the strait would ultimately prove to be the miraculous passage to the Spice Islands. After January, he warned, the days would grow short, and the williwaws, whose destructive power they had already experienced, would become even more ferocious; furthermore, they must not sail by night because the men would be exhausted after a long, strenuous day battling high winds and rough waters. “Most magnificent Lord,” he began,
Having seen your lordship’s command, of which I was notified on Friday 22nd of November of 1520 by Martín Méndez, clerk of the ship of His Majesty named Victoria, and which orders me to give my view as regards what I believe to be better for this journey, either to continue, or to turn back, with the reasons behind either choice, I say: That, aside from doubting that neither through this Canal de Todos los Santos, in which we now are, nor through the other two straits lying to the East and EastNortheast, there might be found any p
assage to the Moluccas, this is irrelevant to the question of what could be eventually found, weather permitting, insofar as we are in the prime of summer. And it seems that your lordship must continue ahead in search of it, and depending on what shall be found or discovered until the middle of this coming January of 1520, you may consider the possibility of returning to Spain, because from then on the days suddenly dwindle and the weather shall worsen. And since now, even though the days last seventeen hours, added to the dawn and dusk, we still suffer stormy and shifting weather, much more so can be expected when the days decrease from fifteen to twelve hours and much more in winter, as we already know. So your lordship may want to leave these straits and spend the month of January in reaching the outside and then, after collecting enough water and fuel, head towards Cádiz and the port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, whence we departed.
San Martín’s position was reasonable and well argued, but cautious.
Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe Page 20