The expedition had ended, but its effects on Spain, and on world history, were just beginning.
C H A P T E R X V
After Magellan
The Mariner, whose eye is bright,
Whose beard with age is hoar,
Is gone: and now the Wedding-Guest
Turned from the bridegroom’s door
As the skeleton crew guided the weather-beaten Victoria along the Guadalquivir River to her mooring in Seville, Juan Sebastián Elcano employed his considerable skills of persuasion in a letter to King Charles to boast of the voyage’s multifaceted accomplishments and to justify his assumption of command after Magellan’s death.
By the florid and long-winded standards of the era, the dispatch was a marvel of concision:
Most High and Illustrious Majesty:
Your high Majesty will learn how we eighteen men only have returned with one of the five ships which Your Majesty sent to discover the Spice Islands under Captain Ferdinand Magellan (to whom glory); and so that Your Majesty may have news of the principal things which we have passed through, I write to say briefly this:
First, we reached 54° S of the Equator where we found a Strait which passed through Your Majesty’s mainland to the Sea of India, which Strait is of 100 leagues and from which we debouched; and, in the time of three months and twenty days, encountering highly favorable winds, and finding no land save two small and uninhabited islands; afterward we reached an archipelago of many islands quite abundant in gold. We lost by his death Captain Ferdinand Magellan, with many others, and unable to sail for want of people, very few having survived, we dismantled one of the ships and with the two remaining sailed from island to island, seeking how to arrive, with God’s grace, at the Isles of Maluco [Spice Islands], which we did eight months after the death of the Captain; and there we loaded the two ships with spices. . .
Having departed the last of these islands, in five months, without eating anything but wheat and rice and drinking only water, we touched at no land for fear of the King of Portugal, who had given orders in all his dominions to capture this fleet. . . . We arrived at the islands of Cape Verde, whose governor seized my boat with thirteen men, and sought to throw me and all my men into a ship which was sailing from Calicut to Portugal charged with spying . . . but we resolved, with common accord, to die before falling into the hands of the Portuguese. And so with very great labor at the pumps, which we had to work day and night to free her of water, and as exhausted as any man ever was, with the aid of God and of Our Lady, and after the passage of three years, we arrived. . .
Your Majesty will know best that what we should esteem and admire most is that we have discovered and made a course around the entire rotundity of the world—that going by the occident we have returned by the orient.
After boasting of his feats of discovery, Elcano turned to the commercial aspects of the expedition and petitioned the king to excuse the men who had suffered so greatly for him from having to pay duties on profits from their personal store of spices:
I beg Your Majesty, in view of the many travails, sweats, famine, and thirst, cold and heat that these people have endured in the service of Your Majesty, to give us grace for the fourth and twentieth of their property and of what they brought with them. And with this I close, kissing the feet and hands of Your high Majesty.
Written on board the ship Victoria, in Sanlúcar, on the 6th day of September of 1522.
The Captain
Juan Sebastián Elcano
The first account of the first journey around the world, Elcano’s letter was dispatched from Sanlúcar de Barrameda even before the ship reached Seville—an indication of Elcano’s eagerness to offer explanations. But his letter did little to clear up the mystery of how Magellan died; nor did Elcano explain how he, a Basque mariner, emerged as the fleet’s Captain General. And any connection between the two events—Magellan’s fall and Elcano’s rise—was similarly obscured. The letter concealed more than it revealed. Many serious questions loomed concerning the voyage: mutinies, the sailors’ licentious behavior and outright orgies with women in distant lands, which had been expressly forbidden by the king; and, most important of all, Magellan’s conduct at sea and accusations of torture.
King Charles never mourned the loss of the Captain General, even though Magellan had always regarded the young sovereign as the paragon of all virtues, the recipient of all his loyalties and efforts, the justification of all his suffering. And Magellan’s fanatical devotion was not returned in kind. Charles felt no sense of kinship with the ardent Portuguese mariner who had presented himself at Valladolid four years before, pleading for royal backing of an expedition. The armada’s many scientific and geographic discoveries and the claiming of dozens of islands and lands for Spain made little impression on this preoccupied sovereign, who, through lifelong habit, merely considered such tributes his due. King Charles barely acknowledged that, thanks to Magellan’s efforts, he now laid claim to much of the known world, at least for a short time. Eventually, he took to boasting about the expedition because it had returned with a shipload of cloves, the aromatic equivalent of gold. He counted the number of bahars of cloves aboard the battered Victoria and ignored the number of souls Magellan and the priests had converted to Christianity. For Charles, the Armada de Molucca could be considered a commercial success; that was all, and that was enough.
