Over the Edge of the World: Magellen's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (41 page)

So began a fierce, tangled battle between the two competing versions of the mutiny.

T
he moment King Charles heard that
San Antonio
had returned, he ordered the Casa de Contratación to restore all the merchandise and equipment aboard the ship to Cristóbal de Haro, to whom Charles, perpetually strapped for cash to fund his empire, was deeply in debt. The Casa was to sell off anything of value “and after the sale,” the king instructed, “send me an account . . . of what you

have sold so that the said Cristóbal de Haro can make an accounting of it so that we can know what our share will be.” Anything over ten thousand ducats would be remitted to the crown. The order crackled with the young king’s eagerness to get his hands on the money, if there was any.

As it happened, there was none. The Casa’s detailed inventory of the ship’s contents listed tarnished combs, crumbling paper, rusty knives, scissors, bent sewing needles, beads, crystals, pearls, a velvetcovered chair, a bolt of decaying altar cloth for celebrating mass, iron, mercury, copper, an oven, a scale, pots, a green moth-eaten cloth, decaying barrels, two compasses, and a small bag of fishhooks, but no spices—nothing, in fact, of any great value. Furthermore, the ship was much the worse for wear after eighteen months at sea. The heat and humidity had taken their toll, to say nothing of the termites boring into the hull. Eventually, the authorities in Seville realized that
San Antonio
had not made it to the Spice Islands, after all. The king’s dreams of claiming the Moluccas for the glory of Spain would have to wait.

No one aboard
San Antonio
knew what had happened to Magellan. They assumed—or perhaps they hoped—that his recklessness and secret loyalty to Portugal had caused him to perish at sea, somewhere over the edge of the world, and the Casa was inclined to believe them. “They believe he must have been double-dealing,” a representative of the Casa reported to the king, “so they had no hope at all of his returning.” The weather-beaten
San Antonio
and her mutinous, ragtag crew of fifty-five were presumed to be the only survivors of what had once been the glorious Armada de Molucca.

W
ithin days of their return, the mutineers delivered their finely accounts to the Casa de Contratación. Fifty-three out of the fifty-five members of the crew gave depositions, and the sudden activity threw the Casa’s clerks into a frenzy. “Since the morning of the Feast of the Ascension, we have been asking questions and taking the declarations, without forcing them, in the presence of two clerks,” wrote Juan López de Recalde, an accountant at the Casa, to Archbishop Fonseca on May 12, just six days after the ship’s return. The task of gathering and squaring fifty-three separate accounts was exhausting and daunting. “We had with us the lawyer Castroverde, legal counsel of this House, and until last night, Saturday, for three days now, we have not been able to take the declarations of more than twenty-one of them. Half a day is needed to take down their account from the day they left this place till their return.”

Mesquita, meanwhile, went directly from confinement aboard ship to jail on land. He was now “in the custody of the Admiral, where he is well-guarded.” The Casa’s representatives insisted they were only protecting Mesquita from the others, but the deposed captain believed he had been singled out for unfair treatment.

The Casa did a remarkably thorough job in uncovering the details of the mutiny at the strait in the allotted time. Their report included an elaborate description of the initial confrontations between Magellan and Cartagena shortly after the armada’s departure from the Canary Islands. There was even an account, inaccurate and inflammatory, of the homosexual behavior that had sent Magellan into a rage and sparked so much resentment among the crew: “It seems that on
Victoria
captained by Luis de Mendoza, a sailor attacked a cabin boy in an act contrary to nature and they told Magellan about it. One calm day, he had the boy thrown into the sea.”

As the report unfolded, a strong anti-Magellan bias became increasingly apparent. “It seems that the captains and officers, seeing that they were moving along the coast instead of going ahead to search for Cape Horn”—the southernmost promontory of South America—“decided to require Magellan to follow His Majesty’s instructions, which were for them to continue their voyage with the agreement, counsel and opinions of the captains, officers and pilots of the armada.” In fact, Magellan’s orders were to “go in search of the strait,” not Cape Horn, and despite what the mutineers later claimed, he had made a point of calling a formal conference and soliciting in writing the opinions of his captains and pilots, just as his orders required. Although he had not accepted their recommendation to turn back, he was not obliged to heed their advice. This was not a democracy, it was an armada, and he was the admiral.

