To the Edge of the World (10 page)

XIII

April 2-3, 1520

“Row to all the ships,” Magallanes ordered as soon as Espinosa told him the news. “Ask them their allegiance. We must know who is mutinous and who has remained loyal.”

Again we were in the skiff.

Now in a loud voice, Quesada declared from the
San Antonio
that he was captain of the ship and that he owed his allegiance to none but the king. When we rowed to the
Victoria,
Mendoza said the same. And we were not surprised to find Cartagena, freed from his imprisonment, strutting about the
Concepción
’s deck and ordering the men to prepare for warfare.

When we pulled alongside the
Santiago,
Captain Serrano seemed baffled, as if he knew nothing of the mutiny. For when we asked him to whom he owed his allegiance, he responded in a puzzled voice that he owed his allegiance to Magallanes. I was relieved. Serrano had not been named in the letter. Until this moment, I did not know where his loyalties lay. As we rowed back to the
Trinidad,
Serrano’s
Santiago
pulled up anchor and followed, aligning itself with the flagship.

It was two against three.

That afternoon, we stared across the mists at the other three ships, their masts thrusting out of the fog like swords. When would they make their move? Would they kill us all? Blow us into the waters with the
San Antonio
’s superior firepower?

A longboat appeared out of the mist. A sailor said he had a message for Magallanes from the three captains. The longboat’s crew of eight was invited aboard. They licked their lips and peered around nervously. I knew they feared ambush. Their leader held out the message for the captain-general and, once delivered, stepped back quickly.

Magallanes skimmed the message. He turned to Espinosa. “It is a list of grievances. They say they have suffered much and are sorry to have taken three ships. They request that in the future I obey the king’s orders and discuss all matters concerning the fleet with them and consult them regarding my exact course. If I do so, they will acknowledge my leadership and kiss my feet and hands.”

Magallanes smiled and handed the message back to the leader. “Tell your captains I would be happy to discuss such arrangements aboard my ship. Please give them my assurances that I will hear them out and do what is right. Espinosa, have the apprentice seaman prepare a feast. I will treat my guests with the honor they deserve.”

A feast! Honor! I felt my lip curl with disdain. What did they know of honor? True honor? They have done nothing but deceive and betray.

After Magallanes finished speaking, the leader bowed. Soon the longboat disappeared from sight. It was already growing dark though it was early afternoon.

One hour later, the longboat returned. The leader bowed again before Magallanes. “Sir, they say they dare not board your ship for fear of mistreatment. Instead, they request your presence aboard the
San Antonio,
where they promise to do as you command.”

Magallanes regarded the leader. “I must have a moment to consider their request. It—it is not easy to command so many.” The captain-general sighed and passed a weary hand over his forehead. Finally he said, “My friend, the seaman has prepared a sumptuous feast and already my stomach growls. Perhaps you and your men are also hungry. It would be a shame to allow such food to go to waste. So come. Rest and sup with me in my cabin, and when we are finished, I will give my reply.”

The men of the longboat smiled. They, like us, smelled meat roasting, and I envied their good fortune.

When they had gone into the captain-general’s cabin, Espinosa approached me. “Come. I need your help.” Again I boarded the skiff, this time without Rodrigo. Espinosa wore a hooded cloak. I saw the flash of steel before he pulled his cloak about him. I wanted to ask him where we were going and why, but the look on his face told me to ask no questions.

In a silence as thick as the newly fallen night, fifteen heavily armed marines slipped into the
San Antonio
’s longboat, moored alongside us. On Espinosa’s signal I began to row the skiff into the darkness, leaving the longboat behind.

I strained against the ebb tide and, as ordered, pulled alongside the
Victoria
and tied the skiff. Mendoza peered over the gunwale. He was fully armored except for his helmet. “Who goes there?”

“It is I, Espinosa, master-at-arms.”

“What do you want?”

“I must deliver a message to you.”

Mendoza blinked nervously and ran his stubby fingers over his goatee. Jeweled rings flashed in the lantern light. “Give me the message.”

“I have my orders. I am to deliver the message privately.”

Scanning our skiff, Mendoza said, “I am sorry, but I cannot permit anyone to come aboard.”

Espinosa laughed, his voice filled with scorn. “The proud Mendoza is frightened of an unarmed messenger? Of a cabin boy? What do you fear, Mendoza? That one and a half men will overpower your ship?”

Even as my ears stung with insult, Mendoza hesitated and then motioned Espinosa aboard. He frowned but made no objection when Espinosa signaled me to follow.

As Espinosa grasped the gangway ladder to climb aboard, he whispered “Stay with me” before disappearing up and over the bulwarks. By the time I climbed aboard, my mind racing, my heart galloping, Mendoza was already escorting Espinosa into his cabin. I hurried to catch up.

