Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (53 page)

A
lthough
Victoria
had passed the supreme navigational test, the torments afflicting her crew were not over yet. On June 8, 1522, she crossed the equator again; this was the fourth time since the departure from Seville. “Then we sailed northwest for two months continually without taking on any fresh food or water,” Pigafetta reported. Inevitably, scurvy returned to devastate the crew. “Twenty-one men died during that short time. When we cast them into the sea, the Christians went to the bottom face upward, while the Indians always went face downward.” The victims included Martín de Magallanes, Magellan’s young nephew, who had sailed as a passenger. Despite everything he had endured, Pigafetta retained his touching faith. “Had not God given us good weather, we would all have perished from hunger.” The survivors summoned the strength to go on.

“Finally, constrained by our great extremity, we went to the islands. On Wednesday, July 9, we reached one of the Saint Jacob islands”—by which Pigafetta meant Santiago, the largest of the Cape Verde Islands, off the coast of West Africa, the very same islands that had served as the marker for the line of demarcation under the Treaty of Tordesillas. The islands remained a Portuguese stronghold, a center for commerce in materials and in men. The seas surrounding the Cape Verde Islands were familiar to Portuguese mariners, too familiar, in fact, for
Victoria’s
safety. The farther north she journeyed, the more likely she was to encounter vindictive Portuguese authorities.

As soon as
Victoria
dropped anchor in the port of Ribeira Grande, on Santiago. Island, Espinosa dispatched a longboat for food needed by the starving crew. Fearing that the Portuguese would likely pounce, the men crafted a story designed to elicit sympathy and avoid uncomfortable facts: “We had lost our foremast under the equinoctial line (although we had lost it under the Cape of Good Hope), and when we were restepping it, our Captain General had gone to Spain with the other two ships.”

The cover story omitted any mention of their visit to the Spice Islands, the precious cloves they were carrying, Magellan’s death, the mutinies, their doubling of the Cape of Good Hope, among other incursions into Portuguese waters, and, most important of all, their nearly complete circumnavigation of the globe. Instead, they posed as an unlucky, storm-battered Spanish cargo ship, hardly worth troubling over. The ruse seemed to work, and Pigafetta exulted, “With those good words, and with our merchandise, we got two boatloads of rice.”

As an afterthought, Elcano told his men to confirm the date with the Portuguese, just to make sure the ship’s log remained accurate after nearly three years’ record-keeping. The reply—Thursday— baffled the sailors. “We were greatly surprised for it was Wednesday with us, and we could not see how we had made a mistake; for I had always kept well, and had always set down every day without interruption.” How could they have omitted a day? As they learned later, “It was no error, but as the voyage had been made continually toward the west, and we had returned to the same place as does the sun, we had made a gain of twenty-four hours.” But this miscalculation meant that they violated their faith by eating meat on Fridays, and celebrating Easter on a Monday.

This was no mere bookkeeping oversight: Albo, Pigafetta, and the rest of the survivors erred because the international date line did not yet exist. No Western cosmologist or astronomer, not even Ptolemy, had anticipated that a correction would be necessary to compensate for sailing around the globe. It took the first circumnavigation to demonstrate the need for a twenty-four hour gain. By general agreement, the international date line now extends west from the island of Guam, in the Pacific Ocean.

A
s
Victoria
was about to slip away from Santiago. Island, Elcano made a serious mistake. “On Monday, the fourteenth [of July],” wrote Albo, “we sent the ship’s boat ashore for more rice. It returned the next day, and went back for another load. We waited until night, but it did not return. Then we waited until the next day, but it never returned.” Something had gone awry, but no one aboard the ship knew what it was. One possibility was that the four Indians who had gone ashore to fetch rice tried to purchase food with cloves. When the Portuguese authorities saw this contraband, which could only have come from the Spice Islands, they became deeply suspicious of
Victoria.

That was not all. While on the island of Santiago, one of the sailors let slip that their Captain General, Ferdinand Magellan, was dead. Pigafetta’s all-too-brief mention of the incident suggests that whoever revealed Magellan’s death also revealed that Elcano and the others were afraid to return to Spain, a remark calculated to raise suspicions. The sailor suspected of betraying secrets was Simón de Burgos, a Portuguese who had passed himself off as a Castilian to join the armada. His concealed identity might have had an innocent explanation—he simply wanted to find work, and with restrictions on the number of Portuguese crew members, pretending to be Spanish was the only way around the problem—or it might have been more sinister. It is possible that once he was among his fellow Portuguese in Santiago, he felt free to reveal his identity and betray his long-suffering crew members in exchange for favors. The severity of the subsequent Portuguese reaction to Burgos’s admissions—assuming he was the source—suggests that he exposed still more about the expedition, including its visit to the Moluccas and incursion into Portuguese waters—all inflammatory matters.

