Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (22 page)

So the wretched winter passed, day by day, hour by hour, the men working constantly and trying to keep themselves warm as best they could, enduring life in a prison so remote it needed no walls. Overseeing these projects, Magellan intended to keep his prisoners in chains until they left Port Saint Julian in the spring.

When the time came to load the provisions, they discovered more evidence that the dishonest chandlers in Seville and the Canary Islands had robbed them blind, and endangered their lives. Although their bills of lading showed enough supplies on board to last a year and a half, long enough to reach the Spice Islands, the ships’ holds actually carried only a third of that amount. This grim discovery cast the rest of the expedition in a different light because, as Magellan realized, they would likely run out of food well before they reached their goal. The men resumed hunting to make up the difference, but they were eating their way through their supplies almost as fast as they replenished them. The only way out of their predicament was to resume the voyage as soon as possible, storms or no storms.

C H A P T E R   V I
Castaways

And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold:
And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
As green as emerald.

F
inding the strait leading to the Spice Islands, always a priority for Magellan, reached the level of an obsession in late April. When the oppressive weather briefly lifted, he rashly sent out a reconnaissance mission to search for the elusive waterway. He selected
Santiago,
the soundest of the vessels, for the task, with Juan Rodríguez Serrano as her Castilian captain. “An industrious man, he never rested,” said one of the crew members of him. He was about to meet the ultimate challenge of his career.

Even if Serrano succeeded in finding the mouth of the strait, he would have to embark on an equally dangerous return journey to Port Saint Julian. Violent storms at sea or cannibals on land could spell disaster. And the temptation to mutiny and sail away—either east toward Spain or west through the strait—might be irresistible to
Santiago’s
crew. Magellan stifled thoughts of escape by keeping provisions on board to a minimum and offering Serrano a reward of one hundred ducats if the expedition located the strait; of course, he could collect only on his return.

Favored by calm weather, the mission began auspiciously enough. On May 3, about sixty miles south of Port Saint Julian, Serrano discovered a promising inlet, which on closer inspection revealed itself as the mouth of a river, which he named Santa Cruz. More than three hundred years later, in 1834, the youthful Charles Darwin visited the Santa Cruz River aboard HMS
Beagle
on her voyage of discovery, and found the same inviting prospect. The river, he wrote, “was generally from 300 to 400 yards broad, and in the middle about 17 feet deep. . . .T he water is of a fine blue colour, but with a slight milky tinge, and not so transparent as at first sight might have been expected.”

Santiago’s
crew soon discovered that food was even more plentiful around the Santa Cruz River than at Port Saint Julian, and Serrano decided to linger for six days to fish and hunt for sea elephants. Given the urgency of finding the strait, his decision to tarry is peculiar. Perhaps neither he nor his men wished to return to Port Saint Julian and its grim reminders of the mutiny sooner than necessary; or perhaps they had no desire to risk their lives on the open water.

After the tranquil respite,
Santiago.
set sail and proceeded south in search of the strait. On May 22, the wind picked up and the seas began to churn, tossing the ship as if she were nothing more than an oversized piece of flotsam. The armada had encountered many violent squalls, but little
Santiago.
had stumbled into the most powerful storm her crew had ever experienced, and they would have to face it alone.

S
errano had no time to reef the sails. Fierce seas pounded the ship mercilessly, terrifying her crew. Serrano attempted to head into the wind and ride out the storm, but overpowering gusts tore the sails, and the seas battered the rudder until the device failed to respond.
Santiago.
was now out of control, caught in the middle of a storm that was still building in power, her men beyond the hope of rescue. The situation was desperate.

At that moment, the storm gathered force, and the winds pushed the helpless ship toward the rocky coast and the prospect of certain death for her crew. Serrano faced every captain’s nightmare as razorsharp rocks sawed into her hull, and she began taking on water. Luck was with her crew, since
Santiago.
washed ashore before breaking up.