“Come in, Mateo, and close the door behind you,” said Espinosa.

In the candlelight, I saw Mendoza frown. “I thought you were supposed to give me the message privately.”

Instead of replying, Espinosa drew out his message and handed it to Mendoza.

As Mendoza unfolded the paper and began to read, rubbing his beard with jeweled fingers, Espinosa glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. In that instant I knew it to be a trap. I swallowed hard, thinking furiously, I am unarmed. What am I to do? And what if the trap fails? Suddenly I felt very much half a man.

It seemed forever before Mendoza finished reading. Then to my surprise, he smiled, his teeth glinting in the candlelight. “The captain-general humbly begs me to surrender,” he said, as if it were a great joke. And he began to laugh. First it was a suppressed chuckle, then a deeper laugh from his chest. Finally, he threw back his head and roared with laughter, his scorn bouncing off the cabin walls and thundering in my ears.

It was then that Espinosa struck.

While Mendoza roared with laughter, Espinosa reached out, grabbed the man’s hair, yanked his head savagely back, and buried his knife to the hilt in Mendoza’s neck. A startled look popped into Mendoza’s eyes. A gurgling. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end as the man sank to the cabin floor with a creak of armor. A trickle of blood seeped down his neck and vanished under his armor. In the candlelight it looked black.

“You killed him,” I said stupidly.

The master-at-arms removed his knife from Mendoza’s throat and wiped it clean on his cloak. “Signal the men in the longboat. They are waiting on the starboard side.”

“We—we were a diversion,” I stammered, trying to understand. “So the longboat could approach in secret.”

Espinosa gave me a hard look. “Do what I’ve asked, Mateo. Go.” Glad to escape the stench of death and my own stupidity, I ran to the starboard side and peered over the gunwale. Out of the darkness, fifteen faces peered up at me. “It is time,” I said.

It did not take long. The men of the
Victoria
surrendered once they saw their captain dead and their ship swarming with marines. Together with Espinosa, I raised the flag of Magallanes on the mainmast. “Long live the king and death to traitors!” we cried.

My heart sang with victory; my blood rushed with joy. And in that moment I happily forgave Espinosa his insult, knowing it had been part of a plan—a grand trap he had trusted me with.

We drew up anchor and drifted until the
Victoria
was alongside the
Trinidad
. Along with the
Santiago,
the three ships now guarded the harbor entrance. The tide had turned. The
San Antonio
and
Concepción
were trapped.

I returned with Espinosa to the
Trinidad
.

Later that night I fell into a numb sleep, dreamless, when suddenly, beside me, someone shook Rodrigo awake. It was Espinosa. “Rodrigo. Now is the time.”

Rodrigo sat up, his eyes as wide as I had ever seen them.

“Row the skiff to the
San Antonio
and pretend to be a mutineer. Pretend you despise the captain-general and wish to come aboard and join their cause. They will believe you because your hatred of the Portuguese is well known.”

Rodrigo said nothing and Espinosa continued, “Wait for the ebb tide, and then when no one is watching, I want you to disable two of their three anchors. That should be enough for the
San
Antonio
to drift toward us. We will take care of the rest. Now go.”

Like that, he was gone.

I watched as Rodrigo approached the
San Antonio
. Whatever he said was convincing, for no sooner had the skiff touched the hull of the giant vessel than he clambered aboard. Now we waited. I did not sleep again. I stood alone, wondering why Espinosa had trusted Rodrigo with such a mission. Did he not know Rodrigo despised Magallanes?

Throughout the night I stared into the darkness, willing myself to see what was happening. Perhaps Rodrigo was welcomed by the mutineers—heartily clapped on the back for fooling Espinosa, a sword lent to his eager hands. Perhaps, like the others, he waited for daylight and the order to slip past us—cannon blazing—for Spain. Why is it everyone I care about is taken from me? I wondered, my chest tight.

At the first faint light of dawn, I still stood at the bulwarks. The
San Antonio
looked like a ghost, and my heart sank. She had not moved. I don’t remember when Espinosa came to stand beside me, but as the sky grew pale, there he was.

And then it happened.

The
San Antonio
began to drift. Slowly at first, then picking up speed.

Espinosa slammed his fist against the gunwale. “He did it! He did it! I knew he would come through!” He turned and ran through the ship. “All hands! All hands! Prepare for battle! Prepare to grapple and board!”

XIV

April 3-May 28, 1520

As the
San Antonio
approached, her decks spilled with crew. They ran into each other, confused, dazed with commotion. Captain Quesada, clad in full armor and armed with a lance and shield, strode across the decks, barking orders.

The
Trinidad
shook as she fired a broadside that slammed into the
San Antonio
’s hull. Wood splinters flew and the air quickly filled with smoke.

