February 8 – April 6, 1522
The continent of Australia seems like it ought to be too big to miss, but European explorers managed to avoid it for a bizarrely long time. Had Juan Sebastián Elcano chosen to point the bow of the Victoria in a little bit more of a southerly direction when that ship left Timor, he might have cemented his claim for a prominent place in our history books alongside Ferdinand Magellan by discovering the Land Down Under. As it was, though, the Victoria neatly skirted the northwestern coast of the continent. The discovery of Australia would have to wait for another 100 years.
Virtually from the first day out of Timor, the sailors aboard the Victoria had the feeling that the god of the sea, who had mostly sent them the winds they needed throughout their time in the Pacific, had turned against them now as they entered the Indian Ocean. During the first five days, there was scarcely any breeze at all; progress was painfully slow, even as the sailors ate through their stock of food with the same dispatch as they would have had they been flying over the ocean’s broad back. Finally, on February 13, the wind began to pick up somewhat. Yet throughout their time in the Indian Ocean, the sailors would feel like they were fighting the wind more than harnessing it. When it did deign to blow, it tended to do so directly against the ship’s bow, forcing it to beat back and forth laboriously to maintain any semblance of forward momentum.
As days at sea turned into weeks, no sight or trace of land appeared, raising buried memories of the nightmare crossing of the Pacific in the mind of every man. There at least the elements had been on their side. But what disastrous fate might they be sailing into now, against the evident will of the god of the sea? A mood of gloom — a presentiment of doom — descended on the Victoria. The sailors started to wonder whether they who had been allowed to leave Tidore were really the lucky members of the expedition after all. They thought back on that steam-shrouded equatorial paradise with an ever growing sense of nostalgia.
A month out from Timor, the hunger pangs were already setting in. The sailors had run out of salt long ago, meaning that the meat they had collected from the many friendly Moluccan natives they met could not be preserved properly for the long haul. It was all gone now; that which hadn’t been eaten had spoiled and been tossed overboard to prevent it from tempting the hungry men into a repast they would soon regret. Ditto the fruit. This left little to eat beyond rice and the Moluccan sago bread. Just to make the situation that much worse, the ship was now leaking quite badly again; those who knew about such things blamed the pitch provided by Sultan Mansur, which was proving a less durable sealant than the stuff available in European ports. In order to keep their vessel afloat, the sailors were forced to spend long hours working the pumps in addition to their other duties.
At last, on March 18, 1522, a lookout cried that he could see a smudge of land on the horizon. The mood aboard brightened in an instant. The ship steered directly toward the smudge, everyone staring ahead eagerly for a glimpse of what they hoped would be just the way station they needed.
Alas, it turned out to be a cruel disappointment, the latest trick of the gods. The island the Victoria discovered is known to us as Île Amsterdam, or “Amsterdam Island.” A forlorn greenish-brown plateau in the middle of thousands of miles of trackless blue uniformity, it boasts no native mammalian life nor any edible vegetation, just scruffy grass and the occasional stubby tree hunkering down in its hollows. A possession of France, it is home today only to a small team of scientists and their logistical staff. In 1522, it was home to no one and nothing.
Observation from the sea was enough to tell Captain Elcano and his sailors that the deserted pebble in the blue was useless to them. Seeing no reason to waste time and food exploring it, he ordered that the Victoria sail onward. The name he chose for the island reflected his current humor: Desesperanza, or “Despair.” It was well-nigh miraculous that the Victoria had stumbled across it at all, in the midst of so much nothingness. But the very uselessness of the place made the encounter seem more like a cosmic practical joke than a sign of holy benevolence.
