The Voyage of Magellan

During that same fateful spring of 1521 which brought triumph followed by death to Ferdinand Magellan in the Philippines, his adopted liege Charles was grappling with problems of his own half a world away. For Charles’s new kingdom of Spain was then in the closing stages of a brief but terrifying civil war.

A year earlier, the city of Toledo, in the heart of old Castille, had instigated a rebellion against its foreign-born, non-Spanish-speaking king and the heavy burden of taxation he was laying upon his people in order to finance his empire-building in South America and elsewhere. The rebel yell radiated outward from Toledo to encompass large swaths of surrounding territory, including the metropolis of Madrid. Charles had no choice but to call up some of his armies to force his own subjects back into line.

Thankfully for him, the royal generals remained loyal, and their well-armed, well-trained soldiers had little trouble defeating the rebels wherever they met them in open battle.  By April 27, 1521, the day of Magellan’s death, Madrid was surrounded by the royal armies and on the verge of falling. Toledo was almost as beleaguered, while most of the other strongholds of the rebels had already been reclaimed.

But the times were such that a new threat to Charles’s rule over his vast holdings seemed to crop up every time he put down an existing one. He was actually away in Germany that spring, where he was presiding over the Diet of Worms, an imperial council that met periodically to set the future direction of that other sprawling birthright of his, the Holy Roman Empire. Ten days before Magellan was killed, the rabble-rousing friar Martin Luther had stood up in person before the Diet and accused Pope Leo X and his Church of the most abominable heresies imaginable. Incensed at Luther’s latest outrage, Charles told the assembled princes that he was through with trying to placate him: “A single friar who goes counter to all Christianity for 1000 years must be wrong. After having heard yesterday the obstinate defense of Luther, I regret that I have so long delayed in proceeding against him and his false teaching. I will have no more to do with him.” He gave Luther until May 6 to recant or face arrest. Two days before that deadline was due to expire, a group of Luther’s supporters spirited him away to a hidey-hole in a tumbledown old castle in Saxony, from which he would continue to foment insurrection against the pope via a series of incendiary written tracts. Thus the most cataclysmic schism in the history of the Christian religion, that glue which had bound the diverse peoples of Western Europe together since the fall of the ancient Roman Empire, became irrevocable. It would be small wonder if Charles, who had just turned 21 years old, was feeling rather overwhelmed at the quantity and magnitude of the challenges confronting him during that spring of 1521.

On the very day of Charles’s deadline for Luther — a moot point now, of course, with the pesky friar hidden away from the Inquisitors who would arrest him — a lookout perched atop the lighthouse at Sanlúcar de Barrameda spotted a ship sailing toward that little town at the mouth of the Guadalquivir River in Spain. As it came closer, it revealed itself to be a badly weather-beaten carrack of Spanish construction, thoroughly unprepossessing in appearance. It was remarkable only for being here at all, where no singleton traders had been expected this morning. Yet it flew the flags of Spain and King Charles, and it certainly was no warship, so the guards at Sanlúcar allowed it to pass by unmolested and proceed up the river to the great port city of Seville, whence Spain’s gigantic and increasingly, impossibly rich overseas empire was being built even as the Spanish countryside much closer by was still bleeding from the wounds of the recent civil war.

Upon reaching Seville, the ship tied up at the nearest open dock. Several wary officials came out to greet it almost as soon as it did so. The rebellion hadn’t ever infected the municipal government of Seville proper, but there was plenty of rebel sympathy in the streets even now, which kept Charles’s loyal lieutenants on a heightened state of alert. When the officials boarded the new arrival to find out what was what, they didn’t find the nest of turncoats they had half expected. What they did find, however, was as confusing a state of affairs as ever a greeting delegation such as theirs has had to deal with.

