The Voyage of Magellan

November 6 – 28, 1520

The San Antonio rode at anchor for 48 hours just north of Dawson Island, awaiting a rendezvous that failed to materialize. Sensing more than ever that he was losing his authority to his pilot Estevão Gomes, Captain Mesquita turned his ship into an avatar of his nervousness. He ordered huge smoky fires to be kindled on the poop deck and musket volley after musket volley to be fired into the unoffending sky, all in the vain hope of making contact with the other ships of the fleet before the other shoe dropped aboard this one.

Mesquita was right to be nervous. For while he twitched and fretted, Gomes was conducting secret meetings with the rest of the ship’s officers, inciting them to mutiny through a mixture of cajolery and flattery. The latter was especially effective with a vain fellow named Gerónimo Guerra, a member of a very minor family of the lowest ranks of the Spanish aristocracy whose head was full of enough delusions of grandeur to befit a king. Guerra had joined the expedition as an assistant to the now deceased Luis de Mendoza, who was not only the original captain of the Victoria but also the original treasurer of the fleet. Although he had tacitly taken his boss’s side during the Easter Mutiny, Guerra had not been an overly active participant in the machinations that wound up costing Mendoza his life. He had then benefited from Magellan’s decision to largely let bygones be bygones. After doing a modicum of time on the chain gang of mutineers, he was deemed rehabilitated to such an extent that he was allowed to take Mendoza’s place as the new fleet treasurer. In this capacity he was assigned to the officer staff of the San Antonio, the ship with the largest hold and therefore a natural place for the treasurer to be.

It was another crucial mistake on Magellan’s part. For, far from being reconciled to his captain general in his heart of hearts, Guerra remained an embittered soul, his aristocratic pride having been deeply affronted by the humiliation to which he had been subjected after the mutiny, the relative leniency of his punishment notwithstanding. He, more so than anyone aboard the San Antonio, was primed to respond to the sedition which Gomes whispered in his ear. Just to make sure the flower of treachery well and truly took root, Gomes offered to make him the new captain of the ship after Mesquita was deposed, declaring himself content to stay in the role of pilot. This was a temptation beyond reckoning for a popinjay like Gerónimo Guerra. Having committed himself to Gomes’s cause, he was instrumental in convincing his fellow officers of the necessity of a change of command.

On November 8, 1520, Gomes asked Mesquita, Guerra, and all of the other officers to join him on the quarterdeck of the ship; that he should be in a position to call such a meeting at all was as potent an illustration as any of just how far the status of the San Antonio’s rightful captain had sunk. Now Gomes made an explicit pitch for mutiny against Magellan, couching the call for betrayal, as is generally done in these cases, in the rhetoric of reason and wisdom. “We have been waiting here for two days,” he said, “with no sign of our companion vessels. It seems to me that there are only two possibilities: either they have been lost or our captain general has made it to the other side of the continent and sailed off without us. After all, he has been growing increasingly unstable ever since it became clear that the whole purpose of his expedition has been defeated. Yes, you heard me correctly. I say to you now as I have said to you before, gentlemen: Magellan’s expedition has long since proved a failure. The only sensible thing to do is — has long been, in fact — to sail back to Spain and inform our king that our expedition has failed despite our best efforts. There is no shame in that; nor will His Majesty in his boundless wisdom blame us for trying and failing where success was never in the cards. Yet Magellan’s megalomania prevents him from recognizing these self-evident truths. And we are the hostages of his mad ego.

“We must be his hostages no more!” Gomes suddenly thundered, bringing his fist down hard on the plotting table in front of him. “It is time to go home, gentlemen.”

The San Antonio may have been the largest ship in the fleet, but it was not a large space in the abstract; the ordinary crewmen heard this speech as well as any of the officers as it was being delivered up there on the open quarterdeck. They stared at their betters, rapt, wondering what would happen next. The onus was on Captain Mesquita to respond to an argument that was by no means uniformly illogical. For all that it was absurd to suggest that Magellan would have simply sailed off into the wild blue yonder without his biggest ship, or that all three of the other ships could have managed to get themselves sunk in these protected waters in the space of a week, the expedition really had failed already in its primary purpose by any sober accounting; no trader with a head on his shoulders was going to try to get to Asia by following a route that came this close to the very bottom of the world. Callow youth though he may have been, Mesquita was as aware of these things as anyone — and yet he wasn’t ready to betray his cousin because of them. Licking his lips, he stammered stubbornly that “the captain general has ordered us to await a rendezvous here. And this is what we must to do. We swore him an oath of loyalty!”

