The Voyage of Magellan

December 18, 1521 – February 8, 1522

The first leg of the long trip home was a dud.

As the Victoria was moving off smartly toward the mouth of Tidore’s harbor, the sailors on the poop deck called urgently down to Captain Elcano on the quarterdeck, pointing behind them as they did so. Rushing up to their perch on the stern to find out what was the matter, Elcano saw the Trinidad wallowing sickeningly on the water well behind the Victoria; it looked to be listing sharply to starboard. While he watched, the ship turned about clumsily until its bow was pointed at the shore. It then proceeded to beach itself there like a swollen, hapless whale. The clashing gongs and cymbals of the Moluccans who had been celebrating the departure of their new friends petered out raggedly, giving way to an anticlimactic silence. This wasn’t at all what they had expected to happen.

Bringing his own ship as close as he dared to the Trinidad, Elcano punctured the pregnant pause. “What is your condition?” he shouted.

“It appears we have a sprung a leak!” came the rather un-nautical reply from Captain Espinosa, that soldier whom necessity had placed in charge of the vessel. Elcano exchanged grim glances with his crew. This was anything but an auspicious way to begin the journey of halfway around the world back to Spain. As they continued to watch, the Trinidad settled itself comfortably on the sandy bed under its keel with an audible sigh of gurgling water. The tired old ship clearly had no intention of going anywhere anytime soon.

Sultan Mansur was also hovering nearby in his royal boat, trying to figure out what on earth was going on. Antonio Pigafetta explained to him from the deck of the Trinidad as best he could. His words came not without a strong tinge of embarrassment; if the Moluccans had still been tempted to believe that these aliens among them were omnipotent, they had been rudely disabused of that notion now.

Yet the sultan remained a true friend to them, the very soul of helpfulness. He called for a team of his best divers to conduct an inspection of the Trinidad’s hull that the European sailors could never have managed so quickly and thoroughly on their own. Alas, the inspection only confirmed the truth that the sailors had already anticipated: the weakened starboard side of the hull had literally burst open at the seams, unable to cope with the weight and size of the cargo of cloves that had been stuffed into the ship’s hold by the greedy mariners. The only silver lining was that the ship was so heavily weighted down that there was little risk of it being dragged out to sea and lost with the tide now that it was sunk in shallow water.

The day of grand leave-taking thus turned into a damp squib. For the first time during their visit to Tidore, the entire crew of the Trinidad slept ashore that night. Their lives were now entirely in the hands of Sultan Mansur. Blessedly, he did not betray their trust as King Humabon had done.

Instead of the first full day at sea of the voyage home, December 19 became a day of hard decisions here on Tidore. In a telling sign of how much the power dynamics had changed since Magellan had lorded it over the Filipinos of Cebu, the officers allowed the sultan and some of his advisors to join their conference on the porch of a guesthouse in his city; Pigafetta or Pedro Alfonso translated for the Moluccans intermittently.

As usual when it came to existential matters, Espinosa took the lead. The first question to be settled was whether the Trinidad could be repaired and re-floated at all. The consensus the assemblage arrived at was that, although the ship would probably be written off as not worth the trouble if they were in a European port, it ought to be just possible, given enough time and effort. The sultan jumped in here to pledge 225 of his own men for as long as they were needed to accomplish the herculean task. Pigafetta would write in his journal that night that he and his comrades were “moved to tears” by this offer. We have no reason to suspect him of exaggeration; the sultan really was displaying extraordinary generosity toward his guests when all of the leverage was on his side.

Still, the harsh reality remained that the salvage operation would take weeks if not months even with such a huge crew of helpers, and a Portuguese fleet might already be on its way to Tidore even as they spoke. As we have seen, nobody worried about such a development more than Gómez de Espinosa. Out of the blue, he came with another of his bold proposals, of the kind that invariably caused everyone to recoil until they had taken a moment to realize that it was actually the only reasonable choice. “We still have one seaworthy vessel,” he said. “We cannot all fit aboard the Victoria, but we can can send that ship on its way now. In fact, one ship alone may have a better chance of slipping past the Portuguese. If God wills it and the Portuguese do not come here to Tidore before the Trinidad is ready to sail again, the rest of us can follow when the repairs to our ship are finished.” To split the expedition now, after having gone through so much together, was a pleasant thought to none of the officers. But they gave way one by one to the cold logic of Espinosa’s plan.