Soon after leaving the island of Despair behind, Elcano ordered a change of course, pointing the bow due west. This might have been read as a positive sign, demonstrating as it did that, whatever else might be going on, the ship was at least making slow progress on its journey. Yet any spark of optimism it might have raised was soon snuffed out again by the long days of monotonous, wearisome, hungry uniformity that followed, broken by no more cries from the lookouts perched in the rigging. Now more than ever, the sailors thought back to the comrades they had left behind; they wondered where they were, whether they had gotten away from Tidore or were now prisoners of the Portuguese. Even if the latter was the case, the sailors on the Victoria were increasingly inclined to believe that those of the Trinidad had been the lucky ones.
They would have been surprised to learn that the Trinidad had not left Tidore in all these three months and more since the Victoria had done so — and yet its crew remained free.
The fact that the Trinidad and its crew were still to be found at Tidore at this late date was certainly not the fault of Gómez de Espinosa; he was never a man to take a day off when there was work to be done. And indeed, he had turned all of his attention to the task of resurrecting the sunken Trinidad just as soon as he had seen the Victoria on its way. The effort involved promised to be considerable: the ship would need to be emptied of cargo there where it had sunk, then dragged ashore, comprehensively refurbished for the third time on this journey, re-floated, reloaded, and resupplied. All of this was daunting enough on the face of it, but it was complicated still more by a confluence of other factors which kept Espinosa perpetually seething with frustration.
The first was the strange, delicate relationship the Europeans maintained with Sultan Mansur and his advisors. As he had before, when the Trinidad and Victoria were merely being loaded there in his harbor, the sultan insisted that his people do all of the manual labor that was required. Espinosa wasn’t sure to what he should attribute this insistence. It might be exactly what it appeared to be on the surface, a gesture of friendship meant to ingratiate the Tidorans with these representatives of a great and powerful empire beyond their ken. But Espinosa had noticed a keen interest on the part of the helpful Tidorans in the technologies of travel and especially war that the visitors had brought with them; he suspected that intelligence gathering was also a motive behind their actions. And try as he might, he couldn’t banish the thought of a much darker potential motive on the part of the sultan: that he was deliberately delaying the Trinidad’s departure, wanting to keep the sailors here so he could sell them out to Portugal for who knew what political and economic benefits. Espinosa wasn’t a man who slipped naturally into such suspicious modes of thought — and yet, like that of all of his underlings, his psyche too had been deeply scarred by the events at Cebu and elsewhere. The lines between native inscrutability and guile had become hopelessly blurred.
The Timorans’ decidedly non-urgent, almost casual approach to the work at hand did nothing to allay his suspicions. Just as they had when their task was merely one of loading and provisioning the Trinidad and Victoria, the helpers put in only a few hours of labor many days. And just as had been the case back then, Espinosa fretted and worried and raged in private, but was in no position to demand anything of Sultan Mansur. All he could do was scan the horizon a dozen times a day for the Portuguese sails he feared, contribute a delicate suggestion here and there, and continue to pray that he wasn’t a fly caught in a devious web.
Once the Trinidad had finally been emptied and dragged up onto dry land by the sultan’s men, the ship’s carpenters saw that the damage to its hull was far worse than they had expected. The storm, the overloading, and a fresh attack of shipworms had left it in a truly sorry state. Large swaths of half-rotten planking were ready to break open and admit the ravenous water. What the Trinidad needed was less a refit than a rebuild.
This reality presented two fresh difficulties, beyond the obvious one of the extra time it would require to set the ship to rights. The first was that bending and joining planks of wood to form a (relatively) watertight hull was specialized work, which could not be so easily outsourced to the sultan’s men, whose shipbuilding techniques and traditions were very different from those of Europe. The other was that timber suitable for shipbuilding was such a rare commodity in Maluku; the sultan had provided the sailors with some wood already, but only enough to make spot repairs, not to remake substantial sections of the hull from whole cloth. He promised that he would acquire more, but it would take some time. Needless to say, this was not music to Espinosa’s ears.
