Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (20 page)

He began his attempt to recover his fleet by claiming the longboat carrying Quesada’s communiqué. With this equipment in hand, he turned his attention to recapturing at least one ship, and then he would go after the others. He decided not to attempt to reclaim
San Antonio,
where the mutineers were deeply entrenched, but
Victoria,
where support for the rebels might be softer, and where he would be most likely to summon support.

Victoria
became the key to the whole plan, and to get her back, he resorted to a ruse. He filled the captured longboat with five carefully selected sailors and instructed them to appear sympathetic to the mutineers, at least at a distance. But beneath their loose clothing they carried weapons, which they intended to use. Their ranks included Gonzalo Gómez de Espinosa, the master-at-arms, which automatically lent authority to their mission. Magellan gave the men a letter addressed to Luis de Mendoza,
Victoria’s
captain, ordering him to surrender immediately aboard the flagship. If Mendoza resisted, they were to kill him.

As soon as the longboat moved out of sight to begin its mission, the Captain General sent a second skiff into the water, filled with fifteen loyal members of the flagship’s crew under the command of Duarte Barbosa, Magellan’s brother-in-law.

When the first longboat pulled up to
Victoria,
Mendoza allowed the party to board his ship. De Mafra, the best eyewitness to the unfolding mutiny, relates, “Mendoza, a daring man when it came to evil deeds but too rash to take advice, told them to come aboard and give him the letter, which he set about reading in a careless manner, and not as befits a man involved in such a serious business.” According to other witnesses, Mendoza responded to the letter with mockery and laughter, crumpled the orders into a ball, and carelessly tossed it overboard. At that, Espinosa, the military officer, grabbed Mendoza by the beard, violently shook his head, and plunged a dagger into this throat, as another soldier stabbed him in the head. Spurting blood,
Victoria’s
captain slumped to the deck, lifeless.

With Mendoza dead, Magellan held the advantage in the lifeand-death contest. No sooner had the captain breathed his last than the second longboat rowed into position beside
Victoria,
discharging its complement of loyalists who stormed the ship. As Magellan had calculated, his guard met with little or no opposition. Stunned by the death of their captain, the crew meekly submitted to Magellan’s men. As if the sight of the dead officer was not insult enough to the other Castilians, Magellan later paid off Espinosa and his henchmen for this bloody deed in plain view of everyone. “For this [action], the Captain General gave twelve ducats to Espinosa,” recalled Sebastián Elcano, one of the mutineers, “and to the others six ducats each from Mendoza’s and Quesada’s savings.” Was this the price of their lives, the Castilians asked themselves. A few ducats?

T
o signal Magellan’s triumph, Barbosa flew the Captain General’s colors from
Victoria’s
mast, announcing to Quesada and the other rebels that the mutiny was ending. Magellan placed
Trinidad
securely between the two loyal ships,
Victoria
guarding one side and
Santiago,
now loyal to Magellan, the other. Together, the three vessels blockaded the inlet to the port; the two rebel holdouts, positioned deeper in the harbor, could not escape.

Magellan expected Quesada to recognize that resistance was futile. The mutiny had failed, and he would soon have to bargain not for better rations or a swift return to Spain, but for his very life. But Quesada refused to give up.
Concepción
and
San Antonio
remained at the other end of the harbor, offering no clue about the mutineers’ intentions. To prevent them from slipping past the blockade at night, Magellan readied his flagship for combat. He doubled the watch and gave an order to “make a plentiful provision of much darts, lances, stones, and other weapons, both on deck and in the tops.” To win the men’s cooperation, he allowed them the pleasure of ample food. At the same time, he warned them not to let the two delinquent ships escape from the harbor into the open sea.

While the others were distracted, Magellan entrusted a seaman with a perilous assignment. Under cover of darkness, he was to sneak on board Quesada’s ship,
Concepción,
where he would loosen or sever the anchor cable so that she would slip her mooring. Magellan calculated that the strong nocturnal ebb tide would draw her toward the blockade guarding the mouth of the harbor, giving him just the pretext he needed for launching a surprise attack. He was prepared to greet her with all the firepower he could muster.

