Sebastián Elcano had never experienced anything like the fierce, confused winds and riptides of Cabo Tormentoso; doubling it would tax his navigational skills, his patience, and his daring to the utmost. Many of the crew wanted to jump ship at the island of Madagascar rather than risk doubling the cape, said Pigafetta, “because the ship was leaking badly, because of the severe cold, and especially because we had no other food than rice and water; for as we had no salt, our provisions of meat had putrefied.” Doing so meant a life of exile and slavery, because Madagascar was a Portuguese stronghold, with ships flying the Portuguese colors calling there on their way to and from the Indies.
A few brave souls on board Victoria had no use for Madagascar. They retained their principles and allegiance to King Charles, and preferred death to spending the rest of their days marooned off the coast of Africa. They were, said Pigafetta, “more desirous of their honor than of their own life, determined to reach Spain, dead or alive.”
Halfway between Australia and Africa, Victoria began to leak dangerously. Deliverance seemed at hand on March 18, when the crew sighted the prominent hump of what is now known as Amsterdam Island. Elcano hoped to perform urgently needed repairs on the shores of this small volcanic landmass, but after four days of tacking in rough weather and surging seas, he was unable to find a secure anchorage. “We saw a very high island, and we went towards it to anchor, and we could not fetch it; and we struck the sails and lay to until the next day,” Albo recorded in frustration.
Elcano eventually gave up on the idea of reaching Amsterdam Island, and repairs took place in the ocean swells. As the men worked, they might have seen the killer whales or elephant seals, and if they lifted their gaze, they would have seen several species of albatross circling above them, the same benignly smiling bird that Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s imagination transformed into a symbol of hope and innocence corrupted by thoughtless violence.
Once the repairs were completed, Victoria resumed her westerly course. Over the following days and weeks, the crew, hovering on the verge of starvation and dreading the onset of scurvy, steadily ate their way through their supply of rice and awaited whatever destiny had in store.
Fifteen hundred miles east of Amsterdam Island, Trinidad prepared to leave the island of Tidore. On April 6, after more than three months of repairs, she finally weighed anchor and unfurled her sails. The ship carried a full load of spices, one thousand quintals of cloves—fifty tons!—more than enough to justify the expense of the entire voyage.
Magellan’s former flagship was commanded by Gonzalo Gómez de Espinosa, and her pilot was Juan Bautista Punzorol, known to history as the “Genoese pilot,” after the name of the short memoir of the voyage he left behind. Sorely missed was Juan Carvalho, the capable pilot who had become a corrupt Captain General; he had died of unknown causes on February 14.
As the fleet’s alguacil. or master-at-arms, Espinosa had performed as a loyal servant to King Charles, and he had helped Magellan maintain authority over his often rebellious crew. During the mutiny in Port Saint Julian, when Magellan lost control of three of his ships, Espinosa had come to his aid, and as a career soldier, he discharged his dangerous duties without fuss or complaint. But as a captain, Espinosa was hopelessly out of his element. Without Magellan to advise and protect him, it became apparent that he lacked the navigational skills to take his ship through rough weather; beyond his lack of expertise, his character, seemingly so straightforward and loyal, turned ambivalent when he should have been resolute, and naïve where he should have been canny. It was not that he lacked discipline, or the support of the men; the problem was that Espinosa, a soldier, was simply not qualified to command a ship. The challenge of guiding Trinidad halfway around the world, often against the prevailing winds, was beyond him, as it might have been beyond even Magellan, had he lived to face it.
Espinosa decided to leave behind four men to operate a trading post on the island of Tidore. The post would store cloves and serve as a symbol of Spanish rule in the Spice Islands. The four men stationed there were, Ginés de Mafra recalled, “Juan de Campos and Luis de Molino and a Genoese and a certain Guillermo Corco.” While serving time at their remote outpost, they picked up alarming intelligence: “Some Indian merchants who had come there to buy cloves told them that a Portuguese armada was coming from India to the Moluccas because they had learned of the Castilians’ presence there.” They, too, wanted to establish an outpost, but more than that, they planned to seize control of the spice trade. The four men left behind suddenly found themselves vulnerable to both Portuguese marauders and to the island’s residents, whose loyalties could be purchased or transferred with a show of force.
