The Voyage of Magellan

July 15 – September 6, 1522

The day that the Victoria slipped away from the Cape Verde Islands was a day at sea like any other for the men aboard the Trinidad. For more than three weeks now, the flagship that had gradually lost its fleet had been making its slow way northwestward, fighting stubbornly recalcitrant winds and currents all the while. Nothing but ocean had been seen on the horizon throughout that stretch of time. Truth be told, the young pilot Juan Bautista Punzorol had little better idea than any of the other sailors where they actually were. All he knew to do was to stick with the plan, to keep the bow pointed in the same direction and hope for the best.

And so the days continued to pass away, one much like another, reckoned only by the slowly dwindling stock of food in the hold and Punzorol’s growing perplexity. The navigator seemed to become less rather than more confidant for each day he spent on the job. This, needless to say, did nothing to ease the worries of his shipmates. They ate less and prayed more, and wondered where on Earth they were and whether they had already passed beyond any hope of survival on this forever ocean.

Still, the nervous sailors derived a modicum of comfort from the steadying presence of Captain Espinosa. He made a never-ending orbit of the ship, from the poop deck to the bowsprit and back again, going down into the hold as part of his rounds and even crawling back to poke his head into the sweltering steerage compartment, where one sweaty man held fast to the rudder. Everywhere he went, he was ready with a dry joke, an encouraging word, or a few matter-of-fact instructions. Somehow the ship’s situation seemed a little less precarious whenever he was on the scene.

It therefore struck everyone to the quick when, at midday on August 20, 1522, the hearty soldier seemed to miss a rung whilst climbing down the ladder from the poop deck to the quarterdeck. With an undignified thump, he collapsed to the planking in a heap. Punzorol, who had been standing on the quarterdeck as usual, gazing perplexedly at his charts and instruments, rushed to his captain’s side with a cry of alarm. Shaking off his assistance, Espinosa  raised himself unsteadily to his feet, nose gushing blood from where it had struck the hard wood underfoot. “I am fine! I am fine! Just a little momentary clumsiness,” he insisted. “Return to what you were doing.”

But Captain Espinosa was not fine. Instead of resuming his rounds, he planted himself heavily on a stool. Within an hour, he had turned white as a swatch of virgin canvas and had begun to sweat and shiver uncontrollably. His chattering teeth rang out like castanets; to the sailors who had come to rely so completely upon his quiet strength, the sound was the clap of doom. Over his murmured protests, a few of the men picked him up bodily. They carried him back to his cabin and laid him on his bunk, tried to make him as comfortable as they could.

For the next two weeks, he remained there in the throes of fever and delirium. He twitched and raged and kept trying to rise from the bunk, until the sailors reluctantly bound his wrists and ankles to it with lengths of rope. The unlikely nursing team gently daubed the forehead of the man who had been their rock for so long, who was now as weak as a kitten and as insensible as a lunatic. They cleaned him when he soiled himself, kept watch over him at all hours of the day and night.

Punzorol, who had spent much time in close quarters with Espinosa during the last few months, was stricken by the disease soon after his captain, leaving the Trinidad utterly directionless as well as leaderless. Pedro Alfonso tried to step into the role of captain, but within a day or two he had fallen sick as well. He disappeared into the bower he shared with his Moluccan wife, who tended to him faithfully, poking her head out only to receive her meager ration of food each day. In other circumstances, her lot as the only woman on a ship full of men might have been a dangerous one, but the carnal beast within each of the sailors had by now been well and truly tamed by privation.