Gomes turned to the other officers. “And what are your opinions?” he asked. “Who among you is for going home? ” Suffice to say that for these men who had endured so many months of peril and privation Mesquita’s argument from principle made a poor riposte to Gomes’s practical logic. Averting their gazes from their rightful captain, they raised their hands one by one.

“This is mutiny!” cried Mesquita, shocked despite himself. There was a pregnant pause after that word rang out, as each of the other men was slapped in the face by the reality of what they were about to do, stated out loud at long last. But they knew that they had gone too far to turn back now.

As for the ordinary seamen of the San Antonio, they gave Mesquita no more support than they had the last time he had been overthrown. Now as then, all they could think about was the prospect of going home. Lest we be tempted to judge them too harshly, we should remember that this stood to become the fourth change in command to which their ship had been subjected since it had left Spain fourteen months ago, and that every single captain it had had on this voyage had been unqualified for the role and incompetent in it. Such chaos in the ranks of command does not tend to engender loyalty among the rank and file.

“The majority has spoken. I am afraid we must make you our prisoner,” said Gomes coolly to Mesquita. He pulled a dagger out of his boot. Mesquita, who carried no such equipment on his person, nevertheless lunged at Gomes brandishing only his fists. Gomes slashed viciously at Mesquita’s leg, and the two men tumbled to the deck, a whirling dervish of flying oaths and flailing limbs. Mesquita had more fight and strength in him than anyone had suspected. Somehow he wrested the dagger away from Gomes. His arm went up and then came down again, impaling Gomes’s hand on the wooden decking and wrenching a sharp cry of pain out of the normally self-possessed pilot. The other officers pulled the enraged young man off his enemy before he could raise that arm of his a second time and stab the traitor right through the heart.

Mesquita continued to struggle manfully as the officers fastened handcuffs around his wrists and fetters around his ankles. They dragged their wriggling, cursing burden below, to throw him down next to the other prisoner aboard the San Antonio, one of the two Tehuelche men whom Magellan had kidnapped from Puerto San Julián. As he was being borne away to the dank corner of the ship that was destined to be his home for months to come, Mesquita could hear Guerra saying that he was in command now. As soon as Gomes’s wound had been tended, he and this latest captain of the San Antonio — who was, needless to say, as incompetent as all of the ones who had come before — commenced guiding the ship back toward Bahía Posesión.

Just one day after the mutiny aboard the San Antonio and that ship’s consequent absconding from the rendezvous point, the Concepción arrived at that same spot. Captain Serrano was dismayed and alarmed to find no ship waiting for him there. Had the green Captain Mesquita run his vessel aground or fallen victim to a sudden williwaw? It seemed improbable with the experienced pilot Gomes aboard to assist him, but the fact of the ship’s absence remained. Serrano’s first impulse was to commence searching immediately in the direction the San Antonio was known to have sailed. But he soon thought better of it; if he didn’t return reasonably quickly, the Trinidad and Victoria were likely to begin searches of their own for not one but two missing vessels. The entire fleet would be left groping around blindly in this maze of fjords, channels, and bays. So, Serrano waited for 24 hours at the rendezvous point, just in case the San Antonio showed up. When it didn’t, he ordered a return to the Sardine River, to inform Magellan of the San Antonio’s disappearance. The captain general would, he was sure, begin an organized, systematic search then, using all three of the ships that were still at his disposal.

Little did he know as the Concepción raised anchor and moved off southward on November 10 that the San Antonio was afloat, intact, and sailing purposefully in the opposite direction. It passed through the Second Narrows, then through Bahía Felipe and the First Narrows and Bahía Posesión. After pausing there for a few days, waiting anxiously for favorable winds, it sailed out into the open azure vastness of the Atlantic Ocean on November 14. Although many perils doubtless still lay ahead of it, one saving grace danced in the head of every man aboard: the San Antonio’s bow was at long last pointed in the right direction. They were all going home. As for their former comrades and the leader to whom they had pledged loyalty fourteen months ago at Sanlúcar de Barrameda, Spain: they would just have to get on — or not — without them.