Again, though, the sultan proved as good as his word, such that Espinosa felt guilty for ever doubting him, even as he continued to rue the delay. Once the needed wood began to trickle in in dribs and drabs, the Tidorans were willing to listen to reason and to step back to let the European carpenters take a leading role. If they did watch with intense interest while the rough planks were warped and shaped to serve the purpose, they could hardly be blamed for that. Had the roles been reversed, after all, the Europeans would have been no less eager to learn from the strangers.
Yet another worry plaguing Espinosa amidst all this concerned the behavior of his own men. While Espinosa and Pedro Alfonso and his wife had been given several fine rooms in the sultan’s own palace, the rest of the sailors had been quartered in groups of three to six all over town. (Was there a nefarious purpose to this? Espinosa hated himself for thinking this way, but he couldn’t help it.) Even after the carpentry work on the Trinidad began, there was nothing for the bulk of the ship’s crew to do, the sultan being as insistent as ever that all of the unskilled labor fall to his own subjects. As Magellan had known and Espinosa knew, the idle hands of sailors were the Devil’s playthings. Almost as much as he lived in fear of the Portuguese, Espinosa feared the day when one of his men would do something to shatter the peace of the community and wear out all of their welcomes. If events ran true to the pattern of the last couple of years, the crime would probably involve the local women. Because the men were no longer gathered in one place, Espinosa found it hard to harangue them as much as he would have liked about the need to keep their hands — and their other bodily members — to themselves. Sequestered in the palace as he was, he had no real idea what they might be getting up to in the streets and houses of the town.
On February 14, 1522 — Saint Valentine’s Day, wouldn’t you know it? — the sultan knocked on the door to his quarters. Behind the sultan in the hallway stood several of his henchmen bearing a lumpy burden in a canvas sack. Espinosa was enough of a soldier that he knew it instantly for a body bag. Looking pained, the sultan asked permission to bring it inside. “One of your men was stricken ill,” he explained through Pedro Alfonso once his men had set their burden on the floor, “and has sadly died.”
Untying the drawstring of the bag, Espinosa found himself peering into the glassy eyes of none other than João Lopes Carvalho, his former captain general. The face was mottled and strangely bloated, even more so than one expects in death. Another soldier’s instinct told him that this man had died of something other than a natural sickness. But, needing time to process this fairly earthshaking development, Espinosa merely made the sign of the cross and muttered a blessing over the corpse, then nodded to the sultan and thanked him for delivering the body. “This man was not only a trusted officer but a friend,” he said. “His death has upset me. I am sorry, but I am not fit for conversation at the moment.”
“Of course,” replied the sultan, diplomatic and deferential as ever. “I will leave you alone with your grief.”
Espinosa did feel a measure of grief, but he was shaken to the quick for other reasons as well. For Carvalho was, alongside himself and Pedro Alfonso, one of the most important men still with the Trinidad. If anything, he may have been the most essential of them all: he was the last professional pilot they had, the man who was supposed to guide the ship home to Spain. This was the reason he had gotten off so lightly for his antics as captain general — and, to be sure, they were all lucky he had, given that it was his quick thinking and smart seamanship that had saved the flagship in the storm that had struck on the way to Tidore. Now, though, he was gone. The hole his absence left was yawning.
“Go out among the people,” Espinosa said to Alfonso. “See if you can find out what really happened to this man.”
The Portuguese trader and raconteur did so, taking with him his wife, a clever woman who could penetrate circles of gossip that he never could as a male and a foreigner. The report they returned with that evening was dismaying but not overly surprising, in light of what Espinosa already knew about Carvalho’s character and tendencies. It seemed that he had been carrying on several flirtations — or perhaps full-blown affairs — with local girls. And he had met the consequences of such indulgences in this strictly patriarchal, sexually circumscribed society. The cause of death was probably poison, a black art at which the Moluccans were unnervingly accomplished. (Witness the rumors surrounding the sudden death of Francisco Serrão!) “I do not advise you to press the issue any further, my friend,” said Alfonso. “The sultan is sending all of us a message. We would do well to heed it.”