The sense of hopeless despair that had been lurking at the periphery for so long set in like a fog, as man after man came down with the sickness. The ship went where the winds and currents wished to push it, while the fast-dwindling number of “healthy” sailors — a funny adjective to use to describe men who were now living on quarter rations — spent their time ministering to the sick who lay spread all over the deck in wretched little bundles, each victim of the plague gibbering and raving in his own private Hell. The healthy ceased to feed the sick; they would just throw up their food anyway, and there wasn’t enough of it left to waste. Otherwise, though, they were cared for with the same tenderness as the captain. In time, a consciousness of ineffable grace superseded the temporal despair aboard the Trinidad. It was the grace of the final exigency. There was nowhere to go to escape this silent killer in their midst, nothing whatsoever to be done about it. They were all equally sinners in the hands of their god, and it seemed that god was in the process of calling them all home to face his judgment.

And so the sailors began to die. One of the first to slip the bounds of this world was a heretofore sturdy fellow named Juan Gonzalez, whose specialty was caulking, who had been liked by all of his shipmates and favored with more responsibilities of late by Espinosa. Nevertheless, one of those shipmates dared to suggest the unthinkable after he was discovered lying lifeless: that they cut poor Gonzalez’s body open, to see if they could learn anything thereby about the plague that was killing them. Such a suggestion would have been greeted with horror and outrage during normal times; a deep-seated Christian aversion to autopsy meant that even many medical doctors who enjoyed the patronage of kings back in Europe  had to content themselves with books of anatomy that stemmed from ancient times. But here and now, no one had the energy to argue the point, even as a concern about the disposition of the soul’s worldly shell seemed suddenly picayune in comparison to the end of all mortal concerns that was looking the sailors square in the face.

So, the enterprising amateur pathologist plunged a knife into the distended belly of the corpse. He was revolted to find that the insides were filled with blackish blood, as if every one of the man’s veins had exploded at once. The stench was overpowering. It was as if Juan Gonzalez had literally rotted from the inside. The retching sailors tossed the putrid, mutilated corpse overboard like the hunk of decaying meat it was, without offering up any prayers for his soul. Those could be given later.

With the Trinidad having become Poseidon’s plaything, that god decided to send it north and west. No longer having to contend with the sails and rudder that were forever attempting to defy his will, he drove the ship along the ocean’s broad back with alacrity. It climbed further and further up the face of the globe, higher than the latitude of the Japanese islands, sitting there undiscovered a little further to the west, their daimyos and samurais still believing that their splendid isolation would last forever; it would not, but nor would it be the Trinidad that brought it to an end.

The days grew longer, the nights shorter. At the same time, the days as well as the nights grew more glowering and bleaker and colder, adding another note of misery to the symphony of suffering. Just as the crew of the Victoria had recently done, the men of the Trinidad dug their rancid old seal-skin outerwear from the cracks between the crates of cloves that filled so much of the hold. The once-precious spice had become for them just one more symbol of the frivolous vanities of mortal existence. Of what use were cloves when one had no meat to spread them upon? Of what use were cloves when one was about to confront God? The ship may have drifted as far north as the Aleutian Islands, may even have passed between them without hitting them.

Then, one day when all seemed lost, a shaft of sunlight broke through the miasma of gray. Captain Espinosa hobbled out from his cabin, a nervous young sailor clutching an elbow to steady him. He was pale, drawn, emaciated; he looked five years older than he had just before he tumbled down that ladder. But he was alive, and mentally at least he seemed his old self again.

Espinosa’s keen eyes sized up the situation in their old way. He wasted no time on recriminations or regrets once he was given to understand how badly the ship had gone astray, in all senses of the word. He merely issued a quick, decisive order. “We must turn this ship around!” he said. “This plan of ours was obviously a mistake. We must go back the way we have come. There is nothing for us ahead in these frigid climes.” At the sound of his voice, some of the sick men rose from their fetid bowers, like the afflicted men of Palestine who had been healed by Jesus; among them was Pedro Alfonso, who had been hovering at the threshold between life and death almost as long as his captain. With a rediscovered sense of purpose, the sailors wrestled canvas onto ropes and hoisted sails. Juan Bautista Punzorol too raised himself from his sickbed to haul out his astrolabe and chart book and plot the new course.