The men they met aboard were as weathered as their vessel; clearly both had been through something well out of the ordinary. A snippy young fellow who introduced himself as Gerónimo Guerra claimed to be the captain of the ship, but he deferred oddly to his pilot, whose name was Estevão Gomes, as soon as the discussion moved beyond vague generalities. But what really brought the head of the greeting delegation up short was the name of the ship itself: the San Antonio. A quick check of his logbook confirmed what his memory had whispered to him: this was one of the ships that had sailed with Ferdinand Magellan almost twenty months ago in the hope of finding a westward route to the Spice Islands. That expedition had last been heard from at the beginning of October of 1519, when it had left the Canary Islands amidst rumors of a Portuguese blockade that had been put in place to stop it in its tracks. It had long since been written off as lost, quite possibly quietly intercepted and dispatched by the Portuguese before it had even made it across the Atlantic to begin in earnest its search for a westward strait through South America.

Now, though, here was this one ship turning up out of the blue, its crew telling a tangled story that the greeters couldn’t make head or tail of. This was a delicate situation indeed. And then, when the delegation conducted a cursory initial inspection of the ship, it got even worse. Down in the hold, they found a man in chains. A Portuguese by accent who claimed to have shifted his loyalties to Spain, he answered to the name of Álvaro de Mesquita, and declared himself to be the rightful captain of the San Antonio, deposed by the sailors around him in a mutiny after he had refused to betray his captain general, who also happened to be his cousin. The greeters didn’t know what was going on here, but they could sense plainly enough that it was well above their pay grade. They set a guard around the ship and sent for the harbormaster of Seville. Let him sort it out.

The harbormaster  ordered all of the 55 new arrivals to be taken off the San Antonio and interned, in relatively comfortable quarters but nevertheless under armed guard, while he sent a preliminary message to his superiors and put together a team of clerks and lawyers to conduct a formal inquiry into exactly what had transpired aboard the ship. Beginning on May 12 and continuing for almost two weeks afterward, these functionaries interviewed each of the men, alone and at careful length. Slowly, a picture of the past twenty months came together. From Captain Guerra on down to the lowliest deck swab, the stories that were told were consistent, being an account of the fleet’s voyage that was the same as the one I have been sharing with you in the broad strokes, but slanted and distorted to place its captain general in the worst possible light.

In these sailors’ telling, for example, the young apprentice seaman who had been caught in flagrante delicto with Antonio Salomone aboard the Victoria during the Atlantic crossing hadn’t been granted clemency by Magellan, only to throw himself into the ocean of his own accord months later; he had rather been ordered to be cast into the sea by the tyrannical captain general himself. The internees claimed that Magellan had routinely ordered sailors to be brutally tortured for the most trifling offenses. In their version of the Easter Mutiny, the mutinous officers had merely been trying to remonstrate with Magellan to get him to take a fairer, milder line with the sailors, not trying to topple him from command entirely; if he would agree to do this, Gomes claimed to have said, Gomes would happily “call you Your Lordship and kiss your feet and hands.” Once the mutiny had gotten properly underway, it had been Magellan’s cronies who had initiated all of the violence, not the other way around. The men of the San Antonio told of horrendous punishments that Magellan inflicted after the principled defiance at Puerto San Julián had proved in vain. They told how his reckless orders had led to the loss of the Santiago, then told of how an ever more  unstable captain general had led them into a precarious maze of ice and shoals at the very tip of South America long after it had become clear that the fast, direct route to the riches of Asia which he had been seeking simply didn’t exist. In the end, the officers of the San Antonio said, they had had decided that they had no choice but to take matters into their own hands a second time — this time more successfully — by rising up against the blindly loyal Captain Mesquita and sailing their ship home. They were sorry that they hadn’t been able to bring the other three surviving ships of the fleet along with them, but any nautical officer’s first duty must be to his own vessel and his own men.