With no priests left, it was down to Espinosa to conduct the burial service, which was attended by the sultan and all of his higher officials and courtiers. Alfonso had warned Espinosa that he suspected the sultan could understand more Portuguese — and by extension its sister language of Spanish — than he let on. Nevertheless, standing behind a casket assembled from some of the sultan’s precious supply of wood, Espinosa permitted himself a few cautious remarks beyond those prescribed by his religion. “João Lopes Carvalho was a fallen creature like all of us,” he said, “a man in whom God’s grace warred with the call of the flesh. I beg you to heed the lesson provided by his life and his death, today and every day that we spend among our beneficent hosts.” He hoped his words weren’t too oblique to drive his point home with the plain-spoken sailors.
More than ever, Espinosa just wanted to be away from this place, but the death of Carvalho had made the question of where to go and what to do after the happy day of departure a more fraught one than ever. Knowing that a measure of redundancy is a good thing to have in any campaign, Espinosa had arranged for Carvalho to have an understudy during the last few months of his life. That man had been one Juan Bautista Punzorol, a bright young spark among the able seamen who had long gazed with fascination upon the arcane charts and instruments that were the purview of the nautical navigator. It looked like it would now be up to this unlikely fellow to bring the Trinidad home. Espinosa took him aside to speak to him as soon as the funeral was over.
The young man had never talked one on one with his captain, and was overawed to be doing so now. It took Espinosa quite some time to bring the conversation around to brass tacks: to just what his new, half-trained pilot was and wasn’t capable of. It turned out that Carvalho had regaled Punzorol with horror stories about the passage around the tip of Africa, one of the most notoriously difficult navigational challenges known to seafairers of this or any other era. Punzorol almost visibly shirked from the prospect of guiding the Trinidad through such a passage on his own. So, the soldier and the greenhorn pilot concocted a completely different plan, one that might well have sent Carvalho spinning in his freshly minted grave, being composed of equal parts ignorance and wishful thinking.
Instead of sailing southwest in the wake of the Victoria, the Trinidad would depart Tidore in the polar-opposite direction: going northeast, all the way across the Pacific Ocean to the west coast of North America. Then it would follow that coast south to that part of Central America where the nations of Panama and Columbia exist today, where the Spain of the early sixteenth century was busily founding its first permanent settlements in the New World. The sailors would make contact with those settlements, and figure out next steps from there.
The plan wasn’t without a certain cleverness. It would free Punzorol from the immense burden of trying to round Africa while also neatly avoiding the multitude of Portuguese ships, colonies, and spies that clustered around that continent. Indeed, the plan was almost eerily prescient in its way. For the region it hoped to reach was the very place where we moderns have built the Panama Canal, our artificial substitute for the convenient natural America-spanning strait that Magellan sought and failed to find, for the very good reason that it doesn’t exist.
But for all its superficial cleverness, Espinosa and Punzorol’s plan was predicated on one massive — and massively flawed — assumption: they believed that the passage across the northern part of the Pacific Ocean would be dramatically shorter than the more southerly route that had come so close to killing them a year ago. Mind you, this assumption wasn’t completely wrong. One glance at a modern-day map or globe will reveal that the bulk of North America really is a goodly distance west of South America; in fact, it comes within a whisker of meeting continental Asia at its most northwesterly reach of all. That said, even the North Pacific remains an enormous span of mostly empty ocean to cross — especially if one attempts the crossing at a diagonal, as Espinosa and Punzorol were proposing to do. To a large extent, they had still not let go of Claudius Ptolemy’s picture of the Earth, a planet about 30 percent smaller than the one we know. Carvalho would doubtless have been able to set them right, to tell them that their numbers simply didn’t add up in the new reality of an enlarged Earth that the last Pacific crossing had so rudely revealed. But Carvalho was dead.
