The Voyage of Magellan

July 31 – September 27, 1521

Where to now? That was the question facing the remnant of Ferdinand Magellan’s great enterprise as it left behind a colossal missed opportunity in Brunei. Problems pressed upon the surviving sailors from every side. The coastline of Borneo was strewn with treacherous reefs whose location and extent they didn’t know it at all, and they no longer had their two Bruneian guides to help them navigate it. Because Captain General Carvalho had made no serious effort to restock the holds during the sojourn in Brunei, being content just to eat the fine meals the Bruneians had served up each day, the supplies of food were running alarmingly low. Then, too, both ships were in more need than ever of a refit; their hulls were constantly springing fresh leaks. A day would come, everyone knew, when one of those leaks would prove too violent to stop with crude plugs made from  timber and pitch; just like that, the two remaining ships would be reduced to one. Like so many of the other problems, the blame for this one fell squarely on the shoulders of Carvalho. His men had told him over and over that the condition of the ships was becoming untenable, yet he hadn’t seen fit to do anything about it. They were all living with the consequences of that failure now. Almost worse than the fear of sinking was the ever-increasing sense of aimlessness that stemmed from Carvalho’s poor leadership, the sense of wandering just for the sake of wandering.

In that spirit, Carvalho ordered a return to Palawan, where life had been pretty good for a little while. Having made that decision, he largely disappeared from view, preferring to spend the vast majority of his time in his cabin with the three nubile playmates he had seized from the Filipino junk. The girls scarcely emerged from the cabin at all. On the rare occasions when they did do so, Carvalho kept them under a watchful eye, guarding them like the rare and sought-after treasures they were. Of course, he was feeding them all the while on his ship’s dwindling stock of foodstuffs. Needless to say, his behavior did nothing to endear him to his men.

As Magellan could have told his unworthy successor, discontent that is unchecked by harsh discipline leads invariably to sloppiness. This is exactly what happened aboard Carvalho’s flagship. Watches were missed; lookouts fell asleep at their posts; ropes were improperly tied. At sea, small mistakes could become big ones with disarming speed. One evening a sailor who had been dispatched to the hold to gather some nails set a lit candle down casually atop a barrel and forgot about it. Some time later, one of his shipmates on deck heard coming up from below the same sound that had presaged the death of the Concepción: the sharp, unmistakable hiss of a gunpowder fuse burning. He ran below decks in search of the source of the sound. It turned out that the barrel on which the candle had been left was half full of gunpowder. The candle had fallen over under the motion of the waves, and some of the explosive stuff that had been trapped in the seams and cracks of the wood had sputtered into a fitful but horribly hazardous life. The sailor raised a cry. He and some of the comrades who answered his call doused the bomb in the offing under several barrels of seawater.

When a report of the incident was brought to Carvalho, he couldn’t be bothered to follow up on it. So, some of the sailors took it upon themselves to administer a beating to the man who had left the candle behind. With each passing day, they were becoming less a crew and more an unruly rabble.

The ships’ progress northward was slow, partly because the winds were not blowing favorably to their purpose, partly because the Trinidad was so poorly handled by its rudderless stewards. By a stroke of luck, they avoided the reefs that divide Borneo from the Philippines. But on the early morning of August 15, 1521, when they were steering around the little Philippine island that we know as Balabac, off the southernmost tip of Palawan, the god of the sea’s patience with the sailors’ casual, disrespectful incompetence ran out. The men aboard heard a muffled thump as the Trinidad, which had chosen to cut the corner close while the Victoria took a more prudent line further out to sea, scraped its keel on a shoal. Several of the hull’s dried-out planks splintered, and a torrent of water rushed into the hold.

The panicked crew ran to wake Carvalho. They found him lying in a tangle of female limbs, dumb drunk on one of the last barrels of the potent Bruneian rice wine. (In contrast to the food, this he had chosen to stockpile for a rainy day, albeit for himself alone.) He could scarcely stand up.

Necessity is often the mother of courage as well as invention. Martín Méndez, the mild-mannered purser who had recently become a buccaneer at the head of a boarding party at the behest of his captain general, jumped into the fray in his stead a second time now. One look told him that the hole in the bottom of the hull was far too big to stop. The only chance, he realized, was to beach the ship before it sank. He shouted orders to that effect — orders which the sailors, desperate to be led, obeyed without hesitation. Aboard the Victoria, Captain Espinosa and his pilot Juan Sebastián Elcano, who happened to be on the quarterdeck together to effect a changing of the watch, were surprised to see the Trinidad sheer suddenly toward land. Recognizing that something must be badly amiss, they lowered sails, dropped anchor, and waited for the full light of day before following suit.