One by one, her crew of thirty-seven crawled to the end of the jib boom and jumped to a rocky beach. As soon as they had abandoned ship,
Santiago.
broke up, and the storm carried away all her lifesustaining provisions—wine, hardtack, and water, to say nothing of the freshly caught sea elephants. Incredibly, all the men aboard ship survived, but once they had given thanks to the Lord for sparing their lives, they grasped the desperate situation they now faced. The storm had stranded the castaways about seventy miles from the rest of the fleet, without food or wood or fresh water, in freezing weather. They were cold and exhausted; soon they would be starving. There was no way to get word of their plight to the Captain General. Their land route back to Port Saint Julian presented seemingly overwhelming obstacles: snow-covered mountains and the Santa Cruz River, three miles wide.

T
he castaways spent eight days in more or less the same area, disoriented, dispirited, waiting for pieces of the wreck, possibly even food, to drift onto the pebbly beach, but the sea yielded only a few planks broken off from
Santiago’s
hull. Subsisting on a diet of local vegetation and whatever shellfish they could catch, the castaways evolved a plan. They would drag the planks over the mountains until they reached the river and there, on its banks, build a raft to cross it. The river lay many miles to the north, and the task proved daunting to the crew. They left most of the planks behind, and after four wretched days of marching overland, the exhausted crew finally reached the broad expanse of the river. The weather had relented, and fish, as they knew from their first visit to the river, were plentiful. It seemed they would not starve, after all.

Lacking planks to build a raft large enough to carry all the men, the castaways split into two groups. The larger group— thirty-five men—set up camp at the river’s edge, while two strong men, whose names were not recorded, set out on the tiny raft. They intended to cross the river and walk the rest of the way back to Port Saint Julian to seek help. It was an exceedingly risky undertaking. Successfully crossing the three-mile expanse of river required a combination of daring and luck, and when they reached the other side, they faced an arduous march in freezing weather, living off the land.

The two crew members in the vanguard succeeded in mastering the river’s breadth in their rudimentary raft, and once they had landed on the far side, they set out in the direction of Port Saint Julian. At first, they followed the coast, where they could be reasonably certain to find shellfish, but vast swamps barred their progress, and they had to walk inland, over hills and mountains, eating only ferns and roots, and suffering greatly in the freezing weather. The trek lasted eleven harrowing days, and when they reached Port Saint Julian, ravaged and gaunt from their ordeal, even those who knew the survivors barely recognized them.

Once the castaways revived, they described the desperate situation of their shipmates on the far side of the Santa Cruz River.

M
agellan had no choice but to attempt to rescue the other thirty-five crew members of
Santiago.
Afraid to risk the loss of another ship to a storm, he sent a rescue squad of twenty-four men, carrying wine and hardtack, along the overland trail that the two survivors had blazed through the harsh wilderness. “The way there was long, twenty-four leagues, and the path was very rough and full of thorns,” said Pigafetta of their grim progress. “The men were four days on the road, sleeping at night in the bushes. They found no drinking water, but only ice, which caused them great hardship.” Failing to find a river or spring, they resorted to melting snow. Finally, in a drastically weakened condition from their days in the wild, they reached the desperate castaways, who had been camping out along the banks of the Santa Cruz River. A pathetic reunion ensued: exhausted men at the end of the world, suffering intensely, expecting to die at any time, united only in the cause of survival, as unlikely as the prospect seemed.

Relying on the small raft cobbled together from the wreck of
Santiago,
the rescue party ferried the survivors back across the river in groups of two or at most three; each trip consumed hours and was fraught with hazard, but miraculously everyone made it to the northern shore. Even so, they were still far from safety because they had to make the rugged overland trek back to Port Saint Julian. As Magellan anxiously awaited the outcome of the rescue mission, the thirty-five castaways and twenty-four rescuers picked their way through the snows of the Patagonian winter, fortified mainly with wine and hardtack. About a week later, they emerged one by one from the forest surrounding Port Saint Julian. Driven by an unshakable will to survive, everyone made it back safely.