L
ate that night,
Concepción
drifted mysteriously across the harbor. Because no one knew of Magellan’s subterfuge, she appeared to be dragging her anchor. It was only a matter of time before she came within range of the flagship and touched off a battle at sea.

A
board
Concepción,
the rebellion was beginning to falter. Ginés de Mafra, held hostage along with Mesquita, noticed that Quesada, the leader of the mutiny, was experiencing pangs of remorse, but he could not persuade his followers to end their rebellion now. “He summoned his crew and asked them that in case they could not get away with what they had begun, what should be done to avoid falling into the hands of Magellan.” The other mutineers merely offered to “follow his decisions obediently.”

Quesada’s only hope, a faint one, was to slip past the blockade and escape. “He gave the order to weigh the anchor, but this did not turn out well for him, as the current brought his ship down the river to the flagship, something that neither Quesada nor those in the ship could help because of the fury of the waters,” de Mafra recalled, without realizing what manner of subterfuge had placed the ship in jeopardy.

Quesada patrolled the quarterdeck, bearing sword and shield, hoping to regain control of the ship or, failing that, to slip past Magellan unnoticed. Instead, he sailed straight into a trap.

A
s
Concepción
approached the flagship, Magellan shouted,
“Treason! Treason!”
and ordered his men to ready their weapons. “Once Quesada’s ship passed by his,” de Mafra continued, “[Magellan] ordered that it be shot, which made those who had offered to sacrifice their lives lose their ferocity and hide below.” Suddenly,
Trinidad
opened fire on the approaching vessel, hurling cannonballs onto her decks. “Quesada, armed, stayed on deck, receiving some spears that were hurled at him from the flagship’s topsail, an attitude suggesting he wished to be killed. Magellan, realizing how slight the opposition offered by those in the
nao
was, boarded the skiff with several of his men.” Before Quesada’s men could offer resistance,
Trinidad’s
loyal seamen grappled
Concepción
to her side and rushed aboard as
Victoria
performed the same maneuver on the hapless ship’s starboard side.

“Who are you for?” the attackers cried as they swarmed across
Concepción’s
cramped decks.

“For the King,” came the response, “and Magellan!” The mutineers’
volte-face
may have saved their lives, because

Magellan’s guard made straight for Quesada and his inner circle, who offered little resistance. The guard freed Mesquita, the deposed captain (and Magellan’s cousin), along with the pilot, Ginés de Mafra. The coup was generally bloodless, and de Mafra was the only one who came close to harm when a ball fired from
Trinidad
passed between his legs as he sat in fetters below deck, shortly before he was freed.

With Quesada and his inner circle under arrest, and
Concepción
returned to Magellan’s control, the midnight mutiny of Port Saint Julian came to an ignominious conclusion. Even Juan de Cartagena, aboard
San Antonio,
gave up hope of carrying out a mutiny. When the flagship drew alongside
San Antonio,
and Magellan demanded Cartagena’s immediate surrender, the rebellious Castilian meekly complied and was confined in irons in
Trinidad’s
hold.

That morning, the Captain General had controlled two ships; now he ruled all five. Despite their overwhelming numbers, the mutineers had lost, and Magellan had emerged from the ordeal more powerful than before. His expedition, whose fate had been in grave doubt, would continue.

N
ow that the Easter Mutiny was finally at an end, Magellan meted out punishment to the guilty parties. The mutineers were about to discover that defying Magellan was even more perilous than the most ferocious storm at sea. To begin, Magellan instructed one of his men to read an indictment of Mendoza as a traitor. The Captain General then ordered his men to draw and quarter Mendoza’s body. This complicated and grotesque procedure usually began with hanging the victim, then cutting him down while he was only partly strangled. The executioner or an assistant would make an incision in the victim’s abdomen, remove his intestines, and, incredibly, burn them in front of the half-dead victim. When he finally expired, his head and limbs were severed from his body, parboiled with herbs to preserve them and repel birds, and finally displayed to the public. In a variation, the victim’s arms and legs were attached to four horses, who were made to walk in opposite directions, slowly tearing the victim’s limbs from his body.