Burgos was not the only crew member who tried to seek asylum from the Portuguese. Elcano had revealed the true nature of the expedition to a Portuguese captain shortly after
Victoria
doubled the Cape of Good Hope, and in the distant Spice Islands, Espinosa had also implored the Portuguese to come to his rescue. Assuming that many of the crew felt the urge to surrender to the Portuguese for the sake of survival, Burgos’s admission might be seen as a diplomatic feeler rather than a betrayal of men who had suffered and died for each other. The crew, near death after three years of incessant journeying, deserve a measure of sympathy. To these beaten-down men, throwing themselves on the mercy of the Portuguese seemed a reasonable strategy for survival.

In practice, however, their attempt to disclose the true nature of the expedition as a prelude to defection failed miserably. “We went nearer the port,” Albo continues, “to discover the reason of the delay, whereupon a vessel came out and demanded our surrender, saying that they would send us with the ship that was coming from the Indies, and that they would place their men in our ship, for thus had their officials ordered.”

Victoria’s
officers stoutly resisted. “We requested them to send us our men and the ship’s boat. They replied that they would bear our request to their officials. We answered that we would take another tack and wait. Accordingly, we tacked about and set all our sails full, and left with twenty-two men, both sick and well.” The number probably included eighteen Europeans and four captives acquired en route. Twenty-two men: all that remained of the approximately 260 who had left Seville with the armada three years earlier. Twenty-two survivors of an endless succession of calamities, storms, scurvy, drowning, torture, execution, war, desertion, and now this final indignity: capture by the Portuguese. The prisoners included Martín Méndez, the fleet’s accountant; Ricarte de Normandia, a carpenter; Roland de Argot, a gunner; four sailors; an apprentice seaman, Vasquito Gallego; and two passengers who had avoided misfortune until this point in the journey.

“Fearing lest we also be taken prisoner by certain caravels,” Pigafetta recorded, “we hastily departed.”

It was July 15, 1522.

W
ith barely enough men to handle the ship, Elcano took
Victoria
along a northerly course to her rendezvous with destiny in Spain. The diarists’ silence concerning the final weeks of the circumnavigation suggests both their distaste for Elcano’s barely legitimate authority and the suffering they endured from scurvy, other forms of malnourishment, depression, and exhaustion. Each day, familiar, well-charted landmarks along the coast of North Africa slid past, bringing no cheer, markers on a voyage to disgrace and prison—or so it seemed to the handful of men occupying their ramshackle ship. Leaks constantly threatened to scuttle
Victoria,
and the men, in their exhausted condition, were forced to work the pumps night and day, simply to stay afloat. Their incessant labor paid off, and by July 28, Tenerife swung into view, signaling the beginning of a new course toward the Azores to negotiate the northerly winds. Elcano, still in command, approached the Azores, hoping to take on the fresh provisions they desperately needed and depart before the Portuguese, who claimed these islands, pursued them, but he wisely judged the maneuver too dangerous to attempt.

As they worked the pumps, the ship’s crew discerned Cape Saint Vincent to the north on September 4. It would be the last important landmark they observed before reaching their goal, and it was a fitting sight, for Sagres, the location of Prince Henry the Navigator’s academy, was located right on the cape; the developments that he had pioneered there a century before had culminated in this strange, difficult, and heroic voyage. Cape Saint Vincent disappeared in the mists as the “Portuguese trades” bore
Victoria
and her skeleton crew east toward the mouth of the Guadalquivir River, its waters churning just as they had three years earlier, when the ship, part of the proud Armada de Molucca, began the expedition to the Spice Islands.

O
n Saturday, September 6, 1522, we entered the bay of San Lúcar only eighteen [European] men, the majority of them sick, all that were left of the sixty men who had left the Moluccas. Some died of hunger; some deserted at the island of Timor; and some were put to death for crimes.” So wrote Antonio Pigafetta, in an elegiac mode.