Grappling hooks soared, snagging the rigging. I pulled on the lines to bring the big ship in close. Armed marines leaped from the
Trinidad
onto the decks of the
San Antonio.
“For whom do you stand?” they cried, brandishing their swords before them. The crew aboard the
San Antonio
raised their hands in surrender. “For King Carlos and Magallanes!”

It was over. As quickly as a knife thrust to the throat.

Quesada and his conspirators were arrested.

A longboat with forty men was dispatched to the
Concepción
. Cartagena surrendered and was imprisoned with Quesada and the other mutineers in the Trinidad’s hold.

So. The inexperienced Castilian captains had suffered defeat. It was victory for Magallanes.

But it was a heavy blow. For chained below were two of the remaining four captains and many of the fleet’s officers. And the question running through everyone’s mind was: Would they all be put to death?

For death was the price of mutiny.

Rodrigo joined me aboard the
Trinidad
. His pale look of yesterday had vanished. When I asked him why he had decided to help Magallanes, Rodrigo spat and said, “I did not help Magallanes. The captain-general is a Portuguese pig.”

“Then why did you cut the anchor cables?”

He shrugged. “Maybe I like Espinosa. Maybe someday I will also become a marine.”

“What about Cartagena? You like him, too, don’t you?”

Suddenly Rodrigo shoved me to the deck. “Do you have to ask so many stupid questions?” he yelled. Then Rodrigo’s face turned strange. I was dumbfounded when his lips trembled and his eyes blinked back tears. “They were going to sink the
Trinidad
. I didn’t want them to kill you.”

I could only stare at him.

Then he punched me in the stomach. I doubled in pain, gasping. “I didn’t want them to kill you, because that’s my job.” He laughed as he fell on me, pounding my ribs.

Birds squawked and circled above us. Again the ships’ companies gathered onshore. Again the wind. The cheerless gray of clouds. The never-ending howling as if we were surrounded by demons.

It was the seventh day of April. On this day Quesada was appointed to die. Four days ago there convened a court-martial. Even the dead Mendoza attended. Propped in his bloodstained armor as if he were yet alive, Mendoza was charged with mutiny alongside his fellow conspirators, forty in all.

All were condemned to death. Mendoza’s body was dragged away, beheaded, and quartered. Dismembered parts of his body were suspended from a gibbet, a grisly reminder.

Then the sentence was appealed. It was argued that the ships’ companies could not afford such grave loss of life. One of the ships would have to be scuttled. More discussions followed. Punish them harshly, some said, a punishment they will never forget, but do not kill them. Kill only half of them, others argued, and the survivors will dare not rise in rebellion again. Even that loss of life, it was decided, was too costly.

Then Magallanes raised his hand for silence. “The judgment is to be amended,” he said. “Only Quesada will be executed. It was he who stabbed the master.”

Finally, on this day, we watched in silence as Quesada crossed himself and knelt in the sand, placing his head on the executioner’s block. He moved his mane of hair to one side with trembling fingers, exposing his pale neck. Then with a flash of light the ax fell. Quesada’s head rolled to the sand, his alabaster hair soaked with blood.

Those guilty of mutiny began the hateful task of careening the ships with their ankles wrapped in chains, all except Cartagena. He was imprisoned in his cabin, for Magallanes dared not allow him access to the ears of so many men, even if those men wore iron shackles. The rest of us began to build barracks and storerooms on a small islet in the bay.

There was one good thing about the mutiny. Minchaca, the marine who had wanted to hurt Aysó, who had then beaten me, was one of the mutineers. Now it was he who was chained. It was he who would suffer. “Who does Magallanes punish now?” I hissed at him one day as he shuffled past me, chains clinking. “Traitor!”

Minchaca stopped and turned. His face looked blank, as if he couldn’t remember me. “Dog-Boy?”

I licked my lips, unsure. It had not occurred to me that he wouldn’t remember who I was. “Aye,” I said.

He said nothing and shuffled on, leaving me standing, reddened with stupidity.

There was an abundance of wood—battered timbers from the ships and a kind of stunted, withered tree that grew on the lower slopes. Immediately we began chopping down trees, sawing, hammering, and drilling. It took us two weeks to build enough barracks and another few days to outfit them with supplies.

Then it snowed and turned bitterly cold. We huddled around the fires in the barracks, the breath of each man clouded with frost, praying for spring to hurry. Cold as it was, the chore of careening the ships remained for those in chains. Come high tide, the convicts floated each ship onto the beach, mooring her fore and aft. Chains clanked as they unloaded cargo and supplies and ballast and shifted the cannon to larboard. As the tide ebbed, the ship rolled on her larboard side, groaning and sighing, weary as an old woman about to sit upon a chair.