They found the flagship perched in the border zone between sea and land like a stray piece of driftwood, its crew splashing around it in the knee-high water, doing their somewhat ineffectual best to drag it further ashore, out of the reach of the tide. Espinosa dispatched most of his own crew in the Victoria’s longboat and launch to lend a hand. The cooler heads of the new arrivals prevailed; the combined force managed to move the vessel beyond the waterline by burying its anchor firmly in the earth and turning the capstan. Inch by painful inch, the ship was dragged to safety in this way. It seemed that the place where the sailors would conduct the much-discussed refits had been selected for them, whether they liked it or not. It was just as well; the food on the two ships had just about run out completely.

When the backbreaking labor of securing the Trinidad in the bosom of the land was finished, Espinosa and Elcano sat together under a coconut tree, drinking the milk of its fruits and gazing out in companionable silence at the sailors who sat or lay all around them, utterly exhausted. These two men had been seeing a lot of one another since their time spent as guests or hostages of the sultan of Brunei, had in fact become unexpected friends. Espinosa, who had once been inclined to judge Elcano harshly indeed for taking the wrong side in the Easter Mutiny, was now more inclined to let bygones be bygones; there simply weren’t enough good officers left to hold grudges against any of them, he thought. Espinosa hacked another coconut in twain with his dagger and poured the thick liquid inside into two wooden cups. He passed one of them to Elcano. “This cannot be allowed to continue,” he said.

“What do you mean?” asked Elcano cautiously.

“This… man cannot be allowed to continue as captain general. He will be the death or disgrace of us all, one way or the other. It is a miracle that we saved the Trinidad today. God will not deliver us from our own foolishness next time. I fear we have to act before there can be a next time.”

The sentiment was not far out of line with what most of the sailors were probably thinking at that moment. Nevertheless, it was stunning to hear voiced aloud, given the source. Insubordination — no, call it what it was: mutiny! — had always been anathema to the staunch old soldier. Elcano had been sure that his friend would follow the chain of command right down to the bottom of the ocean if necessary. “I agree,” he said now, still half suspecting a trap. “But what do we do about it? Carvalho and I are the only experienced navigators left. We cannot afford to… lose his services,” he finished delicately.

“Perhaps we won’t have to,” Espinosa answered. Over the next couple of hours, this most unlikely pair of conspirators hatched the latest plot against a captain general of the expedition. Midway through their discussions, Elcano walked down to the beach to fetch Martín Méndez, the recent savior of the Trinidad. Back in the bower of intrigue under the coconut tree, Espinosa told the pudgy-faced fellow that they had been impressed by the way he had stepped up in the past weeks; this caused him to almost visibly swell up with pride. Then Espinosa told the purser what he and Elcano had been discussing, and asked him with no further ado to join their plot. Méndez looked grave, as well he ought to in the presence of such a proposal, but he didn’t reject the overture. After a long moment of thought, he nodded in acquiescence. With that, the trio set off to see their mutiny through.

They found Carvalho dozing in another shady spot, surrounded by the husks of coconuts and by his harem. Not quite managing to suppress a look of disgust, Espinosa spoke with his habitual clipped authority. “Captain General Carvalho!” he said. “We must talk.”

Opening one lazy eye, Carvalho tried to wave him away like one of the flies buzzing around the remains of his repast. “Later,” he muttered. “There will be plenty of time later…”

“Now, Captain General,” persisted Espinosa. “It must be now. We must speak to you… alone.” This he said whilst glancing pointedly at the three Filipino girls.

So, grumbling and yawning, Carvalho told his harem to stay put and allowed himself to be led deeper into the jungle. Espinosa put the case to him simply and directly. “Your command of the expedition has not been a success,” he said. “We must make a change.”

Carvalho tried to bluster. “On whose recognizance would you do so?” he demanded. “Are you contemplating mutiny?”

“On my own recognizance, and that of my two fellow officers here,” answered Espinosa. “We are prepared to answer a charge of mutiny before a court of law in Spain, if we should be fortunate enough to return there and if you wish to press the case.” At this, Elcano and Méndez blanched a little — they knew well what the punishment was for a conviction of mutiny — but they said nothing while Espinosa continued. “The men you purport to command have no loyalty to you left. You have squandered it. If we go to them with our proposal, it will go hard for you. But you served the expedition well enough before you became its captain general, so we would like to offer you an alternative.”