Had the Trinidad continued on its previous course, it may have bumped into Siberia or possibly even Alaska before too much longer. But we need not second-guess Espinosa’s decision to turn around too enthusiastically, for it is highly doubtful whether the sick and tired crew would have had the wherewithal to survive the coming winter in one of those infamously harsh places. Instead, the Trinidad was to make a last desperate bid to return to the milder climes it had left. It had had nothing but bad luck since leaving Saipan, but it did have the force of nature named Gómez de Espinosa pacing its decks once more. Only time could show whether that was enough to win the race against disease and looming starvation.

While the plague-stricken Trinidad had been drifting purposelessly, a little island of suffering unto itself, the Victoria had been making its very purposeful way toward home. During those first tense hours out of Santiago, Captain Elcano had stood on the poop deck looking behind him, waiting for the Portuguese pursuers that he felt sure must sortie to run his ship down. He knew well that his tubby carrack had no chance of outdistancing a sleek caravel. Yet as the hours passed, none of the distinctive angular sails he dreaded actually materialized on the aft horizon. By nightfall on that first day, he was starting to breathe easier. It seemed that, for the umpteenth time on its three-year voyage, the Victoria had inexplicably escaped seemingly certain disaster.

Elcano couldn’t know that the harbormaster back at Santiago had had a lot to do on this day, such that he hadn’t gotten around to questioning his Spanish prisoners until well into the afternoon. Unable to make much sense of the mixture of lies and truths and half-truths which they spouted, tired out after a working day that had stretched from the pre-dawn hours thanks to this bunch, he had opted in the end to simply let them go. After all, their ship had already moved on, leaving them as just ten more able-bodied seamen whose backgrounds were irrelevant to the shorthanded captains who passed through, so long as they could tie a knot and swab a deck. Why should he create more work for himself by detaining them?

Thus these ten men who had gone all the way around the world found themselves cast adrift in the end on the docks of Santiago, with their ship having sailed without them, leaving them no way of securing their part of the fortune in cloves that was in its hold. What was there to be done about it? A seaman’s lot was often a hard one. They set about looking for a Portuguese ship that would be willing to hire them on before the few coins in their pockets ran out.

Escaping the Portuguese did not mean that Captain Elcano and his crew had put all of their problems behind them. With only eighteen men left aboard — half of what would normally be considered the bare minimum complement for a ship of this size and type — the labor required to keep the Victoria on course was overwhelming, even on calm seas with the worst of the leaking now abated. Yet despite the endless toil that remained their daily lot in life, Elcano and all of the men could feel in their bones how very close to home they were now. Everything sang the same note of homecoming. The hardtack they had purchased at Santiago tasted like home; the seas through which they sailed were, even if occupied by far too many Portuguese ships, comfortingly familiar. Once or twice during the first few days out of Santiago they saw in the distance the actual masts of some of these ships — which were, whatever the threat they might represent, sturdily rigged European masts. If these other ships saw the Victoria’s own sails outlined against the pale blue, they didn’t deem them to be anything worth investigating. Luck now seemed to be on the Victoria’s side.

After a quick consultation with his crew, Elcano elected not to stop in the Canary Islands. Rations were tight, but there ought to be enough food in the hold to get them to Spain proper. Why place their fortune in cloves at the mercy of some last-minute mishap or some random act of mischief by one of the wild and wooly residents of Tenerife? Better just to carry their cloves and themselves directly home. Gratified by his crew’s determination, Elcano said to them the same words that Alcinous said to Odysseus: “I know that you won’t be driven off your course. Nothing can hold you back. However much you’ve suffered, you’ll sail home.”

Wanting to stay as far away as possible from the steady stream of Portuguese sea traffic along the Moroccan coastline, Captain Elcano elected to sail north and even a tick or two west out of the Cape Verde Islands. In lieu of the Canaries, he used the Azores archipelago — alas, yet another possession of Portugal — as his navigational point of reference. On August 7, the sailors saw the volcanic cone of Mount Pico of the Azores emerge on the northern horizon. Only now did the ship turn east. It was less a sprint for home than a sort of meandering limp; it wasn’t easy for the undermanned vessel to keep a straight line against the vagaries of the weather. But day by day, progress was made.

