Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (19 page)

A
nticipating a long, grueling winter in Port Saint Julian, Magellan placed his crew on short rations, even though the ships groaned with the butchered meat of “geese” and “sea wolves,” and fish abounded in the harbor. After the unbroken succession of lifethreatening ordeals they had faced over the previous seven weeks, the seamen expected to be rewarded for their courage and perseverance, not punished. Outraged by the rationing, they turned insubordinate. Some insisted that they return to full rations, while others demanded that the fleet, or some part of it, sail back to Spain.

They did not believe the strait existed. They had tried again and again to find it, risking death while coming up against one dead end after another. If they kept going, they argued, they would eventually perish in one of the cataclysmic storms afflicting the region, or simply fall off the edge of the world when the coastline finally ended. Surely King Charles did not mean for them all to die in the attempt to find a water route to the Spice Islands. Surely human life had some value.

Magellan obstinately reminded them that they must obey their royal commission, and follow the coastline wherever it led. The king had ordered this voyage, and Magellan would persist until he reached land’s end, or found the strait. How astonished he was to see bold Spaniards so fainthearted, or so he said. As far as their provisions were concerned, they had plenty of wood here in Port Saint Julian, abundant fish, fresh water, and fowl; their ships still had adequate stores of biscuit and wine, if they observed rationing. Consider the Portuguese navigators, he exhorted them, who had passed twelve degrees beyond the Tropic of Capricorn without any difficulty, and here they were, two full degrees above it. What kind of sailors were they? Magellan insisted he would rather die than return to Spain in shame, and he urged them to wait patiently until winter was over. The more they suffered, the greater the reward they might expect from King Charles. They should not question the king, he advised, but discover a world not yet known, filled with gold and spices to enrich them all.

This eloquent speech to the vacillating crew members bought Magellan a few days’ respite, but only a few. His stern words had confirmed their worst fears about his behavior and his do-or-die fanaticism. On the most basic level, they believed he considered their lives expendable. In the following days, the men began to bicker; national prejudices suddenly flashed like well-oiled swords drawn from scabbards to cut and slash, usually at Magellan himself. Once again, the Castilians argued that Magellan’s insistence that he intended to find the strait or die was proof that he intended to subvert the entire expedition and get them all killed in the process. All this talk of glorifying King Charles, they felt, was merely a stratagem to trick them into going along with Magellan’s suicidal scheme. Anyone doubting Magellan’s intention to subvert the expedition had only to examine the course they had been following, southward, ever southward, into the eternal cold, whereas the Spice Islands and the Indies lay to the west, where it was warm and sunny, and where luxury surely abounded.

I
n the midst of this turmoil, the officers and crew observed the holiest day of the year, Easter Sunday, April 1. At that moment, Magellan had one paramount concern: Who was loyal to him, and who was not? With a sufficient number of loyal crew members, he would be able to withstand this latest, and most serious, challenge to his authority. Without them, he might be imprisoned, impaled on a halberd, or even hanged from a yardarm by hell-bent mutineers. To assess the extent of danger he faced, he carefully interviewed each member of the crew.

“With sweet words and big promises,” Ginés de Mafra recalled, “[Magellan] told them the other captains were plotting against him, and he asked them to advise him what to do. They replied that their only advice was that they were willing to do as he commanded. Magellan . . . openly told his crew that the conspirators had resolved to kill him on Easter Day while he attended mass ashore, but that he would feign ignorance and go to mass all the same. This he did and, secretly armed, went to a small sandy islet where a small house had been built to accommodate the ceremony.”

Magellan expected to see all four captains at Easter mass but only one, Luis de Mendoza, of
Victoria,
arrived. The air crackled with tension. “Both conversed,” de Mafra says, concealing their emotions under blank countenances, and attended mass together. At the end of the ceremony, Magellan pointedly asked Mendoza why the other captains had defied his orders and failed to attend. Mendoza replied, lamely, that perhaps the others were ill.