The interviewers smelled a rat almost from the start. With one glaring exception, the stories they heard were amazingly alike, as if they had been rehearsed at some length. The exception was the account of Captain Mesquita, which contradicted those of the others at turn after turn and yet often seemed to have more of the ring of truth about it. In his telling, Magellan had been a demanding but fair leader from first to last, clever and conscientious and protective of his men’s welfare even when they probably didn’t deserve it, forced to contend at every turn with a substantial cadre of his underlings who had begun plotting against him before the fleet ever left Spain.

Then, too, there was the question of just what the San Antonio had been up to since it had abandoned the rest of the fleet in Tierra del Fuego the previous November. The returned crew were at pains to emphasize Magellan’s cruel handling of Juan de Cartagena, that “nephew” of the all-powerful Bishop Fonseca, culminating in his marooning at Puerto San Julián. But these self-described men of principle and honor couldn’t seem to explain why they hadn’t sailed back to Puerto San Julián to rescue the persecuted Cartagena after leaving the rest of the fleet. Instead they had proceeded directly across the Atlantic from Tierra del Fuego, only to then dawdle for months on the western coast of Africa. (Their Tehuelche prisoner, the companion to the one who had been aboard the Trinidad, had perished of some foreign disease there before he could be brought back to become the main attraction in some exhibition or other in Europe.) It smacked of the behavior of furtive fugitives who knew they had committed grave wrongs, and were extremely hesitant to return to their homeland to face the consequences.

Indeed, it must be said that the decision not to rescue Cartagena was strange and muddle-headed even if we set principle and honor aside. The mutineers would have been better served to have returned to Spain as the saviors of Cartagena than as men who had been in such a rush to save themselves that they couldn’t be bothered to think about his plight. For when the Seville harbormaster’s report of the interviews reached Bishop Fonseca, that sworn enemy of Ferdinand Magellan and all his works, it turned his natural inclination to look sympathetically upon the mutineers into no small degree of anger at them as well. This was less than ideal for their cause, given that Bishop Fonseca practically ran the Spanish government in King Charles’s absence.

Still, the frugal man of God decided that it wouldn’t do to have 55 men cooling their heels in Seville at the expense of the crown for any longer than they already had, even as he considered mass imprisonment or execution to be a step too far. Thus Fonseca sent grudging orders to the harbormaster to pay everyone but Guerra, Gomes, and Mesquita, those three starring actors in the drama, whatever salaries they were owed, to pronounce their contracts of service complete, and to send them on their way. The authorities in Seville were none too pleased at this clemency; for time immemorial, mutiny has been the gravest crime that exists in both the written and unwritten law books of the sea, and these nautical authorities were as loath as any of their peers throughout history to let anyone who had perpetrated it get off scot-free. But they had no choice, of course. The sailors were told “to look for a means to earn a living without wasting more time,” as if they had been idling there in Seville of their own free will. And so, with this complete lack of fanfare, they ended their tenure with one of the most important expeditions in the history of sea travel. They were free, but they did not escape entirely unscathed; suspicions and rumors about what had really happened on the coast of South America would dog all of them for the rest of their lives, markedly affecting their employment prospects. Nonetheless, it was better than the dungeon cell or the gallows that was the fate of many another mutineer. As for the San Antonio, it was quietly sold to a private trading concern and sailed out of history equally unsung. It presumably ended its days as just another aging cargo hauler on the seaways of empire.

Bishop Fonseca tempered these mercies with vindictiveness in another quarter. Even as most of the crew of the San Antonio were being released, he ordered Magellan’s wife Maria and her infant son to be placed under house arrest in Seville. Maria was thus forced to live as Odysseus’s wife Penelope had while awaiting that hero’s return, a captive in a velvet cage. Like Penelope, she spent her days and nights in “her lofty well-lit room, weeping for her beloved husband, till watchful Athena sealed her eyes with welcome sleep.”