Late in March, the carpenters pronounced the Trinidad seaworthy once again. Never a monarch to turn down a chance to throw a party, Sultan Mansur marked the re-floating of the vessel with music and feasts. The date of the festivities corresponded with Easter that year: March 26, 1522. Nevertheless, the sailors did far less to commemorate this third Easter of their voyage than had been the custom when Magellan was alive; their new leader was less given to overt displays of religiosity, especially among native peoples. (They did at least do more than their former companions who had sailed away with the Victoria: those men barely noticed Easter’s passing at all amidst the grinding, numbing day-to-day of pumps and rigging and constant, gnawing hunger.)
Parties and holidays notwithstanding, a mood of dread was swiftly taking hold among the idle sailors of the Trinidad, one that those toiling aboard the Victoria would have recognized all too readily. By now, word of the planned route out of Tidore had spread throughout the ranks. The sailors understood on an instinctual level what eluded the intellects of Espinosa and Punzorol: that the Pacific was a really, really big ocean, any way they tried to cross it. Add to that their traumatic memories of nearly starving to death on the last crossing, plus their awareness that they were to be guided by a pilot who wouldn’t have been considered qualified to steer a coast-hugger back in Europe. The only counterweight to the sense of impending doom — and admittedly, it was a substantial one — was their trust in Espinosa himself, who had never let them down yet.
Preparations for departure proceeded, not quite apace enough for Espinosa’s peace of mind but methodically. The cloves that had sunk the Trinity last time out had been stored in a dockside warehouse. Discretion having gotten the better of greed, barely half of them were to be reloaded now.
Just days before the Trinidad was to sail, five nervous-looking sailors came to see Espinosa. Sitting there awkwardly in his parlor, they explained that they had all found native wives, and wished to remain here on Tidore and take their chances with the Portuguese who might show up any day. Before Espinosa could react to this bombshell, they rushed to add that they could still do King Charles a service from here. They could protect the rest of the cloves and collect more, they said, setting up a trading post to await the arrival of the additional Spanish ships that would surely come when the Trinidad and/or Victoria reached home and told of the fortune for the taking here. They had begun to learn the Moluccans’ language, to better smooth the way for this archipelago to become a part of Spain’s maritime empire.
Espinosa sighed. After the danger of sailors raping the native women, the prospect of they themselves going native in precisely this way had been next on his list of worries about their living arrangements these past few months. He knew that this idea of a Spanish trading post was little more than a polite excuse for desertion: the convenient westward path to these islands that Magellan had sought had not been discovered, leaving them firmly in the Portuguese sphere of influence for the immediate future at least. Yet Espinosa found that he had no heart to rip these men who had already been through so much away from their new wives. If they preferred to take their chances with the Tidorans and the Portuguese rather than the Pacific Ocean, perhaps they had earned the right to make that choice. “You may stay and set up your trading post,” he said. “But explain to your comrades that you are the only ones who will be allowed to stay, because you have been brave enough to come to me and speak of your wishes forthrightly, like honorable men.” And so the five went away, bowing and scraping to their now-former captain like suppliants in the presence of a god, hardly able to believe that their paltry arguments for remaining had won the day. Only time would tell, Espinosa knew, whether he or they had made the best bet.
The day of departure was set for April 6, 1522. Espinosa suffered more anxiety than ever in the last week, being sure that the Portuguese would suddenly appear or that Sultan Mansur would unleash some last-minute treachery — or both. But neither of these things occurred. Instead, the sultan pulled out all the stops for a farewell bash that put even the last one to shame in the size of its crowds and the sheer volume of noise it generated. Sultan Mansur waved to Captain Espinosa from his own royal boat, which was to accompany the Europeans on the first stage of their voyage home. The Trinidad’s capstan turned, while the cheers and cymbal clashes reached new heights of cacophony. The canvas snapped taut in the rigging, and the ship set off into the Pacific blue where it was to test its luck yet again.
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(A full listing of print and online sources used will follow the final article in this series.)