King Charles proudly wrote to his Flemish aunt, the Archduchess Marguerite of Austria, the Netherlands’ regent, to proclaim the arrival of the prized cargo transported against all odds from halfway around the world. “The armada that three years ago I sent to the Spice Islands has returned and has been to the place where the said spices grow, where the Portuguese or any other nation has never been . . .”—that was manifestly untrue, but Charles had to maintain the fiction that Spain reached the Moluccas first in order to claim them—“and the captain of the said armada asserts that on this voyage they went so far that they roamed around the entire world.” These boasts reveal a twenty-one-year-old king attempting to assert his legitimacy and authority, and he asked his aunt to help bring the spices to market, “as if it were my own affair.” He reminded her that he had “borne great expenses for this new and untried effort, in addition to the work and care my people gave to it,” and he reminded her that he expected the entire empire over which he ruled, from Spain to the Netherlands, to profit, that is to say, get out of debt to the Haro family: “I hope that certainly my realms on this side and also my said countries on that side, and the subjects of each, will receive great benefit, convenience, and profit in the future, as you may well expect. And as to the value of the spices that the ships brought, what will come of them . . . will serve to furnish the preparation of a larger armada that I have decided to send to these Spice Islands as soon as possible.”
Excited by the thought of these riches, the archduchess requested her nephew to designate Bruges, the flourishing Flemish city in her realm, as the new center of the European spice trade, but Charles, thinking he had found a surefire way out of debt, insisted on keeping it in Spain “because this merchandise was first found at the expense of this realm.”
Still gloating over this unexpected success, King Charles summoned Elcano and two men of his choosing to visit the royal residence at Valladolid to provide a full account of their exploits. Elcano selected the pilot, Albo, and the barber-medic, Bustamente, to back up his account. Significantly, he excluded Pigafetta, whom he knew to be a Magellan loyalist. As a sign of royal favor, Elcano’s delegation received a lavish disbursement for formal clothes and traveling expenses to Valladolid; they could be assured of making an impressive appearance before their sovereign.
The city, in north central Spain, was a time capsule of the Spanish past, held for centuries by the Moors, who named it. Christians conquered the city in the tenth century, and it became a stronghold of commerce, its citizens renowned for speaking the purest Spanish anywhere, so important to the kingdom as a whole that by the dawn
of the Renaissance the kings of Castile made it their official seat. For this reason, Valladolid exerted its bureaucratic influence over a substantial part of the world. By the time King Charles took up residence in Valladolid, the city was at its zenith.
Charles received the three world travelers on October 18 with apparent warmth and congratulated them on having reached the Spice Islands through a water route and claiming them for Spain. Keenly aware of what was expected, Elcano solemnly presented His Majesty with samples of the spices brought back from the Moluccas, as well as letters from the island chieftains swearing loyalty to the unknown ruler of the distant land. All that was very impressive, but just for show.
Clouds of suspected disloyalty, even mutiny, hung over the survivors’ heads. Just before their arrival in Valladolid, disquieting rumors had reached King Charles. It was whispered that Magellan had not been killed by warriors on Mactan but by the members of the fleet. Could Elcano have been among them? And there were conflicting accounts of the bitter mutiny at Port Saint Julian, some blaming the Spanish officers for the uprising and others holding the Portuguese contingent responsible.
To get to the bottom of these stories, the three men—Elcano, Albo, and Bustamente—faced an inquiry conducted by Valladolid’s mayor, acting on orders from King Charles himself. The proceeding, which began on October 18, consisted of thirteen questions put to the men. The questions concentrated on two themes, the mutiny and the commercial aspects of the voyage. Elcano had given considerable thought to the charge of disloyalty that he was bound to face, and during his examination he carefully explained his way out of the mutinies that had occurred on the ships by condemning Magellan. Elcano rearranged events to make it sound as though he had been invited by the Spanish captains to serve as the Captain General, that Magellan had favored his relatives on board the ships at the expense of all others, especially the Spanish captains, and that Magellan had defied the king’s explicit orders. “Elcano declared that Magellan said that he did not wish to . . . carry out the instructions entrusted to him by His Majesty,” read the transcript of the proceedings.
By portraying himself as a humble defender of Spanish honor, Elcano skillfully played up to King Charles, but he was less successful in his defense of the expedition’s commercial aspects. Why, his inquisitors demanded, were there only 524 quintals of cloves on board Victoria when she tied up at the quay in Seville, but the ship’s own register clearly showed she had taken on no less than 600 quintals in the Spice Islands?
In his response, Elcano carefully explained that he had relied on the weight given by the islanders from whom he had purchased the cloves, that he personally supervised weighing the cargo in Seville, and that any discrepancy could be accounted for by drying during the long voyage home.
Next, Elcano was asked why he had failed to keep accounts. According to the transcript, “Elcano was asked to declare all that was done on the voyage to the disservice of His Majesty and to defraud him of his property.”
Again, the Basque-born mariner tried to shift the blame to Magellan, claiming that as long as Magellan was alive, he had written nothing “because he dared not to do so,” while after Magellan’s death, he did record transactions. This explanation made no sense because Magellan was scrupulous about recording the fleet’s activities, whether in Pigafetta’s diary or in Albo’s pilot’s log. Ignoring those inconvenient pieces of evidence, Elcano instead spoke grandly and vaguely about Magellan’s “disservice” to the king and the fleet, which he recklessly “abandoned to its fate.” His indictment of Magellan was as damning as it was unsupported by the events.