Still feigning bonhomie, Magellan invited Mendoza to dine at the Captain General’s table, a gesture that would force him to proclaim his loyalty to Magellan, but Mendoza coolly declined the request. Magellan appeared unfazed by Mendoza’s insubordination, but the Captain General now knew that Mendoza was a conspirator.

Mendoza returned to
Victoria,
where he and the other captains resumed plotting against Magellan, sending messages by longboat from one ship to another. After mass, only Magellan’s cousin, Álvaro de Mesquita, the recently appointed captain of
San Antonio,
came aboard
Trinidad
to dine at the Captain General’s table. Magellan realized that the empty chairs made for an ominous sign.

At the moment, Magellan capitalized on a piece of luck. The longboat belonging to
Concepción’s
captain, Gaspar de Quesada, lost its way in the strong current while ferrying conspiratorial messages between the rebel ships and, to the dismay of the men aboard, found itself drifting helplessly toward the flagship and Magellan himself, the one individual they did not want to encounter at that moment. To their surprise, the crew of
Trinidad,
at Magellan’s direction, rescued them from the runaway longboat. Even more amazing, Magellan welcomed them aboard the flagship and provided them with a lavish meal, which included plenty of wine.

At dinner, the band of would-be mutineers drank a great deal and decided that they had nothing to fear from the Captain General after all. They even revealed the existence of the plot to Magellan; they confided that if the plot succeded, he would be “captured and killed” that very night.

Hearing this, Magellan lost all interest in his visitors and busied himself readying the flagship against attack. Once again he questioned his crew to see who was loyal to him and who was not and, satisfied that
Trinidad’s
men would take his side when the mutiny inevitably erupted, awaited the inevitable assault.

L
ate that night,
Concepción
stirred with life. The captain, Quesada, lowered himself into a longboat and quietly made his way to
San Antonio.
He was joined there in the dark water lapping at the ship’s hull by Juan de Cartagena, former captain, bishop’s unacknowledged son, and frustrated mutineer; Juan Sebastián Elcano, a veteran Basque mariner who served as
Concepción’s
master; and a corps of thirty armed seamen.

Under cover of darkness, they boarded
San Antonio
and rushed to the captain’s cabin, entering with a flourish of steel, rousting the hapless Mesquita out of his bunk. This had once been Cartagena’s ship, and in his mind, it still was. Mesquita offered little resistance as the party of mutineers clapped him into irons and led him to the cabin of Gerónimo Guerra, where he was placed under guard.

By this time, word of the uprising had spread throughout the ship, and the crew sprang to life. Juan de Elorriaga, the ship’s master, and a Basque, valiantly tried to dismiss Quesada from
San Antonio
before any blood was shed, but Quesada refused to stand down, whereupon Elorriaga turned to his boatswain, Diego Hernández, to order the crew to restrain Quesada and quash the mutiny. “We cannot be foiled in our work by this fool,” Quesada shouted, knowing that there could be no turning back. And he ran Elorriaga through with a dagger, again and again, four times in all, until Elorriaga, bleeding profusely, collapsed. Quesada assumed Elorriaga was dead, but the loyal master was still alive, though perhaps he would have been better off if he had died on the spot; instead, he lingered for three and a half months until he finally died from the wounds he received that night at Quesada’s hand.

As the two struggled, Quesada’s guard took Hernández hostage, and suddenly the ship was without officers. The bewildered crew, without anyone to give them orders and fearing for their lives, gave up their arms to the mutineers. One of their number, Antonio de Coca, the fleet’s accountant, actually joined the insurgents, who stored the confiscated weapons in his cabin. The first phase of the mutiny had gone off as planned.

Pigafetta, normally a thorough chronicler of the voyage, offers little guidance to the mutiny. In this case, he was close, too close, to Magellan to be helpful. As a Magellan loyalist, he resisted the temptation to hear or repeat any ill concerning his beloved captain. He eloquently presented the Magellanic myth of the great and wise explorer, but at the same time he turned a blind eye to the scandals and mutinies surrounding Magellan throughout the voyage. In his one cursory mention of the drama at Port Saint Julian, Pigafetta even confuses the names of the principal actors. The chronicler, who could be extremely precise when he wished, likely got around to mentioning the mutiny only after the voyage, when he felt safe enough to discuss the bloody deeds happening all around him.