Magellan combined elements of both methods. Mendoza was secured to the flagship’s deck, with ropes running from his wrists and ankles to the capstans, which consisted of a cable wound about a cylinder to hoist or move heavy objects. On cue, sailors pressed on levers to rotate the capstans’ drum, which contained sockets to check its backward movement. Bit by bit, the pressure applied to the capstans ripped Mendoza’s lifeless body to pieces.

Magellan directed that the quartered remains be spitted and displayed as a warning of exactly how traitors would be treated. The preserved body parts of Luis de Mendoza remained visible throughout the next several months in Port Saint Julian, an indelible lesson to the men concerning the consequences of mutiny. The practice, so barbarous by present standards, was in keeping with the customs of the time for those who would defy authority.

M
agellan’s display of barbarism did not end there; he was only to exact revenge for the mutineers’ insult to his authority and to the honor of King Charles. More than execution, torture was his ultimate weapon at sea. That he resorted to torture was not unusual; this was, after all, the era of the Spanish Inquisition, which had formally begun in 1478 and continued under the leadership of Tomás de Torquemada, the first Grand Inquisitor. To many Europeans, the mere mention of Spain summoned images of the Inquisition and of diabolical methods of torture, although Spain was hardly the only offender. Nor was torture confined to special cases of heresy; as Magellan’s behavior demonstrated, it was also applied to other criminal behavior such as usury, sodomy, polygamy, and especially treason, considered the most serious crime against the state.

An inquisition was not a trial in the modern sense. The accused were presumed guilty; their reluctance to confess their crimes only added to the sum of their crimes. Torture was designed to elicit withheld confessions, and the sooner the accused confessed, the sooner the agony ended. Indeed, confessions elicited by torture were considered the best evidence of all.

One eyewitness account of a typical Spanish inquisition evokes the fear and despondency Magellan’s victims likely experienced. “The place of torture in the Spanish Inquisition is generally an underground and very dark room, to which one enters through several doors. There is a tribunal erected in it, in which the Inquisitor, Inspector, and Secretary sit. When the candles are lighted, and the person to be tortured brought in, the Executioner . . . makes an astonishing and dreadful appearance. He is covered all over with a black linen garment down to his feet, and tied close to his body. His head and face are all hid with a long black cowl, only two little holes being left in it for him to see through. All this is intended to strike the miserable wretch with greater terror in mind and body when he sees himself going to be tortured by the hands of one who looks like the very devil.” In Magellan’s time, torture was a vivid, dreaded presence in daily life, and it belonged in every captain’s arsenal of techniques to keep sailors in line. With its legal and religious trappings, it was far more systematic, cruel, and psychologically damaging than the traditional remedy of the lash. Even when physical pain ended, psychological wounds continued to fester deep in the victims’ souls.

Magellan’s use of torture inflamed early Spanish historians, who professed to be shocked by his brutality, but what upset them was not that he resorted to torture, a fact of life in Torquemada’s Spain, but that he tortured
Spaniards.
Among those who denounced Magellan’s conduct regarding the mutiny was Maximilian of Transylvania, the scholar who interviewed the survivors of the expedition on their return to Seville; based on their recollections, he stated flatly that Magellan’s actions had been illegal. “No one, aside from Charles and his Council, can pronounce capital punishment against these dignitaries.” (Pigafetta, who was at the scene of the torture, simply ignored the inconvenient display of barbarism, as he did with everything else concerning the mutiny; it would not do to portray his beloved Captain General as inflicting grievous hardships on his beleaguered men.) Early historians stress that some of the victims of Magellan’s torture were Spanish officers in order to emphasize the insult to King Charles and Castile—evidence of Magellan’s disloyalty toward Spain—but many victims were actually Portuguese.