Guerra, Gomes, and Mesquita too were kept in custody in Seville for several months after the other sailors were freed, until the hot Spanish summer had given way to the welcome cool of autumn. Charles returned to Spain at this time, to set up his court once again at Valladolid. Soon after he did so, a royal edict reached Seville, ordering the harbormaster to send the trio of suspects to the king to have their fates decided once and for all. Thus Guerra, Gomes, and Mesquita set out on the same overland journey that a hopeful Ferdinand Magellan and Rodriguo Faleiro had embarked upon almost exactly four years earlier. These men, however, had more fear than hope in their hearts, along with plenty of hatred to direct toward one another.

In reality, their visit was even less of a priority to King Charles than that of their predecessors had been. The young man still had far bigger fish to fry. Although the rebellion inside Spain had been pretty well put down by now — Madrid and Toledo were both back in royal hands — the conflict between Martin Luther and the pope he had labeled an antichrist was still very much ongoing in Germany. And just to give Charles one more thing to worry about, a collection of long-simmering disagreements with the king of France was on the verge of boiling over. Before the year was over, a full-fledged war would break out between the armies of the two most powerful rulers on the European continent.

With such weighty matters as these on his mind, Charles was little more than a nominal presence at the trial of Guerra, Gomes, and Mesquita; the event was really presided over by Bishop Fonseca. Over the course of several days, the three captives told their stories again, the one narrative still diverging dramatically from the other two on a whole host of particulars. But this time there was one additional character witness who dared to speak up on behalf of Mesquita and Magellan and against the mutineers, at not-inconsiderable risk to himself. Diogo Barbosa, Magellan’s father-in-law, was so outraged at the aspersions that were being cast on a member of his family, not to mention the treatment that was being meted out to his daughter and her son, that he too made the journey all the way to Valladolid to express that opinion.

Charles and Fonseca got an earful from the old man, who fairly sputtered with indignation. He addressed the king with shocking, almost insolent familiarity, revealing as he did so that he had been thoroughly briefed by Mesquita on the latter’s version of events. Magellan had actually taken “great care,” he said, to do everything “to your advantage and not against your honor.” He had been the farthest thing from a tyrant: “When the men he brought with him mutinied with three of the principal ships, he did not punish them severely when he could have, and he pardoned many who later proved ungrateful.” If that wasn’t reason enough to toss Guerra and Gomes into prison and to let Álvaro de Mesquita and Maria Magellan go free with their sovereign’s thanks, just think of the precedent that letting these mutineers get away with it would set: “These [crimes] serve as bad examples, which discourage those who wish to do what they should and give greater encouragement to those who do otherwise.”

Alas, such arguments fell on deaf ears. For Bishop Fonseca, it came down to whom he hated most. And while he was most emphatically not happy with Guerra and Gomes for their willingness to sail for home without a backward glance, leaving his marooned son to die from starvation or from a native’s poisoned arrow, the man who had marooned Cartagena in the first place remained the biggest target of his wrath. Since Ferdinand Magellan could not stand trial here for his crimes, his loyalists and proxies would have to be punished in his stead. In a final verdict that surprised no one, Fonseca allowed Guerra and Gomes to go free with only mild reprimands. Maria Magellan, however, would have to dwell in her velvet cage indefinitely, while Álvaro de Mesquita, the only man aboard the San Antonio who had refused to turn traitor at the crucial instant, was now rewarded for his loyalty by becoming the only man among the returnees to be sent to one of the royal dungeons, where a prisoner’s life tended to be as short as it was hard. A distracted King Charles signed off on these verdicts without much interest. As far as he and those around him were concerned, this closed the book on Ferdinand Magellan and his madcap scheme for sailing west to Asia. The rest of his ships were presumptively lost, their crews all drowned in some frigid antipodean ocean.

Little did the Spanish court know that a part of Magellan’s fleet was still plying the Pacific even as the trial was taking place, still nursing dreams of bringing some of the riches of Asia back to Europe. Contrary to all of their assumptions, Charles and Fonseca had not heard the last of the Magellan expedition.

Did you enjoy this chapter? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it and to gain free access to the ebook versions of all completed series. You can pledge any amount you like.

(A full listing of print and online sources used will follow the final article in this series.)