Setting sail, Espinosa backtracked and followed an easterly course through waters the fleet had already explored, past Gilolo and Morotai, and into the Philippine Sea, all the way to the island of Komo, where Trinidad took on more provisions. From this point on, stout easterly headwinds got the better of his navigational skills, and he took a more northerly course. The choice proved disastrous. Although he now understood how large the Pacific Ocean was, his ideas about the location of landmasses in the Northern Hemisphere were deeply flawed. He mistakenly believed that Asia was connected to the American continent, and that misunderstanding led him to assume that if he sailed far enough north, he would catch benign westerly winds. But soon after his departure, the monsoon season started in earnest, bringing with it a seemingly endless succession of storms and drenching rains.
“After ten days of sailing,” according to de Mafra, “we arrived at one of the Islands of the Thieves.” Their position was uncannily close to the armada’s first landfall after the ninety-eight-day ordeal of crossing the Pacific during the voyage out. “There Gonzalo de Vigo stayed, much tired of the travails.” Nor was he the only one to desert—in all, three crew members fled, preferring to take their chances on a remote Pacific island rather than remain aboard Espinosa’s ship of doom. (De Vigo remained in the Philippines for the rest of his life; the other two deserters were killed by islanders.) De Mafra wrote that Trinidad “sailed to the northeast until she reached 42 degrees North.” Espinosa faced winds of ever-increasing intensity, and soon storms overwhelmed the isolated ship. A more ill-advised global detour cannot be imagined. One can only wonder what he was thinking as he sailed as far north as Japan, into ever more frigid waters, because this course took him away from his goal of reaching Darién.
Scurvy returned to plague the men, and its miseries made the living envy the dead. “At this point many began dying,” said de Mafra, “and one of them was opened to see what it was that they were dying of, and his body was found to be as if all its veins had burst open because all the blood had spread all over the interior of his body. Henceforth, whenever anyone fell sick he was bled because it was thought that the blood was suffocating him, but they kept dying all the same and did not elude death, so thenceforward the sick men were considered helpless and left untreated.” Scurvy ultimately claimed the lives of thirty men, leaving only twenty to carry on. In their frail and bewildered state, the handful of survivors sought an explanation for their suffering. “Some claimed that it was because of the venom poured by the Ternate Indians into the well where they had collected water for the voyage,” de Mafra suggested. Even Espinosa admitted that his course placed the ship in peril, first from the weather, and then from illness: “It became necessary for me to cut the castles and quarter-deck because the storm was so big and the weather so cold that aboard the ship that we could not cook any food. The storm lasted twelve days and because the people did not have any bread to eat, most of them lost weight and when the storm had passed and the people could once again cook food, on account of the many worms we had, it gave them nausea, which affected most people.”
Finally, Espinosa came to his senses. “When I saw the people suffering, the contrary weather, and [realized] that I had been at sea for five months, I turned back to the Moluccas, and by the time we got to the Moluccas . . . it had be
en seven months at sea without taking [on] any refreshments.”
After a brief respite at the Islands of the Thieves to collect water, Espinosa commanded Trinidad to resume her retreat toward Tidore, but as he approached his goal, he received shocking news. On May 13, five weeks after Trinidad’s departure from Tidore, a fleet of seven Portuguese ships, all looking for Magellan and the Armada de Molucca, had arrived at the island. Their leader was António de Brito, bearing a royal appointment as governor of the Spice Islands.