Even Espinosa was surprised at how quickly Carvalho wilted after he heard those words. He accepted the plan that the mutineers described to him more or less unaltered. He would be demoted back to the mere pilot of the Trinidad,  and he would give up his harem. In return, he would be spared the prospect of being executed or marooned, one or the other of which would surely be his fate if the mutiny had to be carried out by force. As a sop to make it easier for him to go along with the plan, the mutineers politely declined to mention the money and treasure he had stolen from the Filipino junk and secreted away somewhere.

Only one thing remained to be done before the latest revamping of the chain of command was announced to the sailors. Rousing Antonio Pigafetta from his rest elsewhere on the beach, Espinosa asked the Italian to help him speak with the three Filipino girls.

After sunset that evening, Episnosa, Pigafetta, and a few hand-picked sailors moved one of the longboats to a secluded stretch of beach, well away from the rest of their shipmates. They brought the girls down to the boat by a circuitous route through the jungle and shoved off again. They then sailed north until they reached the southern tip of the island of Palawan proper, whence the girls had expressed confidence that they could fend for themselves, could reach one of the settlements situated a little further north on the big island. Whether they were truly so confident, or just wanted to be out of the clutches of these bizarre strangers as quickly as possible, was open to debate. Espinosa, for his part, was motivated more by practicalities than chivalry: he knew well how destabilizing the presence of a few females could be for an all-male crew, as had Magellan before him. He wanted no part of the jealousy and chaos that inevitably resulted. The farewells between the European men and the Filipino girls were not tearful.

When the longboat returned to Balabac not quite 24 hours after leaving the island, Espinosa saw that nothing much had changed there. The sailors were still lounging about, munching coconuts and not accomplishing much of anything. That was about to change, he vowed.

Striding ashore, Espinosa gathered the sailors to him with several sharp hand claps and a booming shout. Elcano, Méndez, and a reluctant Carvalho  joined him at the center of an expectant circle of bearded faces. Without preamble, Espinosa explained to them the new facts of life. Carvalho had decided to step down as captain general of the expedition and captain of the Trinidad; they all owed him a debt of gratitude for agreeing to serve “temporarily” in those roles — another polite fiction — when the shock of Magellan’s death and the Cebu City Massacre were still fresh. Espinosa himself would now take over command of the Trinidad, while Elcano would finally be granted the prize he had been seeking for months: he would step up to take over the Victoria. The biggest gasp was elicited when Espinosa named the new overall captain general: none other than Martín Méndez. Ever honor conscious, Espinosa had concluded that he could countenance mutiny only if he didn’t benefit too directly — that is to say, by taking the most prestigious title that was up for grabs for himself.

In many circumstances, this command structure would have been disastrous; despite his recent flashes of courage, Méndez was more deferential than assertive by nature, which is not usually the best quality for a leader. In this case, however, the tripartite command would work out surprisingly well. Existential decisions would tend to fall to Espinosa, nautical ones to Elcano, and day-to-day ones to Méndez, thus maximizing each man’s strengths.

Even more remarkably, Carvalho would slip back into his old role as the Trinidad’s pilot fairly smoothly, would resume doing a pretty good job of it. He almost seemed to be relieved to have been relieved of command. Somewhere deep down, he seemed to realize that he was more suited for some roles, less suited for others.

The sailors too responded positively to the changes, even though said changes made their lives infinitely less comfortable in the immediate sense. The morning after the reshuffling was announced, they were set to the task of re-caulking the hull of the Trinidad. Then, once that was done and the beached flagship had been re-floated, they had to drag the Victoria out of the water and do the same to it. It took them some 40 days in all — long, hard days of labor that lasted from sunup to sunset, the hardest they had worked since the last time they had refit the ships back in Puerto San Julián. Yet there was little grumbling as they went about it. They were happy to be led properly once again, happy to feel that those above them had all of their best interests at heart. Discipline returned to the men who sailed on the Trinidad; the rabble became a crew again.

The island on which they lived and worked appeared to have no human inhabitants at all. What it did have was much better in the eyes of the hungry sailors: roaming packs of pig-like animals, with elongated proboscises that made them look like small elephants. Here a third of a world away from Puerto San Julián, the men made good use of some of the hunting tricks that the Tehuelche had taught them. The strange pigs weren’t easy to corner and kill, but they yielded many pounds of good meat if one could do so, providing a welcome addition to the sailors’ staple diet of coconuts.