But who would go and who would stay? On this question, Espinosa was firm; he knew well the fevered, ugly scramble for places aboard the departing Victoria that would ensue if he opened that door the slightest bit. “The two ships’ complements remain as they are,” he said. “That is the only fair way. I will of course set the example by staying here with the Trinidad.”

He made just two exceptions. Protocol demanded that the captain general of the expedition as a whole should be on the ship which had the best chance of returning home. That man was, of course, Martín Méndez, even if he held that title in no more than a ceremonial sense. (Not that Espinosa said this quiet part out loud.)

As for the other exception: “I believe we should transfer Señor Pigafetta to the Victoria,” proclaimed Espinosa. “His talent for language may be needed on the way home. Our new shipmate Señor Alfonso is well-equipped to serve us here as translator.” Alfonso’s face fell at these words; he had obviously been hoping that he would be the translator who sailed with the Victoria. And to be fair, he was in more danger than anyone should the Portuguese come, being not just an agent of a rival empire but a traitor to his own king to boot. Nonetheless, it was duly agreed that Alfonso would stay and Pigafetta would go. The indefatigable Italian, who had been a fixture aboard the Trinidad through all the trials and tribulations of the past two years and three months, was to make his new home the Victoria. He had mixed feelings about the move, but he knew Espinosa too well to bother protesting.

The surviving sailors numbered exactly 100 at that point. There were 47 in all who were to go, 53 who must stay and hope against hope that their ship could be repaired before a Portuguese sail appeared on the horizon. What with every day’s delay being a fresh roll of the dice in the eyes of Espinosa, the officer’s conclave set the Victoria’s new date of departure for the day after tomorrow: December 21, 1521.

This leave-taking was not attended with so much pomp and circumstance as the last, abortive one had been. Two Moluccan pilots who knew these waters well came aboard to guide the ship on the first stage of its journey, as did a vizier of Sultan Mansur, who was to serve the Victoria in the capacity of his liege’s official emissary as long as it remained within Moluccan waters. But there was no honor guard, no bands or cheering bystanders. Given that the Trinidad and its crew were staying here for the time being, the occasion lacked its former air of finality.

In lieu of the native honor guard, Espinosa led much of the crew of the Trinidad well out to sea beside their departing comrades in their own beached vessel’s launch and longboat. Those of them who could write had handed over letters for their loved ones back home; most of those who could not had dictated missives to those who could. With waves, cheers, and a fair quantity of tears, the two smaller boats turned away from the Victoria at long last to return to Tidore, their island prison for the time being. “God willing, we will see you again in Seville!” shouted Espinosa in parting. The sailors on both sides of the divide tried to take his optimistic goodbye to heart, but all knew well that their chances of ever seeing again their comrades in travel and adventure and privation and battle were doubtful. A single shared odyssey had become two separate ones.

The Victoria had passed the entire voyage to date in the shadow of the bigger, better-equipped Trinidad, which had taken the lead in all things. The Trinidad’s quarterdeck had been the place where all of the vital meetings had been held, and the Trinidad had been the ship whose cannons had boomed to mark each new momentous event, while its unarmed companion vessels had merely tagged along in support. Now, though, a twist of fate had made the Victoria rather than the Trinidad the expedition’s best — and perhaps last — chance to be declared at least a symbolic success, despite all of the losses and follies and the crushing failure to discover the convenient westward superhighway to Asia that Ferdinand Magellan had dreamed of. The men aboard the ship — these 47 of the 239 who had left Spain — had been given a rare opportunity as well as a crushing responsibility.