His Portuguese soldiers, heavily armed, imprisoned the four crew members Espinosa had left behind to maintain a trading post. Then Brito turned his attention to Almanzor, the king of Tidore, demanding to know how he could have allowed the Spanish to maintain a post on his island. Almanzor pleaded for mercy, explaining that the Spanish had forced him to yield, but now that Captain Brito had come to rescue Almanzor from the Spanish, he would gladly switch his allegiance back to the Portuguese. Captain António de Brito, whose cynicism concerning Almanzor’s protestations can be imagined, reclaimed the Spice Islands in the name of Portugal.
Espinosa dispatched a boat bearing a letter for Captain Brito, begging for sympathy. He told a pathetic tale. His ship was in bad condition, down to its last anchor; one storm could send her to the bottom. And he was in desperate need of supplies. Had Magellan been alive, he would never have been so foolish as to write a letter to the Portuguese captain charged with capturing him, and the last thing he would have done was to reveal his whereabouts and weaknesses to the enemy. He would have known there was no chance of mercy from the Portuguese.
Rather than the compassion Espinosa expected, the letter only made Brito gloat. After searching the Indies for three years, the Portuguese governor now knew exactly where the Armada de Molucca was located, and once he had captured the crew, he would treat them as cruelly as he wished.
A few days later, a Portuguese caravel with twenty armed men stormed Benaconora, the harbor where Espinosa had sought refuge. The soldiers boarded Trinidad, expecting to overwhelm the crew, but were repelled by the grievous spectacle of men near death, a foul and unhealthy stench that no one dared to brave, and a ship on the verge of sinking. Everything Espinosa had said in his letter to Brito was true; Trinidad and her crew were in desperate condition and offered no threat to the Portuguese.
Unmoved, the Portuguese soldiers arrested Espinosa and sailed Magellan’s fetid and decrepit flagship to Ternate. There Brito took possession of Trinidad’s papers, logbooks, quadrants, and astrolabes. Included in the haul were the diary of Andrés de San Martín and, it is said, Magellan’s personal logbook. Brito ordered the ship stripped of all her sails and rigging, and in this condition, she rode helplessly at anchor until a severe storm hit the island. The winds smashed apart the remains of the once-proud ship, her precious cargo of cloves sank, and the splintered remnants of her hull washed ashore. The flagship of the Armada de Molucca ended up as driftwood.
Espinosa had squandered his chance for glory. If he had succeeded in guiding Trinidad home, he would have earned a place in history and a fortune for himself. Instead, his indecision claimed the lives of over a score of men, half the remaining assets of the armada, a valuable cargo of cloves, and the records maintained by Trinidad’s officers, including Magellan himself.
When Brito perused the logbooks, he became incensed because they contained damning evidence of the armada’s route through Portuguese waters and its attempts to snatch the Spice Islands away from Portugal. The source of the intelligence was impeccable: the records of the fleet’s official astronomer, Andrés de San Martín. To make matters worse, Brito discovered that the astronomer had secretly altered the location of various lands to obscure the embarrassing fact that the ships had wandered into the Portuguese hemisphere, at least as it was defined by the Treaty of Tordesillas. With this information, Brito had his motive for revenge.
His first victim was Pedro Alfonso de Lorosa, the Portuguese renegade who had joined the fleet when it first called at the Spice Islands. He was beheaded.
Brito then considered executing several sailors and pilots, but preferred that they die a slow death in the tropical heat. He later reported to the king of Portugal, “So far as concerns the master, clerk, and pilot . . . it would be more to your Highness’s service to order their heads to be struck off than to send them [to India]. I kept them in the Moluccas because it is a most unhealthy country, in order that they might die there, not liking to order their heads to be cut off, since I did not know whether your Highness would be pleased or not.” Brito based his judgment of the climate on his own troops’ suffering; of the two hundred under his command, only fifty survived. The Portuguese governor did spare the lives of two men, a boatswain and carpenter, but he did so only to press them into service for the Portuguese. He sent the rest of the crew to a fortress under construction on the island of Ternate, with orders to help build it. The timber used to construct the Portuguese fort, and the cannon to protect it, came from the wreck of Trinidad, formerly Magellan’s flagship and the symbol of Spanish sea power in the Indies.