During our journey, a mass of sea life had settled upon the ships’ hulls, growing with fingers and tentacles that devoured the wood. Barnacles. Stinking seaweed. Such an abundance of colors —greens, reds, yellows, pinks—soft fleshy creatures and those hard as nuts. If unchecked, the marine growth on a ship’s hull became an island in itself, thicker than a man was tall, making the ship unwieldy, likely to founder and sink.

The crew of convicts scraped the hulls and replaced battered timbers. They caulked and painted and poured hot tar over both new and old timbers to kill the woodworm and protect the wood. Always the air stank of boiling tar, of smoke from the forge, of tallow, of oakum. The air hissed of bellows, clanged with the banging of iron, buzzed with the hum of saws. The men removed the tattered sails, then scrubbed and mended them. They pumped out the revolting bilges, crawling inside to scour them—a task despised. Then they rolled the ship on her starboard side and began again.

During this period, Cartagena somehow escaped. He went from man to man, desperate, whispering in each ear how Magallanes was mad and how they were all going to die unless something was done, to join with him now, before it was too late. Everyone turned away from him, pretending they hadn’t heard, their ears waxed cold. Rodrigo swore it was true, for Cartagena had whispered in his ear, too. Rodrigo told me, “But to join with him now would be suicide.”

Cartagena then sat in the shadow of the gibbet. I was gathering wood nearby. Mendoza’s and Quesada’s severed bodies swayed above him, creaking. And while I watched, he placed their stiffened hands on his cheeks and promised to fulfill their vow. Then he wept. It sounded like paper rubbed together—dry and parched.

It was there by the gibbet that he was arrested. Four marines marched toward him, weapons drawn, their breastplates as gray as the clouds. He did not resist, instead going limp, his boots scraping over the pebbles of the beach as the marines dragged him away. Standing with my load of wood, I searched my heart for my hatred, surprised to find only pity.

The next day another court-martial was held. Into the roaring wind and stinging sleet, and before all the ships’ companies, the sentence was announced. Cartagena was to be left behind when the fleet set sail.
Marooned.

With that lonely word whispering in our ears, we were dismissed. As we walked away, Rodrigo said, “Pah! The captain-general’s backbone is limp as a rag. Even now he cannot bring himself to slay the son of a bishop.”

I said nothing, wiping the sleet from my eyes. The wind swirled around me, and I pulled my coat close. My teeth ached with cold. The very cliffs howled in torment, singing ghostly songs that promised naught but death. Nothing could be worse than being marooned in this desolate, godforsaken place. Not even Cartagena deserved such a fate.

Hunting, fishing, trapping, and preparing food for storage now consumed our days. Rodrigo and I went with Espinosa to the offshore islands where the black-and-white geese lived. They were easy to kill. A swift blow over the head brought them down. Back at the barracks, we smoked and salted their meat, storing it in casks. We melted their blubber for lamp oil. We scraped their hides and sewed clothing—boots, hats, coats, even rugs for the barracks floor. But within a week our new clothes began to reek, turning stiff and rotten. We wore them anyway.

On the plains high above the cliffs, we found a strange animal with the neck and body of a camel, the head and ears of a mule, and the tail of a horse. These we killed with crossbows. When I washed the blood and salt from my hands, I drew one into my sketchbook so I would not forget what they looked like. The pelts were even finer than that of the seawolf.

Mussels and crabs grew in the muddy bottoms near the shore. We roasted them and ate them while they were still hot, burning our fingers and throats. Wildfowl were tricky to kill. Rodrigo was expert at bringing them down with a stick thrown through the air. When they fell, stunned, we clubbed them to death.

One day the pimply-faced boy, the master’s lover, walked from our islet into the sea. Over the roar of the wind I begged him to return, but he did not look back. While I watched, the waters lapped over his head and he disappeared. I stood there for an hour. My teeth chattering. My heart hollow. Praying for forgiveness. But I felt nothing, heard nothing but the endless, bone-numbing wind.

Not long after, a blizzard pounded us with its fist, furious and raw. No one could go outside, not even the men in chains. Men lay about on their furs, sewing pelts, occasionally stoking the fires, wondering why spring continued to hide her face. After all, it was May.

As I sat upon my bedding, drawing in my sketchbook, the fleet’s astrologer said something that caused all to sink into silence, punched in the stomach with despair.

“I believe I know why the weather worsens and the days become shorter.” I stopped to stare for his voice was grave. “Just as the stars are different in the Northern Hemisphere, so also are the seasons. When it is winter in the Northern Hemisphere, it is summer here. When it is winter here, it is summer there.”

“What are you saying?” someone cried.

“Today is the twenty-eighth day of May. If we were in Spain, summer would soon begin with the solstice in June. But here in the Southern Hemisphere, June heralds the start of winter. That is why the days have become shorter.”

A profound sense of nothingness pierced me. It cannot be. Beneath my furs, where none could hear me, I wept. Shuddering sobs, like none I had wept before.

Winter.

It had just begun.