No one felt the burden of a sacred trust more than Captain Elcano as he waved a last farewell to Espinosa, the unlikely friend to whose good sense and sheer force of will he owed this chance to go home. It was all up to him now; Martín Méndez was a useful and likable fellow in his way, but everyone aboard the Victoria knew who would really call the shots from here on. Elcano had lived through quite the personal transformation in these recent months, from failed, scorned mutineer to the final arbiter of the fates of 47 souls. It was quite probable that his decisions would render the ultimate verdict on Magellan’s great enterprise, would determine whether and how that man was remembered in the annals of history — a strange position for a man who had once taken up arms against Magellan to find himself in. Still, he had gotten what he had lobbied for for so long after his disgrace in Puerto San Julián: he had a ship to command, and with it the opportunity to leave his own mark on history, however little remembered his own  name was destined to be in comparison with that of his former captain general.

Elcano intended to stick to a plan that had been formulated when the officers had believed that two ships rather than one would be sailing from Tidore this December. With the help of the Moluccan pilots, the Victoria would pick its way south through the heart of Maluku to an island known as Timor. There it would stop to re-provision one more time and to off-load those who wouldn’t be continuing on toward Europe. And then would come the daring, terrifying part of the plan. In order to avoid the Portuguese in the established sea lanes in the northern part of the Indian Ocean, the Victoria would sail more than 3700 miles (6000 kilometers) southwest from Timor, through a part of that ocean that no European had ever entered before. Only once it reached a latitude of about 40 degrees south — below the southern tip of Africa — would it turn due west. It would pass underneath that continent, and only then turn north for the last leg of the voyage back to Spain. Needless to say, the route was fraught with uncertainty; it entailed sailing fully one-quarter of the way around the world in completely unknown waters.

At the moment, though, most of the sailors preferred not to think about the difficulties that might still lie ahead of them. Their Moluccan guides, who were thrilled to have been given this opportunity to hitch a ride with the fascinating aliens, charted a somewhat rambling course through their archipelago, one to which the sailors weren’t overly inclined to object. Really, what was there to object to? The weather was beautiful, the sailing was fine, everyone they met was friendly, and they had more than enough good food to eat. Better to enjoy the present than to worry about the future. In a bid to make said present last as long as possible, Elcano allowed his ship to drop anchor at night whenever the water was shallow enough to permit it.

They soon crossed the Equator to enter the Southern Hemisphere for the first time in more than ten eventful months. The vizier of Sultan Sansur seemed to have boundless authority over the more primitive, non-Muslim tribes that the Victoria met as it traveled further south. The precise nature and source of his authority was one of the many things that would forever remain a mystery to these tourists in a whole different world.

Elcano arranged with his ever-accommodating guides a stop at the island of Buru to celebrate the expedition’s third Christmas since leaving Spain. It proved as enjoyable a holiday as the first one in Rio de Janeiro. For here like there, the islanders provided a feast fit for the gods, at the behest of the vizier who had such a strange power over them.

The first day of 1522 saw the Victoria passing into the Bandu Sea, the largest body of open water that it had yet encountered in Maluku. Shortly after, the pleasure-cruise atmosphere came to an abrupt end, when a series of squalls blew up around the ship. These were nowhere near as fierce as some of the storms the fleet had braved earlier, but the Victoria, being more heavily laden now than at any earlier point in its journey, was less well-equipped to withstand them than ever before. Everyone aboard got an education — or a reeducation — in just what it meant to face strong winds in a sailing ship that was weighted down to the very edge of seaworthiness. The Victoria wanted to shove its way through the waves rather than riding on top of them. Sheets of water swept right over its deck and into the overstuffed cargo hold, settling in the narrow cracks between the stacked crates of spices and burdening the vessel that much more. Thus did weather which might have been seen as little more than an inconvenience a couple of months earlier become an unnervingly close-run thing. No one managed to do more than doze during the worst several days; it was like trying to sleep atop a bucking bronco under a waterfall. Unable to go below for shelter because the hold was so stuffed with cloves, those men not on duty huddled miserably in the bottoms of the launch and the longboat, both of which had been stowed on deck until the inclement weather passed. They covered their pitiful sanctuaries with swaths of canvas to try to keep the water out, but it invariably found its way inside anyway; the sodden sailors had to periodically climb out of their hidey-holes to bail out their bunks.

Fortunately, the squalls did blow the Victoria in basically the right direction. With its hull by now submerged almost to the top of the gunwales under the weight of cloves and accumulated seawater, the ship came on January 10 to an island whose name Pigafetta transcribed as “Mallua”; we know it today as Alor. Elcano ordered an emergency stop here, to assess the situation and drain the water out of the hold. The Victoria’s trip home had started little more auspiciously than that of the Trinidad.