While these events had been costing him one quarter of his remaining fleet, the aforementioned leader had not been idle on the other side of the Brunswick Peninsula. Positively quivering with impatience to confirm that he really was getting close to the other side of the continent, Magellan asked his master-at-arms Gómez de Espinosa to take a longboat and reconnoiter ahead of the Trinidad and Victoria while the latter two vessels stayed at the Sardine River, fishing and awaiting the return of the Concepción and San Antonio.

So, laden with Espinosa and several of his hand-picked guards, with muskets and shot, and with enough food and water for several days, the longboat pushed off early in the morning. It proceeded northwest up the channel between the two islands which we know as Riesco and Santa Inés, whose imposing, almost vertical coastlines are perforated by tiny watery capillaries leading off from the main strait. The mountains crowning both islands made the men in the fragile little craft feel more than ever like mortal dwarfs cast adrift in a land of godly giants. Dolphins colored in the black and white pattern of European dairy cows frolicked happily in the water around them, leaping and plunging just a few feet away from the longboat’s hull, drenching the men with their spray. Like so many of the animals the sailors had met, these perfectly formed creatures of the sea evinced no fear of the ill-adapted, ill-smelling apes and their crude contraption of wood and canvas. Pity or mockery obviously struck  them as more appropriate reactions than fear.

At about noon on the second day out, Riesco Island on the starboard side petered out in a small cape surrounded by a handful of rocky islets. The cape was crowned by a high hill that looked like it should offer a superb view of the part of the strait that still lay ahead. One of Espinosa’s most reliable men, a fleet-footed Flemish fellow who went by the name of Roldán de Argot, offered to climb it. Upon receiving the master-at-arms’s assent, he waded ashore and set off. Once he had scrambled to the top, the view proved to be everything he could have wished for. The clouds fortuitously parted at just that moment, and he saw that the glittering strait below widened as it continued northwest. Here on this windy bluff, the air smelled of the open ocean to his seasoned sailor’s nose. Roldán hurried back down to tell his companions that he was as sure as a sailor could be that the end of the strait was not very far ahead. All the ships had to do was keep sailing in this direction. The narrowest part of the strait, and with it the worst navigational challenges, were already behind them.

That was good enough for Espinosa. The longboat returned to the Sardine River 72 hours after it had left. Magellan was enormously pleased; he praised the boat’s intrepid little crew far more fulsomely than was his wont.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t move on until he had reassembled his fleet. On November 13, there came bad news on that front, when the Concepción returned to the Sardine River alone to tell of the San Antonio’s mysterious absence. All further thoughts of reaching the far outlet of the strait would have to be suspended for the nonce, while the rest of the fleet endeavored to discover what had become of its largest single member. The Concepción did an about-face and sailed back the way it had come, accompanied this time by the Trinidad and Victoria. Upon reaching the rendezvous point north of Dawson Island three days later, Magellan was dismayed to still find no sign of the San Antonio there.

He sent the Victoria north, back to Bahía Posesión, to see if the missing ship had wound up there for some reason. Meanwhile the Trinidad and Concepción would scour the bay directly to the east and the channel leading southeast from there. The searchers would all reunite within eight days, at the usual spot north of Dawson Island. Hopefully, one of them would arrive accompanied by the San Antonio.

This didn’t happen, of course. The Victoria was on the right track, but the horse it pursued had already bolted Bahía Posesión long before it arrived there. Captain Barbosa of the Victoria sent a party ashore to set up a large wooden cross with a message for the San Antonio buried at its base, just in case the ship should turn up here later. He did the same on an islet in Bahía Felipe on his way back to the rendezvous point. The Trinidad and Concepción left more markers in the places they searched. But it was all to no avail. The San Antonio was gone forever. (The first of the markers would still be standing in January of 1535, when the Spanish explorer Simón de Alcazaba became the third man to lead a fleet through the Strait of Magellan. “We entered the strait,” he wrote in his journal, “and to the right we found a cross, very tall, with letters that told when it had been erected, and we saw that it was from when Magellan had passed by.”)