Magellan greeted the dazed, exhausted men with ample food and wine, and treated them all as heroes.

T
he wreck of
Santiago.
and the hardship endured by her crew troubled Magellan more deeply than the violence and torture of the Easter Mutiny. “The loss of the ship was much regretted by Magellan,” de Mafra recalled, “although it was not the pilot’s fault, because along this coast the sea rises and ebbs eight fathoms, and this was the cause of the calamity, so that the ship found itself high and dry.”

As serious as the loss of
Santiago.
might be, Magellan had more to fear from the emotional consequences of the wreck. The disaster confirmed his crew’s fear that the Captain General was leading them on an expedition so dangerous that they would all get killed long before they reached the Spice Islands. To ensure his control of the remaining four ships in the fleet, he saw to it that only diehard loyalists commanded them. While Álvaro de Mesquita, his first cousin, remained in command of
San Antonio,
Magellan appointed Duarte Barbosa, his brother-in-law, as captain of
Victoria,
and Juan Serrano, the unlucky skipper of
Santiago,
as the new captain of
Concepción,
the ship once commanded by Gaspar de Quesada, the mutineer whose severed head rotted on a pike. Magellan himself still ruled over all from
Trinidad.
Finally, he scattered
Santiago’s
long-suffering crew among the four remaining ships to prevent them from secretly conspiring.

In fact, Magellan’s appointment of his relatives as captains served to fuel the silent resentment of many crew members, even those from Portugal. When they finally returned to Spain, if they ever did, they could tell vivid tales of Magellan’s insolence toward the Spanish captains; his shameless nepotism; his reckless seamanship, culminating in the needless loss of
Santiago;
and, most blatant of all, the drawing and quartering of Gaspar de Quesada. All of these grievances remained urgent in the minds of many seamen as they awaited a time and place to act on them.

W
inter relentlessly advanced on Port Saint Julian; the days contracted to less than four hours of light, and the snow line reached down the mountains, across the fields and swamps, eventually extending to the water’s edge. If the crew members and officers ever spent an idle hour at Port Saint Julian, if they fished for the sport of it, or played cards, or indulged in practical jokes, or read the books of exploration and discovery that they carried with them, books such as
The Travels of Marco Polo,
or
The Travels of Sir John Mandeville,
or if they participated in any other pastime during the Patagonian winter, there is no record of it. Magellan kept his men too busy and afraid for their lives for such activities. Only survival mattered.

Magellan ordered his men to hunt and fish, which they did. They found mussels, as well as foxes, sparrows, and “rabbits much smaller than ours,” in Pigafetta’s words. They preserved their catch with salt derived from flats surrounding the bay.

When it became too cold to fish, Magellan sent a party of four armed men—all that he was willing to risk—to explore the interior. They had two goals, to plant a cross on the highest mountain they could climb and to befriend Indians, if they found any. The landscape proved more rugged than they had anticipated, and they were unable to make much progress or to ascend any of the distant mountains. Instead, they selected a lower mountain close to the harbor, named it “Mount of Christ,” fixed their cross on the summit, and returned to the waiting ships, where they confidently reported that there was no sign of human life around Port Saint Julian.

D
espite the empty winter months stretching before them, Magellan was determined to await the coming of spring before he ventured into the treacherous ocean and resumed searching for the strait. To keep his men occupied, he ordered a detachment ashore to construct a small stone enclosure for a forge to be used to repair the ships’ metal fittings, but even this modest project ended in frustration because the weather became so bitter that several sailors suffered crippling frostbite on their fingers.

Amid the intense suffering and hardship, discontent spread among the crew members. As the prospect of another mutiny loomed, Magellan, along with everyone else in the fleet, was distracted by an unexpected sight: a distant plume of smoke wafting over the landscape. Perhaps they were not alone, after all.