It would get still worse. The sailors who inspected the hull found that some of the planking was beginning to split  in much the same ominous way as that of the Trinidad before the abortive departure from Tidore. Knowing that he had no real choice in the matter, Elcano directed his men to pull the Victoria partially out of the water using the capstan, and then to commence a partial refit of the hull, using the timber and pitch that Sultan Mansur had so helpfully provided. Elcano also made an even harder but equally unavoidable decision: he ordered that almost half of the precious cargo of spice be unloaded and left sitting there on the beach like so much flotsam. For there was simply no way the Victoria was going to complete the journey before it in its present burdened state; its prospects were doubtful enough when it wasn’t plowing through the water like a pregnant sow. It was a painful blow for everyone, but no one argued — not after what they had all just been through in only moderately stormy weather.

This island had human inhabitants, who proved the rule of primitiveness increasing the further south one ventured in Maluku. Frustrated and annoyed as they were, the sailors were not in the mood for diplomacy. Thankfully, the islanders were as submissive in their behavior toward the interlopers on their beach as they were savage in appearance. Even Antonio Pigafetta, normally so open-minded and curious, wrote about them in his journal with an unabashed contempt that is seldom evident there.

The inhabitants of this island are savages, and more beasts than men. They eat human flesh. They go naked, except the usual piece of bark to cover their natural parts. But when they go to fight, they wear on the back, the breast, and the flanks pieces of buffalo hide, ornamented with shells and boars’ tusks, and tails of goat skins hanging before and behind. They wear the hair raised high up by means of cane combs with long teeth, which go through it. They wrap up their beards with leaves and enclose them in cases or tubes of reed, a thing which seemed to us very ridiculous. In one word, these were the ugliest men we had seen…

On January 25, the Victoria was pronounced as ready as it could be, and left Alor in a vastly more seaworthy state than the one it had arrived in. The sailors watched sadly as the abandoned chests of cloves that represented a fortune back in Europe were broken open and tossed about by islanders who had emerged onto the beach just as soon as the Europeans had left it.

The sailors’ mood soon picked up, however, now that they were underway again, and in a ship that felt positively sprightly in comparison to before, one which again had space for sleeping below decks. The big island of Timor, their planned point of departure for the Indian Ocean crossing, lay just to the south of Alor. It would have been hard for them to miss even if they hadn’t had guides to take them there. The weather had turned balmy and nonthreatening again, such that much of the old pleasure-cruise atmosphere returned. The Victoria meandered westward along the northern coast of Timor more casually than ever, its crew dreading more than ever the day when they would arrive at the western tip of the island and be forced to contemplate the utterly unknown watery reaches that lay between Maluku and Africa. They stopped frequently at settlements along the coast to stock up on provisions for the trip ahead and draw this stage of their journey out that much more. They were amazed to observe that, even this far south of Tidore, the vizier still seemed to have an almost magical power over the people they encountered.

His good humor restored, Pigafetta occupied himself quizzing the guides about this quarter of the world. He collected a long string of improbable anecdotes and tall tales, which he recorded in his journal as credulously as ever Marco Polo had done. He was told that when a man died on the island of Java, his wife was expected to submit to being burned alive on the same pyre as her husband’s body. He was told that the Javanese men adorned their penises with bells, which their women loved to hear jingle as they climaxed. He was told that there was a tribe of women on Java who killed any man they encountered; they were impregnated by the wind, but killed any male babies that resulted from these unions. He was told that there were birds in the South China Sea who were so large that they could carry a buffalo or even an elephant away to their nests. He was told that the island on which these birds lived was surrounded throughout the year by whirlpools much like the ones belched up by Charybdis in Homer’s Odyssey, such that no ship or boat could approach it.

