A World Lit Only by Fire (47 page)

Piloting his boat to within hailing distance of
Victoria
, Gómez called ahead that he bore a letter from the capitán-general. Mendoza, feeling unthreatened by the little boat—he
had sixty Spaniards behind him—gave the master-at-arms permission to board. That closed the trap, for while Gómez had the
undivided attention of the ship’s crew, Barbosa and his men, unobserved in the bleak fog, slipped around the vessel’s lee
side.

Magellan’s letter bluntly summoned Mendoza to the flagship. After reading it, the don, scornful of so obvious a trap, cried
derisively, “You won’t catch me going there!”—“
¡No me pillarás allá!
” His laugh was cut off; Gómez, with one violent slash, had slit his throat. That was a signal to Barbosa and his party; they
sprang on deck and attacked the mutineers from behind. Within minutes
Victoria
was the admiral’s prize and Barbosa was issuing orders to hoist sails. Before the other two rebel ships could grasp what
had happened,
Trinidad, Santiago
, and
Victoria
had formed a rough line across the mouth of the bay, cutting off the only line of escape. Helpless, they capitulated. Mesquita,
freed from his irons, chaired the subsequent court-martial. On Saturday his cousin the capitán-general passed sentence.

Knowing he would need as many hands as possible once he resumed the voyage, Magellan spared all but Quesada, Cartagena, and
a Spanish priest who had fomented the rebellion. There was only one execution; Quesada, guilty of murder, had to die. Because
he was an aristocrat, he was spared the garrote. But there was also blood on the hands of his servant, Luis de Molino. Molino
protested that he had only been obeying orders, and Magellan, giving that weight, told him that he would be permitted to live
provided he swung the blade decapitating his master—a grisly choice, though it cannot have taken Molino long to make it.
As was customary in that time, the bodies of both treacherous captains, Mendoza and Quesada, were drawn and quartered, after
which the reeking, bleeding quarters were displayed on poles, the theory being that the spectacle would intimidate any men
too dull to have learned the wages of mutiny.

That left Cartagena, who had held high office under the king, and the priest, an anointed man of God. The capitán-general
could not bring himself to shed the blood of either. Yet carrying them around the world in irons was impractical. Therefore
they were to be imprisoned until the fleet departed Puerto San Julián and then left behind. As the five vessels sailed on
August 24, the two marooned men were abandoned on the frigid shore with a thin ration of wine and food. Magellan had declared
that he was leaving their fate to a merciful God, but in the sixteenth century the quality of divine mercy had proved to be
strained and brackish. During the wretched days that lay ahead for the castaways they may have envied their drawn and quartered
co-conspirators.

But at that point Magellan’s prospects did not appear to be much brighter. In quelling the mutiny he had, in a sense, increased
the odds against himself. If he reappeared in Seville discredited by failure, it was doubtful that Spanish authorities would
accept his version of the violent interlude in San Julián. The gruesome deaths of three Castilian noblemen and a priest would
certainly be investigated, and it was by no means certain that the dons’ mild
suplica
would be seen as justification for execution. The capitán-general might well find himself on trial for murder. Only if he
returned a conqueror could he expect amnesty, and as weeks wore on conquest had seemed more elusive than ever. The armada
was down to four ships now;
Santiago
, sent on an exploring mission, had been lost in a storm. Mighty gales tossed them daily; the weather was growing steadily
worse. To the west, snowcapped mountains were clearly visible. They began to see “seawolves,” or seals, and penguins, which
they called “ducks without wings” (“
patos sin alas
”). After anchoring below fifty degrees south latitude, Magellan decided to hibernate for another eight weeks, until he could
be certain that winter was spent. By now he must have been close to total despair. Every hope had died glimmering. The possibility
of redemption seemed very remote. During a year at sea he had covered nearly nine thousand miles, suppressed a bloody uprising,
explored every indentation in what seemed to be an endless coast of rocks and sand, and found absolutely nothing.

His desolation was ironic, for during those eight fearful, brooding weeks, from August 26 to October 18, he was only 150 miles
—two sailing days—from immortality.

O
N
S
UNDAY
, October 21, 1520, a day of high, harsh, howling winds, lookouts clinging to the fleet’s topmasts sighted a steep eminence
which, as they approached, was perceived as a wall of naked white cliffs. Closing, they saw that these formed a cape, beyond
which lay an immense bay of black water. The day was St. Ursula’s. In remembrance of her, Magellan christened the peninsula
Cabo de los Vírgenes. But his officers, still dreaming of the south seas, were unimpressed. The sound, all four pilots agreed,
was a fjord similar to those which had been observed in Norway. “We all believed,” Don Antonio Pigafetta wrote afterward,
“that it was a blind alley.” Only their commander was curious. However, because he had wasted over three weeks investigating
the Río de la Plata nine months earlier, he could spare little for this exploration. He told
San Antonio
and
Concepción
that he wanted them to see how far westward they could sail into the bay, but he wanted them back in five days at most.

As the fifth day waned with no sign of them, he grew anxious, and then was alarmed when the lookout in the masthead of his
flagship reported a distant column of smoke—then the maritime signal sent by shipwrecked sailors. Magellan was issuing the
order to lower boats when the sails of both missing vessels appeared off the port bow. They were gaily decorated with flags,
all hands were shouting and waving, and as they hove to their cannons fired three thundering salvos. Clearly something extraordinary
had happened.