His cryptic reference to “crimes” has given rise to speculation that Elcano had to endure a mutiny during the final weeks of the voyage, and might have sunk to the same level of cruelty as Magellan had in quelling the uprising. Yet the mutiny, if there was one, must have been pathetic and halfhearted, because no other diarist has a word to say on the subject. More likely, the crimes mentioned by Pigafetta were the mundane deeds of desperate men, crimes such as the theft of
Trinidad’s
cloves or the dwindling food supply. Or the malefactors might have been one of the Indians still aboard the ship. The armada had captured a number of prisoners during its travels through Indonesia, some of them pilots, others hostages to be used as bargaining chips, and still others women whose chief role was to serve in a harem. The fleet’s roster, so scrupulous and detailed concerning European crew members, offers little help in tracking the Indians taken aboard during the voyage. Even Pigafetta, who recorded the sad history of John the Giant with great interest and compassion, evinces little interest in later captives and offers no hint concerning their fates, but such prisoners would likely be the first to desert or to be condemned to death for their transgressions.

At last, Pigafetta allowed himself a moment of pride concerning the chief accomplishment of the Armada de Molucca. “From the time we left that bay until the present day, we sailed fourteen thousand four hundred and sixty leagues”—nearly sixty thousand miles—“and furthermore completed the circumnavigation of the world from east to west.” The distance the armada traveled was fifteen times longer than that covered by Columbus’s first voyage to the New World, and correspondingly more dangerous.

T
o complete her journey around the world,
Victoria
and her decimated crew had to make one last passage, from the harbor of Sanlúcar de Barrameda along the Guadalquivir River into Seville. Elcano sent for a small boat to tow the battered craft and her exhausted crew to the teeming city, now abuzz with talk and excitement concerning the unprecedented voyage. Although her hull was in such poor condition and leaking so copiously that the men had to keep pumping all the way just to stay afloat,
Victoria
completed her journey along the river to Seville and tied up at a quay on September 10. Under the scrutiny of representatives of the king and his financiers, dock workers unloaded the precious cargo that
Victoria
had traveled around the world to collect: cloves. Even without the other four ships, the amount of cloves in
Victoria’s
hold was sufficient to turn a profit for the expedition’s backers. The king’s agents were pleased to note that the cloves were of first quality, far exceeding those obtained from merchants who had acquired them in the traditional manner, from middlemen using land routes. The cloves filled no less than 381 sacks, weighing 524 quintals. Their value came to 7,888,864
maravedís.
By royal order, the cargo passed directly to the expedition’s backer, Cristóbal de Haro. Within weeks, he was in possession of the precious cloves, which he dispatched to his brother Diego in Antwerp for sale. The profits were divided between the Haros and the nearly insolvent Spanish crown.

Beyond the profits from spices, the completion of Magellan’s voyage finally gave the Spanish a water route to the Spice Islands, if they wanted it. In terms of prestige and political might, the achievement was the Renaissance equivalent of winning the space race—a competition between the world’s two great maritime superpowers, Spain and Portugal, for territory of vital economic and political importance. In a sudden reversal of the balance of power, Spain was poised to control the spice trade and, by extension, global commerce.

T
he day after arriving in Seville, the eighteen European survivors, attired only in their ragged shirts and breeches, did penance. Their number included Elcano; Francisco Albo, the pilot; Miguel Rodas, a ship’s master; Juan de Acurio, the boatswain; Hernando Bustamente, the barber and medic; Antonio Pigafetta, whose eloquent, occasionally X-rated journal became the primary source of information about the entire voyage; and twelve seamen who, through luck and caution, had managed to survive where so many of their cohorts had perished. Walking barefoot, holding a candle, each world traveler slowly walked, still getting accustomed to the unusual feeling of solid, unshakable land beneath his feet. Elcano led the gaunt, weary pilgrims through Seville’s narrow, winding streets to the shrine of Santa María de la
Victoria,
where they knelt to pray before the statue of the blessed Virgin and Child. They returned to Seville as sinners and penitents rather than conquerors. Their voyage had commenced as a Shakespearean drama, bristling with significance and passion, starring the heroic Magellan, but three years had taken a dreadful toll and the journey was ending as a play by Samuel Beckett. The survivors were shell-shocked, tentative, and chastened by all they had seen and experienced.