Espinosa, now just another prisoner, at first refused to comply with Brito’s humiliating dictates, but eventually he was forced to go along: “I was rewarded for my labor by threats of being hanged from the yardarms and the seizure of the ship loaded with cloves and all of the equipment.” The Portuguese clapped several of his men into leg irons, and even Espinosa himself, “dishonoring me and saying that I was a thief in front of all the native people and not paying respect to me at all, and saying”—and this was the ultimate insult—“ ‘Now we’>ll see [who will prevail], the King of Spain, or that of Portugal.’> ” Espinosa was forced to admit that the Portuguese, not the Spanish, remained firmly in control of the Spice Islands.
Trinidad ’s voyage came to its heartbreaking end in October 1522. >Now there was only one ship left of the five comprising the original Armada de Molucca. This was Victoria, under Elcano’s command, and her prospects of returning to Seville appeared even less certain than Trinidad ’s.
Six months earlier, Elcano had tried repeatedly to set a course around the Cape of Good Hope, each time without success, but without serious damage either. After weeks of failed attempts, Victoria finally sought refuge in a harbor located in South Africa, perhaps Port Elizabeth. More disappointment ensued when a scouting party found no helpful natives, in fact, no people of any kind; and no food. Burning precious calories, the explorers climbed a hill to survey the landscape only to realize that, after all their attempts, they had yet to double the cape. It still lay ahead of them, far to the west.
With the greatest of reluctance, Victoria put to sea once more, battling a set of weather conditions found nowhere else on earth, the result of the interaction between the Agulhas current and everchanging winds. The Agulhas current runs from the northeast to southwest, following the contour of the continental shelf, often at speeds of up to six knots. As if the current did not pose a sufficient threat, the ship also had to battle giant waves and gales that can change from northeasterly to southwesterly in a matter of minutes.
The wind was an even more dangerous force than the current. The major wind belts around southern Africa are influenced by two high-pressure systems, the South Atlantic High and the Indian Ocean High, which form part of the so-called subtropical ridge. The Coriolis effect deflects these winds to the left in the Southern Hemisphere, and they blow around in a counterclockwise direction. Such systems are also called “anticyclones.” Winds can reach up to one hundred miles an hour, and Victoria experienced blasts powerful enough to sheer away her fore-topmast and main yard.
Sixty-foot-high rogue waves, monstrous walls of water, inflicted additional misery on the crew. Each upsurge threatened to swallow the fragile little ship, but somehow she managed to emerge from the churning troughs in one buoyant piece and to surge forward into the next wall of water. After a while, the mauling Victoria received came to seem, if not routine, then predictable. The sea had its own patient rh
ythm of destruction.
Given the wretched and chaotic existence the men endured, the logs and diaries covering this segment of the journey are understandably sparse and occasionally in conflict with one another. Albo, the pilot, and Pigafetta, whose records are generally in close agreement, diverge over milestones they reached by as much as two weeks. Apparently, they were too preoccupied, and the ship too unsteady, to make detailed note-taking possible.
The constant pummeling exhausted the crew, and simply finding a quiet moment to consume a few handfuls of barely edible food, usually rice, came to seem a major accomplishment, and getting through the day a miracle of sorts. Of course, the weather continued to batter the boat by night as well, so there was no rest for the crew, nor safe harbor, nor cooking fire, nor soft dry blanket, nor guarantee that their misery would end anytime soon. They might double the cape in a matter of days, but then again they might never be able to accomplish the feat. And if they were forced to turn back, the prospect of starvation in the open stretches of the Indian Ocean or death at the hands of the Portuguese awaited them. And so they tried again and again, fleeing for their lives, hoping to cheat death just one more time.
Just when it seemed that the cape was impassable, the wind shifted slightly and the storms relented briefly. Elcano seized the moment to round Cape Agulhas, the point farthest south on the African continent, with the Cape of Good Hope coming up quickly, almost easy to handle in comparison.
Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe Page 39