Serrano boarded the flagship from
Concepción
to explain. They had been approaching the western end of the harbor, he reported, when a squall overtook them. As it cleared
they saw that the bay did not end. Instead a channel—“first narrows,” he called it—opened. Passing through this, they
had entered a broad body of water, then “second narrows,” followed by another widening in the channel. On the third day they
had to turn about, to return in the five days allotted them. But they had found no end to the passage; every narrowing led
to another opening. The width of the labyrinthine waterway varied from two to twenty miles. Seamen casting lead had found
no bottom. They had not entered a river; the water was brine all the way, and on both sides the tides ebbed and flowed.

The stoical Magellan betrayed no excitement, but he called for a final salvo of bombards in honor of King Carlos—who, unknown
to him, was now being crowned Emperor Charles V—and led his men in prayer. The following morning, Thursday, October 25,
with his
Trinidad
leading the way, all four ships glided past the barren headlands, and entered the strange new watercourse, named Canal de
Todos los Santos by the capitán-general but known to history as the Strait of Magellan. Off his starboard prow, although he
did not know it, was the southernmost tip of what is now known as South America; to port, a large island and a maze of smaller
islands beneath which lay Cape Horn, some 350 miles above the Antarctic Peninsula. So cold was the island maze that the shivering
Indians who lived there warmed themselves over perpetual fires. The flames, visible to Magellan, prompted him to call the
southern shore Tierra del Fuego—Land of Fire.

Negotiating the strait’s tortuous turns later challenged sailors of all ages, but for the flota’s helmsmen, dependent upon
wooden tillers and clumsy, bellying sails, it was exhausting. The passage was a confused, tangled skein. At various points
it led westward, northward, and southward. Again and again it halved and became
two
channels, forcing the admiral to pause and divide his command until he knew which one was the throughway. The bays assumed
weird shapes. In the lateral channels rocks, appearing beneath sudden shoals, threatened to gouge holes in the ships’ bottoms,
and on the first day one wild squall followed another, sometimes threatening to capsize the lead ship, Magellan’s
Trinidad
. Then the weather improved. In this they were singularly lucky; subsequent navigators found that foul weather was usually
prevalent throughout the strait. Indeed, that became a major reason for their failure to get through it.

After a month in the seaway no one doubted that they had found the legendary paso. Three hundred miles of it lay behind them,
and now unfamiliar birds flew overhead, a sure sign of another ocean ahead. Another fork confronted them. After ordering
San Antonio
and
Conceptión
to spend a maximum of five days investigating the southeastern route—
Trinidad
and
Victoria
would wait here—Magellan called a meeting of his officers. He faced a decision—whether to sail home with news of their
discovery or continue on to the Spice Islands—and he wanted their reports on the amount of provisions left. All told the
same story: soon they would be running short. The holds contained three months of supplies, no more. Estevão Gomes, pilot
of the
San Antonio
, argued vehemently that they should turn back. Stores were not the only consideration, he said; the ships were badly in need
of refitting. Furthermore, no one knew the distance between them and the islands. If it was far, the entire fleet might perish
on the merciless ocean, victims of thirst and starvation, their fate forever unknown.

It was good advice. Magellan chose to ignore it. They would push on, he said; no doubt there would be hardships, but even
if they had to eat the leather on the ships’ yards, he would keep his promise to King Carlos, trusting to God to help them
and provide them with good fortune (“
de pasar adelante y descubrir lo que había prometido
”). The captains were enjoined, on pain of death, from telling their men of the supply shortage. Gomes was unconvinced, however;
the prospect of sailing onward frightened him even more than Magellan’s threat of death and mutilation for mutineers. He decided
to quit the armada with his ship. During the scouting of the southeastern channel,
San Antonio
, with Mesquita in command, showed Serrano’s
Concepción
its heels. Serrano did not know precisely what had happened, but since desertion by the capitán-general’s cousin was impossible,
he inferred that the pilot had led a successful revolt against the captain. Magellan had to face the hard fact that his biggest
ship, with the bulk of his stores, was headed homeward. He was now down to three bottoms, and the supply situation, bad as
it had been, was now worse. Yet he never considered altering his course. In an order issued “in the Channel of Todos los Santos,
off the mouth of the Rio del Isleo, on November 21, fifty-three degrees south of the equator,” he declared that as “capitán-general
of this armada” he had taken the “grave decision to continue the voyage.”

His resolution was strengthened when another pinnace, sent ahead, reappeared on the third day with the electrifying news that
Balboa’s Mar del Sur had been found. Hurrying there, the admiral looked out on the prize Columbus, Cabot, Vespucci, and Pinzón
had sought in vain: the mightiest of oceans, stretching to all horizons, deep and blue and vast with promise. Its peaceful,
pacífico
appearance inspired his name for it, though that came later. In that first rapturous moment he could not speak. Perhaps for
the first time in his adult life, he was overcome by emotion, and his reserve broke. Don Antonio writes that “
il capitano-generale lacrimó per allegrezza
”—Magellan had burst into tears.