The same was true of the giant clams and turtles that could sometimes be seen on the beach; in his journal, Pigafetta claimed to have found one of the former that weighed 20 pounds (9 kilograms), one of the latter that weighed fully 42 pounds (19 kilograms), both sans shells. Less appetizing and more threatening were the crocodiles that lurked in ponds and tidal pools, primordial dragons whose cruel beady eyes could freeze the bravest sailor’s blood before he even saw the Scylla-like jaws, with their “triple row of fangs, thickset, packed tight — and armed to the hilt with black death!” Even the curious Pigafetta kept his distance from these scaly monsters.

Luckily for him, there were plenty of other  uncanny creatures to examined. With their fishing lines, the men caught “a kind of fish with a head like that of a pig, and which had two horns,” Pigafetta wrote in his journal. “Its body was all covered with bone, and on its back it had a kind of saddle.”

Pigafetta thought he discovered “certain trees, the leaves of which, when they fall, are animated, and walk. I kept one leaf for nine days in a box. When I opened it, the leaf went round the box. I believe they live upon air.” What he had really found were insects that had evolved to mimic leaves. There are many varieties of such insects in the Philippines, none of which can eat air. Lest we be tempted to mock him for his naïveté, we should remember that he and his shipmates were cast into a new world of wonders as remote from their experience as anything Odysseus encountered on his mythical voyage. Our own blasé attitude toward the natural world stems from the fact that it has mostly been cataloged by now, and thereby consigned to the category of the tried and true and pedestrian. In some ways, Pigafetta had the advantage of us, to be able to see these creatures for the wonders they were then and remain today. A crocodile is less remarkable to us than a dragon out of Medieval storybooks only because the one has been proven to exist, while the other has not.

September 20, 1521, marked the two-year anniversary of the expedition’s departure from Spain. The men passed it like any other day on Balabac. The end of their labors was in sight; the Trinidad was ready to go, riding at anchor offshore once again, while the Victoria was fast returning to a seaworthy state there on the beach. The store of pitch which had been loaded so long ago in the Canary Islands was almost used up by now. So be it: everyone hoped and prayed that this would be the last such refit they would need to carry out on this endless voyage.

Espinosa, Elcano, and Méndez talked intensively with one another over the course of these final days on Balabac. The question of where to go next — of what should be the purpose of their remnant of a fleet after all that had already transpired — loomed as large for them as it had for Carvalho. But they were less inclined to dodge the question.

By September 26, the Victoria too had been re-floated, and both ships’ holds had been stocked with as many coconuts as could be gathered. On that day, the triumvirate in charge called the sailors to gather around them again. As usual, Espinosa spoke for his ostensible peers at the head of the expedition. Like Magellan before him, he was normally a taciturn man, sometimes infuriatingly so. But also like Magellan, his long silences gave his words extra weight when he did deign to speak.

“Thank you for your work to make our ships seaworthy again,” he said. “God willing, this was the last refit that will be required on this voyage which has proved so much longer and harder than any of us anticipated.

“I know you have all been thinking about what the next stage in that voyage should be. We have been doing the same. One option is to make for home right away, by sailing south and then west. Doing so would be perilous. We would have to trust in God to clear our path of the Portuguese ships that could make life very, very unpleasant for us. And yet sailing that way at some point is unavoidable. I think we can all agree that trying to cross the expanse to the east for a second time is not an option.

“I put it to you, though, that the time may not yet be right to test our luck and God’s grace to the west. The fact is that we have still not accomplished the task we set out to two years ago: we have still not found the Spice Islands. Based upon everything our pilots know about the geography of this part of the world, combined with what we have been able to glean from the natives we have met, we believe that those islands lie not too far to our east. If we could reach them before turning for home, we would be able to report to our holy sovereign in Spain that our mission was a success, despite all the tribulations we have suffered over its course. Additionally, we would be able to return with holds full of cloves, the profits from the selling of which we would all share in. It seems to me and my two partners in command that, if we must brave the Portuguese, it is better to do so knowing that we can each expect the gratitude of our king and a personal windfall if God sees fit to guide us through. We therefore propose that we sail east from this place, to find the Spice Islands at long last and bring honor to ourselves and to our lost and lamented Captain General Magellan. Only then will we make for Spain. What say you?”

The sailors responded with lusty hurrahs all around. The truth was that no one was looking forward to the passage through Portuguese waters. They were happy to defer their homecoming for a little while longer if it also meant deferring that reckoning with luck and fate. And the potential profits that would stem from a visit to the Spice Islands were indeed nothing to sneeze at.

Thus when the Trinidad and Victoria raised anchor and set off the very next day, they pointed their bows eastward. It was to be the Spice Islands for the Magellan expedition after all.

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