Not surprisingly, the mutineers rearranged events at Port Saint Julian to suit their cause. To hear them tell it, they aroused Magellan to fury simply by asking him to obey the king’s orders, or at least their interpretation of them. “One night Gaspar de Quesada with certain companions went from his ship,
Concepción,
to
San Antonio,
which was commanded by Álvaro de la Mesquita. He asked for the said Álvaro de la Mesquita and took him prisoner and told the men of the ship, in the presence of Juan Cartagena . . . that they already

knew how Magellan had treated him [Cartagena]; and that Magellan would have him killed because he had asked Magellan to comply with the orders of His Majesty. . . . They demanded that Magellan comply with the orders of His Majesty; and for their having done this, not to be maltreated by him. . . . If he did this, they were and would be at his command.” They would even, they claimed, “call him Your Lordship and kiss his feet and hands.” The mutineers delivered a wildly distorted rendition of the meeting to which they had tried to lure Magellan. In reality, Magellan had spurned their invitation to attend a conference aboard the rebel ship for fear of his life. But to hear the mutineers tell it, “Magellan sent word for them to come to his ship and that he would hear them out and do whatever was right. They replied that they dare not go to his ship for fear that he would punish them, that instead, he should come to
San Antonio,
where all of them could meet and they would do what he ordered them.”

The mutineers remained oblivious to Magellan’s successful effort to sabotage the revolt. In their account, Cartagena and Quesada ordered the rebel ships to sail out of Port Saint Julian, an act that meant confronting Magellan, whose flagship,
Trinidad,
blocked their path to freedom. “
San Antonio
raised two anchors and started to steady itself with one. Quesada agreed to set his prisoner Álvaro de Mesquita free and sent him to Magellan so there would be peace between them.” This was fiction, as Mesquita knew, but the mutineers invented still more incidents with Mesquita playing a critical part. For example, as the rebel ships sailed past the flagship, Mesquita supposedly asked Magellan not to fire on them so they could “iron out their differences, but before they could move from where they were, in the middle of the night while the men slept, the flagship fired heavy and light volleys at their ship.” This was a good story, but the truth was that
San Antonio,
carried along by a power-

ful current and dragging her anchor, had approached
Trinidad
quite unintentionally in the middle of the night because her cable had parted, not because Quesada had given the order to sail. The befuddled mutineers were left telling tales of
San Antonio
somehow slipping past the flagship in the middle of the night . . . of Magellan’s loyal cousin temporarily siding with the mutineers . . . of the leaders of the mutiny offering to kiss the hands and feet of the Captain General they obviously despised. None of this made sense unless their stories were seen for what they were: rather obvious attempts to exculpate themselves.

Inevitably, the mutineers recast the climactic struggle at the strait in their favor. In their version, Mesquita provoked the rebellion by stabbing Gomes in the leg, and Gomes retaliated by stabbing Mesquita’s left hand. (In reality, of course, Gomes had stabbed Mesquita first.) They also insisted that the trip home had been unspeakably difficult because each man was limited to a ration of three ounces of bread a day. This was another doubtful assertion because
San Antonio
carried provisions for the entire fleet, more than enough food to fill the mutineers’ bellies.

While the mutineers spun their tales for the Casa’s representatives, Gomes and Guerra were held in custody, as was Mesquita, despite his claims that he was the mutiny’s principal victim, not its perpetrator. “We receive a thousand complaints every hour from them, insisting that they should not be imprisoned,” Recalde complained, “that they be given a chance to see Your Majesty to tell Your Majesty what had happened in the said voyage.” But they never got the chance. From his jail cell, Mesquita insisted, truthfully, that he had been tortured into signing a confession that he had tortured Spanish officers, that it was spurious, and that he had acted loyally to Magellan and the king of Spain. Nevertheless, suspicion fell more heavily on Mesquita than on anyone else.