Because they arrived by such a roundabout route, the first glimpse that the sailors got of Europe was not of the country from which most of them hailed, but rather of the homeland of their deceased first captain general. On September 4, 1522, they spotted the Cape of Saint Vincent, at the southwestern tip of Portugal. The men stammered out their thanks to God with more heartfelt feeling than any church choir. For they knew well that just one more full day at sea now lay between the Victoria and the place whence it had departed its native continent.

And so it came to pass that on the sixth day of the ninth month of the Year of Our Lord 1522, the sailors aboard the Victoria spotted the humble lighthouse of Sanlúcar ahead of them, 1075 days after they had seen it fade out of view behind them. Antonio Pigafetta hadn’t been writing much in his journal lately; he was just about out of blank pages, and his contribution to the labor of keeping the Victoria on course consumed almost his every waking minute anyway. Now, though, he put pen to paper once more. For the first time, the true nature and scale of their achievement — the fact that they had sailed all the way around the world — dawned on a member of the crew: “From the day when we left this bay of Sanlúcar until our return thither, we reckoned that we had run more than 14,460 leagues [60,000 miles, or almost 100,000 kilometers], and we had completed going round the Earth from east to west.” Their epic voyage had encompassed fifteen times the distance that Christopher Columbus had had to sail to reach the New World.

Captain Elcano stood on the quarterdeck of the Victoria much as Ferdinand Magellan had stood on the quarterdeck of a different, prouder vessel at this same spot off the coast of Spain 1075 days ago. But if his vessel was humbler, not to mention much the worse for wear, Elcano himself looked and felt no less proud than his former captain general. Who would have thought, he mused to himself, that he would be the one to complete the great enterprise of the man against whom he had dared to mutiny on the 228th day of the expedition? A week after that day, back when he had been a prisoner in chains at Puerto San Julián, his life or death in the hands of the man against whom he had mutinied, who would have thought that he would become the Odysseus who managed to lead the survivors home? Magellan had seen something in Elcano; despite the crime he had committed, the most heinous of them all in the law books of the sea, the captain general had elected to spare him. Now, Magellan’s Christian mercy and good judgment were about to be given their just deserts from beyond the grave, in the form of an eternal place in history for an achievement he had never intended.

The Victoria nudged inside the bay of Sanlúcar. Ignoring for the moment the hails that could be heard wafting across the water from shore — “Who are you? Whence did you sail?” — Captain Elcano guided his ship over to the same out-of-the-way spot where it had ridden at anchor three years ago, waiting for Captain General Magellan to complete his final preparations and give the order to depart. The very planking of the ship seemed to groan and sigh in luxurious, exhausted relief as the vessel’s  equally exhausted and relieved stewards threw out the anchor one last time. With a splash, it sank down to the shallow seabed, to lodge itself securely in the familiar soil of Spain.

This ship was not the proud Trinidad; it had no cannons with which to salute. Undaunted, the sailors loaded muskets with some of the last of their powder. “Fire!” called the strong, clear voice of Captain Elcano. A sharp crack split the air, and a cloud of smoke wafted above the water, above the heads of the bewildered greeting party that was already coming out to them in a boat. The grayish-black cloud floated still higher, above the lush green landscape of Spain.

Of the 239 men who had set out from Sanlúcar on a fine early autumn day three years before, these eighteen had sailed around the world and returned, much changed every one of them inside and out, yet gazing out upon a day and a countryside that looked just the same. “There’s plenty of grain for bread, grapes for wine, the rains never fail and the dew fall’s healthy. Good country for goats, good for cattle too. There’s stand on stand of timber, and water runs in stream beds throughout the year.” What more could any man wish for than this verdant land known as Spain? To travel is good, but home is best.

The Victoria was home.

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