Finally, Elcano was forced to confront the disquieting rumors surrounding Magellan’s death. In his brief reply, Elcano held the Mactanese islanders completely responsible. By burning their hamlet, Elcano implied, Magellan had goaded them into taking revenge. His explanation went unchallenged, and served as the basis of the official determination of the cause of Magellan’s death.
Elcano’s testimony was sufficiently dexterous to exculpate himself from royal disfavor or worse. And his two companions, giving answers remarkably similar to Elcano’s, achieved the same result. By the time the inquiry ended, King Charles and his advisers were reminded that the survivors had brought them a fortune in spices, a claim to the Spice Islands themselves, a new water route to the islands, and an unequaled mastery of the ocean—all of it priceless, no matter how underhanded they had been in getting it.
In the end, King Charles waived the royal duties on the spices the men brought home for their personal enrichment and offered a quarter of his own proceeds from the voyage to the three survivors who had testified in Valladolid. Elcano’s bonus included even more: an annual pension of five hundred ducats, a knighthood, and a coat of arms befitting the mariner who had sailed around the world. It depicted a castle, spices, two Malay kings, a globe, and the legend:
Primus circumdedesti me
Thou first circled me.
Of equal importance, Elcano received a royal pardon for his role in the failed mutiny against Magellan’s command. Elcano insisted on having the document published, making his exoneration complete. He would now be qualified to lead future expeditions for Castile.
With all his new riches, Elcano acquired two mistresses, one of whom bore him a daughter, the other a son, but he lived with neither.
The other survivors of the expedition received similar marks of royal favor. Martín Méndez, Victoria’s accountant; Hernando Bustamente, the barber; Miguel de Rodas, the master of Victoria; and Espinosa each received individualized coats of arms commemorating their accomplishments. (Meanwhile, the coat of arms for the Magellan family remained defaced and dishonored, as it had been since Magellan left Portugal to serve the king of Spain—the king who had all but forgotten him now.)
The men who had mutinied against Magellan—an entire ship filled with them—were freed from prison and absolved of their crimes. Álvaro de Mesquita, who had served as captain of San Antonio until the mutineers overwhelmed him, had languished in jail ever since 1521, when his ship returned to Seville. With Victoria’s survivors corroborating his story, the diehard Magellan loyalist was also freed in a general amnesty designed to end lingering controversy about the voyage. Having had enough of Spanish justice, he fled home to Portugal.
Despite Elcano’s skill at self-promotion, and King Charles’s endorsement, a different interpretation of the voyage emerged soon after Victoria’s return. Maximilian of Transylvania, a secretary to King Charles, pounced on Elcano, Albo, and Bustamente at Valladolid, interviewed them all at length, and very likely talked to Antonio Pigafetta, Magellan’s official chronicler, as well. Within a month of Victoria’s return to Seville, he delivered his lengthy report to King Charles.
In his account, Maximilian saw past the expedition’s internal power struggles to emphasize how it changed the way the entire world would be seen from this time forth. “I have resolved to write as truly as possible,” he remarked. “I have taken care to have everything related to me exactly by the captain and by the individual sailors who have returned with him.” These men were so sincere that it was apparent to Maximilian that “they seemed not only to tell nothing fabulous themselves, but by their relation to disprove and refute all the fabulous stories which had been told by ancient authors.”
By far the most authoritative and eloquent chronicle of the first voyage around the world flowed from the pen of Antonio Pigafetta, who had faithfully maintained his diary throughout the entire expedition. To counter what he expected would be Elcano’s selfserving distortions of the events that had occurred at sea, Pigafetta immediately set about writing his own impassioned plea for Magellan’s valor and lo more important, how he had lived. He revealed Magellan as the fearless disprover of long-standing myths and overturner of tenacious fallacies.
Leaving Seville, Pigafetta headed directly for Valladolid, where he presented the young monarch with “neither gold nor silver, but things very highly esteemed by such a sovereign. Among
other things, I gave him a book, written by my hand, concerning all the matters that had occurred day to day during our voyage”—the most important account of distant lands to appear since The Travels of Marco Polo.
Pigafetta’s diplomatic background served him well, because he then succeeded in giving his account to sovereigns who were often bitter enemies of one another: “After this, I left for Portugal, where I gave an account to King João of all that I had seen. Passing again through Spain, I also went to present some rare objects from the other hemisphere to the very Christian King François. Finally, I went to Italy, to the very industrious lord, Philippe Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, a worthy grandmaster of Rhodes, and placed at his disposal my person and services of which I would be capable.” Pigafetta’s thorough and even-handed distribution of his account ensured Magellan’s leading role in the adventure for posterity—and, not so incidentally, his own. “I made the voyage and saw with my eyes the things hereafter written,” Pigafetta vowed, “that I might win a famous name.”
After traveling across Europe, Pigafetta arrived in Venice, his home, and immediately caused a stir. “There came into the college a Venetian who had been appointed a knight errant, a brother of [the Order of] Rhodes, who has been three years in India,” wrote Marin Sanudo on November 7, 1523, of Pigafetta’s visit. “And all the college listened to him with great attention, and he told half of his voyage . . . and after dinner also he was with the doge, and related those things in detail, so that his Serenity and all who heard him were rendered speechless over the things of India.”
Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe Page 41