When the three ships met up and Magellan learned of their mutual failure to find any hide or hair of the San Antonio, he more than half suspected that its absence was down to malfeasance rather than accident. For if the ship had been destroyed, there ought to have been some trace of it or its crew left behind in these constricted waterways. It wouldn’t have disappeared without a trace — not unless it had been deliberately sailed away. On the one hand, the latter scenario would at least mean that the 50-odd men aboard the ship were still alive. On the other, it would mean that they were traitors who had committed the second outright mutiny of the expedition — and that this mutiny had been, unlike the first one, a success.

Whatever the reason for it, the loss of the San Antonio was a devastating blow, much more so than the loss of the little Santiago had been. Not only had the San Antonio been the biggest ship in the fleet, but it had been possessed of the most cavernous hold of any of the ships in relation to the size of its crew. If the ships that remained should find themselves on the open ocean for another lengthy spell, in other words, privation would give way to starvation that much more quickly without the San Antonio sailing alongside them. Then, too, despite his quarrelsome personality, Estevão Gomes had been treated by Magellan and the other captains as the head pilot of the fleet for good reason: he had been simply the best single navigator on the expedition. That distinction would now fall to João Lopes Carvalho of the Concepción, who was by no means a poor pilot in his own right, but a poor substitute for Gomes all the same.

Magellan was thrown into an uncharacteristic spasm of self-doubt by all of this. Already justifiably worried about how some of his decisions would be regarded back in Spain — most obviously, the fates he had meted out to Luis de Mendoza, Gasper de Quesada, and Juan de Cartagena, all appointees of the powerful Bishop Fonseca — he now felt the need to get something down in writing before he took the fleet further into the unknown. He sent a formal letter to the captain, pilot, and ship’s master of each of the three vessels that were still at his disposal. Pronouncing himself “a man who never despised the advice and opinions of others” — some might have quibbled with that claim — he wrote that “I myself beg you and order you to write down your opinions, each one individually, stating the reasons why we should continue onward or else turn back, and showing no respect for anything that may prevent you from telling the truth. Being aware of those reasons and opinions, I will then say mine, and my willingness to conclude what should be done.”

This prevaricating message made an odd contrast to the Magellan the officers had known over the past fourteen months, that stalwart soldier who had paced the Trinidad’s quarterdeck with fire in his eyes and iron in his voice. For once, though, they became the ones to lift him out of his doldrums rather than the other way around. To a man, each of the officers recommended pressing on; they had come much too far and endured much too much to stop now. This was the one silver lining in the loss of the San Antonio, a ship which had been a breeding ground for sedition and generalized bad vibes from first to last. With its departure from the scene, everyone was finally more or less on the same page.

While these discussions had been taking place, the diminished fleet had been making its way back to the Sardine River and then beyond. Onward it sailed, beyond even the cape from which Roldán de Argot had glimpsed a bright future when the three ships of the fleet were still believed to be four. The water flowing past the ships’ hulls took on a different quality, the truncated chop of an inland waterway giving way to the long, stately swells of an ocean. The land to either side changed in character as well, the mountain slopes with their green trees and white snow giving way to sharp ribs of gray granite where vegetation grew only in the shadowy clefts. The men felt like they were sailing between bones, like they were parasites on the skeleton of some enormous, long-deceased primordial beast.

At dusk on November 28, 1520, the land to port fell away completely. A vista of shimmering cobalt blue stretched away as far as one could see. From his post on the flagship’s quarterdeck, Magellan watched as the great orange disc of the Sun slowly descended into the gloaming depths of a new ocean. Pigafetta would later insist that he saw tears brimming in the gruff old soldier’s eyes at this moment. These waters which he had been trying to find a way to enter for so long looked now so bountiful and beneficent, so good and peaceful to Magellan’s tired gaze that he chose the last of these adjectives for their name. He called the body of water he saw before him the Mar Pacifico: the “Peaceful Sea.”

Alas, the torments that lay ahead for him and his men on these waters would turn that appellation into the cruelest of ironies.

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