Mesquita’s account, so different from the mutineers’ exculpatory version, received little attention and even less credence at the Casa de Contratación. In his defense, Mesquita presented the Casa with the documents he had kept when he presided over the prolonged mutiny trial in Port Saint Julian. The dossier recorded the rebellious actions of every accused crew member, the sentences they received, and Magellan’s clemency, all to no avail. Mesquita was ordered to remain in prison, while the mutineers went free. The ringleaders, Gomes and Guerra, even had their travel expenses to and from court reimbursed, while Mesquita, considered guilty until proven otherwise, was ordered to pay travel costs out of his own, threadbare pocket.

I
n their depositions, the crew members skillfully played on Spanish fears that Magellan was a Portuguese tyrant after all, a cunning agent of his native land who skillfully assembled the Armada de Molucca at Spain’s expense merely to destroy it and to dupe King Charles. They embellished this stereotype with fresh horrors: Magellan was a murderer who tortured honorable Spanish officers with connections in the highest possible place, the Church. They told the tragic tale of Cartagena—a Castilian officer!—who, through no fault of his own, was left to rot on a remote island by Magellan. As if that were not wicked enough, the Captain General left a priest to the same miserable fate.

This was an accomplished argument, but it was not flawless. For one thing, the mutineers had difficulty explaining why they had not rescued Cartagena as they retraced their route home. Fortunately, they generated enough shock and anti-Magellan hysteria in Seville that their inconsistent behavior was overlooked, for the present. Instead, the authorities focused on the accusation that Magellan had tortured loyal Spanish officers at Port Saint Julian, and not only abused them, but dismembered and disemboweled them, and placed his victims’ heads on stakes.

O
n May 26, Archbishop Fonseca—Cartagena’s father—delivered his response to the depositions, and it became apparent that the mutineers’ conspiracy to distort the truth had worked as planned. The bishop expressed shock and dismay at Magellan’s treatment of Cartagena and Quesada. It seemed incredible that Spanish officers would be capable of mutiny, and there was no excuse for drawing and quartering one man and marooning the other. So the mutineers went free, for now, though a taint of suspicion clung to them, and they did not receive the back pay they claimed was due them. “We told the officers and seamen . . . to look for a means to earn a living without wasting more time,” Recalde noted. “They have begun to look for work. We request Your Majesty to let us know what to do regarding said salary.”

In Magellan’s absence, his wife, Beatriz, became an object of suspicion, as if she were somehow involved with events at the other end of the world. The Casa de Contratación cut off her financial resources, and in a memorandum to the king suggested a convenient excuse for not paying her. “The wife of Ferdinand Magellan, as authorized by Your Majesty, has 50,000
maravedís
in this House due the said Magellan as captain. . . . We doubt whether we should pay these claims considering the outcome of the voyage. . . . Inasmuch as we do not have the funds right now to pay them the first trimester of this year, we shall not pay them until Your Majesty advises us what to do.”

The vindictive Archbishop Fonseca had even more punitive measures in store for Magellan’s family. He ordered Beatriz and their young son to be placed under house arrest; they were forbidden to return to Portugal while the inquiry continued. Of course, she had no way of knowing that her husband had died only weeks before, on April 27, in the battle of Mactan, followed by her brother, Duarte Barbosa, who died on May 1 in the massacre at Cebu. And so throughout her captivity she waited, Penelope-like, for them to return home from their wanderings.

But Fonseca was almost as suspicious of the mutineers as he was of Magellan loyalists. He ordered Gomez, Guerra, and several other ringleaders to be brought to him in custody, insisting that they travel separately because they might continue to conspire. He told them he was making plans to send a caravel to Port Saint Julian to retrieve Cartagena and the priest. How the mutineers must have regretted their hasty decision to leave those two in the wilderness. Had Cartagena, who had always despised Magellan, returned to Spain, he would have done more than anyone else to blacken Magellan’s reputation and to win vindication and even honor for the mutineers.

No one besides Mesquita spoke up on Magellan’s behalf. The Spanish officials clearly planned to prevent him from returning in triumph to claim the lands, titles, and riches promised him by King Charles. But they had no way of knowing that their precautions were unnecessary, that Magellan was already dead. Mesquita, whose chief crime was being Magellan’s cousin, remained confined in jail for another year, during which he frequently proclaimed his innocence, to no avail.