T
he mutineers in control of
San Antonio
swiftly converted her into a battleship. Elcano, the Basque mariner, took command and immediately ordered the imprisonment of two Portuguese who appeared loyal to Magellan, Antonio Fernandes and Gonçalo Rodrigues, as well as a Castilian, Diego Díaz. The mutineers, led by Antonio de Coca and Luis de Molino, Quesada’s servant, raided the ship’s stores, filling their hungry bellies with bread and wine, anything they could lay their hands on, and they endeared themselves to their followers by allowing them to partake of the forbidden food. Father Valderrama, preoccupied with administering last rites to Elorriaga, watched all and vowed to report the evil deeds to Magellan, if he ever got the chance. Meanwhile, Elcano ordered firearms to be prepared; the arquebuses and crossbows—powerful, state-of-the-art weapons—were broken out. Anyone attempting to approach the renegade ship would face a barrage of lethal arrows and muzzles belching fire.

Within hours the mutiny spread like a contagion to two other ships,
Victoria,
whose captain, Luis de Mendoza, had resented Magellan from the day they left Sanlúcar de Barrameda, and to
Concepción.
It was only a matter of time until Cartagena, Quesada, and their supporters came after Magellan himself. Only
Santiago,
under the command of Juan Serrano, a Castilian, remained neutral. Quesada, for the moment, decided to leave
Santiago.
alone; it was a decision that would later haunt the mutineers.

T
he sun rose over Port Saint Julian on April 2 to reveal a scene deceptive calm. The five ships of the Armada de Molucca rode quietly at anchor, their crew members sleeping off the previous night’s excesses. For the moment, the Captain General remained secure in his stronghold,
Trinidad.
As a test of loyalty, he dispatched a longboat to
San Antonio,
where Quesada and Elcano held sway, to bring sailors ashore to fetch fresh water. As
Trinidad’s
longboat approached, the mutineers waved the sailors away and declared that
San Antonio
was no longer under the command of Mesquita or Magellan. She now belonged to the mutineer Gaspar Quesada. When the longboat brought this disturbing news back to Magellan, he realized he faced a grave problem, but he remained oblivious to the full extent of the mutiny. He believed he had to contend with only one rebellious ship, not three, until he sent the longboat to poll the other ships and determine their loyalty. From his stronghold aboard
San Antonio,
Quesada replied, “For the King and for myself,” and
Victoria
and
Concepción
followed suit.

To make his point, Quesada audaciously sent a list of demands by longboat to the flagship. Quesada believed, with good reason, that he had Magellan boxed in, and he tried to force the Captain General to yield to the mutineers. In writing, Quesada declared that he was now in charge of the fleet, and he intended to end the harsh treatment Magellan had inflicted on the officers and crew. He would feed them better, he would not endanger their lives needlessly, and he would return to Spain. If Magellan acceded to these demands, said Quesada, the mutineers would yield control of the armada to him.

To Magellan, these demands were outrageous. To comply meant ignominy in Spain, disgrace in Portugal, years in a prison cell, and even death. Under these circumstances, he might have been expected to launch a full-scale attack on
San Antonio,
but for once Magellan restrained his need to assert his authority. He sent back word that he would be pleased to hear them out—aboard the flagship, of course. The mutineers were hesitant to leave their base. Who knew what awaited them aboard
Trinidad
? They replied that they would meet him only aboard
San Antonio.
To their astonishment, Magellan agreed.

H
aving lulled Quesada and his followers into a sense of false security, Magellan quietly went on the offensive. By any objective measure, he operated at an enormous disadvantage. The mutineers controlled three out of the fleet’s five ships and most of the captains and the crews. They had popular sentiment on their side and weapons to back up their demands. In his diminished position, Magellan did not attempt to meet force with force; instead, he sought to dismantle their revolt piece by piece, without placing himself in more peril than he already was.