Perhaps most interesting of all for us is the mixture of facts and legends that Pigafetta wrote down about China, that Middle Kingdom whose name denoted it as the literal center of the Asian world. And indeed, it was a place whose presence loomed large even here, some 3500 miles (5600 kilometers) from the emperor’s dragon throne. Even the Portuguese had scarcely begun to penetrate this land of mystery, where the “greatest sovereign in the world” — a brave statement for Pigafetta to have made as part of an expedition sponsored by King and Holy Roman Emperor Charles! — watched over his sprawling and inconceivably rich realm. Pigafetta’s second-hand report would be the most detailed that Europeans had read on China since the aforementioned Marco Polo’s overland journey there 250 years earlier.

[The Chinese emperor] has 70 crowned kings under his dependence, and some of these kings have ten or fifteen lesser kings dependent on them. He has four of his principal ministers close to his palace, at the four sides looking to the four cardinal winds, that is, one to the west, one to the east, to the south, and to the north. Each of these gives audience to those that come from his quarter. All of the kings and lords of India obey this emperor, and in token of their vassalage, each is obliged to have in the middle of the principal place of his city the marble figure of a dragon. The figure is also engraved on the emperor’s seal, and all who wish to enter his port must carry the same emblem in wax or ivory.

If any lord is disobedient to the emperor, he is flayed, and his skin, dried in the sun, salted, and stuffed, is placed in an eminent part of the public place, with the head inclined and the hands on the head in the attitude of doing zongu, that is, obeisance to the emperor.

The emperor is never visible to anybody, and if he wishes to see people, he is carried about the palace on a peacock most skillfully manufactured and very richly adorned, with six ladies dressed exactly like himself, so that he cannot be distinguished from them. He afterwards passes into a richly adorned figure of a serpent called Naga, which has a large glass in the breast, through which he and the ladies are seen, but it is not possible to distinguish which is the emperor. He marries his sisters in order that his blood should not mix with that of others.

His palace has seven walls round it, and in each circle there are daily 10,000 men on guard, who are changed every twelve hours at the sound of a bell. Each wall has its gate, with a guard at each gate. The palace has 79 halls, in which dwell only the ladies destined to serve the emperor. There are always torches burning there. It is not possible to go round the palace in less than a day. In the upper part of it are four halls where the ministers go to speak to the emperor. One is ornamented with metal, both the pavement and the walls; another is all of silver, another all of gold, and the other is set with pearls and precious stones. The gold and other valuable things which are brought as tribute to the emperor are placed in these rooms…

Delay though the sailors might, the day finally came when the Victoria reached the western tip of Timor. There could be no more putting it off: it was time to brave the untracked expanse of water to the west. The prospect of doing so filled the hearts of even the most stoic sailors with anxious trepidation, filled their heads with memories of the last horrific ocean crossing when they had all come so close to starving to death. Many of the natives here in western Timor suffered from the disfiguring and highly infectious disease of leprosy, which did serve somewhat to place a damper on the sailors’ instinct to put off the day of reckoning yet more. Nevertheless, on the night before the Victoria was to sail off into the uncharted westerly blue, while it was still riding at anchor off Timor, two young seamen climbed quietly overboard, each bearing a piece of driftwood to serve him as a flotation device. They paddled stealthily off into the darkness, never to be seen again.

The deserters’ absence wasn’t noticed until the next morning. When it was, Captain Elcano just shrugged his shoulders and continued the preparations for departure. If the pair would prefer to brave the prospect of leprosy at worst, a life spent without ever seeing another of their own creed and kind again at best, rather than face another ocean crossing like the last one, that was their remit, he supposed. He couldn’t even say for sure that they were wrong in their calculations. For him, it simply meant two less mouths to feed during the uncertain weeks that lay ahead.

So, Elcano, Pigafetta, Méndez, and the other sailors said a warm farewell to their guides from Timore, who, evincing no fear of leprosy, said that they would easily be able to commandeer a native boat and crew to take them back north to more civilized climes. Their unflappability reminded Elcano in an odd way of Espinosa. Pleased though he was to have his own ship at last, he found himself wishing — by no means for the first time — that the Victoria still had the Trinidad and its resolute captain at its side.

Elcano shook off the sentiment and turned to the business at hand. Whatever might lie ahead, today looked to be another fine day for sailing. It was February 8, 1522, and there was a new ocean ahead, the third the Victoria would have to cross in order to complete its voyage around the world.

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